January 3, 2011

an overlooked win for civic renewal: federally qualified health centers

My chief complaint about the health care reform of 2010 was its apparent failure to include active citizens as designers of the bill (the public could have been asked to deliberate about health reform, as Senators Wyden and Hatch proposed), or as proponents of the bill (the administration could have unleashed a grassroots movement to demand passage), or as active participants in administering health care (the bill could have empowered health insurance co-ops).

Yet the bill actually contains many excellent provisions that have received little attention. One reform is a major increase in the authorized funding level for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FGHC). The extra money should raise the number of such centers to 15,000. An FQHC is a local provider, serving a needy community, that gets favorable Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates, access to the National Health Service Corps, and other federal supports. It must be a nonprofit organization or a public entity, and it must have a board of which more than half are current clients of the center who demographically represent the population that the center serves.

Overall, the trend in public administration has been toward centralization and expertise. Based on data collected by Elinor Ostrom, I estimate that the proportion of Americans who serve on any public board has declined by three quarters since the mid-20th century, due to consolidation of public authorities and the replacement of elected offices with professional positions. This means that we have lost powerful educative experiences for our citizens. At the same time, our public institutions have grown remote and distrusted, and we have missed the energies and ideas of people not deemed to be "experts."

Controlling health care costs is a classic "wicked problem," involving complex, interconnected systems, rapid and unpredictable change, valid but conflicting values and interests, and misaligned motives. In general, wicked problems are best addressed by decentralizing control and empowering mixed groups of people, including those most affected by the problem. The administration's support for Federally Qualified Health Centers promotes this populist approach and deserves recognition.

permanent link | comments (0) | category: Barack Obama , populism

December 15, 2010

on public work and alienation

Neighbors love a local stream and are concerned about its health. Thanks to them, a pedestrian footbridge is built over it to provide access and to reduce car pollution. It doesn't matter much whether people cause the bridge it to appear by lobbying the local government to build it, persuading a private company to donate it, or physically erecting it themselves. So long as the bridge was their idea and the fruit of their collective discussion and effort, several advantages are likely to follow: 1) Because they designed it, it will meet their needs and reflect their talents. 2) Because they made it, they will feel a sense of ownership and will be motivated to protect it. 3) Because they are formally equal as neighbors, not ranked in a hierarchy, each will feel a sense of dignity and status. 4) In shaping their public world together, they will gain a feeling of satisfaction and agency that is available nowhere else. And 5) By combining discussion with collaborative action, they will develop skills, relationships, and political power that can transfer to other settings.

None of these outcomes is guaranteed, nor would I ignore the possibility of arguments, tensions, and downright failures. But some of the advantages are impossible to obtain in other ways.

The bridge is just a metaphor. We don't need to burden the earth with unlimited numbers of new structures. Restoring nature is equally valuable, as are various forms of non-tangible and non-permanent goods: events, performances, ideas, cultural innovations.

I don't think that who owns the good is of fundamental importance. There are five basic options: no ownership at all (which is the case with the high seas), government ownership, an individual owner, a for-profit corporate owner, or a nonprofit corporate owner. These legal arrangements are relevant, but they do not determine whether people can do public work together. Other factors, such as motivations, norms, expectations, and rewards, interact with the legal status of goods in various complex ways.

Thus a great example of a publicly created space might be a coffee house, papered with posters for local events, populated by a cross-section of the community. That coffee house may belong to and profit one person, who (along with his or her customers) can rightly feel responsible for building a common space. Meanwhile, a government-owned underpass nearby may be the most forbidding and hostile, anti-public space in town.

As Elinor Ostrom noted in her Nobel Prize Lecture, how people manage a common-pool resource depends in part on whether they are organized as (for instance) “private water companies, city utilities, private oil companies, and local citizens meeting in diverse settings.” Their behavior differs, too, depending on the rules of the game: for example “when they meet monthly in a private water association, when they face each other in a courtroom, and when they go to the legislature.” Despite these differences, Ostrom and her colleagues have begun to build one overall framework for understanding the management of common-pool resources--a framework that tends to downplay the dichotomy between state and private sector that seems fundamental in other theories. One could say that in this framework, citizens are at the center and they have available a plurality of institutional forms and combinations of forms.

Still, I think there is a sense of "public" that makes the creation of public goods particularly precious. My imaginary bridge and coffee house may have different legal status, but they share the advantages listed in the first paragraph above. The outputs of government bureaucracies and private corporations usually lack those advantages, which is why people are alienated from the world that those entities jointly create. Governments can incorporate public creativity and work into their operations, and that would be the best way to make people like the government more. Unfortunately, it is not the main trend in public administration anywhere in the developed world.

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November 4, 2010

against a cerebral view of citizenship

For a faculty seminar tomorrow, a group of us are reading Aristotle's Politics, Book III, which is a classic and very enlightening discussion of citizenship. Aristotle holds that the city is composed of citizens: they are it. Citizenship is not defined as residence in a place, nor does it mean the same thing in all political systems. Rather, it is an office, a set of rights and responsibilities. Who has what kind of citizenship defines the constitution of the city.

According to Aristotle, the core office or function of a citizen is "deliberating and rendering decisions, whether on all matters or a few."* In a tyranny, the tyrant is the only one who judges. In such cases, the definition of a good man equals that of a good citizen, because the tyrant's citizenship consists of his ruling, and his ruling is good if he is good. Practical wisdom is the virtue we need in him, and it is the same kind of virtue that we need in dominant leaders of other entities, such as choruses and cavalry units. Aristotle seems unsure whether a good tyrant must first learn to be ruled, just as a competent cavalry officer first serves under another officer, or whether one can be born a leader.

In democracies, a large number of people deliberate and judge, but they do so periodically. Because they both rule and obey the rules, they must know how to do both. Rich men can make good citizens, because in regular life (outside of politics) they both rule and obey rules. But rich men do not need to know how to do servile or mechanical labor. They must know how to order other people to do those tasks. Workers who perform manual labor do not learn to rule, they do not have opportunities to develop practical wisdom, but they instead become servile as a result of their work. Thus, says Aristotle, the best form of city does not allow its mechanics to be citizens.

Note the philosopher's strongly cognitive or cerebral definition: citizenship is about deliberating and judging. Citizenship is not about implementing or doing, although free citizens both deliberate and implement decisions.

But what if we started a different way, and said that "the city" (which is now likely a nation-state) is actually composed of its people as workers? It is what they do, make, and exchange. In creating and exchanging things, they make myriad decisions, both individually and collectively. Some have more scope for choice than others, but average workers make consequential decisions frequently.

If the city is a composite of people as workers, then everyone is a citizen, except perhaps those who are idle. It does not follow logically that all citizens must be able to deliberate and vote on governmental policies. Aristotle had defined citizens as legal decision-makers (jurors and legislators); I am resisting that assumption. Nevertheless, being a worker now seems to be an asset for citizens, not a liability. Only the idle do not learn both to rule and to be ruled.

Aristotle's definition of citizenship has been enormously influential, but it has often been criticized: by egalitarians who resist his exclusion of manual workers and slaves; by Marxists and others who argue that workers create wealth and should control it; and by opponents of his cerebral bias, like John Dewey. The critique that interests me most is the one that begins by noting the rich, creative, intellectually demanding aspects of work. That implies that working, rather than talking and thinking, may be the essence of citizenship. I draw on Simone Weil, Harry Boyte, and others for that view.

*Politics 1375b16, my translation.

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July 8, 2010

celebrating the intelligence of the worker

As the economy stalls, the earth bakes, oil streams into the Gulf, and politicians and reporters quarrel childishly, misanthropy is a temptation. It is tempting, too, to embrace manipulative or authoritarian politics to compensate for the evident frailties of humankind. This is an excellent time, then to read Mike Rose, The Mind At Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.

I have read the whole volume but would like to focus on chapter 1, "The Working Life of a Waitress." Rose doesn't romanticize waitressing or minimize its physical and emotional toll. But he reveals how complex and difficult the job is and how much pride individual waitresses take in doing their work well. By the hundreds of thousands, waitresses demonstrate excellence in ways that can restore faith in humankind, if you pay attention.

Time is in short supply in a restaurant: customers, owners, and wait-staff want things to move quickly. Space is limited, too, and designed to satisfy other people more than the wait staff. A waitress navigates this crowded space under conditions of uncertainty.

Her interactions are not merely physical, but also emotional. "Remembering orders, being vigilant, and regulating the flow of work all play out in an emotional field." A waitress must resist abuse, inspire positive feelings that enhance tips, collaborate and compete with co-workers, and use "skill and strategy to regulate the flow of work. 'The customer has the illusion that they're in charge' [one waitress says], 'but they're not.'"

Depending on the situation, the waitress has to play "servant, mother, daughter, friends, or sexual object." One says, "You've got to be damned good, damned fast, and you've got to make people like you." Overall, the restaurant provides a place "to display a well-developed set of physical, social, and cognitive skills."

Rose moves on to describe hair salons, construction sites, operating theaters, and other everyday "arenas of competence." The net effect is to remind you that you live among people who achieve great things when contexts call on their intelligence and diligence. (Thanks to Harry Boyte for the reference to this book.)

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June 16, 2010

populism and "the government"

Today's most prominent populists depict the government as alien to "the people." They say the government is a threat that needs to be checked and hampered.

A different populist tradition says, "This is the people's government. We paid for it, we built it, and it should serve our needs better." The clearest recent national voice for that strain of populism was John Edwards, in the 2008 campaign, but the tradition goes back to William Jennings Bryan and before.

For my own part, I'd put the matter a little differently. It is our government: of the people, by the people, and for the people, in Lincoln's phrase. Even in its current form, it is generally for us. Anyone is entitled to criticize the way the federal apparatus is run, but more than 80 cents of your tax dollar goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest payments on the national debt, and defense. Those purposes are supported by vast majorities of Americans. The government is by us in the sense that we determine its priorities, in rough strokes--for good and ill. We want low taxes and high spending, and that's why we get a deficit. The accumulating debt is not only "ours" because we must pay it off; it is ours because we demanded policies that necessitated borrowing. Finally, the government is of the people because the individuals who run it and work for it belong to regular American society and culture. They may not be statistically representative of the whole population, but they are not all that far off.

Having acknowledged that the government is ours already--we own it, legally and morally, and must take responsibility for it--we can turn to the ways it is not of, for, and by the people. In broad strokes, it may come from us, but money influences its decisions far too strongly. There are no realistic pathways for many Americans to enter politics and public life. In the government, power is distributed in ways that make it difficult for the public to hold leaders accountable. (For example, the present administration should be able to determine economic policy so that the public can vote up or down in November; instead, abuse of the filibuster creates deadlock.) The public discussion is structured so that we can't deliberate about common interests and learn from one another, but instead fracture into interest groups whose aggregate demands are irrational. Finally, the government is not of us sufficiently because it does not tap people's energies, ideas, and values sufficiently to solve public problems.

