Where's The Action?
Social democracy is suffering from the decline of civic life. To rebuild, we need to look offline.
Hey MomLeft readers! This is the last post before a winter hiatus. I’ll be back in mid-January. Be good, I love you!
A little over two years ago, I thought the Republican National Committee had a good idea. While overhauling its strategy to reach racial minorities, the RNC launched a series of community centers that hosted free Easter egg hunts, pizza dinners, and dances. Political messaging was present but not central to operations; a free pizza night might have doubled as a phone banking drive. More important was the visible investment in IRL community where civil society has atrophied.
It takes a village to raise a child, ect., ect. But adults need community, too. And as parents know, that village can be vanishingly difficult to find—sometimes to disastrous ends.
Americans are isolated, atomized, lonely. We spend more time alone and have fewer friends, trends accelerated by the decline of social organizations, the erosion of shared spaces, the rise of smartphones, and the shockwave of Covid. With fewer social ties and mutual obligations, precarity feels more pronounced and antisocial policies grow more appealing. The void left by sociality is filled with weaker, darker alternatives; by fuck-your-feelings masculinity influencers, by the right’s policies of performative anti-empathy. Notions of collective care and survival are supplanted by strategic selfishness and idealized individualism. Family is conceptualized not as a thread in a broader social fabric, but as a closed unit, a fortress against the rest of society. Mantras of “no one owes you anything” sound like self-soothing in a world in which everyone owes each other so much, but few feel adequately cared for.
All this as critical expenses like rent, childcare, medical care, and college balloon to account for ever-greater portions of American incomes. It’s no wonder a lavishly funded political operation like the RNC finds it worthwhile to host regular potluck dinners in swing districts where community life has stumbled. Americans are experiencing a deficit of belonging, and the care that comes with it. If the left can’t adequately address those needs, the right will step in to offer its own simulacra of community, either in the form of RNC-backed social groups, or disseminated through fandoms for politically toxic internet personalities.
In the weeks after Donald Trump’s reelection, several writers have flagged social disintegration as an existential challenge for the Democratic Party. Writing in the Nation, Pete Davis chronicles the left’s long drift away from active memberships and in-person meetings, and toward a system of political mailing lists and short-term “mobilization” around elections. Davis prescribes a more locally oriented Democratic operation, with a greater focus on IRL meeting halls and mutual aid.
“The party should directly care for members and for the broader community,” Davis writes. “Democrats should do disaster relief, take on homeless-shelter shifts, cook food when members have a baby, welcome new immigrants to town, and host block parties throughout the year. Effective and inspiring community engagement should be celebrated statewide—and turned into multi-chapter efforts. This is especially important in red districts: Trust is earned not through perfectly targeted messaging in the short run but through in-person care over the long run.”
Writer Ned Resnikoff arrives at a similar conclusion on his blog, suggesting that “liberals and the left organize those who can be organized, and then direct those grassroots foot soldiers toward the goal of establishing a larger social formation: one that has a low barrier to entry but that is also connected by longer-lasting bonds than GOTV.”
Among Resnikoff’s suggestions are left-run community hubs that would host family-centric offerings like free meals for children (something that polls ludicrously well), as well as free childcare programs and social gatherings for adults.
This kind of programming has precedent on the right and left. Resnikoff cites the community-building (and certainly identity-building) work of pro-Trump churches, as well as the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children program, the latter of which was part of a broader community service program that strengthened local political networks by deploying members into direct service of their neighbors.
In Jacobin last month, Bhaskar Sunkara finds similar precedents in Europe, where social democratic parties have also suffered as their traditional working class bases peel away. Sunkara cites the Workers’ Party of Belgium, which has made electoral inroads by going all-in on programs that immediately support the working class, like providing primary health care services at party-run action centers.
The left needs a recommitment to community because no measure of digital ad spending or get-out-the-vote activism is enough to guarantee a loyal base, let alone electoral victory anymore.
Just look at the 2024 election. The Harris/Walz campaign raised jaw-dropping funds. It had full access to a sprawling empire of strategists and analysts. Yet it struggled to combat poor economic sentiment that arose from real financial hardship and from a degraded information ecosystem that has deprioritized reliable and local news in favor of unaccountable influencers, many of them on the right. In the absence of reliable solidarity or dependable Dem-driven change, the Trump campaign was able to turn resentment into a spectacle, an us-versus-them team sport that’s unlikely to address inequality but might give some of Trump’s followers the sense of belonging to a winning team. Working class dealignment came when personal connection with the Democratic party withered.
