Purposeful Places, Community Entrepreneurs and the Defense of Democracy

The unsung people who weave America together need a new vehicle to elevate what they do into something that can meet our moment of democratic challenge.

Deepti Doshi, the co-director of New_ Public, published a lovely post yesterday about “the labor that stands up our democracies: the people who organize our neighborhood gatherings and PTA meetings, the team behind Buy Nothing Groups, and our librarians - creating safe spaces for all kinds of people to connect and through working together build trust and deeper understanding of one another.” She calls them “community entrepreneurs,” harking back to her time at Facebook leading its work managing relationships with group administrators. Personally, I prefer the term “community organizers,” though I suppose ever since Sarah Palin attacked Barack Obama for being one, that phrase has become a bit politicized.

I’m all for Doshi’s big idea, though, which is that we invest more seriously in supporting community builders, though I’d add one wrinkle. As her nod toward librarians suggests, what really builds and sustains community isn’t just dedicated individual organizers adept at “creating containers for healthy community living.” What matters just as much if not more are the places we make for that purpose, like libraries and bookstores and summer camps and religious centers and biking clubs. Individual community organizers-entrepreneurs come and go. They grow up; they burn out; they go through life-cycle changes like starting a family or needing to care for an elder. Purposeful places sustain culture and reproduce those leaders. That’s what we need to focus on.

I met my partner in life at a Jewish (Socialist-Zionist to be precise) summer camp; we are still close to many of our dear friends from as much as 47 years ago. And a few years ago, when we went back there for the camp’s 90th anniversary, one of the things that impressed me most was how the current leaders of the camp, 17- and 18-year-olds who had also spent their summers there, were just like us: devoted to community organizing.

Five years ago, the democracy researcher Hahrie Han wrote in The New York Times in a piece about the power of the National Rifle Association that there were more gun clubs and gun shops in America than there were McDonald’s restaurants. It’s a startling claim, though it’s built on a bit of a fudge; she links to a 2012 ABC News post that there were 51,438 gun stores compared to 14,098 McDonald’s. Still, today the NRA alone claims that it has more than 15,000 affiliated clubs, organizations and businesses; as of 2021 there were 13,438 McDonald’s.

Hahn’s larger point still stands: people get (and stay) involved in political movements for social reasons; they don’t join the NRA first because of its politics; they join because they want a place to shoot their guns. Turning that shared hobby into a hardened political identity has been the work of a generation of determined NRA organizers, but while I detest what they’ve become I am impressed by how much that group has transformed gun ownership into not just a lifestyle but a whole world-view. Not only do many NRA members vote for and support gun rights candidates, they have come to see efforts to regulate gun ownership as attacks on their “American way of life.” Talk about the power of identity politics!

In her post, Doshi argues that the community entrepreneurs she is celebrating—people who host regular civic get-togethers in their homes or who work tirelessly to rejuvenate a local park or who create a neighborhood safety program—should be thought of as the weavers of a healthy democracy because what they are doing, at root, is a counter to the loneliness and anomie so prevalent in America. “Without spaces that cultivate belonging and a shared sense of purpose, why do we expect anything other than high rates of loneliness, polarization, and attacks on our Capitol building?” she asks.

The problem, however, is that while these folks may be humming the right tune, they don’t know what words to say. They may be doing the most basic thing that our democracy rests on—"connect[ing] people to one another and creat[ing] and cultivat[ing] spaces for people to develop relationships to solve problems”—but they don’t associate that work with democracy itself. Even, for example, as book-banning spreads across patches of Trumpist America, public libraries try to stay apolitical. The Brooklyn Public Library has done a great thing by posting a way for teens across America to get a free eCard to access its online collection (including those banned books), but it is careful to not point out where book-banning is coming from and couches its action in generic terms about the freedom to think. The local Yonkers Rowing and Paddling Club not far from where I live exists to nurture paddling and environmental awareness, and it even has a free community access program for Yonkers teens to get into the water they live next to, but it doesn’t—as an organization—enter into local or national political debates.