That diagnosis leads to a positive program that seems much more worthy to be called "populism" than any simple diagnosis of the government as the enemy of the people.

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February 2, 2010

a critique of expertise, part 2

Yesterday's post was Part 1 of a critique of expertise in public policy. Part 2 focuses on the issue of generalization.

Experts generalize. An important aspect of almost all professional training is the identification of general concepts or categories that trigger appropriate responses. Told a story about specific people interacting in a particular context, any professional will look for abstractions. For instance, in medical school, one learns the signs and definitions of diseases, and when a disease is present, a physician knows which treatments to offer. When more than one condition is involved, or when the diagnosis is uncertain, the decision becomes complex, and good physicians fully understand the roles of judgment and luck. Doctors could never be replaced by machines that simply took in data and spat out treatment plans. But diseases and other general health conditions remain central to physicians' analysis. They look for the necessary and sufficient conditions that define conditions, and then apply general causal theories that say: this medicine reduces that illness.

Lawyers, meanwhile, try to apply general rules from statutes, constitutions, and court rulings. Their advice may be controversial or uncertain if no single, definitive legal rule covers the situation--and they understand that--but their professional thinking involves rules. For engineers, economists, psychologists, and virtually all other professionals, the important abstractions may be different, but the basic habits of mind are alike. Professionals have achieved monumental advances (and prestige) by discovering generalizations that apply widely. For example, the polio vaccine reliably prevents polio, and that is extremely valuable to know.

You can also hear ordinary people generalize if you listen in public spaces. They say things like, "Of course Amtrak is always late, it's a government monopoly." Or, "You're getting a cold; you should take vitamin C." Research and data disprove these assertions, and a trained professional would not make them. Even an economist who was hostile to monopolies would not draw a direct line from Amtrak's monopoly status to the tardiness of its trains. (Other countries have monopolistic railroads that run on time.) Instead of being too quick and bold with generalizations, a good professional is fully aware of complexities and nuances.

Even so, there are drawbacks to using general concepts as the main units of analysis. A person, a situation, an institution, or a community can be apprehended as a whole object. We can assess it, judge it, and form opinions about how the entity should change. Evaluating a whole situation need not be any harder or less reliable than analyzing general categories abstracted from such situations. If we can say something valid and useful about a generality (like diabetes, tax incentives, or free speech), we can talk just as sensibly about this patient, this school, or this conversation. The particular object or situation is not just an aggregate of definable components. It has distinctive features as a whole, and we human beings are just as good at understanding those as we are at generalizing abstractly.

The form that our understanding takes is often narrative: we tell stories about particular people or institutions, and we project those stories into the future as predictions. We may find generic issues and categories embedded within a story: King Lear, for example, was a king and a father, and there are general truths to be said about both categories. But the story of King Lear is much more than an aggregate of such categories, which are not especially useful for understanding the play.

In public policy, non-professionals are often better at the assessment of whole objects than experts are. That is because ordinary members or clients of a school, a neighborhood, or a firm know its whole story better than an outsider who arrives to apply general rules.

Often, professionals have in the back of their mind an empirical finding that is valid in academic terms, but that should not tell us what to do. Even when results are statistically significant, effect sizes in the social sciences are usually small, meaning that only a small proportion of what we are interested in explaining is actually explained by the research. Statistical studies shed some light on why individuals differ, but can tell us nothing about why they are all alike. In research based on surveys or field observations, the sample may not resemble the population or situation that we face in our own communities. Experimental research is conducted with volunteers (often current undergraduate psychology majors) in artificial settings. Even if a particular finding is strong, and the sample does resemble our own, there is always a great deal of variation, and any particular case may differ from the mean. Measures are always problematic and imperfect, and some important factors are virtually impossible to measure. Unmeasured factors may be responsible for the relationships we think we see among the things we measure.

All of this is well known and may be thoughtfully presented in the "limitations" section of a published paper. When carefully and cautiously read, such a paper can be very helpful. But the professional's temptation is focus on a statistically significant, published result even if its practical import and relevance are low. Besides, it is rarely the author of a paper who tries to influence a practical discussion. Often professionals have not even read the original paper that influences them. They rely instead on their graduate training or abstracts and second-hand summaries of more recent research. The caveats in the original studies tend to be lost.

Of course, people with professional credentials can be excellent observers and assessors of whole objects like schools, neighborhoods, or firms. In some affluent communities, practically everyone holds an advanced degree and is therefore a "professional." But their judgments of whole objects and situations are best when they think as experienced laypeople, not as specialists. They should draw on professional expertise, but only as one source of insight (and should not rely on only one profession).

Arguments about the proper role of generalization take place within professions, not just between professionals and laypeople. Physicians, for example, are being pressed to adopt "evidence based medicine," which deprecates doctors' intuitions and personal experiences in favor of general scientific findings, especially those supported by randomized experiments. Some medical doctors are pushing back, arguing that experimental findings never yield reliable guidance for complex, particular cases. What matters is the whole story of the particular patient.

The same argument plays out in education. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 favors forms of instruction proven in "scientifically-based research," and the gold standard is a randomized experiment. (The frequently accepted second-best is a statistical model, which can be understood as an estimate of what would be found in a randomized experiment.) Like physicians, some educators resist this pressure, on the ground that an experienced teacher can and should make decisions about individual students and classrooms that are heavily influenced by context and only marginally guided by scientific findings.

This debate will never be fully resolved, but there is a logic to the idea that if we are going to train people in expensive graduate schools and rely on their guidance to shape general policies, they should be the bearers of "scientifically-based research." In other words, the most optimistic claims about the value of expertise rely on a notion of the expert as an abstract and general thinker. When professionals are seen instead as experienced and wise craftspeople, no one exaggerates their role in public life. The physician who is a seasoned healer is left to treat his or her patients; it is the medical researcher with general findings who is invited to influence policy. My claim is that we err when we give such research too much credence.

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February 1, 2010

a critique of expertise, part 1

We need expertise to make wise public decisions. You wouldn't ask just any fellow citizen to operate on your heart; you would find the best-trained and most experienced cardiologist. In the same way, if you want to fix public schools or the justice system, you need economists, psychologists, criminologists, and other experts to advise and perhaps decide.

Everyone finds some merit in this argument, but it can be grossly exaggerated. For example, my friend Harry Boyte often quotes a speech by Donna Shalala that can be found in full here. Shalala was president of the University of Wisconsin in the 1980s and went on to eight years as Secretary of Health and Human Services under Bill Clinton. She epitomized the policy expert who attains public influence. In her 1989 speech, she began by citing scientific discoveries that had "improved human life, prolonged human life, enriched and protected human life. The great plagues are basically behind us," she said, thanks to "scientific research done under the sheltering arms of research universities." She went on to defend the "idea of a distinterested technocratic elite" that arrived in America before 1900 and shaped both the modern research university and government:

Shalala ended her speech with a call for the university's experts to take on the pressing challenges of the late twentieth century, especially persistent poverty and educational failure, with "grand strategies" grounded in apolitical social science. Four years later, she was running a huge federal agency responsible for health care. The administration she served devised a complex health reform bill, described as the work of a "distinterested technocratic elite." It was quickly defeated; the major trends in public health remained basically unaffected.

When Donna Shalala was studying for her doctorate in public affairs during the 1960s, the "moon-ghetto" metaphor was popular. This was the idea that engineers and other specialists had put human beings on the moon (and brought them safely home), so it should be possible to tackle the problems of the so-called "ghetto" in much the same way. It was all a matter of scientifically diagnosing the causes of poverty and efficiently deploying solutions.

Actually, the moon and the "ghetto" are very different. The moon is almost perfectly detached from all other human issues and contexts, because it is almost 240,000 miles away from our planet (although NASA's launch facilities in Florida and Houston might have some local impact). The goal of the Apollo Program--whether you endorse it or not--was clear and easily defined. The challenges were physical; thus Newtonian physics allowed engineers to predict the impact of their tools precisely in advance. The costs were also calculable--in fact, the Apollo Program was completed under budget. The astronauts and other participants were highly motivated volunteers, who had signed up for a fully developed concept that they understood in advance. The president and other national leaders had committed enough funds to make the Apollo Program a success, because its value to them exceeded the costs.

In contrast, a low-income urban neighborhood is enmeshed with other communities. Its challenges are multi-dimensional. Its strengths and weaknesses are open to debate. Defining success is a matter of values; even how to measure the basic facts is controversial. (For example, how should "race" be defined in a survey? What are the borders of a neighborhood?) Everyone involved--from the smallest child on the block to the most powerful official downtown--has distinct interests and motivations. Outsiders may not care enough to provide adequate funds, and residents may prefer to leave than to make their area better. When social scientists and policymakers implement rewards or punishments to affect people's behavior, the targets tend to realize what is happening and develop strategies to resist, subvert, or profit from the policies--a response that machines never manage. No wonder we could put a man on the moon but our poor urban neighborhoods persist.

Thanks to personal computers, spreadsheets, and the World Wide Web, the resources and skills necessary to analyze social data have fallen by orders of magnitude since Donna Shalala was first trained in social science. Now anyone with a computer and basic knowledge of statistics can copy columns of numbers from official websites and look for correlations or more complex statistical relationships. Yet, if anything, we feel less confident about our ability to diagnose and cure social problems than we did in 1970. Shalala's "grand strategies" have receded from view.

Although I acknowledge the value of expertise, we can identify several important general reasons why it is never enough and we always need citizens' participation to tackle social problems.

First, professions cannot be trusted to make decisions for the public, even when their tools and techniques are appropriate and effective. Professionals are human, and if people outside their group turn to them for guidance but do not closely scrutinize their work, they are sure to become lazy, biased, careless, or even corrupt. In 1913, George Bernard Shaw wrote about the reluctance of doctors to testify against one another in malpractice suits. "The effect of this state of things is to make the medical profession a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity." I think Shaw was joking, but there was a kernel of truth in his aphorism. Unless professionals are forced to justify their methods, assumptions, and conclusions in frequent, detailed, open discussions with laypeople, corruption is inevitable.

Second, social issues involve inescapable questions of value. It is not enough to know that A causes B. An engineer, an economist, or a biochemist might tell us that with some reliability. But we must also know whether B is desirable, whether A is an ethically acceptable means to B, and whether the cost is worthwhile. For example, you can often cause a low-income neighborhood to vanish by building a mass-transit station that links it to the downtown business core. Rents will rise around the station and poor people will move out. Crime will fall and investment will follow. Whether those changes count as "success" depends on your values, not on the data alone.

Third, experts are trained to think in terms of categories: to classify situations and then to recommend the rules, methods, solutions, or "best practices" that apply to each classification. There is value to thinking in categories, and experts do it better within their own fields than other people do. However, there are also serious limitations to categorical thinking, and laypeople often see a particular situation better than experts do. I believe this point has great significance for how we arrange our politics and will develop it tomorrow.

