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Future Hindsight
Be a Joiner: Pete Davis
00:49:46
We discuss why joining a club or an association is the glue that binds civic society to democracy. They are the classrooms for our citizenship! Pete’s civic action toolkit recommendations are: Join a club! Re-inhabit the world that...
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- [00:01]
A
Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com hopeful all lowercase and if you want to support Future Hindsight, sign up for the newsletter this way. We'll pop up in your inbox every week with everything you need to to be the spark. Sign up@futurehindsight.com all right, let's get to the episode welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm your host, Mila Atmos. I'm a global citizen based in New York City and I'm deeply curious about the way our society works. So each week I bring you conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic issues and and share clear, actionable ways for us to build a brighter future together. After all, democracy is not a spectator sport. Tomorrow starts right now. When I started this podcast eight years ago, I had a hypothesis that more civic engagement was going to be the key to curing what ailed American democracy. Although I did not have the grounding of studying Bob Putnam's famous book Bowling Alone or any of his other work, I'm heartened that my self generated theory was on the mark. Our guest today is Pete Davis. He's a kindred soul to us here on the podcast. His mission is to deepen American democracy and American solidarity. He's a best selling author of dedicated, founder of the Democracy Policy Network, an interstate network that organizes policy support, and co director of Join or Die, a film about why you should join a club and why the fate of America depends on it. Welcome Pete. Thanks for joining us.
- [02:04]
B
So glad to be here.
- [02:06]
A
So I feel like we should start with where we want to go and then talk about how we get there. The fate of America depends on us joining clubs, on us participating in civic life help us make the connection to American democracy and American solidarity. How does joining help the practice of democracy?
- [02:27]
B
Yeah, well, you know, the clubs and associations that we are part of in ordinary civic life are the classrooms for our citizenship. They're the places where we learn how to give a speech, where we learn how to get things done, where we learn how to work out differences. They're also the place where we get connected with fellow people and get to know them and form what, you know, some academics might say form a public together. That is the stuff that makes up democracy everywhere and that's the stuff in our ordinary neighborhoods across this country that make up American democracy. We have proof of this. We just made this movie called Join or Die about the work of Robert Putnam. He first got famous by studying governance in Italy. If I could say a little bit about his famous study. It really gets into this.
- [03:14]
A
I want to get into that, but I want to have something that gets us into that question because I want to talk about American politics a little bit more.
- [03:22]
B
Great, Sounds good.
- [03:23]
A
And I really want to talk about, you know, we're in this moment of being literally on fire in America, I think. Right. And it feels like we need something really urgent and something really big and we need a silver bullet, which you say does not exist. And of course I agree. It took us decades to get here, American society to become unjoiners. And, you know, Americans used to be joiners. And I've been saying actually on the podcast that we need to slow down, we need to become more philosophical, we need to buy into each other. And I thought that we would do that after 2016, but we didn't. We didn't. So anyway, on the podcast, we have often heard that what we should do to build community is join an organization, join a union, form a reading group. And you actually directed an entire film on the subject, Join or Die, which I highly recommend. I really enjoyed it. So Join or Die sounds like a no brainer, but it isn't really, because Die is like, you know, that's pretty severe. It's pretty out there. So those are pretty dire stakes. What are those stakes? What dies if we don't join?
- [04:28]
B
You know, we get a lot of. We get a lot of pushback about our title. They say, you know, you're talking about this happy, hunky dory thing like civic life in America and joining community groups. And yet you have this very intense title. And what my sister Rebecca Davis and I, we were co directors on the film, wanted this title for was, we believe it is that dire. First off, it's that dire on an individual level. We know from the research that joining a single group cuts your likelihood of dying in the next year and a half, not being part of something. Social isolation is as big a risk factor for death as. As smoking. And yet everyone would say, you know, anti smoking campaigns are helping preserve life. We're in grave danger if we don't have them. The same is true for social isolation. That's on an individual level. On a civic, national level, it's also really dire when you don't have high social trust, when you don't have high Participation, what comes in to fill the gap? Antisocial organizations and authoritarianism and a level of cynicism that leads to corruption, conspiracism, and all these bad things that we don't want in a society. The key to societal flourishing is having a civic culture, having high participation, where we're doing a lot of things together, and everyone participating and making our democracy work. And when we don't have that, things get rough really fast.
- [05:53]
A
Mm. Well, thanks for sharing that statistic about social isolation. I had no idea it was quite so bad. I will state here for the record that. That I am a member of several clubs, so I am that kind of person who buys in.
- [06:07]
B
You're safe.
