The presidential election is a tipping point between two radically different paths for our country, and it is difficult to think of a principle that can guide us both through rule by an authoritarian and an ordinary politician — either of whom will face a narrowly divided Congress.
However, a convincing explanation for how we reached this precipice is that the legitimacy of our institutions has crumbled, and no matter who wins, improving those institutions must be our north star.
Another way to frame the challenge is to invoke Alexis de Tocqueville, the brilliant observer of Jacksonian America. What Tocqueville admired the most about the Americans was their “spirit of association” — their boundless enthusiasm for coming together to pursue common causes. Here is how Tocqueville described that spirit: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.”
At their best, our institutions cultivate that spirit of association, adapting it to a modern world that operates on a scale far beyond what Tocqueville could have imagined.
The spirit of association v. structure of alienation
Americans still get together, but too often, they do so without “a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world.” Too often, they are motivated by something they want to stop in the world, or by a sentiment or an idea alone, with little practical application. And for many Americans, life is bereft of any association at all — we are becoming a lonely country.
The American spirit of association is currently set against a structure of alienation. Its foundations include an economy in which growth does not reliably deliver flourishing; deep racial segregation; a separation between more- and less-educated Americans that overlaps with geography and partisanship; a sense that government is mostly dysfunctional. The accelerants include the fall of communal media and the rise of anti-social media; years of cynical populist attacks against an imagined “enemy within”; the confusion of contempt with communication; and the rise of organizations that cultivate exclusionary understandings of American life.
The result? Almost any place Americans go in order to make sense of the world, connect with one another, and organize for large-scale cooperation is suffering from a crisis of trust. Big business, schools, organized religion, labor, even the medical system — trust in all these institutions are near or at all-time lows. And then, there’s the government.
Tocqueville is widely read as having argued that civic association of all types prepares people for public life. This “schools of democracy” view might lead us to look for solutions entirely outside the political sphere and hope a revived spirit of association spills into government. But that would be too simple, because Tocqueville clearly also believed that civic mingling springs from political association, writing:
“In their political associations, the Americans of all conditions, minds, and ages, daily acquire a general taste for association, and grow accustomed to the use of it. There they meet together in large numbers, they converse, they listen to each other, and they are mutually stimulated to all sorts of undertakings. They afterwards transfer to civil life the notions they have thus acquired.”
Politics that produce in the world
So while a reconstruction of civic life removed from politics is vital, we also need to restore to our political institutions a “taste for association” — a sense that they are not purely arenas where the imperative is survival or rear-guard action, but the instruments Americans use when “they want to produce in the world.” We need to restore political institutions that are not just places in which tired partisan or special-interest identities do weary battle, but in which new identities congeal.
This is the work of many years, but it can guide us in the here and now, as we navigate the certainty of a closely divided Congress, the probability of a contested election, and the possibility of a president willing to shatter democratic norms.
And the “spirit of association” can guide us from the highest levels to the most mundane. In the senior ranks of the Republican Party, the failure to mobilize decisively against Trump in 2016 and 2021 has given way to a reality in which his authority seems impossible to challenge in public — leaving people who know better feeling isolated, and forced to choose between Cheney-like martyrdom, awkward DeWine-like semi-denunciations, or silently waiting for the right moment. There is no easy way out, but what top Republicans need — and encouragingly, are starting to develop — are new networks of coordination, support, and eventually, public clarity. They need the spirit of association.
At the level of governance, we need to overcome hollow notions of democracy that replace deliberation with interest-group vetoes, and blinkered notions of fairness that turn Kafkaesque in practice. As Jen Pahlka points out in response to Ezra Klein’s recent column, we need neither to burn down the institutions nor to defend them unquestioningly. We need to imbue them with the spirit of association. Tocqueville, to be sure, did not directly connect political associations with bureaucracy, and the America he visited was governed by officials who owed their jobs to direct election or to the patronage of elected officials. But he did observe that America’s democratic spirit granted “functionaries” high discretion in exchange for high responsiveness — virtually the opposite of what we see today.
And in the crucial arena where elite decision-making, day-to-day governance, and mass attitudes are linked, we must rebuild the withered infrastructure of our political parties. Instead of being deluged with irritating advertisements and strangers knocking on their doors in the weeks before an election, citizens should get regular outreach from organizers who live in their communities. Instead of understanding the political parties as extensions of the president, citizens should see them as local operations that help them achieve the outcomes they want.
Where we focus our efforts, and how much they are defensive rather than proactive in nature, will depend on the outcome of this election. But the basic charge of renewing the link between the nation’s spirit and the nation’s institutions is already clear.