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December 2, 2009

at the Kettering Foundation

(Dayton, OH) I am here for a board meeting of the Kettering Foundation. I remember when I first arrived in Dayton: the summer of 1987 when I was 20. I came for a summer internship at Kettering. It was my first substantive job (apart from babysitting and cleaning a health club), my first summer with my own apartment, and my first time off the East Coast of the United States--although Dayton, an automotive city, turned out to have very much in common with my birthplace of Syracuse, NY. I was strongly reminded of that first summer because last night was Kettering's annual holiday dinner, to which current and retired staff are invited. Most of the people I worked with in 1987 were at last night's dinner.

The Kettering experience was formative for me. You could describe it as an experience in "deliberative democracy," but I'd define the Foundation's perspective differently. I would say that Kettering is fundamentally populist. There is a deep commitment to the idea that all people are fully capable of self-government. Barriers to popular self-government, including spurious claims to expertise, need to be challenged. Yet for the public to govern well, we have to do things. We have to evaluate the quality of public dialog and public work and take steps to improve it. Deliberation, in the form of the National Issues Forums that the Kettering Foundation launched, is just one means to that end.

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November 24, 2009

accountability: relational and informational

Borrowing an idea from the Kettering Foundation President, David Mathews: Today's policymakers and experts tend to define "accountability" in terms of information. For instance, No Child Left Behind requires schools to collect and disclose reams of data about students' performance, teachers' credentials, etc. The idea is that well-informed parents will be able to apply pressure and make good choices for their kids. Similarly, the Administration has pledged to reveal unprecedented amounts of information about the stimulus spending (and is being beaten up for inaccuracies).

But most people do not think of accountability in informational terms. They think in terms of relationships. For example, in focus groups that Doble Research Associates conducted for the Kettering Foundation (back in 2001), parents were highly resistant to the idea that tests would be useful ways to hold school accountable. For one thing, they wanted to hold other parties accountable for education, starting with parents. A Baltimore woman said, "If kids don't pass the test, is that supposed to mean that teachers are doing a lousy job? That's not right. I mean where does the support come from? You're pointing the finger at them when you should be supporting them." Another (or possibly the same) Baltimore woman explained, "When I think about accountability, I think about parents taking responsibility for supervising their children's learning and staying in touch with teachers." This respondent not only wanted to broaden responsibility but also saw it in terms of communication. Many participants wanted to know whether schools, parents, and students had the right values. They doubted that data would answer that question. And although the report doesn't quite say this, I suspect they envision knowing individuals personally as the best way to assess their values. The focus groups turned to a discussion of relationships:

And so on--the conversation continues in this vein. Note that this is supposed to be a focus group about accountability in education. One Atlanta woman summed it up: "What we've got to do is develop a stronger sense of community between the schools and families in the community."I suspect that she envisions a situation in which school staff and parents know each other, share fundamental values, and commit to support one another. Information is pretty much irrelevant.

I think David Mathews' theory needs more investigation, including national survey data, because we don't know for how many people accountability is relational rather than informational. But let's assume that he's right about most Americans. In that case ...

First, we might discuss whether ordinary people or experts are wiser. There are pros and cons to both sides. Thinking about accountability in relational terms can be misleading. Just because you have known the new principal since you were kids and she wants her students to succeed doesn't mean she is doing a good job. Besides, once we are dealing with state or national policy, you cannot possibly know leaders personally. Thus you may start trying to assess their "character" based on imperfect and often biased sources instead of measuring their performance.

On the other hand, the focus group participants are right that any informational measure, such as a test score, is narrow and simplistic and even trivial. Many of the most important issues are values; over-reliance on information can sideline those issues and drive a wedge between citizens and institutions.

Regardless of who is right, I think this theory has powerful political implications. Especially on the left, leaders (often highly trained and skillful with information) keep hoping that by providing the public with data, they will make people happier. But parents like charter and voucher-funded private schools even when they perform poorly. I am convinced that that's because they feel they have a genuine relationship with those schools. There is a profound lesson here about how to reform education and other sectors.

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November 17, 2009

tensions over technocracy

Ina very valuable piece for National Affairs, William Schambra argues that Barack Obama is the epitome of a policy-oriented progressive; in fact, he is the first "genuine, life-long true believer" in that philosophy ever to occupy the Oval Office. The Progressive "policy approach" presumes that social science can tell us how to fix social problems. Problems are interconnected, hence they require comprehensive reforms rather than programs in separate silos. Standing in the way of the appropriate reforms are local prejudices and interests and "politics"--meaning horse-trading among popular leaders with interests and biases. The perfect manifestation of the Progressive policy approach is the appointment of a policy "czar," an expert, to resolve a broad and interconnected problem. The opposite is a compromise among ill-tutored Congressmen, or a loud objection from some morally outraged cultural group.

Schambra writes:

I endorse much of Schambra's critique of policy-oriented Progressivism. He believes it is an unrealistic doctrine and also undesirable because the clash of interests that it tries to replace with "science" actually reflects cultural vitality. This seems right to me:

I agree with that but am not sure that I share Schambra's reading of Barack Obama. Based on the president's writing and speaking, I think Obama understands the intractability and merit of moral commitments and disagreements. He sees personal behavior and community norms as essential components of social issues--and is often criticized from the left for that. He takes an "asset-based" approach to communities and is an excellent listener. His move away from discrete programs can be seen as arrogant (that's Schambra's view), but it can also be interpreted as a critique of the technocratic idea that problems can be disaggregated; Obama's is a more "holistic" approach. The modesty of the health care reform bill (for it is very modest) speaks to a recognition that you have to mend the ship of state while at sea. An arrogant--or more confident--Progressive would favor single-payer.

Finally, Obama has been criticized by the left for allowing Congress to horse-trade on essential issues like the stimulus package and health care, rather than presenting a detailed proposal from the administration. In that sense, it seems to me Obama has broken with technocratic Progressivism rather than epitomize it.

But in the end, I think the struggle over how to apply science to policy--and how to deal with moral resistance and disagreement--runs through the Democratic Party, the Obama Administration, and the president himself. Schambra has nicely identified one side of that argument, even as he underestimates the importance of the other side.

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July 31, 2009

private opinion polls

These results from the latest New York Times survey are supposed to be evidence that "the public continues to be ill-informed and hypocritical."

People want lower taxes, no spending cuts, and a smaller deficit. It's like the citizen who was quoted in a newspaper many years ago saying, "It's the government's deficit, not ours. Why can't they pay it off?"

Others have already made the following technical point. Few individuals in this survey probably gave inconsistent responses. The overlap between those who wanted "no new taxes" and those who opposed spending cuts may have been fairly small. It was the aggregate result that was incoherent, and that was no individual's fault.

Which brings me to a second, more substantial point. We must aggregate public opinion to get democratic outcomes. But we can aggregate in many different ways. One of the stupidest ways would be to call people on their home phones, out of the blue, and ask them a series of abstract questions. "Do you want lower taxes, yes or no?" "Do you want service cuts, yes or no?" If you tally up the answers and call it public opinion, that is a recipe for incoherence. You will get much better results if, for example, you ask a group of people to think, talk, and develop a consensus plan.

Nina Eliasoph's comments from Avoiding Politics (p. 18) are relevant:

In the case of the New York Times poll, the context is a very cerebral, information-rich, nonpartisan, published forum in which authors and readers are expected to think like ideal legislators and make all-things-considered judgments under realistic constraints. In that context, you look like an idiot if you call for lower taxes, more spending, and a reduced deficit. Into that august forum are dragged innocent citizens who were telephoned randomly without notice and asked to say yea or nay to a bunch of sentences. No wonder that, when their responses are tallied, they look "ill-informed and hypocritical." I guarantee you that if the same people were told they needed to come up with a public position on the federal budget, their response would not only be better--it would have a human face and would be presented with some mix of seriousness, uncertainty, regret about difficult choices, and pride in their accomplishment.

To be sure, the poll gives meaningful information. It tells us what people want when they don't reflect--and most of us do not reflect on national policy very often. So the opinions in the poll pose real problems for national leaders, who cannot deliver desirable outcomes that are practically incompatible. On the other hand, people rate their own understanding of national policy very poorly. They expect good leaders to make tough calls. They realize that the situation is difficult and there are no perfect answers. If you conclude from these survey results that the public is stupid and should be treated accordingly, you misread their mood and their expectations.

permanent link | comments (0) | category: deliberation , populism

January 7, 2009

empowering citizens to make sure the stimulus is well spent

If we are going to borrow a trillion dollars from our kids to spend now on economic recovery, the money had better be well spent. Avoiding waste and fraud is a political imperative; Obama's reelection may depend on it. It also seems important economically. A big rationale for fiscal stimulus spending is to restore confidence. My guess is that people will feel confident if they believe a trillion dollars is being well deployed--less so, if they think it is being wasted.

So far, the President Elect has announced that he's hiring a management consultant, Nancy Killefer, of McKinsey & Company, as a "chief performance officer" and that he will be looking for efficiencies and cuts everywhere in the budget. I think this is essential. Fully compatible with my populist resistance to technocracy is a recognition that it's better to be efficient than inefficient--especially with public money--and that experts can help achieve efficiency.

Yet we can also engage ordinary citizens in overseeing and shaping the use of a trillion dollars of their money. They can add enormous value through sheer numbers of brains and also because they know their own communities best. Equally important, the experience of participating can add legitimacy.

Three tools occur to me, but there are probably more:

1. "Crowdsourcing" the budget. This would mean putting all the details of federal revenue and expenditure online and building a structure to allow people not only to view the data, not only to post individual comments and opinions, but also to accumulate analysis. The structure might be some combination of a wiki, visualization tools, and comment threads--I yield to others who understand these things better than I. (Some helpful ideas are coming from the right.)

2. Participatory Budgeting (PB). This is a policy of setting aside a proportion of government expenditures (usually capital spending) to be allocated by citizens in local deliberative sessions. In Brazil, where PB originated, the sessions are large, face-to-face meetings. Britain and other countries have picked up the model. It has been found to cut waste and corruption, in part because citizens who choose how to spend money become invested in overseeing the implementation. By the way, I don't see why the conversation couldn't be virtual as well as face-to-face.

3. Large-scale deliberations, along the lines proposed by AmericaSPEAKS, about big budgetary choices at the national level.

permanent link | comments (2) | category: populism

November 26, 2008

citizens in the economic recovery plan

On Monday, I made a general argument for putting citizens to work (as citizens) on public problems. I had previously argued that this approach would change the relationship between citizens and government from the dysfunctional relationship under George W. Bush and from the relationship of the Clinton years, when government was presented as a helper to relatively passive individuals.