- [06:07]
A
I'm safe. Actually, I have to. This is really funny. Not exactly apropos, but maybe. I joined a women's club a long time ago now. And in the beginning I was a little bit like, I don't know if I should really do this. You know, it's a women's club. What am I doing here? Blah, blah, you know, and there's this reputation that women are catty, blah, blah, blah. As it turns out, I have made friends across generations, women in their 70s and their 80s, who have been these really kind mentors to me at all points of my life as a young mother, you know, and then now my children are older and transitioning from careers, and I just feel like this is the kind of thing that community does for you. They see you and they touch you, you know, they have this human connection to who you are and help you in the moment just when you need it, in a way. And I experienced a kind of sisterhood that I could have never imagined if I had not joined this club. But to return to the interview, I'm thinking here about the stakes and how you think about being in solidarity, because it looks different, right across the spectrum. I mentioned a little bit just now about sisterhood and being women together and navigating motherhood. But so solidarity requires different things from you as an individual, depending on what and whom you're standing in solidarity with. When you talk about solidarity in the context of democracy and civic life, what do you mean?
- [07:37]
B
You know, on a sociological level? I mean, solidarity is simply the collection of relationships that we have with each other. You know, in terms of American solidarity, it's the collection of relationships we have as a country. A country is more solidaristic if there are more loving relationships between the members of that country across more lines of difference. When you have low solidarity. When most people think I'm Just in it for myself. I don't see anyone else's destiny as part of my own. We act differently than we do when we see each other bound up in the same garment of destiny, as Martin Luther King liked to put it. When we see each other's dreams as part of our own, when we see each other's success as part of our own success, when we just simply, on a sociological level, know each other and, you know, know each other a little bit more, particularly in the particularities of who we are as people. When you have high solidarity, more good things happen. You know, ideas travel faster between people through the ties. So if there's a good idea, more people are closer to institutions of power. So when someone says vaccines are totally dangerous, you can say, well, actually I'm two degrees away from a doctor and I know someone who worked on that and therefore I won't develop a conspiracy theor. When you have more relationships with those who are in power, you watchdog them more and they're less chance of being corrupt. When you have more relationships across difference, there's less segregation. And segregation is what often leads to violence because you start not understanding each other and there's miscommunications between each other. That's why solidarity is really important for community. And then on a micro or meso level, if you want to get anything done, you have to do it together. Whether that's just kind of a hunky dory thing like clean up the park, you gotta do it together. Or if it's fight city hall or go on strike against your boss for higher wages and benefits, that's something you gotta do together. And all of that requires a spirit of seeing each other's destinies as intertwined with yours, which is what the kind of spirit of solidarity is. And so, you know, it's hard to talk about because it has so many good qualities to it. It feels like you're talking about everything, which sounds like you're talking about nothing, but it really is a distinction of a high solidarity or low solidarity society. You go to a low solidarity society and you have more, you know, ethnic and religious conflicts. You have less good ideas spreading, you have more corruption, you have more conspiracies, you have less people feeling like they have collective agency to get something done. And all the opposite in a high solidarity society.
- [10:11]
A
Mm, yeah. Thanks for giving the full on support for solidarity and also explaining it so expansively. So now is a good time to talk about the hard research and the data. Let's ground ourselves in the Work of Bob Putnam, famously the author of Bowling Alone. He is the main character of your film. He conducted a 20 year study of Italian regional governments from the 1970s to the 1990s, which resulted in the publication of something called Making Democracy Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. And he found, unsurprisingly of course, that some governments were more successful than others. So what did he discover were the ingredients of success for good governance?
- [10:55]
B
Yeah, he ran into this amazing natural political science experiment, which was that Italy was decentralizing its governments, its central government and creating regional governments in the mid-70s. So suddenly you had about 20 regional governments that were all starting at the same time. They had the same structure, they. And he was like, my gosh, this is a perfect experiment because we can watch these governments grow and function over 20 years and we can see which ones work and which ones don't work. And then we can ask the most important question, which is, why do some work and others not work? So we followed those governments over 20 years. He was able to organize them from most effective to least effective. Most effective is Emilio Romagna, where everyone loves the government. It gets a lot of things done. It has high poll rating of satisfaction all the way down to Calabria, where it doesn't get much done, it's constantly in chaos, it has low citizen satisfaction. And then he was able to ask, well, what do all the good ones have in common and all the less effective governments have in common? And he found that it wasn't necessarily economics, it wasn't necessarily the structure of the government, it wasn't the education levels, it wasn't staff turnover. What it was was choruses and bocce clubs and football teams and local newspapers and the amount of people talking with each other in the street and the amount of people that said they trusted each other. What the good effective governments had in common was they were part of polities that had high social capital, social connection, social trust. And that social capital, which is kind of the collection of relationships and norms of trust and reciprocity that is heavily correlated with effective government. And you know, correlation is not causation. But then you can start thinking about the causal mechanisms. Like I was saying, when you have higher trust, good ideas spread. When you have higher trust, there's less corruption because more people are watchdogging in the governments. When you have higher trust, more people are participating in public projects. When you have higher trust, more people are participating in elections. And thus you can see how that leads to institutional flourishing. So he found hard data that showed there is this total connection between community and democratic governance.
