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the politics of discontent

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We just finished a Frontiers of Democracy session entitled “The politics of discontent: it works in practice, but can it work in theory?” The premise is that we live in an age of discontent. To theorize about that means to ask: what is discontent, what causes it, and how can we use it to build a better society?

I am actually somewhat skeptical that a category called “discontent” is helpful for describing such a range of phenomena as Trump, Sanders, Brexit, etc. An alternative view would be that there’s a political status quo, and people are inevitably more or less contented with it depending on where they stand across a broad political spectrum. At any time, many people are discontented, but they don’t have anything particularly important in common. Some of them have valid grievances and some don’t. What we might call a climate of discontent is just the aggregate of all the variously unhappy people and movements. The aggregate is likely to be worse when economic times are bad, because then the pie is smaller, but discontent is natural.

Here are some other views that emerged in the discussion:

  1. There is a shared basis of discontent, and it’s procedural. People don’t feel heard; they don’t have opportunities for engaging each other. This discontent is valid, and the solution is more and better democracy. (I’d like to believe this thesis because it would validate a lifetime of work in political reform. But I’m not sure I do believe it.)
  2. There isn’t yet–but could be–a shared basis of discontent if we had better ways of talking with each other across partisan and demographic divides.
  3. There is a shared and valid basis of discontent, and it’s social/economic. For instance, Sanders supporters and Trump voters–and even Brexit voters–share a common root grievance: a global financial system that is cozy with governments and receives bailouts from everyone else. Even if these movements express their views in different ways, similar policies might satisfy them all.
  4. Most of the discontent is coming from formerly privileged groups losing their advantages. A better phrase for it is “right-wing ethnonationlism.” That certainly excludes Sanders voters and Black Lives Matters, but it wouldn’t be valuable to categorize them together with the nationalist right under a heading like “discontent.” Let’s acknowledge that we live at a moment of right-wing ethnonationism when there is also some energy on the left.
  5. This is not particularly a time of discontent. Many aggregate measures of well-being and confidence are up. There are some angry voters, but a total of about 25 million people have voted for Sanders and Trump combined so far (in a nation of more than 200 million adults). The ultimate winner of the presidential campaign is likely to be the most “establishment” candidate since George H.W. Bush in 1992. An odd result for year of discontent.

opening remarks at Frontiers of Democracy 2016

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We meet at a sobering moment. This conference is a descendent of a meeting organized in 2008 called No Better Time. Today does not seem like “no better time.”

The most thoughtful predictions give a man who has been called a fascist by senior members of his own party a 30% chance of becoming president. If the doctor gave you a 30% chance of succumbing to a deadly disease within the next five months, you wouldn’t draw a lot of comfort from the thought that you’re more likely to survive. Like that patient, our republic is in danger.

Meanwhile, fascist candidate Marianne Le Pen leads French polls for president, drawing twice as much support as the incumbent. Strongly paternalistic and antidemocratic nationalist leaders—all strong men—already dominate most of the nations in an arc from China and Russia to Hungry. Venezuelans are fighting in supermarkets for loaves of bread for their children because of a crisis of governance. The Arab Spring has turned into five consecutive years of repression in the whole region and slaughter in Syria, where 400,000 have died with no end in sight. And here in the United States, a man can murder 49 human beings because they are gay. Some are inspired by the sit-in in Congress, but hardly anyone really expects the government to make changes that will reduce the chances of the same thing happening again.

Bertold Brecht wrote a poem in 1939 entitled “To Future Generations”:

Truly I live in dark times!
A sincere word is folly. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. If you’re laughing,
You haven’t heard
The bad news yet.
What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds,
When, if you’re calmly crossing the street,
It means your friends can’t reach you
Who are in need?
…

This we knew:
Even hatred of humiliation
Distorts the features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be kind.
But you, when
one can help another,
Think of us
Forgivingly.

This is the context in which we gather for Frontiers. Indeed, it could be said that there is no better time to meet

We are hardly alone, of course. We have many allies around the world. In fact, right at this minute, by sheer coincidence, a conference has begun at the Central European University in Budapest entitled “Frontiers of Democracy.” Seeing a photo of their sign, texted by a friend, I thought of another poem written in 1939.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages …

Perhaps we can send some light in the direction of Budapest and many other places around the world.

I have given a dark picture, albeit with some ironic lights. None of that implies that we can’t have fun. Working together to build a better world is a source of satisfaction, even joy. We can exemplify the pleasure and humor that comes from civic life at its best. I hope you will enjoy every aspect of Frontiers, especially your interactions with one another. If we let civic life turn dreary, few will chose to participate, and politics will be left to the ruthless.