It's worth thinking about this philosophical shift in relation to our most urgent immediate problem: economic recovery. The Bush bailout and stimulus efforts have involved almost no accountability or transparency. The money has not been directed to ordinary Americans or used for important public purposes. We can do much better by combining Barack Obama’s call for "service and active citizenship" with his economic recovery plan.

In policy terms, putting citizens to work on economic recovery means:

permanent link | comments (1) | category: populism

October 8, 2008

listening

I am grateful that my job pays me to crisscross the country listening to Americans talk about politics, social issues, service, and the news. Since the beginning of last week, I have heard more than 200 different people talk about these topics--in a meeting room at the University of Washington, Seattle restaurants, a classroom at Tufts University in Massachusetts, an airport hotel conference room near Baltimore, and a focus group space in downtown Baltimore. Here are some of the faces and voices that I recall ...

A middle-aged white man in a checked shirt and glasses, with a James Stewart drawl, who is trying to organize discussions in his Kansas town of 750 about how to stem population-loss. An African American Baltimore mother, about 20 years old, who--after saying that she doesn't do anything related to politics, volunteering, activism, or "giving back"--adds that she once "made a difference" to someone else. Her own childhood was scarred by drug abuse, but she found a younger person in the same plight and took in her in, "even though we just have one room to live in." A distinguished professor defending his provocative thesis about citizenship in a room full of people whose open laptops are bedecked with bumper stickers about "free culture" and Obama '08. A young Baltimore woman who says she wouldn't ever vote because of the risk of jury duty; but she did once help to build a Kingdom Hall. A New Orleans community organizer who complains that public discussions of land-use and zoning issues suppress the topic of unions and other mechanisms for raising incomes. A Latino community organizer (one of two Hispanics among all the people I'd met) who pleads for other Latinos to be included in future discussions. A Tufts undergraduate who explains that she understands the financial crisis (better than I do) because her father took hours to explain it to her.

Say what you will--it's a most remarkable country. I can report savage gaps and terrible wastes of human gifts; yet people of every kind want to make things better.

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February 25, 2008

the word "populism"

A European reporter asked me today why there is so much alarm about "populist" politicians in Europe--such as Jean Marie Le Pen in France and the late Pim Fortuyn in Netherlands--whereas American politicians with similar views seem to be considered perfectly mainstream. He could have added Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, or even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, as examples of leaders who are called "populists" and who alarm Americans.

Fortuyn was a libertarian who seemed hostile to immigrants because they were too conservative about religion and sexuality. Ahmadinejad is on precisely the opposite side of those issues. Le Pen is a hyper-nationalist who is often described as racist. Chavez is also nationalistic but his political base is people of color. These people have only one thing in common: they hold views that highly educated people consider bad and dangerously "popular." In turn, these diverse foreign populists have various views in common with American politicians as disparate as Dick Armey, Ron Paul, and John Edwards.

The problem, it seems to me, is terminological. In many countries, "populist" is an epithet. It's OK to be popular, but to be a "populist" means becoming popular by adopting positions that one shouldn't. Thus it's populist to hand out goodies derived from oil sales (bad economics), and it's populist to criticize immigrants (bad values). In Europe and Latin America, you don't generally say that you're a populist; you reserve that term for your opponents.

In America, however, candidates proudly call themselves "populists." The term recalls a controversial but certainly respectable American political tradition going back to the 1890s, if not before. The People's Party and the Populists took various economic positions, e.g., against tariffs. Whether or not those positions were sensible at the time, they are now obsolete. But the original Populists also emphasized procedural reforms, such as the direct election of Senators. They pioneered forms of politics, voluntary service, and institutions that are still highly valuable. And they embodied a culture of populism which was respectful of local and vernacular traditions, unpretentious, but also dedicated to education and creativity.

Incidentally, the discussion page attached to the wikipedia entry in "populism" is a great introduction to the debate.

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November 19, 2007

the case for Nehamiah

Here's a stark contrast:

1. Paul Krugman, "Played for a Sucker," New York Times, Nov. 16: "On Social Security, as on many other issues, what Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want. We all wish that American politics weren’t so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists--which is the case for many issues today--you end up being played for a fool. And that’s what has just happened to Mr. Obama."

2. Harry C. Boyte: "Our Passive Society Needs Some New Nehemiahs," Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune, Nov. 16: "In today's America, as we have come to look to others -- experts, great leaders, celebrities -- to save us from our problems, we have similarly become afflicted by civic illness. Our bitter divisions along lines of partisanship, income, race, religion and geography are fed by devaluation of the talents and intelligence of people without credentials, degrees and celebrity status. Our citizenship declines while we are entertained as spectators, pacified as clients and pandered to as customers.

"We need new Nehemiahs who call forth America's democratic genius of a self-reliant, productive, future-oriented citizenry, leaders who tackle tough issues in a collaborative way and reject the rescuer role. Such leaders would tap the talents of citizens to address public problems on which government is necessary but not sufficient, from climate change to school reform. They would challenge us to create healthy communities, not simply provide access to health care. They would recall that democracy is a way of life, not simply a trip to the ballot box.

"The great leaders in our history -- from Abraham Lincoln to Jane Addams, Franklin Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr. -- have always called upon citizens to address common challenges, and in the process helped the nation remember its democratic soul."

I'm with my friend Harry, and here are four reasons. First, Krugman treats the Republican Party and conservatism as monolithic, imagining that every member of those large conglomerations plays from the same disreputable script. (Cf. all these comments on Think Progress.) In fact, Republicans and conservatives are quite diverse, and some are very discontented with Karl Rove's style of politics.

Second, Krugman's argument is ad hominem. Instead of saying, "Senator Obama, you are wrong about Social Security; it's not really in crisis," Krugman says, "Senator Obama, you are a sucker for trying to meet conservatives half way." Maybe compromise isn't even Obama's intent. He may actually believe that Social Security is in crisis. (Many people do.) When we stop giving arguments and reasons and start calling people "suckers," it's very hard to move forward.

Third, it's going to be impossible to solve any of our real problems unless someone builds a broad constituency. The ruling coalition must be wide enough to embrace some conservatives and some Republicans. Fifty-one percent is enough to knock things down (if you are ruthless), but it is not enough to build things up.

Finally, Krugman's political strategy presumes that liberal leaders can win elections and then implement smart policies that will make the country better. I think this is a long-term strategic error. No policies can solve problems without public support and public participation. In order for liberalism to fly, Americans are going to have to feel genuine connections to public institutions. They will not feel truly connected to government until (a) it seems to reflect some consensus and some civility and (b) it addresses their cultural discontents, which are deep and valid. The majority of Americans have genuine worries about a coarse culture, and unless liberal leaders can address their concerns in an inclusive, bridge-building way, liberalism is doomed.

permanent link | comments (2) | category: Barack Obama , populism

August 15, 2007

opportunity economics and civic participation

The Hope Street Group is an organization founded by young business people who believe in growth, innovation, and opportunity, but do not believe that the current economic system provides opportunities either adequately or fairly. They favor more investment in human capital, reform of taxation and financial markets, and programs to give people second chances at entrepreneurship. Hope Street Group has laid the groundwork for effective political action and will soon be better known thanks to a $1 million Omidyar grant.

I am a member of HSG. I know there are debates about whether GDP growth is an adequate measure of progress, and about whether we can achieve social justice through investments in human capital (rather than changing the bargaining power of labor versus capital). I have nothing original to contribute to those debates, and I'm agnostic about some of the key questions.

But I believe that democracy and civic participation work better when people have a sense that the pie is expanding, and specifically, when people believe that there can be more for all if we cooperate voluntarily. There is a powerful, optimistic kind of populism that says: We can make wealth, and everyone can be better off, but we need to make sure that everyone is included in productive work. This is much better than the kind of populism that presumes there is a fixed quantity of goods, of which the powerful have taken more than their fair share. Optimistic populism promotes public investments in education and infrastructure, whereas resentful populism assumes so much distrust that it ultimately undermines public programs. Resentful populism also generates bad politics: division, hyper-partisanship, retreat into interest groups, and ultimately demobilization; whereas a populism of abundance encourages dialogue, participation, innovation, and creativity.

permanent link | comments (0) | category: populism , revitalizing the left

February 7, 2007

three forms of populism in the 2008 campaign

It appears that the next presidential campaign will offer several strong but contrasting flavors of populism:

Sam Brownback asserts that Americans' traditional, popular, moral values are threatened by the "violence, obscenity, and indecency in today’s media," by "activist judges," by "foreign suppliers" of oil, and by the federal government. I happen to disagree with almost all his positions, but the Senator does share the majority's view of several issues, such as prayer in schools.

John Edwards makes the case that we all belong to one economic community, one commonwealth, and inherit our national prosperity not because of what we do as individuals but because of others' sacrifices, past and present. "We are only strong because our people work hard." "We are made strong by our longshoremen and autoworkers, our computer programmers and janitors, and disrespect to any of them is disrespect to the values that allowed for America's greatness in the first place." Since we belong to one commonwealth, gross disparities in opportunities are unfair.

I used to believe that this position--while morally valid--was a political dead end. Although we had left many Americans in poverty, more than half of all voters were affluent enough that they didn't need government except for purposes that are always well funded, such as roads and suburban schools. "Redistribution" meant "welfare," and the welfare system that had developed since the 1930s was justifiably unpopular. Finally, Americans' were strongly committed to markets and mistrustful of governments.

But several factors make Edwards' version of populism more promising today. Federal welfare has been deeply cut; the remaining safety-net programs serve large majorities of Americans. The issue has shifted from income inequalities (which Americans tend to tolerate) to huge inequalities in risk. Most people must finance their own retirements while some get huge golden parachutes, exemplifying a new kind of unfairness. Meanwhile, the latest generation of super-rich people has behaved very badly: Paris Hilton is a potent symbol. Not least, John Edwards is a skillful persuader, a litigator who knows how to read a jury and marshal effective evidence and arguments.

Barack Obama so far represents a different strain of populism. He says that we American citizens should play a central role in defining and solving our common problems. We are in a "serious mood, we're in a sober mood," and we are ready to work together. "We are going to re-engage in our democracy in a way that we haven't done for some time, .... we are going to take hold of our collective lives together and reassert our values and our ideals on our politics. ... All of us have a stake in this government, all of us have responsibilities, all of us have to step up to the plate."

For Senator Brownback, the way to assert our values is to pass laws that he favors and that have majority support. For John Edwards, "the great moral imperatives of our time" are to fight poverty and get out of Iraq. For Senator Obama, asserting our values means deliberating together as a diverse population and developing ideas that may be new and unexpected.

In philosopher's terms, this is civic republicanism, and it's truly different from mainstream recent liberal politics. To make it work, Obama will have to overcome two challenges. First, he will have to develop an answer for grassroots Democratic activists who are furious at Republicans and consider the Bush administration to be our nation's central problem. Obama believes that both parties are responsible for marginalizing citizens, and what we need are broader public coalitions. The Senator will have to find a way to talk to Democratic primary voters who are not in the mood right now for non-partisanship and cooperation. Second, Obama will have to find a way to respect the voice of American citizens while also saying something concrete about issues such as health care and taxes. He needs to respect the public's voice but also perform the main duty of a candidate, which is to put ideas on the table.