- [13:09]
A
Yeah, it's a really strong connection. And I'm a little surprised that not more people are talking about that in civic spaces in the United States, because it's so obvious, like the research exists and he did this work, you know, a long range, 20 year project that proves we have to do this. And I kind of feel like, how do we get here? You know, I had a conversation with Faj Shakir recently. He ran for DNC chairman.
- [13:35]
B
Love him.
- [13:35]
A
He was a long shot. Of course, you know, he ran the Bernie 2020 campaign, so he was definitely not, you know, a mainstream Democrat. But he told us about how he was trying to get a Super bowl party organized at a local party office and the local party didn't want to organize it. You know, they said it was gonna take too much time, too much effort to organize. And basically his takeaway, which is not, of course, what the local party people said, but Faz's takeaway was that, yeah, you know, it's easier to call 10 rich donors and get them to underwrite the expenses for the party for the year, as opposed to inviting people in and making community and organizing. And I kind of feel like, how do we get here? Is it simply that we don't wanna do the, quote, hard things, you know, and organize, go to meetings? It's easier to scroll social media on your phones or watch tv? Or is it something with capitalism capturing our culture? And here I'm thinking of like, you know, having VIP access to events or celebrity worship, or even paying for clear at the airport so you can cut the line, you know, Evil, evil. So what do you think?
- [14:46]
B
Well, first I'll just say on parties being community, I just have to say, given that example on parties being community entities, I wrote an article in the Nation right after the election about how our parties need to become organizations again. You know, Theta Skocpol wrote an amazing book called Diminished Democracy From Membership to Management in American Civic Life where she talked about how so many of our political organizations, not just community groups, but like ones trying to get things done in politics, have moved from mass membership models to models where what you ask of people is simply dollars and votes and the occasional letter writing campaign. And those dollars go to professional paid lobbyists and managers, centralized places. And it really changes the culture of our politics when we have parties where you're all participating in them versus ones where you're getting money from big donors and then using that to pay consultants to, you know, micro target people at elections to do ad hoc mobilizations and so what I proposed is we needed the four M's for each of the parties. You know, we needed membership halls. We need to rebuild the literal buildings where you're meeting up. We need membership cards where you're telling people you're a member of a party. It's not just that we're just getting you as a voter, we want you to feel like you're a member of this maps. We need to reclaim the idea of knocking on people's doors and owning wards and districts and precincts again and knocking on people's doors outside of elections to tell them we're here and we care about them. And finally, the final M is mutual aid, which is we need to not just be doing politics of just fighting for legislation or fighting for people to win. We also part of politics is just directly caring for each other and when there's a problem, trying to solve it, doing disaster relief, bringing people soup when they're sick, things like that. And so I'm really happy that Shakir was focused on that as well, and sad that the party isn't open to that and we need to push for that.
- [16:44]
A
Yeah.
- [16:44]
B
In terms of the capitalism question, the logic of so much of consumer society is antithetical to civics. And so many people wrote about this in mid century. What capitalist society often invites us to be is either slot into the consumer role, where it's like Burger King, have it your way. You know, you show up, you give someone money and they do something for you and then you walk away and it's your demands because you're the consumer and the consumer is king. Or you're in the hierarchical productive role where you're at a workplace and you file in to do your professional thing that only you do inside of some hierarchical corporation. Civics is a third way. It's what some have called a commons. It's a place where we are not just, you know, putting money in and getting services out. It's we're co creating society together. It's very local, it's very personalist, it's kind of antithetical to scale. Like so much of corporate life is. It is often, you know, has messiness and isn't trying to smooth away all the messiness. And it's kind of stewarding things in common. And so when you have more of space that's taken up by consumption and hierarchical production, you're squeezing out space that is taken up by common civic life, which works under a different logic. And you can see that in how we teach kids in school. If you're just training kids to be good consumers, taxpayers and workers. There's one way you train them. If you're training them to be good citizens, there's another way you train them. And it's not that we need to have all of the logic of society work under the civic logic, but I'd love to have a market economy within a civic society instead of a civic sector within a market society.
