In late December, a guest essay by Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan in The New York Times asked the question: Where are young protestors? Nyhan posits that young people are “demobilized and demoralized,” and he issues a nihilistic, disapproving warning that America’s youth do not pose a promising opposition to Trumpism. But his closing sentences subtly introduce anecdotal evidence that points to a more comprehensive form of opposition: community groups, including the same young people refusing to protest, have formed in select cities like Chicago and Minneapolis to report Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
Why, Nyhan should have asked, have these allegedly demobilized and demoralized youth moved away from large-scale action in favor of persistent, concrete, smaller-scale work? Why have we rarely seen this sort of movement before?
The idea that civic and political associations outside government control, including those reporting on ICE, are fundamental to the American mind is not a new one. In his masterwork Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville depicted the democratic citizen as restless in a way which drives him to address problems through such “voluntary associations.” He saw a clear cultural value placed on the importance of those associations, at least in the United States.
Writing in the 1830s and 40s, Tocqueville bore witness to a very different scope of public concern. In a world without modern connectivity, the problems faced by local communities were far more immediate and less complex than broader national issues. Tocqueville argues that voluntary associations are most effective when their efforts are limited in scale, generally popular, and aimed at attainable goals—he “often admired the extreme skill [associations] show in proposing a common object for the exertions of very many and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.” Yet these associations, regardless of their intended purposes, also serve a vital role for democracy in mediating between the individual and the state. Without them, Tocqueville writes, democracy will slide into infantilizing despotism at the hands of individualism. Once democratic citizens without associational life realize their inability to engage their restless nature, they will fall into impotence and enable the state to fill the gaps once occupied by simple cooperation.
Unfortunately, Tocqueville’s depiction of the democratic mind could not have foreseen our modern condition. Societies progressing beyond survival insecurity have gradually adopted postmaterial values. The postmaterial man might ask himself whether he is happy or fulfilled, and for the first time in human history, the answer might not be obvious. This value shift was inevitable in light of industrialization, but it presents a profound challenge to continued democratic flourishing yet unknown in the times of Tocqueville.
Postmaterialism undermines the straightforward calculus from identifying a problem to forming an association in democratic life. The problems introduced by modernity seem (and perhaps are) far less feasible to address for the average citizen, and there are many more of them. The problems that we face under postmaterialism are diffuse and unattributable. The postmaterial man is inspired to reprioritize: his previous problems feel small, but now he is too small to address them, and so he withdraws into himself. Tocqueville wrote that Americans formed associations around concrete, limited objectives rather than abstract or sweeping aims: “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever founding associations … religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” When faced with problems of greater magnitude, the democratic mind leaps to either despair or a different, distinctly postmaterial course of action.
What is, then, the postmaterial course of action? To contextualize this turn of phrase, it is vital to consider where Tocqueville saw value in voluntary associations. Throughout Democracy in America, he emphasizes the value of both cost and risk as factors that crowd out competing organizations, force consolidation into more effective groups, and spur a degree of relevance and proactivity. Organizing a neighborhood petition towards the mayor’s treatment of potholes is far easier than organizing a similar petition for Israel to allow aid into Gaza: the potential costs of the latter are far less likely to quantify the potential benefits.
Our postmaterialist age provides us an alternative: easier forms of engagement, like social media and phone call campaigns, crowd out more costly methods of protest. By their nature, they prioritize a different set of causes. When goals felt within reach, Americans found associations. When goals are pushed out of reach, Americans turn to lower-cost alternatives that prevent other forms of political engagement.
This turn changes what protest means. Protest has always existed in various forms, but social media posts and other methods of postmaterial dissent lack the specificity and contact that more material methods of dissent require. Because of the ease of virtual protest, its more indirect sentiments have seeped into physical protest as well. The aims of protest have changed; now, the priority of the protestor is their own moral purity—their quest for cleanliness and a lack of complicity—rather than actual change.