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January 1, 2007

populism

I have collected some of my past posts--as well as an important guest post by Harry Boyte--under the new category of "populism." I've done that partly because Harry has persuaded me that "populism" is a helpful name for some of my core philosophical commitments. Meanwhile, I've come to think that we need to reclaim the full meaning of "populism" at a time when people described as populists are back in the news. I'm thinking of Sherrod Brown, who won the Ohio Senate race by opposing free trade and globalization; John Edwards; and the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. In the debate about these men (different as they are) the question is about redistribution: Is it politically smart and morally right to use the power of the state to help working-class people economically, possibly at the expense of the rich? (See Taylor Marsh or the Hope Street Group.)

Actually, I would vote in favor of redistribution, because I think that reasons of prudence and justice favor it. However, I'm not sure that it's a winning political strategy, given the public's understandable distrust for the state. Nor does redistribution exhaust the value of populism and popular sovereignty. There are five other dimensions that are at least as important in populism's heritage and theory:

1) Popular participation in government and civic life. This means not only high voter turnout but also opportunities for constructive engagement at all levels, from school boards to federal agencies. Real "populists" should revive such opportunities, which have shrunk. For example, according to Elinor Ostrom, the percentage of Americans who hold public office has fallen by three-fourths since mid-century, thanks to the consolidation of local governments, the growth of the population, and the replacement of elected or volunteer officers by experts.

2) The capacity to create public goods. The most popular examples today are online: for example, YouTube--whose voluntary users have created and given away $1.65 billion worth of products--and Wikipedia, another voluntary, collective enterprise whose market value is unknown but whose worth is inestimable. Such collective work is an old American tradition, as Toqueville recognized in the 1830s; and it occurs offline as well as on the Internet. Policies can either frustrate or support such popular creativity; supportive policies are truly "populist," even though they are not redistributive.

3) A quality dimension. True populism doesn't pander to or romanticize the public. It recognizes that the great mass of people have latent or potential capacities for true excellence, but we need appropriate opportunities, incentives, organization, support, and education to realize our civic and political potential. That said, populism also rejects cynical and dismissive views of the American people as we are today (such as this).

4) Respect for diversity. Some populists assume that there is a homogeneous mass of "ordinary" or "real" people, as opposed to special interests, elites, and various other minorities--including immigrants. But there is an equally prevalent and far more attractive tradition of American populism that identifies the people with diversity. This is the populism of the 1890s at its best, of folk music, of the Popular Front, and of the Civil Rights Movement. I am aware that 1890s populism turned exclusive and Soviet Communism influenced the Popular Front; but both movements also had truly pluralist strains.

5) A cultural dimension: Populism is not only about laws and policies, but also a way of representing ourselves. In a populist culture, many people are involved in celebrating, memorializing, and debating their common values and hopes through cultural products such as music, graphic arts, folklore, historical narratives, and videos. The results are diverse but serious; people use the arts to define and address public problems. Today, in my opinion, the biggest obstacle to cultural populism is mass culture (which is popular but not participatory), and the greatest hope lies in collective voluntary work.

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December 14, 2006

why Obama has lit a fire

There is a remarkable gap between Senator Obama's actual speech in New Hampshire last weekend (click for video) and the endless coverage and commentary that I have read about it. Reporters and bloggers uniformly take the line that Obama presented himself as someone "new"--as a "change"--and New Hampshire Democratic voters liked him for that reason. Supposedly, they saw him as "new" because of his recent arrival in Washington, his relatively young age, his career in grassroots organizing, and even his race and immigrant background, which make him different from all the other contenders--and worlds apart from the incumbent president.

Novelty would be a superficial reason to "swoon" for Obama; that feeling would soon wear off. But reporters really didn't pay attention to his speech, which is why they don't grasp the source of his popularity.

Now, listen, I have to confess that there has been a little bit of fuss about me lately. And I have been a little suspicious of it, because I actually come from a background of community organizing and grassroots organizing and mobilization and empowerment, and so--a lot of reporters of late have been asking me, 'Well, why are you coming to New Hampshire? What does this mean? You've got big crowds. Does this definitely mean you're jumping in? And this and that and the other.'

What I told them during a press event earlier here today, and what I want to say to you--Obviously it's flattering to get so much attention, although I must say it's baffling, particularly to my wife. I actually think that the reason I'm getting so much attention right now has less to do with me and more to do with you. I think to some degree I've become a shorthand or a symbol or a stand-in, for now, of a spirit that the last election in New Hampshire represented. And it's a spirit that says we are looking for something new. [applause] ...

It's a spirit that says we are going to re-engage in our democracy in a way that we haven't done for some time, that we are going to take hold of our collective lives together and reassert our values and our ideals on our politics. And that doesn't depend on one person. That doesn't depend on me or the Governor or a congressman or a speaker. It depends on you.

There's a wonderful saying by Justice Louis Brandeis once, that the most important office in a democracy is the office of citizen. And that, I think, more than anything is what the election here in New Hampshire represented on Nov. 7. And that is the tradition of New Hampshire, not just in presidential primaries but each and every day: the idea that all of us have a stake in this government, all of us have responsibilities, all of us have to step up to the plate, and as a consequence of everybody ... doing just that, we had an outstanding election here in New Hampshire. So I'm here to get some tips from you. [Applause] I'm here to soak up some of that energy. [Growing applause.] I'm here to bask in the glow of the great work that you have done. And I want you guys to remember that. You're the story, not me. Now that's hard to understand, because that's not the politics we have seen just lately.

The Senator then talks about his work trying to "rebuild and renew America"--especially low-income America--through grassroots organizing. He connects his own work to American history, which he sees as a series of popular uprisings led by "pastors, organizers, agitators, and troublemakers" who have had the audacity to hope.

In each and every juncture of our history, there has someone who has been willing to say that we can do better. ... We can create a country where everybody's got a shot, where every child can dream. ... And I think what's been happening over these last several months is people have realized that that kind of spirit has been lost over the last decade. [Applause.] It's not that ordinary people have forgotten how to dream big dreams; they just think that their leadership has forgotten. [Applause] ... And so what happened in this election, not just here in New Hampshire but all across the country, is that voters decided to start paying attention. They looked up and they said, 'We're in a serious mood, we're in a sober mood, and we want to know, how can we rekindle that spirit?'

Pundits have ignored everything in the speech after "we are looking for something new." (You literally can't find the rest of the speech with a Google search.) Reporters assume that Obama's words about citizenship were just throat-clearing, or crowd-pleasing rhetoric, or false modesty. Thus they can't grasp why people love him.

The public is hungry for more opportunities to participate in solving our grievous problems. It is not only the depth of our challenges that upsets us, but also the sense that we have been shut out of civic life and cannot be part of the solution. A candidate who can genuinely empower citizens will ignite powerful enthusiasm--not among all Americans, but among the politically active who dominate primary elections.

Obama has most of the ingredients he needs to run a persuasive "empowerment" campaign--much more so than Al Gore, John Kerry, or Hillary Clinton. As a community organizer, he has the right resume. (His "home town" of Chicago has been the epicenter of grassroots civic work since the time of Jane Addams.) He speaks eloquently and insightfully about civic participation. What he will need is a list of serious policy proposals for civic renewal. By connecting his rhetoric of empowerment to concrete reforms, he may be able to persuade reporters and other elites to take that rhetoric seriously. They will realize that he really means what he says. And then the fire that he has kindled may begin to burn.

... and that's my obligation, to make sure that I'm willing to partner with the American people on the common-sense, pragamatic, not ideological agenda that they're hungry for to meet the challenges that we face [Applause.]

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December 7, 2006

Emilio Estevez' Bobby

I was very moved and impressed by the movie Bobby, which we saw last night. It is not really about Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The director, Emilio Estevez, tries to depict the American people at a particular historical and political moment. He puts citizens at the center of his story. This is a very unusual and insightful approach to political fiction, and it's especially surprising to find in a Hollywood movie.

In the film, Robert Kennedy is shown only in real television footage and heard only in real recordings that sometimes play as voiceovers while the fictional events unfold. Estevez may have chosen this device out of admiration for Kennedy. But it has the effect of distancing the Senator; we only hear his public statements to crowds of people far from the scene of the movie, which is the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. We have no insight into his motives or feelings.

Although Bobby is far away, we are close to a bunch of ordinary Americans. Like the American people as a whole, they are old and senile, young and foolish, prejudiced and suspicious, idealistic and kind. They fight and they love one another. They register voters and drop acid. They make great music and stand by while their country carpet-bombs Vietnamese villages. In short, they combine flaws and virtues in numerous combinations that Estevez has obviously chosen to illustrate our vast range and complexity.

Estevez sees Bobby as a great leader and is deeply nostalgic for 1968. But why was Robert Kennedy so great that year? We know that he was a highly flawed human being. His words in the film are eloquent, but mainly because of the way they are juxtaposed with the action on screen. His speeches are not terribly well written, nor beautifully delivered.

Bobby was a great leader in 1968--so I believe, and so the movie suggests--not because he was a better person than everyone who holds public office today. He was great because many dedicated and talented people worked for him, and some of his staff are shown in the film. He was great because he represented several grand social movements: the civil rights struggle, the anti-war campaign, and especially mid-20th century liberalism. These movements were built from the grassroots up; they made it possible for national leaders to achieve greatness by using their ideas and rhetoric. Bobby was one of the last to do so, because all those movements were running down by the time of his final campaign.

Finally, Bobby was great because several million very diverse Americans, despite having much else on their minds, invested some hope in the man. He was a phenomenon, in other words, of something going on in the public. He didn't make history as much as he represented it. The movie brilliantly illustrates this by telling the stories of ordinary Americans while the Senator appears on their television screens and moves ever closer to the place where they happen to work. His tragedy is intensely moving just because it is about so much more than one politician.

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December 6, 2006

an embassy from Hugo Chvez

I took these notes while listening to Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, Venezuela's Ambassador to the United States. He was speaking at the University of Maryland, as part of my Institute's effort to develop a project that would address Venezuela's deep internal divisions and learn from its vibrant political debate. (See Phronesisiacal for more.)

The Ambassador began with a complaint. The administration and the media blame the Chvez government "for everything," he said. It is "basically the media" that sets the agenda concerning Venezuela in the United States. The American Congress cannot think past "2+2=4"; they don't have time to go beyond what the media tells them. (Later he added: "if you watch the media in Venezuela for even half an hour, you will think that the country is in a civil war.") But last week's "huge" electoral victory shows that the people support Chvez.

