For anyone still in a post-election stupor, unsure what to do or how to repair our ailing democracy, here are three words of advice:
Start a club.
I don’t mean that sarcastically, as in, “Oh, you got a beef with Trump or the rest of them in Washington? Well, join the club!” I mean it literally. Make a group. Invite people. Create rules and rituals. Establish goals. Meet regularly. In short: Start a club.
This is the great democratic self-cure sitting right before our eyes. I was reminded of this immediately after the election, when so many people I knew were in states of shock or despondence. At Citizen University, the nonprofit I run, my colleagues and I decided that doing something was better than doing nothing. We accelerated plans for a project called Civic Saturday, which we’d been intending to launch in the new year but instead launched four days after Donald Trump was elected president.
Civic Saturday is a civic analogue to church: a gathering of friends and strangers in a common place to nurture a spirit of shared purpose. But it’s not about church religion or synagogue or mosque religion. It’s about American civic religion—the creed of liberty, equality, and self-government that truly unites us (even as we argue over it). We invented Civic Saturday because even before the election we felt that citizens need ritual, shared experiences to help them make sense of our changing country.