Top Down Democratic Decline vs. Bottom Up Civic Renewal: Eight Working Hypotheses

Which of these countervailing patterns will ultimately win out?

The confusing swirl of signals we are getting about the health of democracy in America is a mix of two conflicting trends. On the one hand, our national politics and governing institutions continue to spiral downward in a doom loop of polarization, dysfunction, and de-legitimation. On the other, we can observe green shoots of promise and pluralism in many communities across the country as Americans join forces to tackle challenges they face. Which of these patterns will prevail?

There is no shortage of doom scrollers, cynics, and pessimists convinced that the top down democratic decline will inevitably sink us all. They may well be right. For my part, however, the scenario of a bottom up civic renewal originating in our communities and culture is just as plausible.

Having relocated The Art of Association to Substack, I wanted to use my first post here to share eight working hypotheses informing my hopeful, albeit provisional point of view. They cover the necessity of and prospects for bottom up civic renewal and the implications for actors in civil society. I will flesh out, test, and refine these hypotheses in future updates, adding to and subtracting from the list as needed.

1. The civic renewal we need is not primarily political or governmental but ultimately cultural in nature.

The changes required will not result from one party or another winning and sustaining the power needed to enact its agenda. No particular set of public policies, institutional reforms, or boosts to state capacity will make the necessary difference. Our problems sit much deeper, in the realm of culture.

I have been persuaded on this point by James Davison Hunter and his 2024 magnum opus: Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. Hunter traces how a protean blend of Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism, and Calvinism supplied the solidarity necessary for democracy in America to take root. However, we have exhausted this cultural common ground in working through its many contradictions, e.g., slavery and Jim Crow, the long denial of women’s suffrage, and mistreatment of religious minorities. As a result,

“We are at a moment when the answer to the fundamental question about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be assumed—though not because we are polarized, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to work through what divides us.”

Unless and until we manage to reassemble the shared cultural resources and solidarity that liberal democracy requires, our politics and government are not going to materially improve.

2. We have exhausted the transformative, top down possibilities of national politics for the foreseeable future.

Americans have long hoped for resolution of big problems facing the country through a reorientation of national politics and the federal government. Starting in the Progressive Era, this aspiration, and a series of presidential and congressional responses to it, gave us the Square Deal, New Freedom, New Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, etc. Ronald Reagan led a revolution in the eyes of his supporters. So did Barack Obama. Joe Biden has insisted all along that his agenda is to unify America. Next week, Donald Trump will once again set out to Make America Great Again. We will see if he has better luck this time.

Unfortunately, with our increasingly deep divisions, impaired institutions, and bloated bureaucracy, the impact and half-life of these grand national projects have rapidly diminished. We still have free and fair elections and the requisite modicum of separated powers checking and balancing each other. We should by all means keep working to preserve if not enhance these good things. But they will not lead to an edifying civic revival. If help is on the way, it is not going to come from Washington, DC anytime soon.

3. The renewal of our civic culture, if it occurs, will bubble up from the laboratories of American democracy, i.e., the communities where we live.

Let’s start here with a definition from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ stellar report from last fall, “Habits of Heart and Mind: How to Fortify Civic Culture.”

“American civic culture is the set of norms, values, narratives, habits, and rituals that shape how we live together and govern ourselves in our diverse democracy.”

This report grew out of an earlier set of recommendations in the Academy’s landmark 2020 study, “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century.” Both assessments see political institutions and civic culture as influencing and reinforcing each other in a virtuous cycle. However, the 2024 update acknowledges that “efforts to revitalize civic culture have not been as vigorous as those aimed at reforming political institutions.” It now suggests that renewing civic culture from the bottom up may be a better way to jump-start the virtuous cycle:

“Our towns are where civic culture is created, for better or worse. As this polarized moment in our national politics has shown, civic culture can be poisoned from the top down. But it can be healed and unpolluted from the bottom up and the inside out. How the residents of Tulsa choose to make a civic culture will of course be different from how the people of Tacoma or Tallahassee chose to do so. What connects the people doing this work is a commitment: to being and staying in relationship with their fellow Americans and to the possibility of living together in a freedom that works for all.”

