Civic Studies in the Rust Belt: on the tempos of change

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I’m heading home from Dayton, OH. Tomorrow, we’ll go to my hometown, Syracuse, NY for a visit. Each city has lost about half of its peak population of about a quarter of a million people since the later 1900s. The main cause in both cases has been deindustrialization; hardly any factory jobs remain in either city. In both cases, Interstate highways were deliberately built on top of a thriving Black business district (although Syracuse is now finally working on replacing its elevated stretch of I-81). These cities once offered large department stores, opera theaters, and crowded downtown streets. Today, both communities, with their many resilient and creative people, show some green shoots of civic revival.

I was in Dayton for a Summer Institute of Civic Studies that was graciously hosted by the Kettering Foundation; I played a supporting role. This was the 17th Civic Studies institute that I have led or co-led or supported since 2009, They have taken place in many locations, from Ukraine to Mexico. My most recent one was in Kyiv last May. (Among these 17 institutes, I am not counting a one-day class that I offered in Nablus, the West Bank, last November, nor many semesters of teaching similar material to undergraduates ay Tufts.)

The Dayton Summer Institute was one of my favorites, in part because of the location and the fact that our cohort combined several activists from Dayton’s civil society with visitors from far away. Thanks to our Kettering Foundation hosts, we mixed seminar-style discussions of demanding texts with a city tour, a meal in a host family’s home, and other local experiences. And we held relatively sustained conversations about examples of civic action from Dayton, including a food coop and political reforms.

These rich conversations made me think about the many tempos of social and political change.

There is the slow drip of de-industrialization, which removed about 2,500 people from Dayton each year for decades. Many changes happen that way–gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway said of bankruptcy.

There is an oscillation of progress and regression. Consider Dayton’s history in the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the segregation of many of its institutions, the 1966 riot/uprising, the election of a first Black mayor in 1970, the disappearance of investment and jobs, and even the Trump Administration’s attacks on Haitians in nearby Springfield.

There is the tempo of national and global politics. It is a cliché that change happens rapidly in modern times. Actually, I would describe the political and social order of the USA from 1970-2016 as quite stable, more so than in previous eras. But the last few years have seen dizzying changes, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump; from Tea Party to MAGA to Black Lives Matter to MAGA to the resistance in Minnesota; and in and out of a global pandemic–with Artificial Intelligence now threatening to change everything again.

There are the life trajectories of human beings, some of whom grow into leaders and elders over many decades.

And the trajectories of organizations. We were honored to visit Dayton’s former 5th Street YMCA. Black men with limited means founded this organization in 1928, at a time when Dayton’s downtown Y allowed only limited and segregated access to Blacks. (They could only swim on Thursday evenings, for example). These men raised the money to construct a fine building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, with a facade that bears the names of the Daytonian poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and William A. Hunton, a Black man who worked in the national YMCA at the time and helped to authorize this branch.

In those days, Fifth Street was a busy urban corridor of Black business, including two movie theaters and many professional offices. Now it is bisected by an Interstate and largely depopulated, with quite a lot of grass on plots from which the buildings have been removed. But the well-restored former YMCA building belongs to a significant nonprofit organization, Miami Valley Housing Opportunities.

Somehow, we must reserve some of our energy and attention for long, slow processes–helping young people grow into leaders, building organizations, restoring landmarks from previous struggles, and making our communities more inviting–even as we react effectively to the rhythm of daily crises.

See also: Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time

the Gulf equilibrium

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At this hour, the headlines say that Donald Trump has called off strikes on Iran because negotiations are almost concluded, while Iran denies that there are any talks. Maybe an agreement will soon be signed, but I think not.

Financial Times commentator Chris Giles argues that the US-Iran war is in a “bounded equilibrium.” Whenever the combatants exchange attacks or ramp up their rhetoric, crude oil prices rise. As the price of a barrel approaches $100, Donald Trump worries about becoming the new Herbert Hoover and restrains US attacks, claiming that an amazing deal is on the table. However, as tankers begin to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, the price of a barrel sinks toward $70 and the Iranian regime attacks ships or land targets in the region to reassert control.

As a result, the world is stuck in a range that can be measured in terms of oil prices ($70-100), the number of ships moving through the Strait (zero-80/day) and fatalities from airstrikes and drones (zero-540/day). The first trend moves inversely to the other two.