The Ambassador drew a distinction between "civil society" and "the people." He explained: "For us, 'civil society' [means] organized sectors of society very much connected to big business. 'The people' [means] marginalized people, people who are not connected" to the economy. Later he said that the whole point of the Bolivarian Revolution is to give the power back to the people.

"We don't have anything against representative democracy, but who is represented there? Basically, the elites." After the crisis of the two traditional parties in Venezuela, he said, "no one was expecting that the people themselves would take over." But that is just what happened in Venezuela's "constitutional moment." Although the Ambassador did not clarify when this moment occurred, I assume he meant Chvez' electoral victories and the Constitution of 1999, which was ratified by a plebicite.

Bolivia has even gone further than Venezuela. "We are westernized," the Ambassador said, but in Bolivia, "indigenous people are taking over completely" from the colonial state. "People say, if you let the people participate, you are a demagogue and you are not rational." But we are ready for mature democracy.

"People are always saying: "[Venezuela] is a polarized country.' Well yes, but it is a polarized country because of wealth." The elites who traditionally controlled the oil wealth fomented a coup and then massively sabotaged oil production.

"We will always try to favor direct or participatory democracy," Mr. Alvarez said, "over representative democracy." He conceded: "Of course, you always need representative democracy, because we understand that minorities have the right, for example, to exist."

The Ambassador said that "neoliberalism" favors civil society over the government. "Part of the neoliberal agenda is, you destroy the state." But in the Andean countries, civil society was corrupt ("unions, etc."). "We decided, let's try to create a new state." Cuba provided 20,000 doctors "to do the job that [our] own doctors don't want to do." Now the Cuban doctors are training Venezuelans.

The Ambassador ended with a call for North-South dialogue: "More than half of the problems are not because of the United States, they are because of our own elites." "We need people who could open a different dialogue. I would urge you to put together thinkers ... and social movements" to develop a common agenda for North and South America.

In the Q&A, he defended community councils as a vehicle for participatory democracy and claimed that they were increasingly out of the party's control--evidence of the "excitement" of participation.

I welcome the call to dialogue, the rhetoric of empowerment, the experiments with councils--and those Cuban doctors. I sympathize with this former professor who probably doesn't get a fair hearing in Washington. And I grant that economic elites have been repressive and corrupt throughout the Andes, as elsewhere. However, I left the speech more suspicious than ever that Chvez represents a false populism that equates "the people" with the party, that disparages pluralism, and that blames the media and elites for all criticism. So far, charisma and oil revenues have kept the government popular, but what happens next?

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November 14, 2006

politics as a spectator sport

In the Baltimore Sun on Nov. 5, Michael Hill wrote a piece entitled "Insiders' game: More and more, governing has become a process that leaves ordinary Americans watching from the sidelines." He began:

This time of the year, there is a seamless flow on television as Sunday morning turns to afternoon, from the political talk shows to the NFL pre-game programs.

Both feature pontificating pundits chosen as much for their personalities as their insight. Style is at least as important as substance.

Most significantly, both are spectator sports. Professional football was designed as that. American politics was not.

Even on the verge of an election that has energized the electorate more than most mid-term votes, it still seems that the citizens are on the sidelines of a game that was once famously said to be "of the people, by the people and for the people."

Hill then quoted Benjamin Ginsburg and Matthew Crenson, co-authors of Downsizing Democracy : How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized its Public; Harry Boyte from the University of Minnesota; and me.

I'm as satisfied as the next blogger about last week's good thumpin', which was richly deserved. Further, I don't blame the Democratic Party for the way they played the game. Under the circumstances (one-party rule in disastrous times), the election was inevitably a referendum on the incumbents' performance. To have injected other themes might only have created ambiguity.

Nevertheless, we can pause and lament with Hill the reduced role that citizens now play in politics.

First, it's striking that turnout in such a high-stakes election was so poor. Only 40 percent of the eligible electorate voted, according to Curtis Gans. There were big increases in turnout in some states, but they were undermined by decreases in other places. For most citizens, a Congressional race is largely meaningless because the outcome is foreordained by the way districts are drawn.

Second, although I am closely attentive to national news, I heard little or no talk about critical issues such as the federal deficit, poverty, global warming, high school dropouts, or crime and its consequences. I suppose the minimum wage debate represents a proxy for poverty issues, but it is very far from adequate as a policy lever. One of the best arguments for national elections is that they provide an opportunity for public discussion and learning. That opportunity was missed.

Third, there was no empowerment agenda--no talk of how citizens have become spectators but could be given new responsibilities for self-government. This is a deep problem exacerbated by the complexity of modern issues, the delegation of power to administrative agencies and courts, the weakness of grassroots groups, and the influence of specialists (lawyers, economists, professional educators).

Conservatives respond to public unease about spectator politics when they attack "activist judges" for "legislating from the bench"; but their critique is usually inconsistent and opportunistic. Some progressives may have seen voting as a sufficient form of empowerment in 2006--but it isn't. We will need richer and more demanding forms of civic engagement if we are really going to grapple with our problems.

permanent link | comments (4) | category: populism

September 7, 2006

"the precedence of inside authority"

Yesterday, I argued that communities always need strong civic participation before they can benefit from government aid, philanthropy, and other forms of outside help. Walt Whitman put the same point more grandiloquently in the following lines from Leaves of Grass (81:121 ff.):

Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons;
...
Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority;
Where the citizen is always the head and idealand President, Mayor, Governor, and what not, are agents for pay;
...
There the great city stands.

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September 6, 2006

beyond warm and fuzzy

Toward the end of Diminished Democracy, Theda Skocpol lists some recommendations that emerged from the National Commission on Civic Renewal (of which I was deputy director) and Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. She mentions proposals for strengthening human interactions at the local level and enhancing civic education. Skocpol writes:

Such prescriptions evoke warm and fuzzy feelings in all of us caught in increasingly frenzied worlds of demanding work and hard-pressed family life. But as strategies for the revitalization of U.S. democracy, recommendations so preoccupied with local social life--remedies that ignore issues of economic inequality, power disparity, and political demobilization--are simply not plausible. ...

Improving local communities, and social life more generally, will not create sufficient democratic leverage to tackle problems that can only be addressed with concerted national commitment.

The state of Maine, for example, is a wonderfully civic place, scoring near the top of Putnam's cross-state index of social capital. No surprise, for Maine has strong civic traditions, a progressive Clean Elections Law, and relatively high voting rates. The state boasts remarkably neighborly towns; active nonprofits and citizens' groups; elected officials readily available for personal contact; public radio and television stations plus the Bangor Daily News practicing civic journalism at its best; and native wealthy citizens (above all novelist Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha) who give generously and wisely to community undertakings everywhere in Maine. But Mainers still need to be part of a broader national community and democratic politics with real clout. Over the decade of the 1990s, four-fifths of Maine families have experienced a steady deterioration in real incomes. What is more, the erosion of health insurance marches forward inexorably as more and more Maine businesses and middle-class as well as poor people suffer from the rate-setting practices of nationally powerful insurance companies. Despite local civic vitality, in other words, many Maine communities and people have been badly hurt by the erosion of active democratic government in the United States.

I fully agree with all of this. I also share Skocpol's view that civil society ought to be political as well as social, and national as well as local. In other words, voluntary groups should have national agendas as well as social and service functions.

Still, the importance of a strong civic culture is not negated by the trends Skocpol mentions: declining real income and access to health care. It's true that a government could (and, in my opinion, should) cover everyone's health insurance and raise real family incomes through changes in tax rates. However, those redistributive policies will not address many of the problems that are uppermost on people's minds in Maine and elsewhere--such as how to make public schools work for all kids, or how to cut the crime rate, or how to generate satisfying and secure jobs. Government has a crucial role in addressing those problems, but it will almost inevitably act through independent grantees or local public institutions such as neighborhood schools. Much depends on how well those institutions perform, which--in turn--depends on how well they tap the passion, energy, and experience of local citizens.

Moreover, we have to ask why people don't demand policies like universal health care. Such proposals are reasonably popular in surveys but do not motivate mass political action. I think there are two main reasons. First, as Skocpol has argued, people lack the civic infrastructure through which to influence the government. They need associations with national influence but also local roots so that they have ways of entering civil society and developing political skills and identities. Second, people are suspicious of big institutions such as schools and health systems. To some extent, that is the result of anti-government propaganda. But to some extent it is because big institutions are unresponsive and rather ineffective. Thus it seems to me necessary first to build participatory, responsive, local public institutions--such as those in Maine--and then to ask people to vote for redistribution.

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August 8, 2006

listening to Kansas

In today's New York Times, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank, decries the right-wing revolt against expertise:

To the faithful, theirs is a war against 'elites,' and, with striking regularity, that means a war against the professions. The anti-abortion movement, for example, dwells obsessively on the villainy of the medical establishment. The uproar over the liberal media, a popular delusion going on 40, is a veiled reaction to the professionalization of journalism. The war on judges, now enjoying a new vogue, is a response to an imagined 'grab for legislative power' (as one current Kansas campaign mailing puts it) by unelected representatives in the legal profession. And the attack on evolution, the most ill-conceived thrust of them all, is a direct shot at the authority of science and, by extension, at the education systen, the very foundation of professional expertise.

Frank finds all this very distressing, because he believes that the "populist" activists of Kansas are undermining their own self-interests by voting against professionals--thereby achieving "distinctly unpopulist results."

The question turns on whether professionals are actually worthy of trust and support. If Kansans are furious at "education insiders" and other experts, is that because they have been deluded by conservative rabble-raisers? Or could they have a point about professionals' arrogance?

Consider that Americans (parents and other non-professionals) play a dramatically reduced role in public education. In the 1970s, more than 40 percent said that they worked on community projects--which often involved education--but that percentage is now down to the 20s. PTA membership rose to 45 per 100 families in 1960, but then fell to less than half of that in the last twenty years. Under No Child Left Behind, very little about schools can be influenced or debated except evolution and sex ed: two hot-button issues that mobilize ideologues. The core curriculum, which is loaded with value-judgments that deserve public debate, has been decided by the people who write tests--pyschometricians and other experts far from Kansas (but close to Princeton, NJ). Meanwhile, the general atmosphere of schools seems commercialized, sexualized, and otherwise reflective of bad values.

Anyone who has tried to participate in educational issues, whether at the national level or in one's local school, knows that jargon, turf, and bureaucracy are the order of the day. This would be fine if school systems produced excellent results.

I have dwelled on the case of education, but it would not be difficult to develop similar arguments about professional journalism and medical care. (Anyone who has wrestled with the medical bureaucracy during a health emergency will recognize an arrogance, a status-consciousness, a worship of machines and chemicals, and a lack of concern for the whole patient that cannot be attributed to insurance issues alone.) I know it is more controversial, but I tend to believe that judges have overstepped their bounds as well, particularly in cases where they have made live public debates moot by handing down decisions not clearly based in the Constitution.

