It’s been an exhausting few months. Most days, I just can’t read or think about the news. When the latest story—someone in power doing something clownish or evil or both—inevitably finds me, it has all the appeal of a pop-up ad or a mosquito. I feel, probably a little ridiculously, instantly impatient, like I have to drop everything to get whatever it is out of my awareness.

It’s not just me, of course. Other people are exhausted by different things in different ways, and many people are exhausted (or worse) by more material changes in their lives. (Many, who have my genuine respect and admiration, aren’t exhausted at all, or manage to work their way through it.)

But if the early days of Trump II have exhausted many of us individually, we’ve also been exhausted, or drained of some sort of vital power or energy, collectively. It’s that latter kind of exhaustion—subtler, longer in the making—that I’d like to consider here.

Here’s the idea, briefly: our collective exhaustion consists, at least in part, in a loss of what I’ll call civil capacity. Civil capacity is the capacity of civil groups and organizations to provide goods not adequately provided by the market or the state. Some ways of developing civil capacity (going beyond the sorts of street protests that have shown their limits in recent years) can be borrowed from past and ongoing efforts. Rekindling these efforts will require us to expect more from labor unions, political parties, and other organizations that have grown unhelpfully accustomed to offering a narrow range of services. Other types of civil capacity will require new strategies and organizational forms. We need to develop civil capacity primarily because there are lots of goods states and markets fail to provide, and more every day. But we also need to develop civil capacity because it’s an under-appreciated source of support for groups that sorely need it.

You can think about civil capacity by analogy to the idea of state capacity. State capacity is the ability of a state to perform the functions it’s called on to perform—its ability to mobilize its resources, workers, and constituents to maintain infrastructure, social welfare programs, industrial policy, the courts, the police, the military, tax collection, and so on. Civil capacity, similarly, is the ability of civil groups and organizations—community groups, coops, labor unions, religious institutions, NGOs, political parties—to perform the functions that they are called on to perform. (It’s a bit broader, both with respect to the range of groups it involves and the range of functions it performs, than the earlier, but clearly related, idea of community capacity.) These functions, and the groups and organizations who carry them out, aren’t fixed for all time. They respond to public need, and to the failures and limitations of other institutions. Think of the ways that libraries patch local gaps in public education and childcare, or the social science research after Hurricane Maria that, in another time and place, would have been reported out by journalists.

Civil capacity is a new name for a very old thing. Historically, radical political movements have won a great deal of support by doing what states couldn’t. Nineteenth and twentieth-century European socialist and anarchist parties developed a wide range of educational programs for workers and young people, to which the best-known contributor was probably the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. The People’s Free Food Program, along with other “survival programs” developed by the Black Panthers, kept people fed and healthy, but also won support for an otherwise widely scorned movement. Even Hezbollah’s Jihad Al-Bina and Hamas’ social services play a crucial role both in keeping life livable in difficult circumstances, and in maintaining the organizations’ legitimacy. (The point, of course, isn’t that Hezbollah and Hamas deserve your support, but that they’re able to gain support in this way in spite of some pretty deeply anti-social tendencies.)

We don’t expect, say, the Democratic Socialists of America or the Green Party or labor unions, or even local Democratic or Republican machines, to do these sorts of things. But why not? To take the rhetorical question literally, we’d have to tell the story of how the sort of educated, well-intentioned mid-century workers who had previously become organizers set their sights on professional philanthropy, policy, and public interest law.

To be clear, some ideological organizations in the United States are doing this work. Churches, synagogues, and other religious institutions provide all sorts of care to their neighbors. The success of the 2010s teacher strike wave was due, in large part, to “bargaining for the common good,” or making demands not just for the teachers themselves, but for students, their parents, and the wider community. Brooklyn’s Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals provides basic medical care and helps community members navigate housing and medical bureaucracies, while advocating for changes to the social systems that make people sick. (This is also a helpful example of civil capacity organizing that makes effective use of its participants’ specialized skills.) Don’t Call the Police collects local resources for people looking for alternatives to calling the cops in a crisis. And most famously, many of the mutual aid groups that sprang up around the country since 2020, alongside older organizations like Food Not Bombs, are still hard at work. These efforts are, for the most part, somewhat scattered and small-scale, but they need not be. And crucially, each of these efforts helps cultivate support for causes that, many of us think, could use it.

But other sorts of civil capacity will take more than imitating past efforts or scaling up present ones. What would it take, for example, for civil society to respond adequately to the defunding of federal research organizations? We could, and should, fight to keep this state funding in place. But we also need to think about ways that civil capacity can make science resilient against its vicissitudes (and other shortcomings). Imagine a science cooperative, which makes merit or lottery-based grants to member labs but requires that a certain percentage of revenue from patents and consulting fees derived from the research it funds go back into the coop. Something like this could at least protect science from the changing whims of presidents or congress. It could even (with some qualifications concerning the role of public accountability in science) eventually render the grant-making functions of something like the NIH or NSF unnecessary.

Some readers might object that developing civil capacity to do things that the state should be doing takes needed pressure off of politicians. A cynical response would be that the U.S. state in 2025 is already pretty resistant to public pressure. But the stronger response, I think, is that this just isn’t how things have played out historically. Federal spending on food stamps increased dramatically in the years after the Panthers rolled out the People’s Free Food Program. The rise of party-based worker education programs was followed, slowly and then rapidly, by the largest global expansion of literacy and higher education in history.

I don’t know if I have anything useful to offer the exhausted of the earth, individually. But if we as a whole, or the various groups that make it up, seem depleted, there’s some reason to think that rebuilding civil capacity is the answer.

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