During fascism’s first coming, Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism succeeds by redirecting working-class economic discontent into ineffectual, aestheticized performances of politics.
“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves,” Benjamin writes in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. “The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”
Benjamin’s essay is concerned with the public’s changing relationship with art and media in the interwar period. Benjamin theorizes that the public’s depth of participation with art is changing, becoming shallower and prone to context-collapse as new technologies flood the art market with cheap offerings and mass reproductions. The result, Benjamin writes in (lol) 1935 is an artistic landscape unmoored from any specific place, and a distracted populace that consumes more content but pays less attention. The effects, Benjamin argues, are political, as people demobilize from meaningful activism, in favor of using their media habits as an outward avatar for political involvement.
Thus as connections to community and place crumble, and digital distractions further atomize Americans from each other, media-savvy strongmen can offer themselves as new venues for identity. People don’t just vote for Donald Trump; they’re Trump fans, not totally unlike how Swifties might construct identity and belonging in relation to Taylor Swift and her extended fanbase.
If now is the moment to suggest major changes for the left, I’ll join other essayists who’ve proposed a renewed Democratic commitment to civic life. I also wish for other, broader, more abstract changes that need to accompany the rollout of free food programs or whatever. I wish for a categorical reevaluation of our digital lives, for the slowing of our media metabolisms, and the development of slower-twitch attention spans. I want deeper connection, longer memory, less consumption; more nature, more mutuality, more generosity, more care. I want the refusal to be streamlined, consolidated, and made efficient. I want the rewilding of our lives and relations, IRL.
The real action is offline. Maybe it’s time to go there.
This is as good an interval as any, ahead of a scheduled recess and amid a much-debated Posters’ Migration from Twitter to Bluesky, to say that I’m not sure the shape of my future on the internet. I got online as a kid when the internet felt stranger, richer with potential. I made a career on here, made friends, made community. I wouldn’t have the life I love today without the internet.
But in recent years it’s bored me to shit. It feels tamed, surveilled, solved-for. It feels optimized for distraction, to reward our worst impulses, and to monetize the worst actors. I find myself thinking about (sorry!) Marxist writings on land enclosure, the medieval process by which feudal landowners seized communally held property, turning sites of survival into sites of extraction. The woods and fields where a peasant might slack off or grow their own food were privatized, giving the masses nowhere to work and exist besides the properties of the very wealthy.
I used to imagine that I lived a lot of my life online, but lately all the old, good websites I loved have been captured by venture capitalists bent on squeezing a few extra dollars out of beloved blogs or half-decent social media sites. The rich have bought up and consolidated the common spaces that were once used for dicking around with your buddies and maybe making a little work that belonged to you instead of your boss. The wilds of the digital world have been robbed of their mystery, homogenized, given over to algorithms that make the internet feel like a casino for dopey, fascist content doled out in 15-second clips at the behest of some channed-up billionaire who thinks he’s a technofeudalist princeling.
There’s no complete logging-off, at least not for me. But lately I’ve approached social media with a sense of revulsion, one that grows in equal and opposite measure to a newfound sense of place and purpose I’ve found in nature: in leading toddler hikes, doing volunteer trail maintenance, or messing around in my garden. It’s not politics, but it feels vital if I’m going to continue working anywhere adjacent to politics without burning out entirely. I’ve been learning the names of plants, and what they like.
I’m not in America at the moment, but Australia, where I’ll sometimes see a plant I know from home. Sage, a friend, hello. Eucalyptus, which I know from carefully curated floral arrangements, here blooming in the wild where it belongs.
I spot other sites for comparison. I visit the main street of a small Australian city, where a pristine public parenting center offers families a place to take free classes, change diapers, nurse babies, receive maternal and child health care, join play groups, receive legal services, and attend holiday parties. None of this is radical, but it’s a glaring absence from American family life, and an opportunity screaming to be met by any political party that cares about building an enduring ground game.
Americans want stability and belonging. These are linked outcomes that we must pursue together in the real world, against the forces that have privatized and parceled out the spaces we once shared.