This phenomenon is visible across modern democratic dissent: there has been a decline in mass protests with concrete demands, a new language of “complicity” for those who refuse to partake, and an appeal to an ambiguous authority (for example, “the federal government” as opposed to specific bureaucrats or local officials). Tocqueville reflects on a similar effect of the transition to the democratic age. He argued that, “Equality suggests to the Americans the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of man,” suggesting a possibility of purity that simply does not exist. In the pursuit of purity comes virtue signaling; the actual impact on the issue does not matter as long as one stakes their claim on the right side of history. In the time before postmaterialism, problems were solved via association-led deconstruction and delegation. When faced with great problems now, we will not form associations without breaking down the problems and tempering our expectations of purity.
Postmaterial life continually places great problems in front of us and recalibrates our focus: we disregard fixing the problems in favor of projecting our own purity. Protest concerned with one’s individual relationship to injustice is far less attentive to the finer details of that injustice. The rare mass protests in the United States today are largely manufactured by elites with very few concrete demands, which prevents legitimate challenge to authority. Perhaps the real reason that young people are not in attendance at “No Kings” demonstrations is that they do not feel the need to validate their purity via protest as they might have for Gaza, for Vietnam, or even in 2016—their opposition to Trump is almost ubiquitous.
Tocqueville warned that if democratic citizens became overly concerned with their petty domestic interests, they would lose sight of the mediating associations that held real value.What he could not have seen, despite this prophetic forecast, is that a genocide across the world could become a domestic interest. Tocqueville’s vision of associations as mediating institutions used to address problems is no longer a priority for democratic minds that have moved past the material needs that those associations serve. Instead, we pursue our own moral purity, and have lost sight of the material power required for actual change. In practice, this not only leads to less change but also to a broad individual impotence in the democratic soul.
If this is to continue, postmaterial attitudes will tend towards a drastic expansion of state power and despotism. When people draw within themselves, they put others into categories and identities, not only losing compassion for their neighbors but also the ability to see others as complete individuals.This insularity dulls proactive inclinations towards association-forming and real methods of protest.
As Tocqueville prophesied, the democratic man has become impotent and infantilized; when he is preoccupied with the genocide in Gaza, he can no longer tend to the potholes in his street. Soon the state will decide which potholes should be filled, and the postmaterial man will still refuse to take any sort of material action—form a group to collect donations or connect with people affected, perhaps—in favor of aimless virtual protest against an amorphous state.
Perhaps, as a final gasp of self-determination, this postmaterial man will attend a town board meeting once the potholes begin to affect him personally. But he’ll be bored throughout, tapping his foot impatiently during the public comments and getting irritated when someone else brings up the potholes before he does. Once it’s his turn, he won’t know exactly who he’s talking to (the mayor? town board?) and he likely won’t have thought this problem all the way through. A call to the highway superintendent’s office might have been more direct, but he’s here already, and the esoteric, unilateral, all-knowing state certainly must care about his potholes. If getting upset at part-time elected officials can’t solve his problems, what can? All of this can’t be his fault, of course.
This is democratic impotence. The postmaterial man is paralyzed—he’s become so infantilized that even when he’s allowed the state to step in and decide when potholes should be filled, the thought of concrete action doesn’t enter his mind.
Tocqueville views the quest for purity as an addiction that leads us to impotence. Only in the democratic age do we consider the quest to perfection a reasonable one. It traps us in an oscillation between belief in and resistance to change, paralyzing us alongside an expansion of state power. Instead, we must acknowledge that many problems may never be solved. Purity is an impossibility; there is no way to grow beyond attempting to solve our difficulties face-to-face. The change towards seeing problems as reparable but not solvable and seeing others as whole persons is one which is easy to proselytize but difficult to apply. It is not a course of action which I pretend to have completely adopted, yet it is vital nonetheless. Can you overcome your guilt and drive towards moral purity to devote yourself to smaller-scale issues, refusing your movement towards impotence? Can you resist the guilt that drives you to a “No Kings” protest in favor of marking the location of ICE vans on an app? As Tocqueville foresaw, the costlier option is also the more effective one.
The goal of associational life is not only to address problems; it is to fill in the gaps of seeing beyond the self and to escape the individualism that leads to infantilization and impotence. The point is not the sit-down meeting, it’s that you had to walk to get there. If you can’t see the difference, try it yourself. The future of democratic life, and in turn all of our ability to flourish in a world free of despotism, depends on it.
Image: Matthew Pratt, The American School, oil on canvas, 1765 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)