Author Archives: Peter

About Peter

Associate Dean for Faculty and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.

being a friend to a project

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The other day, in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, we were reading a long review article about Positive Youth Development (PYD). PYD can be described as a set of empirical hypotheses with supportive evidence (e.g., that youth flourish best when given opportunities to contribute to their communities). Alternatively, it could be defined as a set of value propositions that may or may not be empirical (e.g., youth have a right to contribute to their communities). It can also be described as a set of programs for young people. Those programs exist because of funding streams and other policies that can be categorized as PYD as well. And it’s a community of people–scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and maybe youth–who are involved with PYD.

Presented with an article, you can read it, learn from it, agree with it, criticize it, assess it, share it, cite it, even assign it. But you can’t be a friend of the article. It exists in its final form and can’t be influenced. It can have fans, but not friends in a recognizable sense of that word.

You can be a friend of something like PYD, assuming that it is a community of people or set of programs. Such a friendship can incorporate criticism–or even require it. For instance, I think PYD should be more political. Youth should have more opportunities to change official systems. I can say that as a friend of PYD, even as part of the PYD community. My friendship is predicated on a decision that PYD has potential, that it is worth engaging. My friendship does not depend on my assent to any particular list of hypotheses or principles, nor my endorsement of any particular program.

I say all of this for two reasons. First, academics learn how to relate to texts as critical readers. We are also supposed to learn how to relate to other scholars as people. But we learn less about how to be friends of communities or movements. Some of us are good friends (in that sense), but it’s not really part of our training.

Second, I think the relationship between empirical hypotheses and actually existing movements is widely misunderstood. It turns out to be true that many youth flourish when offered certain kinds of opportunities to contribute to their communities. That claim of PYD is true because a community of practitioners set about to create such opportunities and made them work. The knowledge that we have gleaned through research on PYD is a product of their efforts. This doesn’t mean that knowledge is subjective or relative. Some programs succeed, others fail, and we can measure the difference. But no program succeeds without being designed and implemented, which requires a prior commitment by some organized group.

The knowledge contained in an article about PYD is thus dependent on people’s work in the world. You can’t be a friend of the article, but you can be a friend of the people upon whom it depends. If the article contains a mistake, you should notice that. If the programs fail to work, you can help them to work better. A community can falter, splinter, or go in the wrong direction, but it can’t be invalidated. That means that a critical response to a publication is disagreement, but a critical response to a movement is action.

saving relational politics

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In the June edition of Perspectives on Politics, I have an article entitled “Saving Relational Politics“* I review Caroline W. Lee’s Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry and Josh Lerner’s Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics and I advance an argument of my own.

I argue that what’s most valuable about activities like public deliberations, planning exercises, and Participatory Budgeting is not actually “deliberative democracy.” Neither political equality (democracy) nor reasonable discussion about decisions (deliberation) are essential to these activities. Instead, they are forms of relational politics, in which people “make decisions or take actions knowing something about one another’s ideas, preferences, and interests.” That makes them akin to practices like one-on-one interviews in community organizing–or Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed.

Relational politics has disadvantages and limitations–it’s not all that we need–but it is an essential complement to well-designed impersonal forms of politics (bureaucracies, legal systems, and markets). And it’s endangered, because genuine forms of relational politics are not valuable to governments or companies. Relational politics still occurs at small scales, but we need strategies for increasing its prevalence and impact against powerful opposition.

Lee’s book is a useful critique of typical strategies for expanding relational politics, which involve developing small models and trying to get powerful organizations to adopt them. Lerner contributes a strategy, which is to make processes more fun so that they are desirable to both citizens and institutions. I review both books positively but argue that they leave us without a persuasive strategy for saving relational politics. After considering some alternatives, I argue that relational politics is most likely to spread as a by-product of mass movements that have political agendas. However, we need some people to pay explicit attention to the quality of the participatory processes.

*Per the copyright agreement, I am posting the “version of record” on my personal web page after its appearance at Cambridge Journals Online, along with the following bibliographical details, a notice that the copyright belongs to Cambridge University Press, and a link to the online edition of the journal:

Saving Relational Politics

Peter Levine (2016).
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 14, Issue02, June 2016, pp 468-473
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=10356927

a political defense of Hamilton

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The political theorists Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick make the political case against Hamilton, the musical. In the debates among the founders, Alexander Hamilton was the elitist, the one with the most “contemptuous attitude toward the lower classes.” He was “perfectly comfortable with the inegalitarian and antidemocratic implications of his economic vision.” As friends have noted, this might be why Hamilton is so popular among contemporary liberal elites. It could be a sign that the left-of-center seeks a thin kind of diversity (in this case, color-blind casting) that is perfectly compatible with boosting Wall Street’s interests. In the musical, Jefferson criticizes Hamilton with these words: “Our poorest citizens, our farmers, live ration to ration / As Wall Street robs ‘em blind in search of chips to cash in.” The lyrics give Jefferson the chance to make that kind of point, but why is Hamilton the hero?

I think this is an important line of argument (I’ve been waiting for prominent writers to make it in public), but I’d defend the musical on two main grounds.

First, I am no expert on Hamilton (the man), but Hamiltonian economics has an important truth to it. In a market economy where corporations, not landowners, are the most important actors, self-rule is impossible unless the people have a powerful instrument, the state, that they can use to regulate the market. Hamilton built the federal state in the face of Jefferson’s opposition. Jefferson’s sociology (envisioning a nation of independent farmers) was false to his own time and became irrelevant in the following centuries. In 1909, Herbert Croly recommended “Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends”: giving the central government enough clout to make local self-rule possible. It’s that aspect of Hamilton that aligns with the center-left today.

