Habits of Heart and Mind: How to Fortify Civic Culture
Why Civic Culture Matters
When it comes to political change and collective action, civic culture shapes the frame of the possible. A culture where people are used to being passive spectators will yield leaders who hoard power. A culture built around every person for themselves will struggle to confront long-term challenges. A culture that encourages people to dehumanize those they disagree with will yield a society better at destroying than building.
In a healthy civic culture, people feel bound to something larger than themselves—a common purpose. In times of change, a strong and vibrant civic culture provides mechanisms to manage collective anxieties about who we are. It makes it possible for people to respect differences, freely exchange ideas, shape institutions, actively engage with diversity, and build a more just society.
An unhealthy civic culture, on the other hand, feeds isolation, cynicism, zero-sum thinking, and withdrawal from common life, making institutions frozen, broken, captured, or monopolistic. Toxic civic culture amplifies power imbalances and allows problems to harden into grievances. The cynicism of citizens in an unhealthy civic culture becomes self-fulfilling, thereby empowering the already powerful and privileged in a vicious cycle. An unhealthy civic culture limits a people’s capacity to foster creativity, imagine the full humanity of others, and make meaning together across worldviews. Such habits and patterns make a society atomized, helpless, and receptive to demagoguery and authoritarian appeals.
A healthy civic culture matters for constitutional democracy in the same way that clean air and water matter to human flourishing. They are essential conditions for a thriving society. Just as a lack of clean air and water will lead to negative health outcomes that shorten lives, so does an unhealthy civic culture make our institutions less responsive, our communities fractured, and our muscles of democratic citizenship atrophied.
In the 1830s, Tocqueville articulated in Democracy in America both the healthy and unhealthy patterns of civic culture in the United States—and how the two were often entwined. The promise of civic equality for white men, he observed, unleashed bottom-up energies and innovations unknown in aristocratic Europe. It also created perpetual status anxiety, which in turn fed egotism, materialism, and a self-centeredness that eroded the social virtues of community. Similarly, the fact that the United States was born out of rejection of monarchical tyranny and mistrust of concentrated power made white Americans of the early nineteenth century freer and more independent than anyone else on earth—and also more prone to conspiracy thinking and a reflexive hatred of government.
All these patterns persist in contemporary civic life. American civic culture today often tends toward hyperindividualism, historical amnesia, and mutual mistrust. But our culture is also one where people can reinvent themselves, transcend the hatreds of their ancestors, and build new bonds of civic affection. The American-style free market economy intensifies the impulse to be unconstrained by the past.
If the animating question of civic cultures generally is, How shall we live together? a core question of American civic culture is What does it mean to be free?
In the United States, the tensions of civic culture are expressed within a framework of ideas. This is a country with no common god or ancestry. The core ideas of the American creed, articulated in the founding of the nation (created equal; life, liberty, happiness) and in subsequent refoundings (government of, by, and for the people), hold our diverse society together. They do so not by forcing consensus or orthodoxy but by enabling and requiring unending argument. America properly understood is an argument—between liberty and equality, strong national government and local control, colorblind and color-conscious approaches to law, the pluribus and the unum.
Civic culture here requires not just an awareness of these arguments but also a willingness to participate in them—and to take responsibility for the underlying circumstances that enable a perpetual argument to unfold constructively.
Civic culture’s significance becomes clear when we examine the rule of law: the principle that no one is above the law, requiring leaders and citizens alike to adhere to it, and that the state itself is bound by law. This concept is crucial to a functional constitutional democracy, yet it transcends legislation; it a pattern of norms, values, narratives, habits, and rituals—an embodiment of civic culture. It reflects a collective commitment to the principles of self-government, even when we disagree with specific outcomes.
While the rule of law is an ideal, and not without its breaches, it remains vital for individual rights and collective liberty. The alternatives—rule by force, chance, or the self-interest of autocrats or oligarchs—are antithetical to American values. Those who have endured injustices recognize that the antidote to the rule of law’s corruption is its refinement.7
A healthy civic culture is easier to appreciate in moments of intense communal tragedy, such as natural disasters or events like September 11. During such crises, a kind of civic awakening often occurs as people step out of social isolation and into joint action with neighbors they have never known. Disasters heighten an awareness of our reliance on the natural world, the spirit of service before self, the practice of mutual aid, and the willingness to sacrifice for the common good.
But a healthy civic culture matters beyond times of emergency. A nation’s civic culture is the aggregate of decisions every person makes regarding how to behave in the company of others and whether to treat community problems as their own. A strong civic culture promotes what Interfaith America president Eboo Patel calls “civic pluralism.”8 More than mere toleration of difference, civic pluralism is a mutual commitment among people of diverse backgrounds to collaborate toward shared goals.
What it means to be free, then, is not primarily a philosophical question. It is a practical quandary for communities living with the crises of homelessness, mental illness, and opioid addiction; or engaged in furious debates about gender identity, public schooling, and how we share our common natural resources; or wondering how to find purpose and cohesion when globalization has gutted the middle class.
These are our towns. And our towns are where civic culture is created, for better or worse. As this polarized moment in 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 choose 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. The American word for this is union.
The next section of this report is about the how of civic culture: methods and experiments that Americans of all kinds have devised to create better, stronger civic culture—bonds of union—in the places where they live.