- [18:33]
A
Oh, that's interesting. Totally agree. You said something interesting about the commons, you know, being squeezed out. But I feel like it's not so much that the commons is being squeezed out as it is that people are abandoning the commons. We're just walking away from it. And I feel like there are multiple reasons. Right. For example, we have reshaped our society the way that we teach people what you just referred to. But I wonder, you know, how we can go back to reclaiming the commons, Because I feel like it's there. There's still libraries, there's still public parks. We can still go. You know, in your movie there was something about picnics and I was like, oh my goodness, I think I have not been to a picnic since I was in college, you know, so that is a really long time ago. Nobody has invited me to a picnic. Nobody has suggested I go to a picnic in decades.
- [19:23]
B
Basically, at the end of the 20th century, there was a larger than 50% drop in picnics in the 20 year period at the end of the century. So you are not alone. There's been a large picnic crisis around the country.
- [19:34]
A
Right. Like that used to be the thing, let's go to Central park on a Saturday and, you know, hang out, have a picnic, throw a Frisbee. Nobody does that anymore. Everybody's like, ah, I'm busy, or whatever. There are so many reasons. And I think in my case I thought, oh, it's because now I have kids. People do different things, you know. But speaking of picnics falling, there is also an active effort from the current administration to disband clubs and affinity groups at universities and schools, like women's groups, you know, at West Point or by ethnicity. And I don't know how we can, as everyday people, have the courage to keep doing this when there is a powerful actor who's trying to get us to stop doing it and not be in community.
- [20:28]
B
Yeah. You know, everything in public life is a dance between us as individual agents and the institutional order that is presented to us. Opportunities are presented in the structure of life and we respond to them. Let me give an example, because there is a Park, it becomes easier for you to go to a park, and if there were no parks, it would be harder for you to go to a park. And so there's always the world out there and us. And that can be for good or for ill. You know, you start a library and more people find it easier because there's an opportunity to read more. You destroy a library and, you know, everyone could still figure out a way to read some other way, but because of that change in the structure, it becomes harder for you to do something individually. So now the question is, how does anything change? Well, we have to move on both fronts. We have to create an institutional order and reform an institutional order that makes it easier to be communal and civic. So we need to create, as Hari Hahn, the great political scientist at Johns Hopkins, writes about, we need to create more civic opportunities for people. We need to create more clubs and organizations and communal aspects of institutions that invite people in. We can't just put it on every individual to figure this out. So that's one part. But then we as individuals also have to make our moves too. You know, someone has to do something different if we want things to change. Now, how do we make things change when it's hard? Well, we just have to figure it out because, you know, I heard about this wonderful union idea that someone said to my co director on the film, and it's just really haunted me recently, in a good way, which is they said as long as there is an unmet demand of a set of workers, it is always possible to. To have a unionization campaign. As long as there is an unmet demand, which is as long as they want higher wages, there is some path forward to get them together to fight for higher wages. The only time when it's over is if they don't want it anymore. And I feel the same about civic life. If there's anything we want different, it's only a tactical puzzle to figure out. How do we organize people to come to an awareness of the things we want different and come together with each other and be armed with the right tools and strategies that allow for that desire for a different future to become a reality. And so the way to find the courage is we have to blow on the sparks of our desires for something different. You know, Jane McAlevy, who we featured in the film, the great late labor organizer, said, you first raise expectations and then you raise hell. And. And the biggest thing first is we gotta raise our expectations for the world we want to live in. They're trying to. They're trying to sand it down in us and say this is fine, but, you know, for many of us, we're settling for five out of 10. I think we can get nine out of 10 out of our American public life.
- [23:29]
A
Oh, here, here.
- [23:30]
B
Well, I don't promise 10 out of 10. You know, that's for. That's for the theologians.
- [23:35]
A
Yeah, that's.
- [23:36]
B
I can promise nine out of 10.
- [23:37]
A
That's great. That's great. We don't want to live in fantasy. But, you know, you mentioned something really powerful here, which is that what is missed in all of this, that organizing is about power. Right. It's about having the power to change things, to pressure our elected officials to act on our behalf, to organize for higher wages, to get the thing that you need to address the needs of your community. And that, in sum, is the practice of democracy, is people banding together to solve their problems.
- [24:05]
B
Yes.
