The Tradition We Forgot — and What It Cost Us
Highlighting Civic Scholars Council: Trygve Throntveit's recent Time essay
Trygve Throntveit’s recent Time essay makes an argument that doesn’t get made often enough: the crisis in American democracy isn’t just about polarization or distrust. It’s about forgetting what democracy actually requires of us.
Throntveit is a Research Professor at Ball State, a Stanford Hoover Institution Civics Fellow, and a member of the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council. His piece traces a tradition that ran alongside the rights-language most of us learned in school: the tradition of “commonwealth,” the ongoing work of diverse citizens building something together they couldn’t build alone.
The Civil Rights movement is his sharpest example, and he frames it in a way worth sitting with. In popular memory it’s a rights story. He argues it was primarily a power-building story. SNCC didn’t arrive with answers. They went into communities to understand local knowledge and aspiration, then helped people build their own capacity for collective action. Ella Baker insisted on group-centered leadership so communities could sustain themselves after any individual leader moved on. The legislative coalitions behind the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts required collaboration among liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans, labor unions, and religious bodies that had almost nothing else in common.
None of that was comfortable. None of it required agreement. It required people to work together toward something larger than what they were separately angry about.
That tradition eroded. Throntveit traces it to the 1980s, when civic association membership cratered and both parties settled into framings that cast democracy as zero-sum. The result, in his phrase, is “vending machine” citizenship: insert preference, receive outcome, rage when the machine fails.
Braver Angels gets a direct mention in the piece, alongside the Industrial Areas Foundation and educators building civics curricula around actual democratic practice. What he says about these efforts matters: they embody the experimental willingness to try new approaches, the reflective willingness to face history honestly, and the empathic willingness to find public value in people who differ from us.
That’s a precise description of the work. Not a movement. A practice.
As we mark 250 years since the Declaration, Throntveit closes on the mutual pledge its signatories made: lives, fortunes, sacred honor. The pledge wasn’t just about rights. It was a founding act of courageous citizenship. The gesture that started the tradition we’ve spent decades forgetting.
Read it. Then tell me: what does recovering that tradition look like where you live?
A great piece in Time by Trygve Throntveit. Certainly worth reading.