The Institute for the Study of War tends to interpret daily changes in Iran’s posture as the result of competition among factions in the regime, some more bellicose than others. (See yesterday’s report, for example.) But that form of explanation is compatible with Giles’ equilibrium theory. Perhaps aggressive factions tend to gain influence whenever oil prices slide.

For the Iranian regime, the status quo is tolerable, but they risk losing leverage when shipping goes back to normal. On the other hand, they do incur costs when the US strikes Iranian targets. These twin pressures keep their behavior within a range.

This current equilibrium is not truly stable. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the status quo lasts for months or even a couple of years, the underlying situation is subject to breakdown in various ways.

The US economy may take a major hit once global oil reserves run out, or simply as a result of sustained energy shortages plus other vulnerabilities, such as an overpriced stock market. If a serious US recession follows the attacks on Iran, that may deter future US aggression and make Iran less interested in developing other deterrents, such as nuclear weapons. In a recession, Trump might be motivated to entice the Iranian government to reopen the Strait by offering security guarantees, sanctions relief, or pressure on Israel.

On the other hand, the Iranian economy could collapse, or the Iranian regime could face other pressures that persuade its leaders to reopen the strait without tolls. I find this outcome harder to envision, but it is possible.

In the meantime, I would tune out daily news about negotiations. I would not use the oil futures market to predict the future, although the current price does indicate the situation of the day.

The current situation may continue long enough that Democratic candidates in the 2028 presidential race will start having to offer solutions.

See also: how markets predict news; Prisoner’s Dilemma in the Gulf; the Gulf War and the energy transition

where is the attention?

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Sometimes, my dog wonders something about me. Perhaps: Will I will play with him?

He stares at my face, which means he must look quite far above his own head. His nostrils may twitch, and I guess that he is gathering as much data as he can with his nose. His head is cocked, which signals to me that he has a question. His ears (being floppy) are harder to interpret, but usually you can tell that they are tensed forward to listen.

Where is he when he attends this way? One valid answer: between his nose and his tail. Or: in the space contained by his fur.

But it would be a normal use of the English language to say that his eyes–or his mind–are on me. Presumably, he is not thinking about his tail, whereas he is intentionally focused on my face. His eyesight is directed, so that he is not looking anywhere other than my face. Even the space between us and behind me is presumably blurred for him. I am the “figure,” and the rest is the “ground.”

The senses of smell and sound are less directed. Information can reach a nose and ears from any direction. But Luca is probably trying to screen out other olfactory and auditory data and lean into information about me that may be carried by smells and sounds.

He cannot feel me from a distance, and he is probably inattentive to the things that he can feel, such as the ground below him–unless it moves. He is not focused on touch because it will not tell him whether I am going to play with him.

Thus, if you ask where is he when he wonders about me, a plausible answer would be: In a zone centered on my face. But my face is merely a source of information, so another answer could be: He is in relation to me. Or: We are together. After all, the purpose of the cocked head is to tell me that he is attending to me so that I will be more likely to answer his question.

This act of attention has duration. Luca sustains his gaze, which is why I infer that he is attentive. Besides, he is interested in whether I will play with him in the future because I have played with him in the past. I don’t know whether a dog thinks about memories or plans, but humans certainly do. And neither memories nor plans are in the present.

If Luca already knew what he wanted to know, he would no longer pay attention. Nor would he attend if there were nothing present that might answer his question. Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that attention arises “in the process of learning” (1945, p. 34). He defines the “attention itself” as “circumscribed ignorance, an intention that is still ’empty’ but already determined” by what is really there.

Let’s say that any sentient being is its attention, or at least that its attention is a very significant aspect of the being. I have explored that thesis a bit here.

Our attention has a location that is related to the location of our body, but the two are not coterminous. In fact, we are rarely aware of most of our body, and we cannot become aware of some parts or aspects of it, such as the blood in our veins. Although Luca’s sensory capacity is concentrated inside his skull, he is not attentive to his skull and can never even see the back of it.

Still, the body has an important relationship to attention. If something happens to the body, we may immediately notice it and may be compelled to attend. I pulled a muscle in my back on Monday, and that certainly got my attention. If the body dies, the attention ends.