- [24:11]
A
We'll be right back with Pete Davis. So stay with us. This man has a fire in his belly. And you want to be sure to hear this episode's civic spark. One small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. But first, take a second to think about some of the most successful businesses. You know, the ones with sales going through the roof, like Untuck it or Cotopaxi. What do you think of? I'm sure what comes to mind is a great product and a cool brand with brilliant marketing. But have you ever thought about the businesses behind the business? Because, after all, you cannot do it alone. For millions of businesses, that business behind them is Shopify. They're the secret ingredient that makes selling and for shoppers, buying simple. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. You want to know why? Well, for one, Shopify is home to the number one checkout on the planet. And we can't forget about the not so secret, secret shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way fewer carts going abandoned and way more sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, then your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. That's not so much to ask, is it? And that's why businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. If you have a business, you want that business to grow. And Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level, no matter how big you want to grow. And that's what I love about Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Cotopaxi uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com hopeful all lowercase go to shopify.com hopeful to upgrade your selling today shopify.com hopefully and now let's return to my conversation with Pete Davis. But let's talk about how to make joining a thing. The Democracy Policy Network just published a toolkit on 13 Ways Cities can cultivate a sense of city membership. Now, we don't have time to go over all 13 ways, but tell us about the importance of place based membership in deepening democracy and solidarity.
- [26:52]
B
I would argue, you know, maybe this is going on a limb here. I would argue the most important venue for democracy is our local democracy. And it's often the one that's forgotten. You know, our screens are pulling us all around the world and all different times and all different content everywhere. But most of the things that directly affect us are in our communities. And most of the people that we can easily come together with are our direct neighbors. And the places where we're gonna get the most joy in meeting is meeting up in person with real people. And what do all the people you can meet up in person with real people frequently have in common? They're probably close until we kind of invent teleportation. So the venue of the city as a place that has a sense of membership I think is really important. So what do I mean by a sense of membership? You could think about your relationship to a city as, I just randomly rented an apartment here or bought a house here, and so it's just a real estate designation. Or you could think about it as just, I'm a taxpayer and I put in my taxes and I get my services and I get arrested if I don't pay my taxes or something like that. And I'm just under this jurisdiction. But there's another, deeper way to think about your relationship with the city is that I'm a member of the city. This city itself is in a way, an association. And that's how many people have thought about their cities and neighborhoods throughout American history. And especially the effective cities and neighborhoods cultivate a sense of that membership where I care about its past, I care about its present, I care about its future, I feel solidarity with the other people in it. I see myself as part of a shared project with my neighbors. And so what we did with the City Membership Policy Kit, which you can find at the Democracy Policy Network democracypolicy.network is we said, well, how could cities cultivate a Sense of membership among their residents. Here's just one example. Having cities care about the associational life going on inside of their cities. Just like how they care about the commercial life going on inside of their cities. So most cities across America have an economic development office. That economic development office cares that new businesses are created so much so they're creating incentives for those new businesses. And they create a community of practice among those new businesses. And they aid those new businesses in finding space. And they woo those new businesses to come in and encourage you and connect you and things like that. We should also have civic development offices in our city. You know, offices of city membership that are caring about the associational life and trying to help clubs get off the ground, trying to help them find meeting spaces. Another aspect is having a culture of neighborhoods inside of cities. You know, some cities have decided they're gonna have a neighborhood liaison in every city, in every neighborhood in their city. And they're gonna have a formal structure of giving those neighborhoods identity and leadership. And then they're even throwing, on top of that, some little micro grants to, you know, do neighborhood events or to create neighborhood spaces and things like that. And so these little things, like caring about the associational life or defining neighborhoods within, creating structures of leadership within them. Those, plus we have 11 others, are ways that you can start cultivating a sense that, hey, you're part of the city. Welcome. You know, and speaking of welcome, that's one of ours too. We say there should be orientations to joining a city. You know, maybe every six months or so, there's a welcome orientation for all the new residents that came in the last six months. Voluntary, of course, but it's there if you wanna get to know, you know, your mayor and how the different systems work and get a tour of the history or things like. So that people can really feel like they're part of this.
- [30:27]
A
For the record, New York City is one of those cities. We have block associations and there are community boards. And of course you have city council, which is not quite the same thing. Cause that's elected office. But there are neighborhood associations in New York City, which sounds wrong because, you know, New York City famously is, quote, unfriendly and unneighborly. But it isn't. It really isn't all my experiences.
- [30:47]
B
It's underneath the surface. It's one of the most neighborly places in the country, for sure.
