Tending the Fire of Citizenship

It’s easy to say you belong to a party.

It’s much harder to articulate what you believe, why you believe it, and what responsibility your belief carries.

That gap — between political identity and political understanding — has grown into a chasm. We are more politicized than ever, and yet we are less political in any meaningful sense. We wear team colors, but forget the game was never supposed to be us versus each other. It was supposed to be us versus the problems we share.

We were reminded of this recently, in the days after the death of Pope Francis, when we came across a quote in a New York Times Magazine article reflecting on his political legacy. He was asked about electoral politics — how he approached it, how the faithful should engage it — and while he was careful not to endorse any candidate, he offered a quiet, piercing observation:

“There are nations, and I’m thinking of Latin America,” he said, “which are too politicized, but they don’t have political culture.”People are “from this party or that one,” he added, “but effectively without a clear thought on the foundations, the proposals.”One of the jobs of the Church, he said, was “teaching to have political culture.”

That paradox — too politicized, without political culture — hit us like a tuning fork. Because it named something we’ve been living through in the United States, perhaps more clearly than we’ve been able to say ourselves: a civic life that is loud, reactive, furious — and hollow. A nation where everyone has a side, but fewer and fewer seem to know what they’re actually standing for. A country that fights without memory, without maturity, without foundation.

Politics, properly practiced, is like tending a communal fire: slow, careful, sometimes messy, but sustaining.

Without political culture, that fire has not just been abandoned — it has become a wildfire, burning out of control, destroying the very structures that once sheltered us.

We have lost much of what once taught us how to tend that fire.

• Where once community centers, churches, and local political involvement formed citizens, we now have outrage machines, monetized algorithms, and echo chambers.

• Where once civic education taught responsibility and compromise, we now teach grievance and spectacle.

• Where once politics asked us to wrestle with discomfort and stewardship, we now demand instant emotional gratification and call it democracy.

Outrage is cheap. Citizenship is hard.

We must remember: politics was never meant to be easy, or clean, or quick. It was meant to be the slow, sometimes agonizing work of building a life together — one argument, one agreement, one compromise at a time. It was meant to be the craft of belonging, not the sport of destruction.

Without a shared political culture — a culture rooted in memory, ethics, humility, and duty — democracy collapses into grievance and revenge. Without shared fire-tenders, there is no fire: only ashes.

We cannot afford to be merely politicized.

• We must be political in the oldest, truest sense:

• Responsible to each other.

• Committed to the work of governance, not just the spectacle of outrage.

• Stewards of a flame we did not start and must not extinguish.

No single moment broke our political culture. It eroded slowly—like a shoreline battered by waves no one thought could reach that far inland. What we’re living in now is not the aftermath of one collapse, but the result of many small abandonments.

We abandoned civic education. Once, schools taught government not as trivia, but as a responsibility. Students learned how a bill became law, yes—but also how to hold a town hall, how to serve on a board, how to disagree without turning disagreement into dehumanization.

That curriculum didn’t vanish all at once. It was crowded out.

In the early 2000s, federal policies like No Child Left Behind forced schools to prioritize reading and math scores as the primary markers of success. Standardized testing became the dominant framework, and everything else—civics, art, critical thinking—was pushed to the margins.

In its place: compliance, silence, and a generation of students trained to find the correct answer instead of wrestling with difficult questions.

We abandoned our civic institutions. Community centers, churches, public libraries, and neighborhood associations—these were once the places where people practiced democracy in daily life. Not perfectly. Not always inclusively. But they offered something we now miss terribly: a chance to belong. A place to sit across from someone unlike you and work toward something shared. Many of these institutions have been hollowed out or turned into battlegrounds themselves—stripped of trust, resources, or purpose.

We abandoned local political engagement. More and more, our attention is consumed by national spectacle: presidential debates, cable news arguments, federal drama. We talk about politics constantly, but rarely where we live. Many of us couldn’t name our city council representative or describe a single zoning issue shaping our neighborhood. We obsess over who holds the White House while ignoring who holds the keys to our local school boards, our city commissions, and our planning committees.

And into that vacuum rushed something far more corrosive: Outrage, optimized. Anger, sold as clarity. Identity, reduced to slogans.

Social media didn’t invent this crisis, but it poured accelerant on it. The algorithms reward provocation, not dialogue. We are pushed toward performance, not participation—toward spectacle, not substance. Rage is the currency, and every click is a vote for escalation.