In short, I think Frank very acutely diagnoses a revolt against the professional elites. But suppressing the revolt will not make the problem go away. Professionals must change their behavior in order to merit public respect.

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May 23, 2006

the power of community organizing

Yesterday, I showed the correlation between economic development and political participation. I also pointed to some cases--South Africa, India, Tanzania--in which there was more participation than one would expect given the level of development. All three countries are famous for democratic political leaders and grassroots democratic organizations. It seems that people like Gandhi and Mandela and the movements they represent can make a big difference.

Closer to home, the West Side of Chicago shows the same pattern. According to this fascinating paper by Gregory B. Markus, there is broad and deep democratic participation in the West Side despite its entrenched poverty and unresponsive government. The West Side was home to Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, and many grassroots organizations that last to this day. They have had a clear impact.

Markus and colleagues surveyed 5,626 residents in a diverse set of 14 American cities. Overall, they found powerful correlations between the amount of civic participation, on one hand, and residents' approval of local government, education, crime, and community, on the other. Markus' scatter-plots look just like mine from yesterday, only with US cities instead of nations.

But the West Side of Chicago stands out on the graph. This is a poor area: 40% of households had less than $15,000 in income in 1996; 86 percent were people of color; only a third had education beyond high school. According to Markus' survey, they tend to distrust "other people" and the local government. Indeed, Chicago's government has been untrustworthy in its treatment of West Siders. With a few bright spots, City Hall has been notably corrupt, unjust, even brutal. Residents are very unlikely to believe that they can understand government or that officials care about people like them. The schools are some of the worst in America.

Yet levels of civic and political participation on Chicago's West Side are extraordinarily high. Once you control for demographic factors, the West Side is first among the fourteen communities in both electoral and civic participation. What's more, residents of a particularly poor district within the West Side are more engaged than those in a more middle-class enclave. The most highly engaged group of all are African American residents of the particularly poor Southwest part of the West side.

The explanation is fairly evident: deliberate community organizing. Chicago has been an extraordinary laboratory for such work since the days of Addams and Alinsky. It is the national headquarters of the Gamaliel Foundation, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and National People's Action. There are famous community development corporations like Bethel New Life; powerful religious congregations; neighborhood associations; and engaged colleges and universities. There are countless links among these groups; activists in IAF, for example, spend their time launching other associations and persuading institutions to be more engaged.

One quarter of all West Siders (and more in the poorest district) are members of a block club or neighborhood association. Almost one fifth have served on a nonprofit board. Those who participate explain their reasons as: making the community a better place to live (71%), influencing policy (51%), being with people I enjoy (43%), and meeting new people (40%). Especially in the poorest district, a substantial group claims that participation is "exciting." These statistics reveal a neighborhood in which people are used to political group-membership, which they see as both powerful and enjoyable.

Thanks to Robert Putnam and others, we know that in general people who trust one another and trust the government are more likely to participate in their communities and in politics. Those relationships are real and important. But in the West Side of Chicago, we see a place where membership and participation has not produced a high level of trust in other people, confidence in the government, or even political "efficacy." Yet West Siders participate.

Two questions arise for me. First, is all that participation effective at addressing the problems that people care about? In general, rates of engagement correlate with social outcomes, as least as rated by citizens. But Chicago's West Side is an outlier in the survey because residents are highly dissatisfied with schools, the government, and crime, yet they participate. Does this mean that raising participation does not improve social outcomes, despite the general correlation between the two? Or are education and crime in the West Side substantially better than they would be absent the participation? (Chicago has fared better than some of its peers--St. Louis, Detroit, and Cleveland--and the difference could be attributed to strong neighborhood-level politics.)

Second, how long does it take and how hard is it to raise civic engagement through community organizing? The Chicago case shows what is possible, but that process can be traced back 120 years. What does that history mean for a city like Santa Ana, CA, which rates very poorly on civic engagement in the Markus survey? Are there any shortcuts?

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May 8, 2006

"Civic Populism," an essay by guest blogger Harry Boyte

Harry C. Boyte is a senior fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. Harry started his career working for Martin Luther King, Jr., as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His many excellent books include Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work and CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics.

Harry recently suggested that I write on this blog about populism. I said that I don't have the historical background to do it right, but I invited him to contribute something in his own voice. He has generously provided the following essay:

Civic Populism, by Harry C. Boyte

In common parlance "populism" means a folksy style or, negatively, demagogic leaders who profess to champion victimized people as cover for trouble-making. "Populism" or "populist" is thus the epithet used to criticize a group of Latin American leaders. Juan Forero reported in the New York Times (April 20, 2006) on "populist movements ... promising to redistribute wealth [that] threaten to create a political free-for-all that could weaken already unstable countries." Jorge Castaeda followed with an op ed ("Good Neighbor Policy," NYT, May 4, 2006), arguing that immigration reform is needed in order to halt "the wave of populism that has swept Latin American cities."

Peter Levine, who invited me to reflect on populism in this civic space, has termed the rhetorical championing of innocent people against nefarious elites, "sentimental populism" (August 23, 2004). Yet in civic terms populism can be understood as something different, the heritage of democratic politics in the United States that is an alternative to liberalism and conservatism, with new currency today.

Populism took explicit shape in the movement of black and white farmers and their blue collar and professional allies in the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in the short-lived "People's Party." In broader terms it is a tradition in which civic agency and civic life built through cooperative work formed an alternative both to the paternalistic state and the untamed market. As the historian Eric Foner has argued, "Precapitalist culture ... was the incubator of resistance to capitalist development in the United States. The world of the artisan and small farmer persisted ... into the twentieth century and powerfully influenced American radical movements. ... These movements inherited an older republican tradition hostile to large accumulations of property, but viewing small property as the foundation of economic and civic autonomy." Foner proposed that in the U.S. it was "not the absence of non-liberal ideas but the persistence of a radical vision resting on small property [that] inhibited the rise of socialist ideologies."

The emphasis on civic agency took new forms in the 20th century in an identifiable strand of democratic thought and action, what can be called civic populism or citizen-centered politics. This combines democratic respect and democratic power with democratic development--the idea that "the people shall govern" as they prepare themselves to govern. Civic populism has surfaced in broad movements such as early 20th century progressivism, New Deal reforms in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement. Civic populism includes figures as diverse as Jane Addams, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Alinsky, Ella Baker, the Rev. Martin Luther King, and Linda Chavez-Thompson in our time. It also runs as important threads in the policy ideas and civic philosophies of political leaders such as the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the late Republican governor [of Minnesota] Elmer Andersen.

Civic populism once had wide foundations in what can be called mediating institutions connecting the civic life of communities to the larger public world. These included locally rooted political parties, religious congregations, businesses, unions, neighborhood schools, settlement houses, sometimes colleges and universities. Unions, for instance, were often deeply tied to communities. The black Minnesota union leader and civic populist Nellie Stone Johnson recalled that into the 1950s unions had store front offices, where people would socialize, discuss issues, and undertake community projects. Mediating institutions also included locally rooted public agencies, from local governments to cooperative extension and soil conversation districts.

These were places where people acted on concrete interests and received tangible benefits, while also learning public skills and habits of dealing with others who were different--negotiation, problem-solving, the messy improvisations of everyday politics. They also experienced the equal respect, freedom, and generative power that comes from common labours freely undertaken. Nick Bromell has described what emerges from such experiences as "the understanding that human equality is rooted in the activities of human beings, not in abstract rules that treat humans as mere blanks. Democracy [in these terms] doesnt just allow us to govern ourselves; it produces selves that find the labor of self-government worth the effortbecause those selves are worthy of respect."

Civic populism integrates particular interests into a larger vision of the commonwealth or common good, a theme recently advocated for the Democrats by Michael Tomasky in "Party in Search of a Notion" (The American Prospect, April 18, 2006). But civic populism is more than a notion to win elections. It is a tradition stirring to new life in a fledgling movement for civic renewal, often brilliantly chronicled on this blog. Its deepest impulse is to transform the "Me First Culture" into a "We Culture."

Civic populism addresses the dysfunctions of a Me First Culture because it challenges the technocratic politics--domination by detached experts--that generates such a culture. Technocracy, spreading through society like a silent disease, presents itself as an objective set of truths, practices, and procedures. But it turns people into abstract categories. It decontextualizes problems from civic life. It privatizes the world and creates a pervasive sense of scarcity. It profoundly erodes a culture of equal respect.

Civic populism counters the impersonal, hierarchical patterns of technocracy while transforming the Me First Culture of isolation, fear, consumerism and scarcity that is technocracy's degraded progeny. Civic populism retrieves citizen politics as the way we negotiate the plural, relational, narrative qualities of the human condition in order to solve problems and live together without violence. It revitalizes civic cultures of mediating institutions that have narrowed in recent decades to providing services to needy clients and consumers. It generates a spirit of abundance by tapping the enormous civic energies and talents now stifled by technocracy. Finally, civic populism cultivates civic habits and outlook among professionals and amateurs alike--an understanding of ourselves as citizens working alongside our fellow citizens, neither above nor below.

I believe that civic populism can be enriched, deepened, and translated into public debate by integrating themes of citizenship, community, and public life through the idea of a politics that aims at the strengthening of civic life. Civic life is a concept with broad resonance and appeal to many different groups. It suggests the context for cooperative labors, and the sense of public abundance that public work generates. Government in these terms is best conceived not as "the solution" or "the problem" but rather as the resource of the people in addressing our common problems and creating democracy.

Politicians can play important roles in articulating civic populism, but the concept of the impact of public policies on civic life needs to come from many directions. Moreover, the concept of civic impact of policies--what practices and policies contribute to civic life and generate cultures of civic abundance, and what erode civic life--can be applied not only to assessment of government, but also to many other institutions.

To renew democracy as a way of life will mean integrating civic populist examples into a broad challenge to a scarcity based technocratic politics. It will entail an alternative politics based on abundance. And it will mean remembering the heart of the populist faith, that democracy is embodied not mainly in structures or institutions, but in the wisdom, confidence, skills and habits of the citizenry.

permanent link | comments (0) | category: populism , populism

"Civic Populism," an essay by guest blogger Harry Boyte

Harry C. Boyte is a senior fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. Harry started his career working for Martin Luther King, Jr., as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His many excellent books include Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work and CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics.

Harry recently suggested that I write on this blog about populism. I said that I don't have the historical background to do it right, but I invited him to contribute something in his own voice. He has generously provided the following essay:

Civic Populism, by Harry C. Boyte

In common parlance "populism" means a folksy style or, negatively, demagogic leaders who profess to champion victimized people as cover for trouble-making. "Populism" or "populist" is thus the epithet used to criticize a group of Latin American leaders. Juan Forero reported in the New York Times (April 20, 2006) on "populist movements ... promising to redistribute wealth [that] threaten to create a political free-for-all that could weaken already unstable countries." Jorge Castaeda followed with an op ed ("Good Neighbor Policy," NYT, May 4, 2006), arguing that immigration reform is needed in order to halt "the wave of populism that has swept Latin American cities."

