America has plenty of activists. It needs more connectors
If you are paying attention, you know that America is not suffering from a lack of political activists.
When I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I was constantly approached by people asking me to sign petitions for ballot initiatives. Sometimes they seemed genuinely bewildered when I politely declined to join their cause. “How could you be for allowing people to hunt wolves?” an activist would ask.
Not only that, it seems like more and more activist movements are geared towards national political struggles. It can be overwhelming and exhausting and honestly, a lot of activists are annoying.
So much of American life is politicized today, for many reasons: secularization, the erosion of civil society and trusted institutions, and the steady concentration of power in the national government, to name only a few. The media often foments the drama and division.
A new Pew Research Center study divides Americans into four groups based on how they participate in public life: Mobilizers, Connectors, Spectators and Outsiders. Connectors, who make up 28 percent of the public, are highly involved in their communities without making politics the center of everything they do.
Connectors vote. They volunteer. They attend religious services, give to charities and belong to civic organizations. But compared with the most politically active Americans, they are less likely to work on campaigns, contact elected officials or display political messages.
They are engaged without being consumed by politics.
Mobilizers are 9 percent according to Pew but they are loud and they are far more consumed with national politics.
Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized the connectors immediately. During his travels through the young United States, he marveled at the American habit of forming voluntary associations. Whenever citizens saw a problem, they organized. They established churches, schools, charities and societies of every description without waiting for any governmental permission.
These associations taught Americans to cooperate, accept responsibility and work alongside people with whom they did not always agree.
Activism so often begins with an opponent and polarizing speech and declarations. The hyper-politicization has also led to more political violence in America.
At its most extreme, however, political activism can harden into something more dangerous. In a July 16 speech on the resurgence of political terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that radical left-wing ideologies can foster a “poisonous resentment” expressed through destruction, violence and terror.
Most activists, of course, are not violent. But when politics becomes an all-encompassing moral or religious identity, opponents can cease to look like fellow citizens and begin to look like enemies who must be defeated at any cost.
America will always have activists, and it will sometimes need them.
But a healthy republic depends even more on the citizens who join, serve, give and belong.
Pew’s study reveals the enduring value of the Connector. America could use many more of them.
—Ray Nothstine
— The Federalism Beat