Looking Back
Whew! The Civic Fields "Year in Review" is here
Civic Fields is not quite a year old, but this week we are going to call it a year with a Year in Review post before taking some time off.
But first, thank you to all of you who have been readers this last year. We started this little newsletter a little under a year ago to try to make Substack a medium for rooting and reflection and not just reaction. Civic Fields has been that, I hope.
But Civic Fields has also turned into a bit of a virtual gathering space. The greatest joy here for me this year, by far, has been featuring voices that are not my own. A big thank you to Katie Bruner, Graham O’Gorman, Matt Pitchford, and Dave Tell for taking part in this little epistolary venture.
Thank you also to all of you who have emailed or sent notes. Given the time and energy Civic Fields takes, I have thought about throwing in the towel more than once. But each time I start moving that way, someone among you out there sends an encouraging note, keeping me going. Again, thank you. I am so very grateful for these acts of friendship and support.
The tag line for Civic Fields does not roll off the tongue, but it is the truest one I could come up with: “Working between the headlines and history, Civic Fields is a weekly newsletter devoted to civic life and its repair.” What follows is a review of what we’ve done this year and a concluding thought on what I at least am digging for here at Civic Fields.
Civic Fields has brought you a year of writing about our current civic life alongside writing about people and notions from the past.
We started with a reflection on rooting, meditating on the wisdom of Simone Weil. Any viable civic future, Weil teaches us, needs to be rooted in the past.
And then we went and began digging.
On of our patron saints, Hannah Arendt, urged us to think about what political strength really looks like. I argued Trump lacks it, and I still believe that. For all his power, he is a political weakling.
I also suggested that calling Trump an “authoritarian” is somewhat of a misdiagnosis. Instead, Trump’s style of governing more closely reflects what I called neo-royalism (something we were exploring here at Civic Fields well before the “No Kings” protests began popping up across the country). I also wrote about my skepticism about MAGA arguments that Trumpism represents a break with neoliberalism. And at the height of the Epstein news cycle this summer, I asked what the Epstein files might reveal about Trumpism itself?
A big theme here this year has been republicanism as understood in political theory, not political partisanship. In the spirit of republicanism, I argued for politics of duty over politics of authenticity; I argued that the republican conception of liberty is a superior alternative to "liberal" concepts of freedom; I wrote on “red republicanism” and conceptions of civic good while reflecting Wim Wenders’ great film, Perfect Days. We also touched on civility in an age of incivility and looked back at a great black republican, Martin Delany, who argued that civil rights are never enough without political rights. In the republican spirit, I reflected on the glories and crimes of the Declaration of Independence.
Does MAGA know anything about the old tradition republicanism? I doubt it. However, this fall, I got myself into a bit of hot water with a good friend when writing about how the Founding Fathers seem to me conspicuously absent from MAGA. My friend and colleague, Dave Tell, thought this was nonsense and smartly pushed back. He wrote a post here that argued the Founding Fathers are quite present in MAGA land, but in the service of a racist politics rather than a kind of republican revival. Dave and I continued the discussion with a joint post on “thick” vs. “thin” conceptions of history.
Finally, we closed out the year on political matters by considering Congress’s role in American politics and offering “three cheers” for the Democratic Party as it seems to be moving toward functioning the way a national political party must if it is to function well.
True to its name, Civic Fields has also engaged with a number of “fields” other than politics.
We’ve done a bit of sociology. We looked at Robert Putnam’s vision for civic renewal in contrast to Trump’s grievance capitalism. We also did a deep dive into James Davison Hunter’s book, Democracy and Solidarity, in two parts: an affirmation and a critique. Sociology also led us to contemplate two representative American cities, Las Vegas and Boston. We looked at the “Vegas-ification” of America, discussing how what happened in Vegas definitely did not stay in Vegas and how culture shapes political and civic life. These posts were followed by a series of posts from Northeastern University’s Matt Pitchford on the great, if fraught, city of Boston, with focus on its complex civic history. Matt concluded his posts by reflecting on how social and civic life are shaped by one’s immediate surroundings. I really loved these refections.
Another field we’ve explored this is American Christianity. After Pope Leo XIV was elected to the papacy, I reflected on what the new pope’s vision of politics and social teaching might mean. Later, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I commented on the dangerous apocalyptic state of the religious right. In our most recent post, my son and right-hand man here at Civic Fields, Graham O’Gorman, wrote about violence and American Evangelicalism.
We’ve also looked at the field of media theory. The age of AI is upon us, but it’s more than it’s cracked up to be, or so I argued in a two-part post (Part 1 linked here and Part 2 linked here). This fall, we also touched on the work of a great media philosopher, John Durham Peters, who has a different take on the effects of social media than you are used to encountering.
Finally, we wrapped up the year thinking about higher education: earlier in the year I asked, what are “civics” for? More recently, I explored and lamented what is going on with federal funding cuts to higher education. And Katie Bruner of MIT wrote a really thoughtful piece about how to think about federal funding for research in the sciences.
Whew!
So, looking back, what is Civic Fields about?
First, the premise here is that civic life is not one thing over here and other fields—economics, culture, religion, technology, media—things over there. Civic life is not a “sector” of our life; it is part of the ecology of life together. The civic crisis today is multi-pronged; renewal must be multi-pronged. So, whatever you do on a day-to-day basis—teaching, writing, nursing, building, preaching, baking, studying, walking, reading, conversing, bowling—can be part of renewal.
Second, Civic Fields also works from the premise that the past is a crucial resource for what it can teach us both negatively and positively about our present and our future. I worry a lot about a society that has no real engagement with, or memory of, the past. The past-focus at Civic Fields is not about nostalgia; nostalgia is but a way of avoiding actually engaging the past. Instead, it is about rooting.
Finally, if there’s a politics here at Civic Fields, it’s republican in the old-school sense. If there’s an economics, it is one set against Big Capital and technological take over. And if there is a religion, it is one that is humble and wondrous, not a violent and militant.
Civic Fields is planning on coming back in 2026. Meanwhile, Graham and I wish you a holiday season full of deep and rooted rest.