On a recent Tuesday night, I sat on my couch scrolling through my phone. Just two miles away, my local government was holding a public meeting that I could have attended. I didn’t.
That probably sounds familiar. But I have a confession to make. I spent 33 years teaching high school civics, and I hold a master’s degree with a concentration In American history. If anyone should have been sitting in the front row of a municipal budget hearing, it was me. Yet, I usually show up only when a zoning decision affects my neighborhood or a crisis demands my attention.
My hypocrisy isn’t unusual. It reflects what political scientists call “civic thinning,” the slow erosion of the everyday habits that allow communities to govern themselves.
When we talk about the challenges facing Michigan’s rural towns and small cities, we usually focus on population loss, struggling downtowns, or economic change. Those problems matter. But another challenge receives far less attention.
Local government itself is not failing. According to the University of Michigan’s Michigan Public Policy Survey, local officials continue delivering essential services despite growing financial and political pressures. The trash is still getting picked up; the roads are plowed after a snowstorm.
The bigger concern is that fewer citizens are helping sustain those institutions. As Mike Ridley, supervisor of Tuscarora Township in Cheboygan County, warned younger generations via the Michigan Townships Association: “One of these days we’re going to hand your generation the keys, whether you want it or not. … You don’t want to see things come grinding to a halt.”
Those University of Michigan surveys also show resident engagement declining over the past decade. Local officials increasingly report relying on the same small group of volunteers, struggling to recruit future leaders, and watching public trust weaken.
Still, while the surveys describe the problem, they do not fully explain it.
No single cause can. Demographic change, the pandemic, declining participation in civic organizations, fewer local newspapers, rising political distrust and social media have all contributed. But many of those trends point toward a common problem: the disappearance of the places where Americans once learned the habits of community.
As a history teacher, I find it helpful to look at the genesis of the landscape itself.
The grid of townships covering Michigan was more than an efficient way to survey land. Under the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance, the young republic divided the frontier into relatively small six-mile-square townships because many of the founders believed self-government worked best when it remained close to ordinary people.
Citizens were expected to know one another, debate local problems face-to-face, and accept responsibility for the communities they shared. The township wasn’t simply an administrative boundary. It was where democracy was supposed to happen.
We often think of democracy as elections, constitutions, courts, and legislatures. Those institutions matter. But democracy is also a skill, and like any skill, it improves through experience and repetition.
For generations, much of that practice happened outside government. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third places” to describe the diners, church basements, volunteer organizations, and Little League concession stands that existed somewhere between home and work. These were the places where neighbors learned to disagree without becoming enemies, solve problems together and get to know people whose lives looked different from their own.
Most people didn’t become engaged citizens because they set out to strengthen democracy. They became engaged because they already knew the people sitting beside them at the township meeting.
As many of those places have disappeared or weakened, opportunities to develop those habits have shrunk. Social media didn’t create every civic problem we face, but it has increasingly replaced face-to-face community with online engagement. Instead of regularly interacting with the people who live nearby, many of us spend more time with algorithms that sort us by outrage instead of geography.
We exchange neighbors for followers.
We trade local concerns for national controversies.
When the only public square many of us experience exists on a screen, we have fewer opportunities to solve ordinary problems with the people who live down the street.
That helps explain why discussions about culverts, sewer bonds or school budgets can suddenly feel like debates over national politics. We are asking people to use localized civic skills they have fewer chances to develop.
A small town can survive population decline. It can adapt to economic change. What it cannot easily survive is losing the habit of self-government.
Rebuilding that habit doesn’t require everyone to run for township supervisor or school board. It starts with something much smaller. Attend one planning commission meeting. Volunteer for a community organization. Spend more time in places where neighbors still meet one another as neighbors instead of political opponents.
We often talk about democracy as though it were a machine the founders built that will keep running on its own, but “rule of the people” is less like a machine than a skill. It survives only if each generation keeps working at it.
All that considered, maybe I’ll see you at the next public meeting.
We could probably both use the practice.
Keith Kindred is a retired Michigan teacher who taught at the high school and college levels for over 33 years. He is also the author of several self-published books and regularly writes about education policy.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Democracy is a skill we may be forgetting | Opinion
Reporting by Holland Sentinel / The Holland Sentinel
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