Reading this BBC piece about basically a sovereign citizen movement in Germany (linked to those folks they arrested earlier this week) makes me realize how universal the civic craziness is. For all the profoundly dysfunctional aspects of American civic life, it's not uniquely American. I mean, from a purely economic point of view, Brexit was crazier and more damaging than even the election of Trump.
By civic life, I mean the shared space we live in and agree to manage by certain rules, and I'm not sure how you repair civic life. I'm at least a little skeptical that we ever had some golden age of civic life, and even when it was better, it often excluded minority groups. How do we create a shared sense of community?
For conservatives, civic life is centered around a faith tradition, but those faith traditions are often exclusionary and rarely universal. For liberals, the concept of tolerance is central to community. Those two visions are diametrically opposed. It's difficult to say "There is no god but God and Muhammad is his profit, but I'm cool with atheists, too." Faith often leads to certainty, whereas tolerance is rooted in questioning and doubt about your own perspective. "I might be wrong, so I won't judge" is very different from faith.
Max Weber (I think) referred to the Enlightenment as the "disenchantment of the world," but that was only true for a slice of educated elites. Increasingly today, we are divided along lines of faith and no faith, as opposed to between faiths. Faith-based community was a strong community and tolerance-based community are more atomistic.
The challenge for liberals is to create a universalist and connective theory of community to bind people to a common civic project.
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