Beginning the work of civic renewal in localities rather than at the national level is an easier lift in part because Americans have more trust in democracy the closer it is to them. Sixty-six percent of respondents in a 2022 Pew survey reported a favorable view of their local government, and 54 percent did of their state government, compared to only 32 percent who thought well of the federal government. Geographic proximity enables personal relationships, mutual accountability, common contexts, and shared goals among citizens and civic leaders in ways that our national political fray does not.

Indeed, the debates about democratic norms and the rule of law that rage on cable news and social media are bothersome background noise to people focused on more practical and proximate matters like helping young people find good jobs so they don’t have to leave town, enhancing the downtown business district, creating places where neighbors can hang out, or cheering on the high school football team. National funders and advocates must avoid the temptation of imposing their agendas for defending and reforming democracy on residents for whom they are much less salient.

4. Ensuring that a critical mass of American citizens are animated by “self-interest well understood” will be key to civic renewal.

The “Habits of Heart and Mind” report highlights the work of numerous groups and leaders serving in the vanguard of renewal as “civic catalysts.” It notes the different ways they are sparking and facilitating civic joy, community service, pluralism and the free exchange of ideas, co-design and shared decision-making, mutual aid, narratives of common purpose, and shared spaces.

The catalysts really are doing inspiring and essential work. However, civic renewal will hinge in the end on whether a critical mass of citizens come to recognize that they can best serve their own interests by associating with others to realize shared goals. Relative to relying on especially virtuous civic leaders, this approach puts civic renewal on lower but sturdier ground. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America:

“The doctrine of self interest well understood does not produce great devotion; but it suggests little sacrifices every day; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous, but it forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves; and if it does not lead directly to virtue through the will, it brings them near to it insensibly through habits.”

This observation raises a pressing question: What are the settings capable of cultivating these low but sturdy virtues and habits in a “multitude of citizens?”

5. Americans develop their “self interest well understood” and become more capable of pursuing it through their associational lives.

We experience associational life in many different collective settings. They include a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, e.g., churches and synagogues, Boys and Girls and 4-H clubs, PTAs, Urban Leagues and Leagues of Women Voters, Rotary and Optimist clubs, and fraternal societies. They also include countless informal groups that the IRS does not regulate, e.g., bible studies, bridge clubs, neighborhood watches, school communities, Facebook groups, recurring pick-up basketball games, bicycle rides, bingo nights, and — famously — bowling leagues. Finally, the settings include more economic, public, and political settings, e.g., union halls and chambers of commerce, township and school boards, city councils, and local political party organizations.

One common denominator across these myriad settings is that people participating in them have opportunities to set agendas, make plans, take risks, lead and follow, look out for, and give and take with each other. In doing so, they can better understand their own self interests, how they correspond with those of others in the group, and how best to pursue them together in associational contexts. Thus whether Americans have access to a sufficient number and diversity of associations in which they can learn and practice these things really matters. Indeed, as Pete and Rebecca Davis, the filmmakers behind “Join or Die” like to say, “the fate of America depends on it!”

Focusing on the quality and quantity of our associational ties as key factors in the health of democracy in America is a venerable perspective, stretching back to Tocqueville. Yet in recent years, civil society actors working to shore up democracy and civic life have been much more apt to focus on either institutional reforms (e.g., Ranked Choice Voting or filibuster reform) or behavioral interventions at the individual level (e.g., depolarization workshops or media literacy programs).

As Hahrie Han and Dan Vallone point out, despite the differences in these two approaches, “they both presume a more stable and predictable world than currently exists.” The prevailing paradigms also share the goal of getting Americans to support agendas that others have developed and want them to sign onto. Han and Vallone propose that we adopt anew a Tocquevillian paradigm, one that, “reframes the question of reforming democracy from ‘How do we get people to do a thing?’ to ‘How do we equip people to become the come the kind of people who do what needs to be done?’” This is the question that those of us working for civic renewal need to be asking ourselves in the years ahead.

