Public intellectuals don’t agree on much. However, in recent years they seemed to nearly unanimously believe that American public life was in terrible shape. Political scientists debated whether voter turnout in national elections was merely stagnant or was actively declining. Sociologists suggested that television, overwork, and a breakdown in communal ties were undermining participation in both public and social life. There was chronic hand-wringing about the state of political debate, with civic activists proposing that America needed more deliberative dialogue among people with different points of view.
These worries blossomed in the 1990s and continued to grow in the Bush years but now seem badly off target. Voter turnout in 2004 and 2008 was higher than it has been since the 1960s. The Obama campaign mobilized unprecedented numbers of volunteers. A thriving, if contentious public sphere has emerged on the Internet. Young people who a decade ago were volunteering in direct-service organizations but were otherwise disconnected from public life and electoral politics are now fully engaged and activated, not just as voters but as activists.
The movement to reinvigorate citizenship had roots in academia. Harvard’s Robert Putnam identified the decline in political participation as a symptom of a broader collapse in civic organizations. In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, he drew on survey data showing declines in membership in local organizations like the Elks lodges to argue that “social capital” — the resources that enable trust and cooperation — was drying up. Benjamin Barber of Rutgers and later the University of Maryland was among many who advocated for efforts to strengthen civil society, the realm of life between government and the market. James Fishkin, now at Stanford, sought to construct models of informed deliberative democracy. Harry Boyte of the University of Minnesota argued for expanding opportunities for public involvement in community decisions. Putnam’s Harvard colleague Theda Skocpol described the shift from political organizations based on active local participation toward large and distant direct-mail membership groups, dubbing this shift “diminished democracy” in a book of the same name.
This academic movement to reverse civic decline had an unusual level of impact outside the ivory tower, because politicians were struggling with the same problems. Bill and Hillary Clinton invited many of the movement’s key academic and civic figures to a series of meetings in the White House and at Camp David. Before long, however, the impulse to redefine citizenship was lost in the partisan warfare of the Clinton era.