Fear in Our Hearts. Caleb Iyer Elfenbein

from whom the authors of the Declaration borrowed their ideas would argue that this means we should be free to pursue our own interests with minimal interference. But a “happy” life might also require guaranteed access to some basic building blocks. Identifying just what they are—and who is responsible for providing them—and then balancing this with freedom from interference in our lives is no small task.

      Defining happiness, in turn, is fundamentally tied to the way we understand liberty. Prioritizing the ability to pursue our own interests means that we define liberty as negative freedom, or freedom from interference. In contrast, prioritizing access to basic building blocks of a happy life means that we define liberty as positive freedom, because without these essential elements we aren’t able to pursue a meaningful life.

      How we define life itself, and what it means to protect life, isn’t any less challenging. There are very few subjects in the United States today that are more divisive than this. Debates about reproductive choice, so-called stand-your-ground laws, and police shootings all relate in a fundamental way to what happens when one person’s right to life appears to conflict with another person’s right to pursue their own interests.

      The words in the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” formulation are entirely common. Yet trying to define them is very difficult once you dig just a little bit below the surface—difficult, but crucial. Very rarely do most of us actually engage in debates about defining abstract concepts like liberty or happiness. Instead, we often implicitly define these ideals through the policies and programs we support. Participation in the political system is an important way to demonstrate this support. Voting, though, is only one way that we might express what these abstract ideals mean to us.

      We can also attend school board meetings and local planning board hearings; run for office; write letters to the editor or otherwise contribute in some way to public discussions; join a school club, religious institution, or civic organization that addresses pressing needs in our local communities; organize or participate in a protest; or contribute financial resources to national organizations advocating around a particular cause or issue. These are just some examples of the many, many different ways we might go about working toward what we believe to be in the best interests of our communities.

      Taken together, all of the different ways that we participate in and support our communities constitute our public lives. By extension, public life consists of all the opportunities we have to work with others to figure out how to move forward as a community on a given issue or set of issues. Public life thus often requires us to work through some pretty hairy disagreements. Given our country’s enormous diversity, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that disagreements are a big part of public life. Disagreement isn’t something we can step back from or wish away. It is our reality, an outgrowth of how our country came to be and how it continues to change, just like everything else around us.

      Mediating differences about big ideals and the smaller details in which they play out in our lives is an ongoing process. Our political and civic institutions are all tools we can use to do this work. It is certainly an imperfect process. And so part of our responsibility is to try and make sure that things are working as well as they can in any given moment. All of this mediating and striving—this is the stuff of public life. Mediating our differences is how we end up giving meaning, or definition, to ideals. It’s our life together.

      Our life together doesn’t unfold in the abstract, of course. It unfolds in and through what we can call the conditions of public life.

      The conditions of public life are all of the things that affect how much we feel like we belong where we live. Lots of factors contribute to this feeling. To help unpack all the different elements of the conditions of public life, I want to present some concrete examples that might affect whether someone feels like they belong in the public spaces in which our lives play out. I imagine that most of us can connect these examples to our own lives, even if our answers are very different. From there, we can reflect a little on the concept more generally.

      Our physical environment certainly plays a role in whether we feel like we belong to the town or city we live in. We notice what the parks look like in our neighborhood and how they compare to others in our town or city. We notice whether the town or city takes care of the streets in our neighborhood. As parents or students, we notice what the schools look like inside and out. The conditions of these elements of our physical environment reflect degrees of belonging to broader communities.

      One of the biggest determinants of whether we feel like we belong is interaction with other people. Take, for example, how we experience the ways people respond when we enter public space. Responses can be more or less subtle. Someone could, for example, say nasty or off-color things to you because of who you are (or who they think you are). Or they could say things about you to others just loud enough for you to hear. Sometimes responses can be nonverbal. Police officers and other security personnel might be suspicious about me as I just go about my business and follow me around. Maybe people in my local community have harassed or assaulted you or people you know because of who you are.

      At times, other people’s behavior that isn’t necessary directed at us specifically can still deeply affect whether we feel like we belong in our local communities. For example, when people who live in my local community do things that are meant to make me or people like me feel unwelcome, such as vandalizing a house of worship or a particular business, that affects me personally. When politicians or other public officials say disparaging things about people like me, whether in public or on social media, this affects me personally.

      All of these things, from our lived environment and the way that people respond to us when we enter public space to the way that others talk about or treat people like us, constitute the conditions of our public lives. If we don’t feel like we belong in our community, we are less likely to actively participate in public life, or at least to participate in ways that are entirely of our own choosing. This has tremendous implications for our everyday lives.

      We might be less likely to speak up if our kids aren’t getting what they need in school. We might be less likely to attend or speak up at school board meetings or to attend town or city council meetings to voice concerns about something. We might be less likely to report threats or crimes.3 We might be less likely to run for public office of any kind, whether the school or zoning boards or the town council or county attorney. We might still do some or all of these things, but the reaction from others might range from nothing to nasty looks or comments to harassment or death threats. The experience of American Muslims running for political office, which I will touch on a little later in the book, underscores this last point.

      Even when the conditions of public life are challenging for people, this doesn’t mean that everything about public life is negative. As we have seen significant rises in anti-Muslim sentiment and activity over the past few years, for example, non-Muslims have also reached out to or publicly say things in support of American Muslim communities.

      There are many, many instances of such compassion and empathy. These are good and important moments. But they don’t necessarily cancel out the bad. When things are happening to us—or to people we know—that make us feel like we don’t belong, our public lives can become uncertain and uncertainty can produce fear. Fear, in turn, will most certainly affect how we live our public lives.

      Think back to Maheen, who talks about censoring herself when she disagrees with someone so that she will appear amicable and nonthreatening. Her public self (at the time she wrote her article) is the result of fear, and her fear results from her own experiences and what she assumes others think about her (as a Muslim). These are the conditions of her public life. For Maheen, being what every parent wants for their children—unapologetically confident, empowered, and passionate about who she is and what she thinks—requires an act of courage.

      This means that there is a serious problem in the conditions of our public lives. This problem is taking particular shape today, but it has a long history in our country.

      Histories and Contemporary Realities of Belonging

      Who gets to fully participate in this life together has, from the moment of our country’s