Trevor Dale
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The Work of Self-Government: Attention Is a Civic Resource

September 21, 2026

A diverse group of citizens listening to one another around a community meeting table, illuminated by warm light in a dark civic hall.

In 2026, the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. It is a useful moment—not for easy patriotism or easy cynicism, but for a harder question.

Are Americans still practicing self-government?

I believe we can. But only if we treat democracy as something we do, not something we merely inherit.

That begins with a resource we rarely describe as civic at all: our attention. Where we direct it determines what we understand. What we understand shapes where we participate. And where we participate helps determine whose interests government can afford to ignore.

We are ancient. Our tools are not.

Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago. For most of that time, people lived in relatively small communities. They were not “doing nothing.” They developed language, art, tools, trade, social bonds, and remarkable ways of surviving difficult environments.

Then, within roughly the last 12,000 years, agriculture began changing the scale of human life. Food production supported permanent settlements and larger populations. Cities, states, written law, organized commerce, concentrated power, and organized warfare followed in forms and at scales that earlier communities had not known.

The most dramatic acceleration is newer still. Industrialization, fossil energy, mass education, modern medicine, computing, and global communication transformed ordinary life in only a few generations. Today, a device in your hand can deliver more information, entertainment, persuasion, and outrage before breakfast than many of our ancestors encountered in a lifetime.

Our tools changed faster than we did.

We still respond to threat, reward, belonging, status, novelty, and convenience. Those instincts are not character defects. They are human. The danger begins when powerful institutions learn to exploit them more effectively than citizens learn to govern them.

America’s achievement—and its unfinished promise

The United States did not invent democracy. Ancient Athens practiced a limited form of direct democracy, republics existed before the American founding, and Indigenous nations across this continent had their own traditions of law, diplomacy, representation, and consensus.

What the United States built was an unusually durable constitutional republic organized around a written charter, divided power, federalism, regular elections, and a process for amendment. That achievement was real. So were its contradictions.

The original system did not distribute political power equally. Enslaved people were denied freedom and citizenship. Women were denied the vote in most states. Indigenous people faced dispossession and exclusion. Voting rules commonly privileged property-owning white men.

The country became more democratic because generations of Americans organized, protested, litigated, voted, and demanded that the nation honor promises it had not yet kept.

That distinction matters. Democracy was not completed in 1787. It has always been a continuing argument over who belongs, who has power, and whether public institutions answer to ordinary people.

The Constitution’s capacity for change is one of its strengths. Amendments, legislation, courts, elections, and state and local government can move the country without requiring violence. But flexibility is not self-executing. Checks and balances work only when institutions defend them and citizens insist that they work.

The last fifty years: not one conspiracy, but an organized imbalance

It is tempting to tell the modern political story as though one villain entered the room and took control. The truth is less cinematic—and more instructive.

Beginning in the early 1970s, business interests developed more coordinated and durable political infrastructure. One influential artifact from that period is the confidential memorandum corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in August 1971. He urged business leaders to defend free enterprise more systematically in universities, media, courts, and politics. Less than two months later, President Richard Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court.

Other institutions formed during the same era. The Business Roundtable was established in 1972 to give chief executives a coordinated voice in public policy. The Heritage Foundation followed in 1973 to develop and advance conservative policy ideas.

These organizations did not secretly replace government. They did something more ordinary and, over time, more powerful: they organized, invested in ideas, recruited talent, built relationships, and stayed engaged.

That is not inherently illegitimate. Businesses, unions, nonprofits, religious groups, professional associations, environmental organizations, and individual citizens all have a right to petition government. The democratic danger appears when one class of participants has vastly more time, money, access, and institutional capacity than everyone else.

Court decisions changed the terrain as well. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, the Supreme Court held that the government could not prohibit corporations and unions from making independent political expenditures. The decision did not permit direct corporate contributions to candidates, and the Court upheld disclosure and disclaimer requirements at issue in the case.

The years that followed nevertheless brought enormous growth in outside spending, while parts of that spending moved through organizations that do not publicly disclose all of their donors. Citizens United was not the only legal development behind that change, but it was an important one.

The central problem is not that organized interests participate. It is that ordinary citizens too often arrive only at the end—angry, underinformed, and exhausted—while organized interests participate every day.

Attention is now part of the political economy

Modern influence is not only about campaign contributions or lobbyists. It is also about attention.

Social media was not created as a government plot. Its platforms can connect families, mobilize communities, spread knowledge, and give people a voice they might otherwise lack. But many of the largest platforms earn money by keeping us engaged long enough to show us more advertising. That business model can reward whatever captures attention most reliably—including outrage, fear, novelty, misinformation, and division.

The result is not simply that we become distracted. Our attention is sorted, measured, predicted, and sold. Citizens enter a public conversation already segmented into audiences, each receiving a different emotional version of reality.

The evidence about social media and young people is serious enough to require action, but it deserves honest language. The U.S. Surgeon General has said the available evidence does not allow us to conclude that social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. The advisory reports that young people spending more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental-health problems such as symptoms of depression and anxiety. Association does not resolve every question of cause, and online life can provide real benefits. But uncertainty is not a reason to leave children inside an uncontrolled experiment.

