Cultivating our civic imagination — and putting it into practice

A wide-ranging Q&A with Join or Die co-director and civic activist, Pete Davis

Pete Davis

is many things. He’s the best-selling author of Dedicated, founder of the Democracy Policy Network and Getaway, and now co-director of Join or Die, “a film about why you should join a club — and why the fate of America depends on it” (see trailer here). With all of these projects, it’s no surprise that Pete has established himself as one of the foremost thinkers on community and democracy in America. 

I’ve been fortunate to have near weekly conversations with Pete for much of the past year. What I appreciate most about Pete is his sense of wonder for the world and imagination for what it could be. A conversation with Pete is an invitation to reconnect with your inner child, while learning about Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, Martin Buber, and the history of communitarianism in the process.  

This week’s Q&A reflected the imaginative range of so many of our past conversations. What has touring Join or Die around the country taught him about the under-discussed dynamics in American community life? What can the last community wave in the 1990s teach us about today’s moment? What will it take to reimagine life in America’s communities and begin working toward that vision?  

It’s an expansive, dreamy, sharp conversation — and I’m so excited to share it with y’all.

- Sam

PS - Join or Die is screening nationwide this year for their Join Up! Tour 2024. If you’re part of a civic group, campus, congregation, company, or neighborhood that wants to screen the film, reach out to them at Host.JoinOrDie.film. And if you enjoyed the conversation and want to follow Pete’s work, you can visit his website and follow his Twitter and Substack.

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Pete Davis, courtesy of Pete Davis

You’ve done a lot in your 12 years since graduating college — from starting CommonPlace and the Democracy Policy Network, to writing Dedicated, to your most recent project, Join or Die. How would you describe the throughline that animates all of this work? 

For years I have described it as the project of deepening American democracy and solidarity. I mean democracy in the broadest sense of the term: anything that extends more power to more people in more ways, anything that helps more people, in a deeper way, co-create their shared world, and, in my national context, co-create America. By solidarity, I mean the broader sense of what we talk about when we talk about building community: anything that weaves us together in a shared destiny. Deepening American democracy is about empowering ourselves and our ideas vis a vis our structures, and deepening American solidarity is about connecting us to each other. 

Recently, I have figured out a way to unify those two: they both fall under the category of civic development since a moral “civically developed” community is usually both more solidaristic and more democratic. I think they go hand-in-hand because you feel more willing to enter into community with each other if you feel the community is more democratic. As my favorite philosopher, Roberto Unger, would say, “The challenge is to create communities that don’t require you to trade empowerment for belonging.”

This line of thinking is inspired by Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work study of Italian regional government, with its legendary finding that the most significant factor for producing a thriving democratic government is a thriving community. When you look at the examples he studies — that things like bocce clubs, choral societies, local newspaper readership, and neighbor-to-neighbor trust go hand-in-hand with functional government — you start noticing that the line between the work of deepening democracy and the work of deepening community is very fuzzy. Those conceptual categories could merge into what could be called “civic development” or “civic cultivation.”

How did Join or Die come about? Why did you decide to dedicate years of your life to making a documentary about your former professor, Robert Putnam?

My sister Rebecca Davis, who I co-produced and co-directed the film with, has been a professional video journalist for years. We had always wanted to make a documentary together. We said to ourselves: “Since these are so tough to make and take so long, we should only make one if there is some idea that we are completely on fire for.” We landed on the idea of community in America, and, specifically, the concepts that turned me on to the idea of community in America, which came from taking Robert Putnam's class 13 years ago, reading Bowling Alone, and seeing the world differently ever since. Meanwhile, as my sister toured the country with NBC News, she was seeing the symptoms of the Bowling Alone phenomenon: from the opioid crisis, to teen suicide, to polarization ripping towns apart. She was hungry for something that struck at the root of these problems, so we started working on this movie. 

With any documentary, you have to have the stars align for it to work. We got lucky: we caught Bob as he was ready to reflect on his life and we caught viewers as Americans are coming to awareness of our isolation crisis. If it used to be that there was a niche group of Americans who were Putnam-ites turned on to the civic crisis, that club is becoming bigger by the day. We hope the movie offers some light bulb moments to many more Americans, just like Bowling Alone did for us when we first encountered it.

Have there been any elements of the response to the film that have surprised you? 

We thought this movie would mostly be a message to people who aren't joiners, and it would simply be a nudge to have them become joiners. That is half the audience. My favorite thing I hear from audience members is, “I joined a club after seeing your movie.” That's the whole premise. But a lot of super joiners have also watched the movie. They see the film as a different thing — they don't need a nudge to be joiners — they say things like, “You’ve finally given me a conceptual framework to understand why the heck I am sending out this email again, trying to encourage people to come out to the meeting.” What we’re saying with the movie to those people is: “What you're doing is important.” 

