Monthly Archives: December 2006

a healthy debate about civic renewal

I believe that current forms of politics are, in general, too manipulative. Americans recognize that they are being focus-grouped, polled, canvassed, frightened, divided, titillated, and provoked; and they don’t like it. They want opportunities to share ideas and develop solutions.

However, when we ask why citizens have been sidelined and what to do about it, we offer various answers that reflect our political views. That’s fine; there are many valid “flavors” of civic renewal. Nothing would be more useful than a competition or debate among political parties and candidates who vied to put “citizens back at the center.”

Examples:

A libertarian version might favor vouchers so that citizens could create and run their own schools. It might recommend allowing residents of urban neighborhoods to form associations that could purchase their own municipal services. And it would strive to remove regulations on nonprofit organizations.

A cultural-conservative version might strive to reduce the influence of courts and the federal government so that citizens would be more involved at the local level in debates about, for example, teaching evolution. This version would support civic education that emphasizes patriotism, knowledge of the Constitution, service, and responsibility. It would recognize military service, including ROTC and the National Guard, as forms of civic participation. And it might favor public funding for faith-based social services.

A progressive version might favor unions, community development corporations, land trusts, co-ops, and other alternative economic institutions that encourage popular participation. It would emphasize electoral reform and “alternative” (i.e., non-commercial) media. This progressive version would support civic education that emphasizes critical thinking, political skills, and social justice.

A deliberative version would be resolutely neutral about ideology but might support investing public funds in public deliberation (both online and face-to-face), granting power to citizens’ advisory panels, and providing civic education that emphasizes deliberative skills.

new work from AmericaSpeaks

I’m especially proud to be a member of the board of AmericaSpeaks at this moment, when the organization has completed two remarkable projects.

In Northeast Ohio, deep in the Rust Belt, there is an urgent need for vision, coordination, and civic participation to reverse decades of economic decline. (I know that general scene from my own experience growing up in Syracuse, NY.) AmericaSpeaks recently convened 21,000 citizens of 16 northeastern Ohio counties to deliberate about their region’s future. “Voices and Choices” was an intricate project with numerous components and partners. The final report is here.

In New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina, profound controversies about values, tradeoffs, and cultural identities immediately arose. There was a crucial need for public deliberation, or else decisions would be made by elites–or mere inertia would prevail. As it turned out, the various layers of government did little to engage citizens. But AmericaSpeaks planned and launched an elaborate series of public deliberations involving 2,500 citizens. It took courage to begin this project without firm funding or commitments from local institutions. No one else was ready to step into the breach, and AmericaSpeaks succeeded. The organization produced an overall report from “Community Congress II.” Readers of this blog may be especially interested in the work with youth; see the video report of deliberations among New Orleans high school students. See also Joe Goldman’s personal report on “The Democracy Movement.”

This work can be filed under “deliberation” and “reflective public opinion,” but it is at least as valuable as community organizing and civic education.

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.

an embassy from Hugo Ch?vez

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?

universities, civic engagement, and the global market

If I were asked why most universities do not put a lot of effort into civic education or civic work in their own communities, I would say that it’s because they compete for students. Prospective students and their parents want credentials that are valuable in the job market. What affects the value of a diploma is not what the student learns in college, but how competitive it was to enter the university in the first place. Thus admissions offices do most of the economic work of universities, by selecting and sorting applicants.

However, to attract top students, universities need the assets that enhance their reputations, which include famous and sought-after faculty and well endowed facilities. Universities do whatever it takes to draw top faculty and donors, and neither group is particularly concerned about civic education or engagement. In any case, institutions make few important decisions about their own priorities. The critical decisions are made elsewhere in the academic labor market. For example, faculty are promoted when other institutions try to lure them away. Thus, even if a university decided to reward professors for civic engagement, the actual rewards would go to those with high market value.

Thorstein Veblen already recognized this situation in 1918 (see The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men). But conditions are worse in a globally competitive economy wherein risk has been individualized and each student feels that his or her economic future will be determined by credentials–not by family networks, unions, welfare systems, or even genuine learning.

Why then do I not argue, at least in passing, that the problem for civic engagement is contemporary capitalism? (Or I could say “globalization,” or “neoliberalism”.)

First, because I think we can fight the problem I have outlined above without battling capitalism. We can organize faculty who are dissatisfied with a life shorn of civic or public significance. We can bring colleges and universities together in consortia such as Campus Compact to resist competitive pressures. We can develop forms of civic education that appeal to prospective students because they may confer job skills. And we can press for changes in goverment policies, such as the proportion of federal work study grants that are reserved for community-based jobs.

Second, I am not willing to call capitalism “the problem,” because it seems to me to combine a mix of positive and negative features. Global capitalism undermines traditional cultures and democratic sovereignty (see last Tuesday’s post), but it also unleashes human creativity and freedom. A university insulated from the market might be a refuge for high culture, critical thought, and civic engagement. Or it might just consume public funds and tuition dollars without any accountability for outcomes.