What are the Background Issues and Events Which Have Led Us To Take On This Challenge?

I see at least three deep transformations underway in society that challenge our old pretenses about "citizenship" and force us to think and act deliberately and urgently to shape what "citizenship" becomes for us going forward. Very briefly, these are:

The shattering of the "public sphere" (where we discover the "community interest")

This is much deeper than "fake news" and the fragmentation of our information space on social media. Almost since the day it first came into being, the "public sphere" has been losing its claim to be a place for similarly situated citizens to reach reasonable agreement through free conversation. Instead, it's fractured into a field of competition between plural, conflicting interests-big conflicts (like capital versus labour) that (history suggests) might not rationally fit together again. It's the Humpty Dumpty problem. And if nothing like rational consensus can possibly emerge from debate between these competing interests, then the whole exercise can, at best, only produce an unstable compromise, one that reflects the present temporary balance of power.

By consequence, the press and media have been losing their claim to be organs of public information and debate. Instead, they've become technologies for manufacturing consensus and promoting consumer culture-long before "social media" became a thing.

At the heart of our democracy, there lives a growing contradiction. On the one hand, the public sphere-that elegant place of rational, public discourse-has shattered. It's been replaced by "a staged and manipulative publicity," (Jurgen Habermas) performed by organized interests before an audience of idea-consumers. But on the other hand, we "still cling to the illusion of a political public sphere," within which, we imagine, the public performs a critical function over those very same interests that treat it as a mere audience.

What politicians like Donald Trump have done is dare to drop the pretense. He uses media technologies not to inform public opinion, but to manipulate it. By his success in doing so, he forces us to recognize that, yes, that is in fact what these technologies are good for. And he forces us to recognize that, no, one does not need to be armed with facts or rational argument to use them for that purpose.

The corruption of citizenship virtues as they are turned into market goods

Money and markets have now penetrated many areas and activities of society where, previously, they didn't belong. Small examples: in many amusement parks, premium passes are now sold that permit you to jump the queue ("Cut to the FRONT at all rides, shows and attractions!"); scalping tickets for campsites at Yosemite; and giving ghost-written toasts at your best friend's wedding. Larger examples: paying drug-addicted women cash incentives to undergo sterilization or long-term birth control; public programs that pay kids who raise their test results in school; selling permanent residency or citizenship to foreign investors; or selling pollution permits and carbon offsets, i.e., selling the right to indulge in pollution.

Many of our moral choices have now been converted into market exchanges. Perhaps this is a good thing. After all, the market is an efficient way of allocating society's resources. Many things in society-from Yosemite campsites to hospital beds to residency visas-are scarce, so the question becomes who should get them? The market is one way of answering that question, by holding an endless auction that distributes them by willingness to pay.

Or perhaps, our moral choices have not just been converted, but downgraded. Whenever we use markets to solve the problem of who gets what, then we need to be on guard for two new problems. The first, obviously, is inequality. "The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters."

The second problem is that we run the risk of corrupting the thing itself. If we pay kids to get better grades, are they internalizing a love for learning, or are we training their brains to respond to external incentives? If citizenship is sold to wealthy foreigners, do they approach their new community with a citizen's sense of duty and responsibility-or with a property owner's sense of entitlement?

Said the Harvard economist Greg Mankiw: "There is no mystery to what an 'economy' is. An economy is just a group of people interacting with one another as they go about their lives." When we convert our choices from moral logics into market logics, we are changing the nature of our interactions with one another.

The global financial crisis, which strained bonds at home and shattered illusions abroad

Yes, it happened 10 years ago, but that is why we can now look back and see its consequences more fully. Domestically, there is little doubt that the global financial crisis strained the bonds of citizenship, of belonging. While some people weathered the crisis (or were even enriched by it), many were pushed toward poverty and precariousness - in the multidimensional sense: financial, mental health, physical health, again the list goes on.

Hannah Arendt once wrote: "The vehement yearning for violence is a natural reaction of those whom society has tried to cheat of their strength." Jonathan Sacks (formerly Chief Rabbi in the UK) wrote: "Those who are confident in themselves are not threatened but enlarged by the differences of others."

The global financial crisis shook many people's confidence, and made many people feel threatened. In many dimensions of their being. One way to understand the conflicts within our communities and within our politics today is as an attempt by people to restore their confidence.

The global financial crisis also shattered (or at least, has terribly weakened) one of the most powerful narratives in world affairs: namely, that liberal democracy = progress. Today, it's easier to see that a large part of that narrative's appeal has been that the liberal democracies weren't just "freer", they were also richer, and technologically more advanced. Now, China is powerfully demonstrating that it is possible to get rich and become technologically advanced without liberal democracy.

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Cold War, and China's embrace of market economics, it was easy to imagine a world in which liberal democratic notions of "citizenship" would one day become universal. Today, it's easy to imagine a world in which liberal democratic notions of "citizenship" retreat, in many parts of the world, as more people become "subjects" of autocratic regimes.