It’s easy to hide behind a screen and rant into the abyss. There’s no discomfort, no accountability, no eye contact. You don’t see the person you’ve hurt—or the community you’ve weakened. The internet lets us be loud without being present, certain without being informed, cruel without consequence.

And it’s not accidental. Rage bait drives engagement. Division keeps people scrolling. Entire platforms have been engineered to monetize outrage, creating a feedback loop that isolates us from each other and from the truth.

Like a parasite, the system burrowed into our national psyche and began draining us of empathy, nuance, and logic—hollowing out the very traits democracy depends on to survive.

This is how we lost political culture.Not in one blaze of destruction, but in the quiet, daily decision to stop showing up.To leave the fire unattended.To assume someone else would tend it.

Without an ethical foundation, politics becomes a power struggle for its own sake.

It no longer asks what kind of world we should build together—only who gets to win.

When political culture dies, what remains is politics in its most hollow and dangerous form:

Power without purpose. When power is no longer tied to a shared vision or public good, it becomes hollow — something to be seized, protected, and wielded, not for something, but simply so the other side can’t have it.

• The U.S. Senate filibustering routine legislation not because of genuine opposition, but to deny the other party a “win.”

• Elected officials refusing to certify election results they know are valid, simply to stay in the good graces of a political base.

• Local leaders blocking affordable housing projects because of ideological loyalty — even when their own constituents are struggling with housing insecurity.

These aren’t disagreements over what kind of society we want.They’re contests over who gets to hold the gavel. That’s not politics. That’s theater.

Argument without substance. Debate becomes reflex. You take the opposite side not because you’ve considered the issue, but because your opponent has spoken first.

• Public health became politicized during COVID — where wearing a mask or getting a vaccine wasn’t about safety, but about not letting “them” be correct. People chose positions based on their enemies rather than based on evidence or ethics.

• Renewable energy projects are blocked by politicians who previously supported “energy independence” — but now oppose solar or wind farms because environmentalists support them.

• A gun safety measure is introduced, and someone immediately invokes the Second Amendment, not because the proposal violates it, but because they’ve been trained to react before thinking.

This is not debate. This is tribal instinct masquerading as principle.

Identity without responsibility.We claim the names—patriot, progressive, Christian, conservative—but often abandon the obligations those identities carry.

• Someone proclaims themselves a “patriot,” but refuses to accept the results of a fair election — undermining the very Constitution they claim to revere.

• A person calls themselves “pro-life,” but supports policies that cut food assistance, deny healthcare access, and ignore child poverty.

• A self-described “progressive” rails against inequality but refuses to support zoning reform in their own neighborhood because it might affect their property value.

• A church preaches love, but turns away the poor, the refugee, or the queer teenager in need of shelter.

Identity without responsibility is the collapse of integrity.And when whole communities do this — when parties and institutions do this — political culture unravels.

This is where we are.

We live in a time of profound civic loneliness. People are isolated from community and unmoored from shared purpose. They search for belonging in movements that offer certainty—even if those movements traffic in cruelty. They are hungry to be part of something. And where political culture has failed, culture war has filled the vacuum.

We live in a time of chronic mistrust. We don’t trust our institutions because we no longer see ourselves reflected in them.And we don’t trust each other because we’ve been trained to fear each other.This is what happens when citizenship is replaced by consumption—when people stop believing their voice matters unless it goes viral.

We live in a time of weaponized disconnection. Authoritarianism thrives not because of one leader or one party, but because the people have been systematically, algorithmically, emotionally disconnected from the habits that sustain democracy.

Without political culture, democracy becomes brittle. It cannot absorb conflict. It cannot weather crisis. It cannot inspire anything except despair or domination.

We shouldn’t be surprised that so many people are angry. We should be surprised that we thought we could strip away all the connective tissue of civic life and not end up here.

What happens without political culture? Exactly what we’re seeing now: More rage.More alienation.More cruelty dressed up as clarity.And a creeping, quiet collapse of the idea that we can govern ourselves at all.

If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s this: politics without culture is politics without roots. It cannot nourish. It cannot hold. It sways with every wind of outrage.

Political culture is what anchors a democracy.It is the deep, often invisible foundation that tells us not just how to govern, but why we govern together at all.It is about the shared, lived habits of a people who still believe they owe something to one another — and to the country they share.

Because in a democracy, government is not meant to serve a party, a religion, or a race.It is meant to serve the people — all of them.That only works if we believe we are, in some meaningful way, a people.