Also, people come up to us after the film and tell us about the new clubs that they joined and their local experience of civic life. The happy news is sometimes people say, “I started a queer skateboard collective,” or “We’re bringing European soccer fan clubs to America.” But then we also hear sad stories like, “My Elks club is being ripped apart by the cable news.” We're getting an interesting read of what's going on in civic life from what people are telling us after the screenings.  

Are you getting a sense of any trends or dynamics in community life that seem to be overlooked or under-discussed?  

We're seeing this phenomenon that I wish someone could write something on: the two roads for graying civic groups. You have many groups where the average age of membership is in the 60s and 70s and moving up every year. There are some where young people are trying to join, but an intergenerational link has been broken. Older members tell the new young recruits, “First things first, recruit all your friends. You need to save this group for us, but we have to do everything the way that we've always done it.” This isn’t working: no one wants to join a club and then immediately be the savior of it. But then we're seeing other hopeful stories like the ones we feature in the movie — the Waxahachie Odd Fellows Lodge, for example — that recruit young people, incorporate them well, and have a healthy give and take between the old and new. I'd love someone to write a Jim Collins-style management book about these two different trajectories: What are the elements of civic groups that allow them to navigate intergenerational transfer well? How does this compare to the civic groups that don’t and enter a death spiral?  

We’re also observing a set of distinct joining cultures, theories, and communities of practice among various political tribes — and these different silos aren’t learning from each other enough. For example, evangelical churches have a parallel world of civic organizing theory: they go to conferences and follow podcasts about community-building, but they have their own language and purpose for it (e.g., “church planting”). Meanwhile, a parallel group of civic liberals is having another community-building discussion about our social fabric and civic life — and, in turn, a parallel group of lefties are having similar discussions about union organizing and growing the DSA. But they’re asking many of the same questions: How do we get people to come to meetings? How do we get them to feel the mission? How do we grow? These are three completely quarantined conversations. There could be an interesting conference that brings all three together.

Behind the scenes with Bob Putnam, courtesy of Join or Die

In many ways, Putnam is the icon of the last wave of communitarianism — and it seems like we’re entering a new wave of communitarianism today. Where do you think the last wave fell short? How do you think this wave could learn from and build on past efforts? 

I love this question. For one, acknowledging that there was the last wave is useful. We in this wave need to read the works of the last wave — Putnam’s work, Amitai Etzioni, E.J. Dionne, Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy, Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent, and more — so we don’t reinvent the wheel.

Two, I'm not as much of an expert as the people who were part of the 1990s wave — I was like, five — but from my sense of the last wave, they did a lot of work on the spiritual crisis that people were feeling, the joys of associational life, and the importance of clubs, unions, congregations, and families. They also worked to disestablish, philosophically, the entrenched concept of humans as fundamentally isolated, hyper-independent, and self-interested (what some have called homo economicus) — and put forth an alternative conception of humans as embedded, interdependent, and community-spirited. But that wave didn’t intervene enough within the institutional structures of society: how our housing, health, education, economy, urban landscape, and more are designed. Therefore, associational life and a more communal spirit could only be sprinkled on top of structures that were left untransformed.

This wave of community spirit seems more willing to question and transform our institutional landscape — more willing to see that we need to reconstruct our social structures with an eye toward community-building. What some have called the neoliberal consensus was so strong in the 90s. Because this consensus is weaker now, it allows us to have a broader imagination about what it’s going to take to deeply and lastingly rejuvenate American community. 

The challenges of this moment — technological, political, social, spiritual — feel much more acute than in the 1990s. 

It seems very hopeless now, but we must remember: often the most hopeless times are very fruitful because everything inspires its opposite. The moment when something is at its most extreme is when the alternative to that extreme is being born. These extreme moments cause us to be visited by what some have deemed the prophetic — the desire for an imaginative spirit to realize an alternative to the present arrangements. But here we see an interesting phenomenon: when we live in a hegemonic time in one direction and the desire for an alternative arises in us, we struggle to find the tools to realize this alternative because all the tools around us have been built in the spirit of the status quo.

Let me get much more concrete here: we have to avoid the pitfalls of individualist communitarianism. In this time of hyperindividualism, as we have a spark of a desire for a communitarian alternative, we're still surrounded by mostly individualist tools. So you start thinking, “I privately have to solve this isolation problem for myself as part of my own story of personal progress.” What are the common hegemonic aspects of hyperindividualism? Obsession with your health. Obsession with your career. Apps to solve everything privately. Corporations to solve everything for you privately in the consumer context. Okay, let's say you're desiring a communitarian alternative to our current system. Well, the first thing you're going to turn to is: “For my health, I privately need to figure out how to get friends. What can technocratic experts tell me about how to get friends? What app could help me get friends? What corporation could provide me with the consumer products called ‘friends’?” Those are the beginnings of an alternative — that is, the tools being turned in on themselves. But we also need to go beyond these individualist tools: the community revival we seek must be created communally.

You and I have talked a lot about the need for a greater civic imagination — one that is unencumbered by what’s “practical” or “feasible.” Where does your civic imagination take you?