Peter Levine, who invited me to reflect on populism in this civic space, has termed the rhetorical championing of innocent people against nefarious elites, "sentimental populism" (August 23, 2004). Yet in civic terms populism can be understood as something different, the heritage of democratic politics in the United States that is an alternative to liberalism and conservatism, with new currency today.

Populism took explicit shape in the movement of black and white farmers and their blue collar and professional allies in the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in the short-lived "People's Party." In broader terms it is a tradition in which civic agency and civic life built through cooperative work formed an alternative both to the paternalistic state and the untamed market. As the historian Eric Foner has argued, "Precapitalist culture ... was the incubator of resistance to capitalist development in the United States. The world of the artisan and small farmer persisted ... into the twentieth century and powerfully influenced American radical movements. ... These movements inherited an older republican tradition hostile to large accumulations of property, but viewing small property as the foundation of economic and civic autonomy." Foner proposed that in the U.S. it was "not the absence of non-liberal ideas but the persistence of a radical vision resting on small property [that] inhibited the rise of socialist ideologies."

The emphasis on civic agency took new forms in the 20th century in an identifiable strand of democratic thought and action, what can be called civic populism or citizen-centered politics. This combines democratic respect and democratic power with democratic development--the idea that "the people shall govern" as they prepare themselves to govern. Civic populism has surfaced in broad movements such as early 20th century progressivism, New Deal reforms in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement. Civic populism includes figures as diverse as Jane Addams, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Alinsky, Ella Baker, the Rev. Martin Luther King, and Linda Chavez-Thompson in our time. It also runs as important threads in the policy ideas and civic philosophies of political leaders such as the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the late Republican governor [of Minnesota] Elmer Andersen.

Civic populism once had wide foundations in what can be called mediating institutions connecting the civic life of communities to the larger public world. These included locally rooted political parties, religious congregations, businesses, unions, neighborhood schools, settlement houses, sometimes colleges and universities. Unions, for instance, were often deeply tied to communities. The black Minnesota union leader and civic populist Nellie Stone Johnson recalled that into the 1950s unions had store front offices, where people would socialize, discuss issues, and undertake community projects. Mediating institutions also included locally rooted public agencies, from local governments to cooperative extension and soil conversation districts.

These were places where people acted on concrete interests and received tangible benefits, while also learning public skills and habits of dealing with others who were different--negotiation, problem-solving, the messy improvisations of everyday politics. They also experienced the equal respect, freedom, and generative power that comes from common labours freely undertaken. Nick Bromell has described what emerges from such experiences as "the understanding that human equality is rooted in the activities of human beings, not in abstract rules that treat humans as mere blanks. Democracy [in these terms] doesnt just allow us to govern ourselves; it produces selves that find the labor of self-government worth the effortbecause those selves are worthy of respect."

Civic populism integrates particular interests into a larger vision of the commonwealth or common good, a theme recently advocated for the Democrats by Michael Tomasky in "Party in Search of a Notion" (The American Prospect, April 18, 2006). But civic populism is more than a notion to win elections. It is a tradition stirring to new life in a fledgling movement for civic renewal, often brilliantly chronicled on this blog. Its deepest impulse is to transform the "Me First Culture" into a "We Culture."

Civic populism addresses the dysfunctions of a Me First Culture because it challenges the technocratic politics--domination by detached experts--that generates such a culture. Technocracy, spreading through society like a silent disease, presents itself as an objective set of truths, practices, and procedures. But it turns people into abstract categories. It decontextualizes problems from civic life. It privatizes the world and creates a pervasive sense of scarcity. It profoundly erodes a culture of equal respect.

Civic populism counters the impersonal, hierarchical patterns of technocracy while transforming the Me First Culture of isolation, fear, consumerism and scarcity that is technocracy's degraded progeny. Civic populism retrieves citizen politics as the way we negotiate the plural, relational, narrative qualities of the human condition in order to solve problems and live together without violence. It revitalizes civic cultures of mediating institutions that have narrowed in recent decades to providing services to needy clients and consumers. It generates a spirit of abundance by tapping the enormous civic energies and talents now stifled by technocracy. Finally, civic populism cultivates civic habits and outlook among professionals and amateurs alike--an understanding of ourselves as citizens working alongside our fellow citizens, neither above nor below.

I believe that civic populism can be enriched, deepened, and translated into public debate by integrating themes of citizenship, community, and public life through the idea of a politics that aims at the strengthening of civic life. Civic life is a concept with broad resonance and appeal to many different groups. It suggests the context for cooperative labors, and the sense of public abundance that public work generates. Government in these terms is best conceived not as "the solution" or "the problem" but rather as the resource of the people in addressing our common problems and creating democracy.

Politicians can play important roles in articulating civic populism, but the concept of the impact of public policies on civic life needs to come from many directions. Moreover, the concept of civic impact of policies--what practices and policies contribute to civic life and generate cultures of civic abundance, and what erode civic life--can be applied not only to assessment of government, but also to many other institutions.

To renew democracy as a way of life will mean integrating civic populist examples into a broad challenge to a scarcity based technocratic politics. It will entail an alternative politics based on abundance. And it will mean remembering the heart of the populist faith, that democracy is embodied not mainly in structures or institutions, but in the wisdom, confidence, skills and habits of the citizenry.

permanent link | comments (0) | category: populism , populism

August 26, 2005

three possible goals for the left

In Norway last week, it occurred to me that the left in modern times has taken three distinct paths, each with a different goal:

1. Reduce alienation. Marx's essential idea was that people should be able to conceive creative concepts and then implement them in the real world. Since individuals cannot realize impressive ideas by themselves, such creativity must be cooperative. In a capitalist system, some people conceive ideas and different people carry them out, and both kinds of people (i.e., capitalists and workers) are constrained by market competition. Therefore, everyone is alienated.

I think there is some truth to this diagnosis; but the main socialist and communist solution--workers' collective ownership of factories and farms--has been largely disastrous. Workers are much less alienated in a Tayota plant than in a Soviet one. If there is a strategy for reducing alienation, it probably involves some combination of the small, voluntary co-ops and land trusts described at community-wealth.org; plus policies to support parenthood (which is relatively unalienated labor), and a dynamic entrepreneurial sector.

2. Increase equality. There are strong theoretical arguments in favor of more economic equality than we have in the USA. My favorite argument goes like this. We are capable of producing enormously more value per hour of work than our ancestors did, not because anything that you and I have achieved ourselves, but thanks to an accumulation of knowledge, technology, and social organization. If you are born to parents with education, capital, savvy, ambition; and if they care about you; and if you live in a nice neighborhood in a developed country; and if you have reasonable genes and luck, then you can benefit hugely from the accumulation of progress. If, however, you lack most or all of these advantages, then you will capture little more value from your work than people did 3,000 years ago. This is unfair.

Therefore, if some beneficent being with superhuman power and intelligence (and an inclination to meddle in our affairs) showed up on earth, it would redistribute goods in a much more equitable way. However, in our actual circumstances, there are some big barriers to redistribution. First, in a country like the United States, the median citizen has enough wealth that he or she is not too enthusiastic about redistribution, which might only benefit those further down the ladder. Citizens of poor countries have even less political leverage over us than our own poor have. Second, redistribution probably reduces economic productivity; and we Americans are deeply committed to prosperity and progress. Third, any political power (e.g., a party or a state) that is capable of greater redistribution is also capable of self-dealing and corruption. As I've noted before, textile workers in Taiwan and Hong Kong earn 10-20 times as much per hour as textile workers in China and Vietnam--two countries where a Communist party monopolized power in the name of equality. Those parties now make their own elites rich by blocking independent unions, a classic example of corruption.

These skeptical arguments don't prove that we have the balance just right in the US in 2005. The standard measure of inequality has increased very substantially since 1980, which suggests that we could do somewhat better.

3. Improve Externalities. That's not a phrase that belongs on a bumper sticker or in a political speech. Nevetheless, the left has made the most progress since 1960--throughout the industrialized world--by mitigating certain negative externalities. An externality occurs when some people have a voluntary exchange that affects other parties who didn't consent to their agreement. The externality is the effect on the third parties. It can be positive: for example, a new downtown store can benefit me even if I never shop or work there, by lowering crime, beautifying my city, providing jobs for my neighbors, contributing taxes, attracting visitors, and so on. An externality can also be negative, and the usual examples are environmental. For instance, smoke can blow from a factory into the lungs of people who never consented to receive it.

The mainstream environmental movement accepts a system of private ownership and free exchange (notwithstanding problems of alienation and inequality), but objects to negative externalities and favors regulation--along with public education and tax breaks--to reduce these problems. This strategy has the great political advantage that it accepts the basic status quo of a market system. It has at least two big disadvantages: it cannot deal with all problems, and it sounds relentlessly negative. The cumulative effect of the environmental movement, for example, has been to suggest that the natural world is deteriorating because of the side-effects of human behavior. The world is getting worse, in short, and all we can do is to mitigate the decline.

But a strategy of improving market externalities can be made positive (as I argued once in a narrower post on environmentalism). In fact, most of the good things in life are positive externalities that arise as side effects of market transactions or as the public effects of people's work in voluntary associations. Much of ethics consists of acting so that one's externalities are positive. We could even define the "commonwealth" or the "commons" as the sum total of our externalities, the negative ones subtracted from the positive ones. Then the question becomes: What combination of regulations, opportunities for collaborative work, and moral education can best enhance the commonwealth?

permanent link | comments (0) | category: populism , revitalizing the left

August 23, 2004

sentimental populism

I recently came across a critique of Ralph Nader that Harry Boyte wrote several years ago. This is the best paragraph:

Ultimately, the problem with Nader-style populism is that it asks very little of citizens. It is based on a fairy land account of our nation's problems in which the people are innocents, the corporations are villains and democracy will come when we break them up. Instead of a populism of grievance and victimhood, we need a civic populism that teaches people how to work across lines of difference, how to understand problems in many-sided ways, how to listen to others with whom they disagree, how to think strategically and practically, not simply in emotive or righteous ways.

I think the criticism is accurate; and it applied even thirty years ago when Nader was a crusading lawyer instead of a presidential candidate. It also describes people like Venezuelan President Hector Chavez, media scholar Robert McChesney, and Michael Moore. I'm much more attracted to populism that has two important features: it recognizes that ordinary people are already creating and wielding power all around us (they are not just victims); and it recognizes the ways that popular attitudes, skills, and values could be improved. Corporations and governments are not the only things standing in the way of popular rule; sometimes people are uninterested in governing. But that's not an argument against populism. It's a challenge that makes you think hard about civic education, community organizing, and institution-building.

Speaking of which, Ned Crosby has posted a very useful long comment about the Jefferson Center and its Citizens' Juries on this blog.

permanent link | comments (0) | category: populism

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