I was pleased to see Ben Smith bring Marc Dunkelman’s stimulating essay in the new National Affairs to a wider audience of political junkies. Dunkelman’s core point is that our political system has evolved in response to underlying changes in what he calls our “middle-tier relationships,” which stand between family members and our closest friends and more distant relationships. The small niceties and social obligations that defined life in an ethnic neighborhood or in a small town are markedly different from the anonymity of life in the urban and suburban communities in which most Americans now live. Technology has allowed us to deepen our relationships with those closest to us and to engage with more near-strangers who share our interests (in a particular professional sports team, an obscure rapper, philately, etc.), yet it has also allowed us to screen out interactions with neighbors.
My own life represents an extreme manifestation of this phenomenon, as I maintain close contact with friends who live very far away yet I know almost none of the people who live in my apartment building. The advantages of these developments should be obvious — we can leave our homes without fear of endless chitchat with tiresome busybodies — but Dunkelman suggests that we consider the downside for our public life.
[T]he way in which we organize our lives today represents a major departure from the architecture that has characterized most of American history. Writing in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville opened Democracy in America by highlighting a crucial distinction that separated American communities from those in Europe. In France, power flowed from the monarchy out to the provinces — so that local government was frequently answerable more to its masters in Paris than its subjects at hand. The United States, on the other hand, was sub-divided into towns and counties, which selected their own leaders and then channeled power from the ground up. American citizens (or at least those given the franchise) controlled their own “townships,” as Tocqueville called them, and local communities then selected representatives to the state and national legislatures.
The effect was to make villages and towns the basic building blocks of American society. Geography — not some ancient rite of nobility or any formalized religious hierarchy — defined the structure of political power within the nascent republic. Despite the fact that the founding fathers were themselves culled from a sort of colonial aristocracy, a sense of autonomy became ingrained in each American subdivision in ways largely absent from the monarchical structure that dominated most of Europe. When an 18th- or 19th-century European thought of his “little platoon,” he tended to think of his class or rank. (Indeed, Edmund Burke, who coined the term, was referring to distinct economic classes.) When Americans thought of their platoons, however, they tended to think of their neighborhoods, or their villages or towns — each of which often contained its own diverse mix. Collaboration among neighbors who had entirely distinct sensibilities became a staple of everyday American life. In turn, the relationships formed between the interdependent residents of each township became the lifeblood of American democracy.
The affiliations that matter most to me are far more taste-driven and ideological than they are geographic. Though I have a fairly strong regional identity, it is more of an outer-ring than a middle-ring phenomenon. And I don’t think I’m alone in these regards.
Dunkelman offers a brief but illuminating discussion of Peter Blair Henry and Conrad Miller’s work comparing economic and social outcomes Barbados and Jamaica. Barbados had managed to navigate a rocky economic transition while Jamaica had not:
The important element to note here — a distinction absolutely crucial to understanding the islands’ divergence — is the success the Barbadians had in bridging the divides that separated the nation’s distinct classes. Citizens from different pockets of society negotiated with one another, revealing a real appreciation for the fact that they were all in the same boat. This underlying societal trust empowered the elites, who would likely have been stymied by mutual antagonism, to collaborate on a way forward. Those who represented laborers accepted lower wages without fear of reprisal. Those who represented small businesses agreed to lower profit margins without having to worry that member business owners might revolt. And representatives of the government could contribute to the compromise without being paralyzed by the prospect of severe political recrimination.
In Jamaica’s case, however, that same sense of public trust was elusive: The island nation was bereft of the resilience borne in the middle rings. In Barbados, where small-business owners and the working classes intermingled, leaders were able to bridge the chasms that separated divergent interests. But in Jamaica, where class divisions were more all-encompassing, proposals to share sacrifice proved to be a bridge too far. The strength of their middle-ring relationships thus accounted for a great deal of the difference between the two islands’ fates.
This discussion reminded me of arguments on the role of declining social capital in fueling Jamaica’s crime explosion. Dunkelman goes on to argue that we’re seeing a Jamaican-style dynamic in the United States, and in particular in our densest, most diverse regions:
[B]eneath the process-oriented complaints that typically dominate any discussion of political gridlock is an explanation that lies outside of either state’s capitol building: The architecture of community in both states has evolved away from the Barbadian model to resemble the sort found in Jamaica. The middle-ring relationships that once tied Tocquevillian townships together have been loosened by the changes in the routines of American life. And despite all the benefits of globalization, the information revolution, and the rise of the service economy, the transformation of community has left California and New York, like much of the rest of the nation, much more difficult to govern.
At its root, that antagonism is driven by the fact that the constituencies that elect individual members of each legislature are, for the reasons explored above, less in tune with the interests, grievances, and concerns of those elsewhere in the state. The “creative class” professionals who live in San Jose and the Upper West Side are less apt to have sustained exposure to the struggles facing communities in California’s Central Valley and in upstate New York. Because they live within their own clusters, the bankers and lawyers who work in the financial districts of New York City and San Francisco are less likely to mingle with the school teachers and firefighters who live in the outer boroughs and the relatively less expensive pockets of the Bay Area. The Chinese immigrants and their children who settled in Flushing and the Vietnamese-American families who have made a home in Garden Grove are less likely to share common experiences with the Hispanic communities that live near each.
I strongly recommend that you read Dunkelman’s essay, and I say this as a rootless ideologue. You can find an interview with Dunkelman at NPR.