I love this little parable by the philosopher Roberto Unger: “You can imagine things very far from the status quo. And they're called interesting, but impossible. Or you can imagine things close to the status quo, and they're called possible, but trivial.” So, we could do a tiny tax credit and get that done in the next 10 years, but it's not going to change much. Or we can reimagine community in America — and that lights us on fire — but it's deemed impossible. 

If everything is either interesting but impossible or possible but trivial — then nothing interesting is ever possible. But this is wrong, Unger reminds us: our nation, our world, our history are filled with many various alternatives! So what's going on here? The answer, Unger says, is you need to have a “programmatic politics” based in “revolutionary reform.” It’s a two-part process: one, imagine where you want to go, and then two, do the first steps in the direction of that vision. That vision may seem naive, but you can start taking steps in the direction of it. Those first steps might seem trivial, but a first step can lead to a second step and a third step. You have to be switching back and forth between a dreamy vision and practical work. If you keep that back and forth going, you'll be surprised by what you can accomplish in a generation. 

When it comes to rejuvenating community in America, I think we need to go through every sector in society and we need to imagine more communal versions of that sector. Then we have to start doing the practical, experimental work of taking first steps toward those visions. 

What do these first few steps actually look like? What’s the role of theory and policy? What’s the role of community-builders and neighbors? 

The first big task is, in each of the sectors, within the professional schools and among the broad profession, we need communitarian fields of scholarship and practice: communitarian urban designers, communitarian public health experts, communitarian legal scholars, etc. Each of those fields needs to be created and theorized; this would include coming up with visions, rethinking deep assumptions in the sector, and generating, gathering, packaging, organizing, and amplifying experiments. For example, you could be in the communitarian education field and you find this promising model for how schools can cultivate community connections among the parents of students. The field can do the work of gathering, analyzing, and diffusing this model to schools across the country. 

However, this is only half the story. You can’t mandate ideas from above — you need committed “cultivators” of civic life embedded in communities and institutions across the country. By cultivators, I mean people on the ground who are day-in-day-out, year-in-year-out performing the improvisational jazz of asking: “What's the next thing we can do to make this place a little more civic? What’s the next barrier we can remove that can make this place a little more civic? What’s the next problem we can solve that can make this place a little more civic?” 

The way the two sides work together is that the sector-specific fields are filling up libraries of model policies, practices, and programs that the local cultivators can take off the shelf and integrate into their local civic cultivation plans. 

I talk about it this way because we need to get out of the “silver bullet mentality.” People always ask me: “If you could wave your magic wand to create community, what would be the one idea?” There is no “one idea” that does anything because some big ideas might work in one place but might not work in another place. The only big idea that consistently works, if I could wave a magic wand, is to have more people who are committed over the long-term to doing the work of local civic cultivation — and to have those civic cultivators be supported by and participate in a broader field of civic theory and practice. 

I know you as being a spiritually guided person. But, perhaps to an outsider who watches Join or Die, they may just think you’re the “join a club” guy. So how do you think about things like friendship and community — not only theoretically or practically — but from a metaphysical perspective? How do these perspectives undergird or inform your work? 

Let’s start with relationships. My favorite book is I and Thou by Martin Buber, the great Jewish thinker. I and Thou is pages upon pages of trying poetically to grasp the mystical thing that is happening when you enter into relationship with someone. What he's talking about is the difference between when you're going through the world seeing people as “its” — not only things to be consumed or used, but also things that can be categorized or flattened or judged by their surfaces — versus when you see people as “thous” or “yous,” where the infinite soul in front of us ceases to be, in Buber’s words, “a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities” but rather is “neighborless and seamless…not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.” 

Second, why care about groups or clubs? There are all these practical things about what clubs are doing. They help with health and democracy. They help connect you, and social connections have all these benefits. But civic organizations are also doing something special which is generating an autonomous space — what people like Ivan Illich and David Bollier have called “The Commons.” It's this space that is not paralyzed by what Illich fans call the large “professional and commercial systems” of our time. Usually, when we're navigating the world, we are pressured to see the world through buying and selling (a commercial lens) or through professional experts telling us what best practices are (a professional lens). This paralyzes our ability to think and live autonomously. You face a problem and your brain goes to either: “What can I buy to solve this problem?” or “What does an expert say in the latest Vox article about how to solve the problem?” A civic space can be this other space where we can rediscover again: “What is an idea we have about solving this problem? How do we want to co-create this space that we collectively hold together?”

This is radical: there can be this other space, beyond commerce and bureaucracy, that lets that light in. Wendell Berry called it “convocation.” We each have a calling, but then, when we come together in a group, we merge our callings and we are convocated into the group. I love when people use words like this because something special happens when you're in a group and it’s really vibing. You can step back and see: all of your various journeys arrived at that place together and you're letting the spirit inside each of you flow into it, for all. I want to save that space from the encroachment of the professional and commercial spheres. I want to preserve that spirit.