At Work in the Fields of the Civic
A look back at Civic Fields so far this year
I was in Oregon last week at a conference and took a couple of extra days with my wife to go on some epic hikes in celebration of our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. We spent one of our hiking days at the Cascade Head Biosphere Region on the Oregon coast. It is an utterly remarkable place—the most diverse ecosystem in an ecosystem-rich state, home to countless plant species, a huge variety of animals, lots and lots of bugs, and spectacular beauty.
When Civic Fields was conceived, we envisioned it as a diverse ecosystem of ideas and arguments centered on questions of civic crisis and renewal. That’s what the “fields” refers to, at least in part. Civic Fields today is still not quite what I imagined it to be. I don’t know if it ever will be. But it definitely has met the “diverse ecosystem” ideal.
Summer is upon us. This means a different and more “impromptu” pace for Civic Fields. I am going to spend most of my time this summer working on my book project. I will drop in on Civic Fields when the muse or the news hits hard. Otherwise, I am focused on liberalism this summer (the book).
The onset of summer also gives us an opportunity to look forward a bit and back a bit.
With regard to looking forward, it has been super gratifying to get other writers and thinkers to contribute to Civic Fields these past months. If you are interested in being a contributor, or know folks who might be, feel free to reach out to me at ned@civicfields.org. Even if you have your own thing but want to cross-post, I’d be up for considering. No promises here, but I am eager to build the Civic Fields writing community.
As for looking back, Graham, my stalwart managing editor, and I put together a review of Civic Fields since January 2026. For those of you new to Civic Fields, this will give you a great sense of what we’ve been up to recently. For those longer-term readers, a compendium. (We did a similar thing in December, recapping the first year of Civic Fields, linked here.)
So, where have we been in 2026? What fields have we traversed?
I have said it before: Civic Fields attempts to refrain from being too timely. We are not a “news” newsletter and are not interested in chasing every headline. Over the past six months, however, the headlines have reflected many of the themes that Civic Fields has sought to address, making this a more “newsy” spring than we might want.
Broadly speaking, 2026 so far has meant a shift from exploring American civic life in its many facets to defending and defining it. The news has forced us to return to basics: What do authority, violence, and power look like in a healthy democratic society? What are they for? Why do we do this whole “democracy” thing anyway?
Shortly after the new year, when Nicolás Maduro was ousted, we returned to the theme of Neo-Royalism, asking about the organizing logic of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. A couple of months later, we did the same regarding Iran, investigating how “cliques” function as the modus operandi for Trump & Co’s geopolitics. These articles, along with one on National Conservatism’s fascination with Viktor Orbán and Hungary, were diagnostic. What’s going on and why is it happening? The notion of “anarchy from above” captures many of the queries.
While the geopolitical landscape was shifting week to week, domestically, we had to deal with the breaking news on predation—with the further release of Epstein files, and the headlines of Cesar Chavez’s horrible private life. For these, too, we needed to ask diagnostic questions: What is the state of the American elite? And what is the distinction between predatory and persuasive power?
But among these posts, we began to prescribe remedies drawn from political philosophy and timely examples—a task that, in addition to diagnosis, is crucial to democracy and increasingly rare. We explored democracy as a security plan, not the least as a check on elite power. We took a trip to the Mississippi Delta, where a group of community leaders perform politics without enemies to great success. We remembered the “good” culture war of Martin Luther King Jr’s non-retributive justice work. And we considered the importance of "picturing reality" when fantasy culture becomes a kind of political tyranny and reconsidered Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance.
Lingering in many of these reflections was a concern with violence. Here, we turned to a patron saint of Civic Fields, Hannah Arendt. Consulting Arendt’s On Violence, we looked at how power and violence are not synonyms, but in fact antonyms, perhaps a simple observation in appearance, but profound in its consequences. To assess what we deemed “Arendt’s law,” we conducted some preliminary research on the correlation between the loss of political power and the rise of internal violence within countries.
Additionally, we queried the current landscape in American universities, coining the term “captocracy” to describe the state of dependence on big tech. And we looked at how conservative donors are funding a strange renaissance in the university humanities.
Encouraged by the great work of Valentina Fazio, we held out hope for the potential civic benefits of “semantic AI."
Finally, we also had a little fun this spring covering the legal and lyrical adventures of Afroman, speculating about what we might learn from his tasteful art of public shaming.