- [30:52]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. And people are, you know, very loyal. Whether they're from a neighborhood in Queens or in Brooklyn or somewhere in Manhattan or I don't know, Clinton Hill or whatever it is. But so I read in one of your interviews you made a distinction between belonging and membership. And as a non white immigrant to the United States, I often think about belonging and often think about being out of place, but I've never thought about it in connection to membership. What's the difference between belonging and membership?
- [31:25]
B
I'll be very abstract here and say, you know, definitions are culturally constructed, and there'll be a bunch of different definitions of what membership evokes in people and what belonging evokes in people. You know, sometimes as I've talked about this, people have said, well, membership raises my hackles and makes me sense, like exclusive membership. But here's how I, and Sam Pressler, who I wrote this City Membership Kit with divine. Membership is, you know, belonging is often kind of an individual sense of feeling like you belong. It kind of evokes a feeling inside of you. Membership is a communally constructed idea. A sense of membership is just as much something going on inside you versus also a bunch of structures throughout that make that membership real. And the way that you're interacting with everyone else and the things that are expected of you and the ways that you are welcomed and. And the ways that you're celebrated and the ways that have expectations set of you, all of that is kind of this collective project of creating a sense of membership among a community. You know, let's take a school and you could say the teachers are all employees and the students are all clients receiving services, and the parents are all taxpayers. And you leave it at that. And they get mad at you if you're not being a good employee or a good taxpayer or good client receiving your service. Or you can just start communally creating a membership structure which says, you know, we're all gonna welcome all the new people and have rituals of welcoming when someone joins. We're have rituals of leaving when someone leaves. We're gonna have a mission statement that we're gonna inculcate in people daily. We're gonna learn the history of this place and make it honorable to learn about the history and be inspired by the history of a place. We're gonna have expectations of people that they care about, that they see each other as part of a shared destiny. Through this school, we're gonna plan out futures together. We're gonna care if someone doesn't show up in a loving way, like if someone's not at a meeting for a long time. We're gonna check in on them and bring them soup if they're sick. You know, all of that together, there's not one silver bullet. There's not one engineering piece that makes it membership or not membership. But. But collectively, what that does is makes you feel a sense of membership in something as opposed to someone in some rigid, cold set of legalistic and commercial expectations. And so that's what we mean by this.
- [33:52]
A
Right. I like it. It was really powerful, and I had not considered in this way. So thanks for explaining this. So another reason I asked the question about belonging is because we hear this word a lot, especially in the context of identity politics. Right. Of course. Identity is part of coming of age, I feel like. And now I have young adults as children. And young people have always looked to define themselves, to find their place in the world. And you argue that being a joiner is gaining ground in the United States. And we know that we will need millions of Americans to become joiners going forward. So are young people into this right now? Are young people thinking about identity as being a joiner, or have you found any evidence of this? Yeah.
- [34:40]
B
Yeah. Well, here's one thing that we really like emphasizing on this tour with the film. And this goes back to, like, some of the great original Democratic theorists, like John Dewey. There's often individualism and all the things that come with individualism, like individual identity and things like that is often pitted against community, and they're threats to each other, basically. But one thing you discover is that you develop your individualism through community. This is something that John Dewey liked to talk about. The stuff that makes up who you are is usually through your participation in something bigger than yourself. And so when a young person is worried about finding an identity and filling themselves up with particular content that is their life, that is what gives them meaning and purpose and verve. What I often recommend is it's not that you should go be alone and reflect on who your true self is. You should instead go and engage in the world and through your memberships, through your participation, through your, what Wendell Berry calls convocation, finding your calling together through all of that, in your engagement and community in the world, you develop your identity. You become part of New Orleans when you move there and you join the culture and you participate in the local politics, and suddenly you're a New Orleanser or whatever they call it, and you get into an arts subculture and you participate in it, and you learn the craft and you learn all the other people in it, and you learn the history of it, and you become friends with a bunch of others. You fight in some fight to save Some old venue that was gonna be torn down. Suddenly, that's a big part of who you are. It's through the community that you develop identity. And what do we want out of our identity? What identity is, is it's a template for heroism. And I think a lot of young people are seeking out capital R, romantic heroism. They want to have meaning in their life. They want to fight for something. They want to have an adventurous journey that leads them to test, you know, as the great songwriter Joe Pug says, test the timbre of your heart. And community is the venue through which you find heroism. It is through joining up with a community that you join up with a grand history. You learn about the history of that community. You learn about the current struggles that it's facing. You learn about the future hopes of it, and you throw your life into it and give a shot at pouring some of your life essence into it so that something new can be achieved. The next chapter of this community is created. You know, like current basketball players, they talk about, I'm trying to create the next chapter of what basketball is. You know, Timothee Chalamet just won his SAG Award, and he said, I want to be one of the great actors. That is the next chapter of acting. Just like Humphrey Bogart or Robert De Niro. What you're doing when you're joining a community is you're deciding to heroically create the next chapter of whatever that thing is. And you'll never have that chance if you just sit alone in your house. It is through community that we gain identity, that we gain form to our life, that we gain meaning, and we finally get our chance to be heroes.
