Like the rapid-fire beats, growling lyrics, and spinning guitar licks that define his band’s death-metal sound, guitarist George Morris’ outlook might be mistaken as angry, even nihilistic.
Consider his band’s name: Abandoned in the Abyss.
Though the name is meant to reflect a broader feeling of loss and frustration, the Idaho-based musician isn’t feeling particularly hopeless.
Why We Wrote This
Democracy requires civic engagement – and it can sometimes seem to be falling short. But the seeds of renewal are visible, from potluck dinners to youth programs.
Determined to create a social movement, he co-founded a nonprofit called Innerbeast, focused in part on promoting independent music, but also on hosting free cooking and art classes.
Mr. Morris says he was homeless for several years in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Part of his desire to engage now came from those days on the streets when his prospects had nearly evaporated.
“When you’re broken, and you feel like all hope is going, and some random act of kindness is given upon you, it keeps your heart warm and on fire,” says Mr. Morris.
Many citizens see America on her 250th birthday as struggling to express civic ideals amid weakened institutions and tribal politics that elevate differences over commonalities. And the nation’s founders foresaw that, whether in good times or bad, the prosperity of the United States would depend on the active virtues of its citizens. “A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin told Philadelphians after helping to frame the U.S. Constitution in 1787.
In that light, Innerbeast might be one small part of America’s stubborn “civic genius,” as Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, calls it. It is also part of a building movement by many Americans to traverse new civic frontiers.
“There is a kind of growing local appetite for countering the divisiveness – that you don’t have to agree on everything to cooperate on some things,” says Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of “Strangers in Their Own Land” (2016) and “Stolen Pride” (2024).
Today, technology and political upheaval have weakened many of the institutions that provided a sense of civic stability – from labor unions to newspapers, and from churches to the Rotary Club.
But even as institutions have become more fragile, civic participation has grown in some venues, from voting stations in Atlanta to food banks in New Mexico. Nationwide, voting rates are at near-record levels for the modern era – exceeding 65% of the eligible population in 2020 and 63% in 2024. And after years of missing recruiting goals, the past two years have seen the Army and other military branches meet their recruitment quotas.
Living in a “civic desert”
Yet, by some measures, today’s civic energy is more inward-looking and subjective, defined partly by a growing sense of loneliness and despair. Dwindling economic prospects in some areas have fueled those emotions. Polls find that Americans feel less connected to their communities than they did a decade or more ago.
“Part of the loss leads to social desertification,” says Dr. Hochschild. In places where in-person social connections have faltered, researchers say it becomes more common for people to also disengage from politics, current affairs, volunteering, or even helping their neighbors.
And unlike 50 years ago, many Americans today find it difficult to weave a common national narrative. That’s evidenced by struggles in Washington over how best to commemorate the 250th.
“In some ways, we’re all living in a civic desert. People respond pretty well to interacting with members of the other party. The problem is they don’t do it,” says Peter Levine, author of “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America.”
In addition to changes in technology, media, and politics, some experts say it’s significant that many school systems have pared back on civics education over time, whether driven by a focus on academic basics or worry about political sensitivities.
“We’ve seen the removal of the language of citizenship from institutions like schools, and it has created a kind of silence about the civic ferment,” says Harry Boyte, head of the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University in Minneapolis.
“There’s a tragedy when mainstream groups like local school systems abandon the connection with the good things in the American story,” he says. “You also see the field of patriotism ceded to hard-liners and conflict entrepreneurs. But there’s also now a great hunger where people are sick of nasty and toxic partisan attack politics. They are hungry for a different understanding of American identity.”
In the shadow of the Florida Mountains in Luna County, New Mexico, Jan Millis has seen the promise and the tensions firsthand.
The food bank she founded – Project Comunidad – processes and delivers 40,000 pounds of food each month to hundreds of families. Over a dozen people volunteer. And while poor and rural, the area is not a complete civic desert. Yet she says the kind of divides so apparent at the national level play out locally, too.
“There’s a lot of judgment right now,” says Ms. Millis, whose whole family gets involved by making cooking videos for clients, whom pantry staff refer to as “the neighbors.” “You’ll hear someone say, ‘Oh, did you see the [nice] cars that were in that line?’ But I had a person in tears because she had to borrow a car to get their food. It’s easy to sit back and critique. It’s hard to get out there and show compassion.”
The patriotism of participation
Some Americans are also working to invoke a patriotism less weighted with ideology and more with the power of participation.
In that vein, Mr. Patel’s organization, Interfaith America, has created America’s Potluck, a project promoting community dinners. Since 2021, potluck participation has gone up by 22%, according to the National Civic Life Study. “Potluck” is a word that was part of the American lexicon at the founding.
Courtesy of Interfaith America
“It’s a way of imagining the nation as a place where people of different ethnicities and races and religions and beliefs bring their best dish … to a common space,” says Mr. Patel, author of “We Need to Build: Field Notes for a Diverse Democracy.” “And that common space has to be what you all take responsibility for. It’s got to be safe, clean, and have enough forks and plates, which creates the opportunity for creative combinations and enriching conversation.”
There’s some evidence of such participation persisting or even rising. A Census-AmeriCorps study from 2023 found that 54% of Americans did things such as lending tools to neighbors or helping them run errands, up from 52% in 2019. And most people do talk to their neighbors, even if the frequency has declined.
The oil patch town of Kilgore, Texas, has emerged as a national example of the power of civic acts.
It’s one of the top host towns for a project called the American Exchange Project, which pays for high school seniors to travel after graduation to places in the U.S. where they might never go on their own. So, city kids from New England turn up in places like Kilgore, which, in turn, sends some of its teens to places like Berkeley, California.
Usually, the visitors and locals are perplexed by each other when they first meet, says Kilgore Mayor Ronnie Spradlin. But it doesn’t take long for them to bond over activities such as touring the oil history museum, shooting guns, or riding horses.
For her part, Dr. Hochschild describes how the characters in her 2024 book, in Pikeville, Kentucky, gathered a few months back out of a simple notion. Their appearance in a book illustrating harsh American divides led them to believe that perhaps they are also part of the solution – by getting together.
“We have to take it as our job to address the understandable desire to retreat,” says Dr. Hochschild, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. “Once you get the bridge half-built, you’ll be surprised at the number of people who are bringing concrete to build the other half of it.”