In most places the Democratic Party simply doesn’t fill this gap. I was struck reading this recent piece in Daily Kos by Jaynie Parrish about how the Northeast Arizona Native Democrats are organizing by just how much they are doing to build community year-round. She writes, “We’re proving to be a fixture in the communities we serve. We let folks know we're here not only to register them to vote and talk about the importance of being civically engaged, and get to know the Democratic candidates, but we are here to also help citizens with basic needs. About 30% of our organizers’ time is dedicated to helping the community, whether that's picking up elders and taking them on a grocery store run, or hosting community clean ups. Others have regularly delivered water, firewood, PPE, food-boxes, and just recently through one of our phone-banks, assisted an elder whose roof was blowing off in a storm. Several of our team members also organized or assisted with back-to-school drives for families in need, one organizer continues to collect clothing and toiletries for local domestic violence shelters and much more.” Does your local Democratic organization sound anything like this?

Conversely, we have a very active array of national groups, loosely working under the banner of the “Not Above the Law Coalition,” who are working hard to defend democracy from the Beltway outward, filing critical lawsuits, refining messaging aimed at countering the MAGA threat, and galvanizing attention around key events like the nationally televised hearings of the January 6th Select Committee. This work is crucial and it has been succeeding, as the growing audience for those hearings and the rising concern about “threats to democracy” in recent polls shows. But for all their good work, the most these groups have come up with to localize their actions is to importune volunteers to get their cities and towns to pass “Democracy Resolutions” in support of the January 6th committee. Don’t look, but there haven’t been many.

So we have a double problem. We don’t have much local infrastructure that matches what places like gun clubs and evangelical churches do for the MAGA right, and what social infrastructure we do have is devoted to the almost completely apolitical celebration of community. And at a moment when adherence to the rule of law is deeply threatened, when the majority of Republicans believe an election was stolen from them and that efforts to reclaim power by force or violent threats may be justified, defending democracy seems to be something that only professional do-gooders or explicitly political groups can do.

We need a new vehicle for this cause. I don’t know what it is (or just have the vaguest of notions, like the Delicious Democracy crew in DC or the Knit Democracy Together craftivism project led by artist and former Vermont Assistant Attorney General Eve Jacobs-Carnahan) but if you see one percolating or have ideas, leave a comment and let’s con-spire.

—Related: While Trump may be winning his legal battle with the Justice Department over the classified documents he stole from the White House and took to Mar-a-Lago, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform will soon be getting its hands on his tax returns.

—Also related: Editor & Publisher’s Gretchen Peck reports on how some news organizations are turning democracy into a real beat. And the details are hair-raising: “this huge infrastructure emerging to get people who questioned the election results to work elections — to be the people who are checking your ID as you come in to vote,” for example. And this: “Even people who aren’t all-in on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen feel like the election denialism is a gateway to feel affirmed — to feel a sense of belonging to a movement.”

Odds and Ends

I’ve found several new (or new to me) newsletters worth paying attention to.

—AI Snake Oil, written by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, is for people who need some informed pushback on the hype.

—Knurdology, written by Sam Chavez, is exploring the often unspoken culture of activism, offering common sense on why we can’t operate under a constant sense of urgency or why we need to celebrate more.

—Bill McKibben’s The Crucial Years gets to the heart of the fight against climate disaster, week after week.

—Lately Katie Harbath’s Anchor Change has been doing great work pinning down what tech companies are, and aren’t, doing to combat political disinformation as the election heats up.

—David Slifka took a close look at who is a moderate in America and discovered that the word has no agreed-upon definition.

—Last but not least, journalist Laura Jedeed’s Dispatches, which focuses on the hard problem of hyper-polarization in America without giving in to the “both sides bad” equivocation so common among “moderates” became a must-read for me with this recent post about the 74 million people who voted for Trump. Well, this post too, about why she welcomed Biden’s speech on democracy with relief and trepidation. She writes, “I regularly meet and speak to people who live in each America. I find myself liking most of them, and I care very much about a few. With notable and important exceptions, the vast majority of people in both nations are human beings who want a decent and fulfilling life. They do not feel fulfilled. They are desperately unhappy. They are terrified that the other America will take what little joy they’ve found away from them. One of these Americas is correct to be afraid. The other is no less scared for being wrong.”

Deep Thoughts

Right now I’m making my way through Balaji Srinavasan’s intriguing and maddening book The Network State, so more on that soon, but in the meantime I wanted to flag a few new books just out from friends: Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires; David Corn’s American Pyschosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy; and Mike Tomasky’s The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity. I’ve read Rushkoff’s and loved it; may it be the last book anyone ever chooses to read about a tech billionaire. I haven’t gotten to the other two yet but both are solid thinkers and well worth a look.