6. More democratic and place-based forms of philanthropy are better positioned to support civic renewal than national mega-funders.

The shifts in civil society outlined here cannot rely on philanthropy from wealthy foundations and institutions. Their grants are too few and far between for the breadth, depth, and consistency of support needed. Such grants invariably come with at least some strings attached — values, goals, strategies, time horizons, deliverables, metrics, etc. — that do not reflect a particular community’s circumstances. However well-intentioned and trust-based ambitious national funders may be, they naturally have their own agendas.

The word philanthropy, taken back to its Greek roots, means love of humanity. There are many ways in which this love can be expressed that are better suited to civic renewal in a democracy than million dollar grants from mega-funders. The more democratic alternatives include, for example, self-funding via membership dues and subscriptions, more widespread and smaller contributions from “everyday givers,” collective giving circles, mutual aid networks, and nascent forms of participatory grant making. These alternative forms of philanthropy have the added benefit of helping their small “d” democratic donors connect the dots between their goals and interests and those of the broader community of which they are part. Being more proximate helps too. Community foundations and individual donors who grant through them are, at their best, providing civic leadership that sparks rather than smothers promising local developments.

There are, to be sure, fruitful ways for national funders to support civic renewal. For example, in one creative innovation, the Trust for Civic Life is pooling tens of millions in contributions from national foundations to make large and flexible grants to entrepreneurial “civic hubs,” e.g., community foundations or economic development groups. These hubs, in turn, are using their local knowledge and networks to get the funds out to the groups and initiatives leading the renewal of their communities.

Perhaps the most important ways national philanthropists can support civic renewal are to first do no harm and then stay out of its way. They can go about this by practicing what I have elsewhere termed “responsible pluralism.” Doing so will help them avoid inadvertently fueling polarization and top down democratic decline through their grant making to support policy advocacy and systems change.

7. In parallel, we need to create a cultural keystone capable of holding the distributed and dynamic elements of our civic renewal together.

The decentralized patterns of civic renewal anticipated above are necessary but insufficient. To complete the work of renewal, we need to shape a new cultural keystone capable of holding its many different components together. This cultural innovation should be shaped by the early and local signals of civic renewal and inspire others in turn.

Here we have come full circle, back to the conclusion of James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity. We must recreate a cultural basis for the solidarity that liberal democracy requires if we are to co-exist peaceably and take collective action in a diverse republic cast on a continental scale. Hunter’s book is an impressive initial step toward crafting this new keystone. So too are the “Our Common Purpose” and “Habits of Heart and Mind” studies from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The upcoming commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is prompting other constructive steps at places like Monticello, New America, and Stand Together.

While the emphases differ across these preliminary sketches, three broad commitments inform all of them: 1) they appreciate the accomplishments of constitutional democracy in America; 2) they reckon with its many painful contradictions and the struggles we have had in resolving them; and 3) they explore how our now more fully realized and diverse democracy can flourish in the future.

8. Bottom up civic renewal will take decades and may still be swamped by top down democratic decline—so there is no time for delay!

I readily admit that the steps outlined above will take several decades to pay off — if they do — in a bottom up civic renewal. All the while, the headwinds associated with our top down democratic decline will continue to make progress difficult. In the end, the forces driving the decline may be impossible to overcome. But that does not mean we should throw up our hands or stick with reform strategies and paradigms that are clearly not working. Indeed, without harboring illusions about the certainty of success, we should press ahead with a shared sense of purpose and urgency in working for civic renewal. The odds still may not favor us, but they will improve as a result of our dedicated efforts.

That is all for now — more to come soon! In the meantime, I am curious to learn which (if any) of these hypothesis most resonates with you — and which do not. Please leave a comment below or hit reply to this email newsletter to let me know directly.