- [37:52]
A
Wow. Wow. This was super inspiring. You have a fire in your belly. So tell me you are an advocate for greater civic imagination. And assuming that Americans are gonna join in and they're gonna become these heroes on their, you know, capital R, romantic journeys, they've become joiners once more. How do you envision our Future in like, 20 years?
- [38:18]
B
Well, it's up to us. You know, we have to decide. Are we gonna deepen American democracy? Are we gonna expand more power to more people in more ways? Are we gonna deepen American solidarity? Are we gonna increase more relationships between more people in more ways? Are we gonna, you know, stay at home and let the world happen to us, or are we gonna go out there and figure out a way to turn it around and co create our shared world? Are we gonna have a sense of freedom, not just as liberty from power, but rather participation in power as Cicero Or Martin Luther King like to say, These are the questions. It's up to us to decide what we're gonna do. Someone's gonna do it, and I hope it's you.
- [38:59]
A
I hope it's all of us. I hope it's all of us.
- [39:00]
B
I hope it's all of us.
- [39:01]
A
Yeah. Yeah. We have to. We have to do it.
- [39:04]
B
That's the question. I really feel if we don't deepen American democracy and solidarity, we're gonna be in trouble. The big problem today, when I look around at what's going on in American civic life, which is a total mess, is that we have a very rigid line between insiders and outsiders. And when you have a very rigid line between insiders and outsiders, bad social ills arise among the insiders. Corruption arises. Not just the corruption of, you know, bags of money being handed to you to do something, though, that's happening too. It's the corruption of people just losing a sense of mission and cashing their checks and, you know, not caring if they succeed at their mission in public life and just getting their university board seat afterwards or whatever, and riding off into the sunset without ever fighting for, you know, a sense of what their professional mission is. Among the outsiders, you fall into kind of cynical conspiracism where you think everyone's out to get you. Nothing's worth trusting. Everyone's corrupt. And both of these places, when you have this rigid line between insiders and outsiders, they have this false solution that they both arise inside of them. The insiders think we just need a message better. We're doing all this great work, but we just need to tell the outsiders about how it's such great work. But that never works. The outsiders think we need to throw the bums out. They say if we can only replace those insiders with our insiders, then we'll show them, and that'll solve everything. And what you find out is that the insider's new messaging doesn't break through to people. And the outsiders, new people that they put in after throwing the bums out, end up not being the solution that they wanted, and they start having conspiracies about them, too. You find out none of this works, and there is only one answer. And that answer is to blur the line between insiders and outsiders, invite more people in and open up more windows and doors on the inside so that there's more connection between the out and the ins, so you can't even tell the difference between that. What do you call a society where the line between insiders and outsiders is blurred. A democracy, a deep democracy. And what is the venue of that blurring? It is associational life. It's anytime we decide as outsiders to take action and co create our shared world and claim our right in a democracy, as insiders, that's the answer. We gotta keep that churnin'.
- [41:20]
A
Hmm. Wow, that's super deep. Well, I hate to pivot here, but we have to. So every week on Future Hindsight, I ask my guests to share civic spark. One small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. What's a good way to turn the insights that you've just shared with us into action?