Australia chose a stronger guardrail. Since December 10, 2025, covered social-media platforms have been required to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts. The responsibility rests with platforms rather than children or parents, and under-16s may still view publicly available content that does not require an account.

America does not need to copy every policy another democracy adopts. The point is more basic: democratic societies are allowed to decide that a profitable product still carries public obligations.

The same incentives reach the dinner table

Food may seem like a sharp turn from democracy. It is not. It is another example of what happens when institutions become highly skilled at capturing human appetite while the public struggles to shape the rules around them.

America’s food system is not a cartoon in which executives gather in a room and decide to make people sick. That would be simplistic and unfair. Businesses respond to incentives. The problem is that those incentives can reward inexpensive, highly palatable, heavily marketed products more reliably than they reward long-term public health.

In a small but tightly controlled NIH trial, 20 adults lived at the NIH Clinical Center and ate both an ultra-processed and a minimally processed diet for two weeks each. The offered diets were matched for presented calories, energy density, macronutrients, sugar, sodium, and fiber. Participants were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. On the ultra-processed diet, they consumed about 500 more calories per day and gained weight; on the minimally processed diet, they lost weight.

That study does not prove that every processed food is harmful. It does not establish intent by any company, and a 20-person inpatient trial cannot answer every question about real-world diets. It does tell us that product design, convenience, appetite, and health cannot be separated as neatly as we sometimes pretend.

People with larger bodies are not economic inputs, moral failures, or problems to be managed. They are people. The stronger argument is structural: when preventable illness produces revenue in one part of the economy while families, workers, insurers, and taxpayers absorb the cost elsewhere, the incentives are misaligned.

Citizens can demand clearer labels, better school meals, independent nutrition research, healthier default options, and rules based on transparent evidence. The FDA oversees approved food additives and substances considered “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. In August 2026, the agency proposed requiring companies to notify the FDA of GRAS conclusions, provide safety evidence, and make more of that information public. That proposal itself is a reminder that regulatory systems are not finished products. They can be examined, questioned, and improved.

What re-engagement actually looks like

The good news is that civic participation works when it is organized, specific, and sustained.

The civil-rights movement did not succeed because people merely expressed opinions. People held meetings, trained volunteers, registered voters, built institutions, endured extraordinary risks, marched, and returned after the cameras left. Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma voting-rights campaign in 1965 helped create the public and political pressure that produced the Voting Rights Act. That law did not complete the work of equal citizenship. It demonstrated what disciplined civic action could make possible.

There are quieter models too.

Oregon voters created the state’s initiative and referendum process in 1902. More than a century later, state law established a Citizens’ Initiative Review Commission that can convene a demographically representative panel of voters to study a ballot measure, hear competing arguments, and prepare findings for the official voters’ pamphlet. It does not replace an election. It gives voters a more considered source of information before one.

Participatory budgeting takes another practical approach: give residents a direct role in deciding how a defined portion of public money should be spent. The argument stops being “government should do better” and becomes a real choice among parks, sidewalks, schools, housing, and public safety.

Denmark’s national Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Issues offers another example, with an important limitation. In two rounds beginning in 2020, 99 citizens received information, deliberated, and delivered recommendations to the political process. The assembly was advisory, not a substitute legislature, and its final gathering concluded in 2022. Its value lies in the method: representative citizens were given time, evidence, and a structured way to work through disagreement.

These mechanisms share a pattern. People receive real information, hear competing views, deliberate with people unlike themselves, and connect their conclusions to actual decisions. That is the opposite of being treated as a consumer profile, a data point, or a target for manipulation.

The responsibility is ours—but so is the power

Saying “the current state of the world is your fault” may be emotionally satisfying, but it is not true. No parent working two jobs, no exhausted caregiver, no student, and no isolated voter created the systems shaping modern life.

But there is a truth inside the accusation: democracy weakens when too many of us surrender attention, knowledge, and participation to people whose incentives are narrower than the public good.

The remedy is not to become obsessed with politics. It is to become usefully engaged.

  • Know who represents you at the city, county, state, and federal levels.
  • Read one local agenda before a meeting and follow what happens afterward.
  • Vote in primaries and local elections, not only presidential elections.
  • Support credible local journalism.
  • Ask candidates direct questions and expect direct answers.
  • Join one institution—a neighborhood association, school community, union, professional group, faith community, or issue-based organization—that keeps working after an election.
  • Learn who funds political messages and demand meaningful disclosure.
  • Teach children how advertising, recommendation systems, and algorithms compete for their attention.
  • Choose one issue and remain involved after the headline fades.

Start local because local institutions are where citizenship becomes visible. City councils decide zoning, roads, policing priorities, and budgets. School boards shape the daily lives of families. State legislatures often write the rules governing health, voting, food, education, and technology.

The American experiment was never a machine designed to run unattended for 250 years. It is a practice.

We do not need to “take the country back” from one another. We need to take responsibility for it together—informed, difficult, patient, local, and persistent.

Your attention is not just personal. It is political power in its smallest, most renewable form. Where you place it, who earns it, and what you do with it are acts of self-government.

Engagement is not a partisan weapon. It is the price—and the privilege—of a country governed by its people.

Sources

An essay by TREVOR DALE.More writing →