{"id":18248,"date":"2017-03-28T13:38:18","date_gmt":"2017-03-28T17:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18248"},"modified":"2017-03-28T14:19:02","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T18:19:02","slug":"civic-deserts-and-our-present-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18248","title":{"rendered":"Civic Deserts and our present crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

My colleagues Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and Felicia Sullivan have published an article in The Conversation<\/em> that I believe supports an important diagnosis of the 2016 election and our current crisis. Their article is entitled “Study: 60 percent of rural millennials lack access to a political life<\/a>.” They find that a majority of rural youth live in areas that they call \u201cCivic Deserts,\u201d which are “characterized by a dearth of opportunities for civic and political learning and engagement” and a lack of “youth programming, culture and arts organizations and religious congregations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Young people in these areas are less\u00a0civically and\u00a0politically engaged than\u00a0other youth. They do not\u00a0belong to groups and they rarely take civic actions, like voting and volunteering. “During the 2016 presidential election, young people who live in Civic Deserts were less likely to vote compared to others with more civic resources.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But if they did vote, “they were slightly more likely to choose Trump than those with better access to civic resources.\u201d To illustrate that point: young urban Whites who lived in areas with many civic organizations voted for Trump at a rate of 17 percent. Young Whites who lived in Civic Deserts\u2014which could be rural,\u00a0suburban or urban\u2014voted for Trump at more than twice that rate:\u00a039 percent.<\/p>\n

A person could prefer Trump over Clinton in the November election for a variety of plausible reasons. For instance, if you think that abortion is murder, that is a reason to pull the lever for Trump\/Pence instead of Clinton\/Kaine. But to like<\/em> Trump\u2014to appreciate his rhetoric and leadership\u2014is a different matter.<\/p>\n

I have argued that few people who belong to functional voluntary groups will appreciate Trump. In almost any kind of voluntary association (whether an evangelical church, a Farmworkers\u2019 local, a business coalition, or a lending circle) leaders typically emerge who demonstrate two virtues: inclusiveness and accountability.<\/p>\n

No matter how unified the group, it will encompass some diversity. Members normally expect their leaders to hold the group together by using words and taking actions that include, rather than exclude. Groups do sometimes expel or deliberately alienate members–but only in extremis<\/em>. The normal goal is to hold the group together.<\/p>\n

And members expect their leaders to deliver. If the pastor says the church is going to build a new playground slide, then a new slide had better appear reasonably soon, or the pastor\u00a0will be blamed. If the informal leader of a social circle promises to organize a gathering but fails to set a date, her stock as a leader will fall.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump exhibits neither virtue. He is happy to exclude and he is utterly unaccountable. Indeed, I believe many of his fans don\u2019t really expect<\/em> him to deliver. For them, he is like a droll uncle sitting beside them on the couch, watching O\u2019Reilly, and making remarks that reflect their feelings. When he says he\u2019s going to drain the swamp, they take that to mean that he endorses their values and despises the lobbyists and politicians whom they despise, not that he will actually pass ethics reforms.\u00a0I posit that this\u00a0attitude reflects a lack of satisfying experiences with voluntary associations in which the leaders are inclusive and accountable. And that is an increasingly common situation given the steep decline in organizations like unions and churches.<\/p>\n

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Thus I consider the decline in membership\u2014especially among working class Whites\u2014a fundamental cause of Trump.<\/p>\n

As evidence, I cite my colleagues\u2019 new finding that White Millennials who live in Civic Deserts voted for Trump.\u00a0I’d also cite a recent conversation with a\u00a0self-described Southern\u00a0conservative evangelical pastor, who told me that he despises Trump\u00a0because\u00a0the president\u2019s leadership style violates everything he believes about how to hold a community together.<\/p>\n

I’d also cite Hannah Arendt\u2019s argument that loneliness is a precondition of totalitarianism. For her “isolation” means being alone, but “loneliness” means having no felt capacity to control the world in conjunction with other human beings:<\/p>\n

Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together, ‘acting in concert’ (Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition. …<\/p>\n

In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one\u2019s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable\u2026<\/p>\n

Isolation then becomes loneliness. … Totalitarian domination … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man (The Origins of Totalitarianism, <\/em>p. 474-5).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Donald Trump is no totalitarian, but the mechanism is similar.\u00a0When individuals learn from hard experience that they stand alone in a harsh\u00a0world, they are prone to follow leaders who simply echo their private thoughts and make them feel part of a\u00a0unified mass.<\/p>\n

See also\u00a0the hollowing out of US democracy<\/a>,\u00a0to beat Trump, invest in organizing<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the \u201ccivic state of the union\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My colleagues Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and Felicia Sullivan have published an article in The Conversation that I believe supports an important diagnosis of the 2016 election and our current crisis. Their article is entitled “Study: 60 percent of rural millennials lack access to a political life.” They find that a majority of rural youth live in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,34,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory","category-trump","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18248"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18255,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18248\/revisions\/18255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}