We need a shared civic identity — not rooted in blood or ideology, but in the commitment to work for the common good.Without that identity, democracy becomes a battlefield of tribes — each convinced that only their side is real, or worthy, or right.

Nationalism and patriotism are double-edged swords. They have been used to unite — and to oppress. But something must bind us. Something must remind us that we belong to each other — and that we are building, however imperfectly, the same future.

Political culture gives us that “something.” Not with flags and slogans, but with shared purpose and practiced trust.

Because patriotism isn’t found in waving the biggest flag. It isn’t lapel pins, bumper stickers, or angry declarations of love for a country you refuse to help repair. There are people who drape themselves in the symbols of America but have no interest in the work of being American.

A political culture isn’t built by shouting your allegiance. It’s built by showing up.

It means learning how to listen to an argument you disagree with — not to destroy it, but to understand it. It means forming your own argument, learning how to articulate it with clarity and care—and if it fails to meet the moment, going back and doing the work again.

It means participating, not just performing. It means staying at the table, even when it’s uncomfortable. It means accepting that democracy is not supposed to be clean or easy — it’s supposed to be shared.

At its core, political culture means four things:

A Shared Story.Not uniformity, but a sense of collective memory.A recognition that we are bound by something more than algorithms or ancestry — a belief that we share a past worth remembering and a future worth building. It is the story that lets us say we, even when we disagree.

Ethics and Stewardship.Politics is not just about power — it is about responsibility.Responsibility to the vulnerable. Responsibility to the truth. Responsibility to something larger than our own wins and losses.When we act in the name of the public, we should carry that name with reverence.

The Practice of Disagreement.Political culture doesn’t erase conflict — it gives us the tools to survive it.It teaches us to debate without dehumanizing. To lose without plotting revenge. To argue from principle, not just from pride.In a healthy political culture, disagreement is not war — it is the work.

Active, Local Citizenship. Politics is not something that happens on cable news. It’s what happens in school board meetings, city councils, mutual aid circles, block parties. Political culture reminds us that national transformation is built from local trust — from the habits of showing up, listening, voting, volunteering, helping, building.

These are not glamorous things. They are slow. They are rarely televised. But they are how a people learns to govern themselves.

We don’t need a culture of louder slogans. We need a culture of practiced trust, principled debate, and everyday courage — the kind it takes to sit across from someone different and still believe that we matters more than me.

That’s political culture. That’s what we’ve lost. And that’s what we can build again.

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We don’t claim to have all the answers. But we know what it looks like to show up.

Because that’s what this is about.Not theory. Not slogans.But showing up.Getting your hands dirty.Looking around and asking: What needs fixing?And then deciding: What’s mine to do?

For us, that’s taken different forms.

For Brian, it’s meant doing the hard, often invisible work of downtown economic development. Of removing barriers so entrepreneurs can open more easily.Of helping create policies that make our downtown more inclusive and accessible — for the people who actually live here, for the people who walk its sidewalks, not just the ones who pass through.

It’s about more than business. It’s about making downtown Elgin a place where people can gather. Where ideas can cross-pollinate. Where diversity isn’t just acknowledged, but honored — because it’s the source of our strength. Where we stop seeing difference as division and start recognizing it as potential.

For Katie, it’s leading PADS of Elgin, the city’s homeless shelter — serving some of our most neglected and undervalued neighbors. It’s about making sure people have a place to sleep, a way forward, a chance to belong.It’s about meeting a massive national crisis — the housing crisis — with local courage. Because if we don’t address it here, in small ways and real ways, it will reshape our communities in ways we can’t yet predict.

This is what rebuilding political culture looks like.

It’s knowing your city council members by name. It’s checking the docket for the next meeting — not because you need to speak, but because you care. It’s being able to say, “Maybe we should try this instead of that.”It’s choosing to govern safely, sanely, and rationally — even when it’s hard. It’s refusing to turn disagreement into enmity.

We take seriously what Ruth Bader Ginsburg's words seriously: lead in a way that makes people want to follow you. That’s what we try to do every day — in this city, with these people, for this community.

Because political culture isn’t something you inherit, it’s something you practice. Not alone — but together. Over time. In conversation. Through conflict. With love.

If you’re reading this, the invitation is yours too. Start where you are. Find what’s yours to fix. And show up.

Tend the fire where you are. Not for show — but for shelter. Not for applause — but for each other.

That’s how we begin again. And it’s how we keep going.