There's no getting around politics

This post has been moved over from my old Substack.

I’m in The Hub today with an article called There’s no getting around politics*. Their daily email says, “Today, Janet Bufton imagines a world where we're not jamming politics into every nook and cranny of life. And while some of the most important activities in our community are non-political, they form the backdrop to our politics. Tackling the little problems in our society, instead of leaving it to government, helps build a healthy democracy.”

This article has been kicking around in my head for a long time. What I want to say feels big and important and has to be broken into small enough chunks to bring people along with my excitement about what I think is “our” potential to improve things.

Even among people who spend all day getting mad because they’re on the Internet or watching cable news, it feels like there’s a deep dissatisfaction with our increasingly impersonal, anger-fuelled interaction with society. Whether it’s Facebook instead of face-to-face or 24/7 news instead of the local nightly news—people keep doing it, but they’re grumpy about it. There is an appetite for change.

But also a vibe of deep reluctance to be the ones to do something about it. Maybe because we’re worried about feeling like *waves hands* all this is our fault, and an implicit assumption that we don’t have to clean up someone else’s mess.

I don’t think all this is our fault. And I don’t think anything will change unless we change what we’re doing.

My theme recently: Libertarians have something valuable to add to the conversation, so I’m trying to put some of it out there. I believe that we can solve a lot more problems ourselves than we do and that local communities are the best situated to address many of them. But progressives and conservatives want community-level action, too. Someone seems to need to remind us to get out and actually do the things we can, regardless of what the overarching political atmosphere should look like.

Leaving problems to someone else isn’t working. Not enough people are stepping in. Politicians are spending time culture warring instead, which encourages us to feel like culture warring is civic participation. It’s not, it’s corrosive to civic participation. Disengaging from collaborative participation in society has allowed the muscles we need for democratic participation to atrophy. That’s bad for everyone, not just libertarians.

Obviously, there’s a certain level of privilege involved in community and volunteer work. You need to have the time, support, and capacity. But that’s why I wanted to write this article, and will probably keep writing on this theme. We’ve mentally set the barriers to participation and our expectations of what we have to achieve too high. For those of us who can participate, we shouldn’t assume that the things that need doing are big and daunting. And the more of us participate, the smaller the unmet need for community might become.

Plus! I wrote an “extra” for The Great Antidote podcast with Edward Glaeser on cities, which came out on 4 May, Jane Jacobs’ birthday, and which you can find here. —

*An aside: in the process of writing this, I was convinced by my husband not to use “politics” as broadly as some political theorists, who use the word to mean something like ‘the actions we do toward collective decision-making, society-building, and governance’. I think a word for this would be useful, but the ordinary use of politics makes it too confusing. Harrumph.