- [41:44]
B
Yeah, you know, I'm not gonna have this be my official one. I hope by this time in the interview, all of you know I. The opening line of our film is, this is a film about why you should join a club and why the fate of America depends on it. So I hope it's already well known that what I want you to do is join a club. Yes, any type of club, club, an association, a league, a union, a cooperative, a commission, art scene, anything where you're connected with real people in the real world, doing things together. But I'll give a special one for this kind of concrete insight. And this might be surprising to people because it sounds a little more passive than I've been sounding and others have been sounding on this podcast, but I find it to be really effective, which is, if I can zoom out a bit, there's this wonderful Western poet named Gary Snyder. And Gary Snyder said that what we should do is we should practice reinhabitation. We should acknowledge that we're part of a world together and we should reinhabit that world. He had a joke where he said, no one has yet discovered America, by which he meant no one has really taken the time to understand what's going on around us. And he meant this in a naturalist way, where he said, like, understand the trees in your neighborhood, understand the rocks in your neighborhood, understand the water systems in your neighborhood. He was talking about reinhabiting people into nature, but then he expanded it to our human sociological nature too. Understand how the trash system works in your city. Understand how the government works in your city. Understand how the budgeting works in your city. Understand how does the school system work in your city. And so what he said is the practice of taking the time to learn about the world around you and how it works. That is part of the practice of inhabiting the world, of becoming a member of the world, because getting to Know someone is how you build a relationship with them. You get to know each other and you become friends. And he says, get to know the world, and you become part of it. You become friends with the world. And so my thing would be, actually a good first step is to just take some time quietly, to learn empirically what's going on in some slice of public life. How does your city buy its trash vehicles? How does the city decide when a sidewalk is built or not built? What is it like to be a guidance counselor at a middle school in your city? How does the Department of Commerce work? You know, any of these things, let alone all the flora and fauna? And what is the history? You know, there's this whole Swedish movement called Dig where youe Stand, which is all about learning the history to inspire you about the future. What happened in your block 100 years ago? What. What's been the story of your block? All of that process of reinhabitation is going to give you empirical reality. That's gonna give you fire in the belly. Because as you learn about how things really work, you're gonna run up on things that are gonna make you wanna participate in those systems. And most importantly, gonna make you mad about how some of those systems aren't working as well as they could be. And so reinhabit the world that you're in by learning about it. And if I had to get really concrete about that, set out and write a report on. Set out and write a report on how something works in your city, and then share it with people. And you can call up 15 people and say, I'm writing a report about how this works in the city that I wanna share with other people. Could you sit down with me for 30 minutes to tell me how this all works? And you will be so surprised by how much it sparks inside of you and how much it wants you to go deeper. Everyone who goes out and sets out to learn more about the concrete reality of how the world works, they just get drawn deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And it usually ends with them, like running some national crusade to fix something.
- [45:45]
A
Well, I have set out eight years ago to figure out how American democracy works, and I'm still at it. And I have learned so much, and I've been inspired by so many people, including you. Thank you very much for coming on today. I have only one more question.
- [45:58]
B
Yes?
- [45:59]
A
Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
- [46:03]
B
You know, everything that we dream for the world already exists in piecemeal, spread out in millions of experiments and alternatives and deviances. All around the world and across our history. The only challenge is to blow on those sparks, spread those seeds, foster them and connect them and grow them. And so, you know, if you're wishing we had an alternate economy, there are experiments and alternate economies all over, from public banks in North Dakota to social housing in Montgomery County, Maryland, to social cooperatives in Korea and Northern Italy. If you're dreaming of a different way that campaign finance is run, there's an experiment in Seattle around democracy vouchers. If you're dreaming of a different way that the news media is run, there's thousands of experiments in alternate local journalism. If you're dreaming of a new way that health or childcare is done, there's thousands of experiments. Now it could be done. As my favorite philosopher Roberto Unger says, the world remains restless and the dominant narratives and power players are never fully dominant. There is always deviances. There are always alternatives. And the challenge is to just grow them. And so the world we hope for already exists. Let's just foster it more.
- [47:21]
A
Wow. Yes, indeed, indeed. Thank you for sharing all of those pockets of hopeful alternatives and that we need to just grow them more. I think that's really good advice because it feels so desperate right now. But actually there are places where things are already working really well. Thank you very much, Pete, for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show and thank you.
- [47:46]
B
For all you do. This is such a great example of one such alternative.
- [47:49]
A
Thank you. Pete Davis is the best selling author of dedicated founder of the Democracy Policy Network, and co director of Join or Die. Remember, civic action doesn't have to be complicated. It's about small steps that spark progress, like sharing this episode with a friend. Let's recap this week's Civic Spark and fire up our collective power. Obviously, the first thing you should do is join a club or join an association. The second thing you might do is to reinhabit the world you're in. Find out the history of your place or get granular on how something in your city works, like how the garbage trucks are purchased. This will inform you and your life in a surprising way. Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Julie Souk. She's a professor of law at Fordham University and a leading scholar of constitutional amendment, equality and feminism. That's next week on Future Hindsight. Now be sure to follow us on your podcast app so you don't miss a single episode. Let us make it easy for you. We're here to help you stay engaged so follow Future Hindsight and we'll stay in your rotation every week. And if you need that extra push, let Future Hindsight jump into your inbox every week. Sign up for the newsletter now@future hindsight.com thanks for tuning in, and until next time, see clearly, act boldly and spark the change you want to see. This episode was produced by Zach, Travis and me.
- [49:39]
B
This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.