By Doug Pinkham
Public Affairs Council President
July 25, 2011
Political gridlock, which seems to get worse every year, has many possible causes. Most people blame politicians, while others say it's the fault of special interests or the news media. But perhaps there is a larger underlying force at work. In a recent article in National Affairs, Marc Dunkelman places much of the blame on changes in community design and social interaction.
It sounds academic, but I think he's on to something. Here's a personal example: Fairfax County, Va., with a population of 1.1 million people, is the largest county in the Washington, D.C., area. The City of Fairfax, Va., a tiny town with only 24,000 residents and its own mayor and council, is located in the middle of the county.
Twenty years ago, when I lived in the City of Fairfax, my wife chaired the arts commission and I served on a long-range planning task force. The mayor lived around the corner, which made it easy for us to give "feedback" on city services and for him to find "volunteers" for his community endeavors. We had a stake in the town's future.
Today, as residents of Fairfax County, we are represented by one of nine district supervisors, who sit on a Board of Supervisors that governs the region. We don't know many of our neighbors (much less our elected officials), nor are we involved in local politics. Like many people, we have become detached from civic life.
This is not an insignificant problem, writes Dunkelman. In fact, he thinks America's early embrace of towns and villages as the building blocks of community helped to define its identity. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, observed that self-government of these "townships" enabled people to work out their differences and maintain a healthy sense of autonomy.
In recent decades, however, Americans have moved out of cities into suburbs where this interaction doesn't always take place. Faced with a budget problem, a small town where everyone knows each other can bring factions together to hammer out a compromise. Trying to do the same thing in a county, state or nation is difficult because people don't feel the same sense of civic duty.
What's also missing, notes Dunkelman, are "middle-ring relationships." Using the rings of Saturn as a metaphor, he argues that we engage regularly with our "inner rings" - family and close friends. Even though we may not live together, we use smart phones and Skype to spend more time with these people and less time getting to know our neighbors.
In addition, social media and the Internet allow us to form "outer-ring relationships" with those who share the same interest, career or political ideology. We are not bound to these people by geography and probably don't know them well. Instead, we're connected through a common activity or opinion.
"Middle rings" represent regular acquaintances, local business owners, fellow PTA members or neighbors we see now and then. In a small town of 20 years ago, these relationships tied people to one another, often out of necessity.
Dunkelman thinks the new model represents a major shift with implications for our economy, culture and politics. That's because American society now resembles a honeycomb, in which groups of self-sufficient people live next to other groups but each is walled off from the others.
He notes that in states such as California and New York, the new community architecture has had a profound effect on government:
The spirit of compromise has been sapped from politics. Each individual section of each state's honeycomb is less aware of the struggles or frustrations felt by communities living just across the highway. Politicians, in turn, represent constituents less interested in negotiation, and more suspicious of those who live in increasingly alien pockets nearby. Leaders willing to strike a compromise are accused of apostasy, rather than lauded as keepers of the peace.
At the national level, writes Dunkelman, the conventional wisdom blames special interest funding of elections, redistricting, the filibuster and the rise of opinion journalism for our current political morass. If those factors were to blame, then one wonders why gridlock took so long to get here. After all, campaign contributions were an extremely powerful (and less regulated) tool in the 1950s, gerrymandering and the filibuster date back to the 19th century, and the nation's first newspapers were mouthpieces for the major political parties.
Something else is clearly at work, and Dunkelman thinks the answer lies with the missing middle rings:
To some degree, that gridlock is a reflection of the politicians now elected to Congress. Raised in an increasingly honeycombed society and legislating, in turn, without the deep exposure previous generations had to the interests of other constituencies, today's partisans are more loath to agree to some mutual accommodation.
More than that, politicians today are being elected by voters who are themselves children of the honeycombed society. Without middle-ring relationships to ground the broad understanding that an integrated society will be more dynamic than one in which opposing interests perpetually snipe at one another, voters are more militant in their demands that their representatives champion their own respective causes, and are more prone to the sort of stridence that refuses to find common ground.
What to do about it? While conservatives and liberals have different views about the role of government, both believe in the power of local communities to solve problems. In a nation without middle rings, however, this may not be possible. Eventually the public will demand new approaches.
"Our temptation, time and again, will be to find scapegoats and assign blame," writes Dunkelman. "But we would be wiser to accept that American life has undergone a deep and consequential change. It will therefore be incumbent upon new generations to adapt the institutions of American democracy to the contours of a transformed society."
This process should start with all of us admitting that we deserve the Congress and administration we have elected. They are an outward expression of our honeycombed society, not the cause of it. If we can begin to think of the U.S., with all its diversity, as a small town that needs to work out its problems, then each of us can find a positive role to play.
Until then, the forecast is for more political gridlock.
Comments? Email me.