At the same time, we must be profoundly serious. The stakes couldn’t be much higher. We must squarely face unresolved problems, such as how to expand civic values and practices to the scale of nations and the globe, how to tap the power of social movements, and how to define and confront evil.

We must do more and better, and we must change fast. We have a lot to accomplish in the next 48 hours. Let’s get to work.

pragmatism and the problem of evil

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Discussing Dewey in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies yesterday, I (and, I think, several colleagues) had the sudden recognition that American pragmatists tend not to deal with evil very persuasively. In The Public and its Problems, Dewey writes:

Nevertheless, the current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and that this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself shares in selecting its governors and determining their policies, are a deposit of fact left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake of doctrines and forms, however transitory the latter. They are not the whole of the democratic idea, but they express it in its political phase. Belief in this political aspect … marks a well-attested conclusion from historic facts. (p. 146)

Dewey’s idea is that we can’t justify processes like electing leaders a priori. There is no natural right to vote; it doesn’t depend on a social contract. Rather, it’s a “deposit of fact” left from human learning over many centuries. Voting exists because we have learned to vote. Fortunately, that process is progressive and beneficial: the current has steadily flowed toward democracy. It is crucial not to fetishize any given process or right, because we will come up with better ones later. When we think of documents like the Constitution, Dewey says, “the words ‘sacred’ and sanctity’ come readily to our lips” (pp. 169-70), interfering with our critical reasoning and our ability to learn from experience.

These words were published in 1927. About 14 million people were sentenced to the Gulag from 1929 to 1953. Auschwitz opened in 1940. The current was not exactly steady in the direction of democracy. Robert Zaretsky has a beautiful piece in today’s Times about how not being occupied during World War II made Americans–probably white Americans more than others–“stupid.”  According to Zaretsky, Czeslaw Milosz was fairly indulgent of our stupidity, although he diagnosed it clearly. It is precisely the kind of foolishness suggested by the first sentence in Dewey’s quotation above.

What if we said the following instead? Human beings torture each other, enslave each other, carpet-bomb each other, and intentionally wipe out whole communities. This happens often. Enough: it has to stop. Translated into constitutional terms, “thou shalt not torture people” turns into a right to due process and rule of law. We must do our best to make such rights sacred and nonnegotiable. They are not literally sacred, in the sense that God or nature decreed them. But they are bulwarks against cruelty, which is the worst of us, to paraphrase Judith Shklar’s Liberalism of Fear. When everything is left open to experimentation and learning, people may spend hundreds of years “learning” that they can own other people or that Jews are blood-sucking parasites. We should rather treat as sacred and unamendable such passages as Article One of the German Constitution:

(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority. (2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.

I think that there are pragmatist replies to this kind of liberalism, but I can’t be satisfied with them unless they explicitly invoke and address the problem of evil. I’m worried about this kind of theme in Dewey (ably summarized by John M. Savage in John Dewey’s Liberalism):

Dewey

I’m all for cultivating democratic habits, but that’s not the only bulwark against tyranny. It’s also helpful to ban tyranny and to make that prohibition permanent.

register now for the National Conference on Citizenship

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Strengthening America’s Civic Health: Developing Strategies for Enhancing Civic Life and Improving Communities 

Peter, 

Please join us for this working convening in Washington DC, co-hosted by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. For more information and to take advantage of our early bird registration, please follow this link.

We think of civic health as the way that communities are organized to define and address public problems. This convening will focus on how to strengthen civic health to aid the efforts of those working everyday on their communities’ most pressing challenges.

This working convening will be informed by you—individuals, agencies, and institutions who are working to support engaged, resilient communities. With a focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion, we are inviting your feedback to help shape this important discussion in October through the following avenues:

  • Connecting the Dots: The Role of Civic Health in Community Problem Solving: You are invited to join a webinar conversation to provide input on how best to enhance consideration of the relationship between civic health and the challenging issues you face. Webinars will be held July 11th and 14th at 2pm Eastern. Register here.
  • Community Conversations on Civic Life: Together with the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), NCoC will support a series of community conversations on civic life. More details will be available soon.
  • Pre-Convening Survey: Together with our partners at the Tisch College of Civic Life, we will gather feedback from registrants that will help inform content and shape the discussion in October. All registrants will receive an invitation to offer their input.

Register now to receive the early bird registration rate of $150.

 

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.