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.

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 Ch?vez 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 Ch?vez.

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 Ch?vez’ 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 Ch?vez 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?

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.

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;

There the great city stands.

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.