Empire of Democracy by Simon Reid-Henry

Author:Simon Reid-Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

The New Citizens

The trend to declining popular participation in public life was observable beyond the overtly political sphere. What was more it could be seen at all ages, be it the decline of Boys’ Brigade members in Scotland or of the old Centro Primo Maggio in Verona province—a communist party social club, which transformed itself first into a modern social center, and then into a sports club.82 But where had people gone, if they weren’t any longer members of political parties, or unions, or social clubs? Were they all now, as the American sociologist Robert Putnam famously observed in his 1995 essay (and later bestselling book), simply “bowling alone”? In fact, people had not vacated the public realm; but they were thinking and acting as public citizens differently: more individually, more voluntaristically. And the result was a notable decline in civic engagement.

The evidence was certainly striking: since 1973 the number of Americans who had, in the last year, “attended a public meeting on town or school affairs” had fallen by a third.83 As Putnam concluded, “Americans’ direct engagement in politics and government has fallen steadily and sharply over the last generation.”84 But people more generally were not joining sports clubs, or literary societies, or helping out at their local school as much as they used to do. Instead they were doing a shift at the local soup kitchen or Restaurants du Coeur (founded across France’s major cities in the mid 1980s by none other than failed presidential candidate “Coluche”). One study estimated the total voluntary labor time devoted to these charitable works in France at 700,000 hours a year in 1990, or equivalent to 3.4 percent of all paid jobs.85

In a curious return of the international scene to domestic shores, these were often inspired by a distinctly humanitarian passion rather than a political ethic, and so it is little surprise they should often have been overseen by the Red Cross or Oxfam. And while these programs filled in for the civic engagement of earlier times, they did not endow a specific solidarity or sense of community that true civic engagement did. Where people were coming together now, it was in passive, nonideological organizations—of the sort that brings football fans into a common identity, but one that falls short of community—and in small private gatherings which, as the sociologist Robert Wuthnow demonstrated, may not be public gatherings so much as “occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others.”86 Trust was on the decline; people had largely stopped meeting socially with their neighbors. More people asked dog walkers to take out their pets; eventually they would entrust Alexa to look after the dog at home.

Citizens were also encouraged in their retreat from civic engagement by the private sector, which sought to offer them a commercialized form of citizenship in place of the political one they were losing. Public institutions were given over to market providers who promised to offer a better variety of services for less money. Citizens

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