Henry Farrel writes that a much-discussed decline in civic engagement is, to the surprise of its theorists, being reversed by partisanship:
This academic movement to reverse civic decline had an unusual level of impact outside the ivory tower, because politicians were struggling with the same problems. Bill and Hillary Clinton invited many of the movement's key academic and civic figures to a series of meetings in the White House and at Camp David. Before long, however, the impulse to redefine citizenship was lost in the partisan warfare of the Clinton era.At roughly the same time, though, a promising young organizer-turned-politician from Chicago joined Robert Putnam's Saguaro Seminar, which brought together religious and civic leaders to explore ways to rebuild civic engagement in America. Today, when Barack Obama speaks about how citizens can transcend their political divisions to participate in projects of common purpose, he is drawing on the arguments and ideas from these intellectual debates of a decade ago. Ironically, while his election revives this dormant tradition, it also reveals the limitation of the underlying theory of civic decline.
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--The Editors
