Rediscovering the Town Hall

If you want to know what’s missing in American democracy, don’t look at the Capitol.

Look at the empty church basements, the shuttered Grange halls, the PTA meetings that can’t make quorum.

In 1774, when a New England town called a meeting, most eligible citizens showed up. They debated, amended motions, and voted line by line on how to govern their community — and eventually, how to defy an empire.

In 2025, when a town calls a meeting, you’re lucky if more than a handful of people attend — usually to argue about a zoning permit. The rest of us watch politics on screens.

The Rooms Where Democracy Was Born

The town meeting was not a quaint custom; it was the technology of self-government.

Attendance in 18th-century Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont towns was high — often mandatory with fines for those who didn’t show up. Every farmer, blacksmith, and shopkeeper was expected to show up, speak, and vote. There were no spectators, only participants.

Those meetings were more than decision-making sessions. They were schools of citizenship.

People educated each other. The blacksmith might explain how a new bridge would affect trade; the farmer would do the arithmetic on the tax rate; the schoolteacher would cite the town charter. Every person spoke in language the others could understand, because persuasion was the only power anyone had.

By the time they voted, people didn’t just know what the issue was — they knew why it mattered and to whom. The act of deciding created a shared sense of ownership. Win or lose, it was our decision.

Westward: Democracy by Necessity

As settlers moved west, the habit of meeting went with them.

Before governments arrived, miners, ranchers, and homesteaders made their own. In the gold camps of California and the irrigation ditches of Colorado, they held open meetings to write laws, settle disputes, and allocate water. They called them “miners’ courts,” “claim clubs,” or “ditch companies,” but the principle was the same: don’t wait for permission — gather, deliberate, decide.

In those rough rooms, democracy wasn’t a theory. It was how you kept the peace, shared the water, and buried your dead.

The Long Decline

Industrialization, professional politics, and mass media eroded that culture of self-rule.

By the mid-20th century, civic life had already begun to hollow out. Robert Putnam would later chart the collapse: fewer local associations, fewer meetings, fewer conversations across class or party lines.

Today, very few Americans participate in any face-to-face deliberative body where something is actually decided by vote.

We haven’t stopped talking about politics; we’ve just stopped doing politics.

From Town Meeting to Comment Thread

If you think we already have “town meetings” in Reddit threads or social-media comment wars, you’re missing the whole point. If you think those meetings where your representatives come to blow smoke in your face are a town meeting, you’re also missing the point.

Those are shouting rooms, not meeting rooms. There’s no shared budget, no shared plan, no consequences.

Everyone’s talking; no one’s deciding.

The old town hall trained adults to govern; the new ones train children to complain.

The meeting once turned noise into decision; now we’ve built systems that turn decision back into noise.

And being preached to in church isn’t it either — the point is not to be led but to participate.

Privately Owned Public Squares

The places where Americans now “meet” aren’t even ours.

Online forums are privately owned and arbitrarily policed. You can be silenced, suspended, or banned for life without facing your accusers or appealing to your peers.

It’s the opposite of the old meetinghouse, where every citizen had standing and every decision was made in the open.

The tragedy isn’t that people misbehave online; it’s that we’ve accepted governance without representation. The modern forum has plenty of speech but no sovereignty.

Understanding as Ownership

Self-government only works if citizens understand what they’re governing.

The old town hall made that understanding unavoidable. To cast a vote, you first had to listen, argue, and learn.

Every meeting was a miniature seminar in law, finance, and ethics — citizens learning to govern by governing.

Today, ignorance is easy and consequence-free. People vote on slogans, not specifics, and blame the system when it fails.

But the system is us.

The Cost of Civic Ignorance

If you’re reading this and mad about the way the country is going, have you ever attended a town meeting?

Don’t complain about corruption if you don’t know how a budget works or what the law actually says.

Don’t be shocked when liars get elected if you’ve never learned to test a claim or read a policy.

If you’re too busy to be an educated citizen, you’re volunteering to be a mark.

In politics, as in markets, the inattentive consumer gets scammed.

Rediscovering the Town Hall

Rediscovering the town hall doesn’t mean romanticizing the past. It means recovering the principle: that freedom is a skill, not a gift.

A democracy is only as alive as the number of rooms where citizens still look one another in the eye and make decisions together.

If you participate in all of this, you’re much more likely to make good choices about elected representatives — and maybe even propose your own candidates instead of waiting for professional politicians to decide your choices for you.

Before we vote for better leaders, we might try becoming better citizens.

The town hall wasn’t just where Americans ruled — it was where they learned how to.