By the way, in the musical, the character Hamilton doesn’t espouse elitist views. So if there’s a political problem with the musical, it’s not that it defends elitism but that it misrepresents a historical figure. There are not many references to economics at all. At one point, Burr asks, “Or did you know, even then, it doesn’t matter / Where you put the U.S. Capital?” Hamilton replies, “Cuz we’ll have the banks.” That could imply that banks are good, or it could just mean that banks are important, and New York will “have” them as instruments.

Second, the musical has a powerful political message that’s not about economics. It’s about the positive joy of political participation, the “public happiness” of which Hannah Arendt wrote. The musical shows why you should want to be “in the room where it happens.” It’s also a frank celebration of the kind of political ambition that is about trying to make something great and be known for it. I think that kind of ambition is not only a useful motivation for service but an intrinsic good. I’m with Arendt that zeal for public repute is honorable.

Finally, the musical embodies a kind of cultural appropriation that I admire and recommend. I’m not against cultural appropriation in general, and especially not when a marginalized group appropriates the most prized possessions of the dominant culture (Shakespeare, for instance, or the King James Version). In this case, we have a musical about the founders of the Republic in which the dominant genre is hip hop, the genius writer is a Puerto Rican, and the cast is multiracial. They are claiming the legacy of the founding for themselves, which is their birthright.

See also: notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (on public happiness in the Founders’ generation); the Citizens United decision and the inadequate sociology of the US Constitution; when is cultural appropriation good or bad? and cultural mixing and power; and (for an argument in favor of cultural appropriations like Hamilton) “a different Shakespeare from the one I love”.

the eighth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies begins

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Today begins the eighth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life. That means 7-8 hours of seminar discussion each day for two weeks, based on thousands of pages of readings. The syllabus is largely unchanged from last year. My co-conspirator in all of this work is Prof. Karol Soltan from University of Maryland.

Participants this year include two professors of philosophy, several community organizers and NGO leaders, and current PhD students in political science/political theory, developmental psychology, sociology, and geography. They come from the US, UK, Argentina, Ecuador, India, Pakistan, and Thailand.

The curriculum is unapologetically theoretical, even though most participants are selected because of their practical interests. As I’ve argued recently, our civic practices have outrun our theories. We have a lot of wisdom about how to organize a meeting or an advocacy campaign or what makes a good learning opportunity for youth. We have much less clarity about what all of that is for and how it relates to large-scale social conditions and political institutions. The 2016 Summer Institute won’t answer those questions definitively, but it’s a chance to struggle with them together.

citizen diplomacy

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(Dayton, OH) Since 1961, Russian and American citizens have met at 20 Dartmouth conferences to discuss the relationship between their two nations. This process continues now, even as NATO troops conduct a “massive airborne exercise in Poland,” practicing for a potential war with Russia in the heart of Europe. I’m proud to serve as a trustee of the Kettering Foundation, which has been one partner in sustaining the Dartmouth process for 55 years.

In one sense, any conversation between Russians and Americans would be a “citizens’ dialog.” For instance, presidents Putin and Obama are citizens of their respective nations, so when they have a phone call, two citizens are talking.

The Dartmouth conferences have not drawn statistically representative or typical people, but rather luminaries from each side. And although the participants are formally independent, they are often related to their respective governments in various ways. So if this is citizen diplomacy (and I think it is), we need to understand the word “citizen” in a particular sense.

Official representatives of governments can negotiate. They can agree to outcomes and either shake hands on the spot or at least take agreements back to their bosses for approval. As in any situation modeled by game theory, the parties have pre-established identities and objectives. The “players” know who they are (e.g., the US Trade Representative) and what they want. The outcomes of a negotiation can be good for all, or better for all than horrible alternatives, such as war. Negotiation is essential for peace. But the outcomes can also be suboptimal for everyone when situations like Prisoners Dilemmas arise, as they often do between states. Negotiations can break down completely. And even when the parties reach an agreement that satisfies them, their negotiation can be indefensible in principle or harmful to other parties.

In contrast, the participants in a citizens’ dialog are not empowered to represent their governments or make decisions. They may be influenced in myriad ways by their governments, but they have no opportunity to commit their governments to decisions. That change in the basic situation—which renders the participants “citizens”—also removes many of the constraints of game theory.

People who are not empowered to negotiate can explore a range of solutions that they might not want to commit to. They can choose from among their many identities: American, professor, Massachusetts resident, father, or citizen of the world. They can change their minds about what they want, or even talk without particularly wanting anything. They can disagree with people on their own “side,” since they are not serving on an official negotiating team. And they can develop and come to care about relationships with individuals from the other side, which has happened powerfully and repeatedly in the Dartmouth Conferences. At a minimum, they can come to understand better what people in the other country value and want, and that understanding can enable more productive negotiations between the states.

It’s not true that “to understand all is to forgive all.” People may genuinely and sincerely believe and value things they shouldn’t. That means that you can have a free and frank exchange of ideas (as they say in diplomacy) and still believe that the other side is badly misguided. Indeed, they may be badly misguided. On the other hand, there is usually some validity in any group’s perspective, and if nothing else, mutual understanding allows a relationship to develop. Once you care a bit about the other people, you’re less likely to endanger everyone. Social capital (trust and reciprocity) is repeatedly found to allow people to solve the kinds of problems modeled by game theory.

The current relationship between the US and Russia is complex and fraught. We are, for instance, backing different sides in a deadly civil war. Negotiations have virtually ceased. We also tend to have different grand historical narratives in our minds, in which the other country figures mostly as villain. Citizen dialog is therefore of the greatest importance today.