Our attention has a location in time that is related to the present hour and minute, but the two are not identical. We can be deeply engaged with a memory or a fear or hope for the future. And an instant of attention may make sense only as one part of an extended act. I may attend to one word while writing this whole post, but no word means much alone.

Two or more attentions can be connected, with each serving as the object of the other. Then it may be more meaningful to ask where we are than where I am.

Where? and When? seem to be questions about limitations. We are finite, limited creatures who cannot be everywhere or last forever. However, we are not limited in quite the way we may assume when we identify with our body at the moment that is shown on a clock. Our place and time are different from that.

Source: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Gallimard, 1945). (“La conscience en train d’apprendre” is “cette ignorance circonscrite, de cette intention <<vide>> encore, mais déjà déterminée“). The metaphor of figure and ground also comes from this text.

See also: people as clusters of attention; paradigms of attention; effortful attention and moral responsibility; Cezanne’s portait of Gustave Geffroy; Rilke, ‘The Grownup’.

preparing for a threat to the fall election

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Under the headline “This Is What’s Keeping Me Up at Night,” New York Times columnist (and Charles F. Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow) David French sketches a disturbing scenario.

The Democrats may win a majority of House seats this fall. Donald Trump and many allies would decry the election as rigged and corrupt. When the House convenes in January, several defeated Republicans would file challenges, which the Committee on House Administration would consider. Controlled, as now, by Republicans, this committee would refer the final decision to the full House, also with its current composition. The Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members,” and the Supreme Court has clarified that there is no appeal to the courts. The House majority could vote to seat several incumbents who actually lost their elections, thus retaining Republican control.

[July 31: I have received well-informed feedback that the newly elected House would consider any challenges. I think that is different from what David French suggests, and I hope it is true!]

To accomplish this outcome, the House Republican majority of 218 would have to hold together. A disproportionate number of the defeated Republican incumbents would come from the party’s more centrist and institutionalist wing. Although they would have an incentive to award their seats to themselves, that would be crossing a Rubicon. If several defeated candidates were seated, then arguably the current Republic would have ended just after its 250th anniversary. That fact would probably deter at least three Republicans, thus defeating the effort. And we might hope that many more, including the Speaker, would avoid the temptation.

But the risk is high enough that civil society must prepare. No republic can depend on the self-denying virtue of its current leaders. We should certainly expect step one: very prominent efforts to depict the election as stolen.

Citing Minnesota organizer Doran Schrantz and others, Micah Sifry envisions a mass response involving “coordinated work stoppages, business closures, and economic withdrawal, to put pressure on business elites and corporations.” I assume that the most effective time for such efforts would be while the House Administration Committee considers challenges to the election, although resistance should persist and grow in the event of an adverse vote in the full House.

Last winter, Minnesotans provided an example of a large-scale and disciplined civil action that depended on prior training and coordination. Robert F. Worth reported that 65,000 residents of the Twin Cities received training in civil resistance. Now is the time for more such preparation, and Sifry recommends Indivisible’s Hands Off Our Vote national kick-off call on Thursday July 30 and Freedom Trainers’ election defense resources. I’m also tracking the 10 Steps Campaign and Vote Riders, among othes.

These groups will tend–overall–to draw people who want the Republicans to lose the election in the first place. That category includes me. However, it is also important for people who may vote Republican to defend the election results, whoever wins. They can be more persuasive inside the House GOP caucus.

I doubt that 218 House Republicans will vote to seat candidates whom they know just lost the election. But it is plausible that 218 Republicans will convince themselves that the election really was stolen by Democrats, relying on lurid charges from the president that circulate in right-wing media. Conservatives will be the best sources of countervailing information.

As examples of efforts to organize and train people in defense of the election that are more likely to draw conservatives, I would cite The Advancing Liberty Coalition, Vet the Vote, and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, among others. Some of these groups emphasize recruiting people as volunteer poll workers while encouraging them to defend the election if necessary.

As Sherilyn Ifill wrote last year: “People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things.”

See also: What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement; building power for resisting authoritarianism; learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion; the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance (march 2025)

what it would take for the public to trust science

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On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO2 concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.


Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.

See also: my own trust in institutions; mixed thoughts about the status of science; the Pew climate change survey and the state of science (2016); Civic Engagement in American Climate Policy:
Collaborative Models etc.