political reform on a base of civic renewal

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I have not seen any news reports yet, but today the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Communications Workers of America, and the NAACP had planned to announce a common agenda on democratic reform.

This is a welcome development, because they contribute grassroots constituencies, but they are likely to focus exclusively on formal political reforms, such as the filibuster, campaign finance, and the voting process. I could not agree more that these reforms are needed–I began my career working full-time for Common Cause and have written a whole book about campaign reform and related measures. But I think civic renewal is essential to political reform, and the two must be pursued together. That is true because …

  1. A broad base of active citizens is no longer available to demand beneficial political reform. When John Gardner announced Common Cause in 1970, 100,000 people immediately joined and began funding the new organization. They had habits of reading newspapers, joining and leading associations, and trusting the government enough to try to reform it. That base is now much smaller and more fragmented.
  2. Many of the proposed reforms would require active, skillful, committed, and organized citizens. For instance, disclosing campaign finance data will do no good unless independent citizens are ready to use it for constructive purposes.
  3. Even reformed governments cannot solve our most serious problems alone. Solutions require active and organized citizens. For example, in his magisterial new book, Robert Sampson finds that neighborhoods with more civic engagement have dramatically better educational outcomes, even though they are part of the same school system. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
  4. As James Madison argued, the people are capable of selecting representatives who will deliberate about the common good—but only if the people themselves have some experience deliberating and governing. Otherwise, they will not know what good government looks like. Madison cited “good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people” as means of enlightening the public. To those means, we should explicitly add experiences in governing voluntary associations and local communities.

The traditional structure of American civil society has eroded badly, as marked by serious declines in the proportion of people who attend meetings, work with neighbors on common problems, belong to voluntary associations, participate in the governance of religious congregations, follow the news, trust other people, and trust institutions.

But a new civil society is being invented. It is composed of groups that organize local deliberations; community development corporations and land trusts that govern public assets; broad-based community organizing groups; the national and community service programs (insofar as they allow their volunteers to influence their agendas); innovative civic education programs, from kindergarten through graduate school; universities that serve as community anchors; citizen-generated news sources; municipal governments that employ collaborative governance or participatory budgeting; watershed councils, restorative justice, and many other streams of civic practice.

This work needs to be in closer dialogue with advocacy for political reform. That is a goal of the Campaign for Stronger Democracy, a particularly important node in the overall network for democratic reform. The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, CWA, and NAACP are bolstering one wing of the reform movement. It is important, however, to retain the overall balance.

WaterFire and the aesthetic dimension of civic renewal

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(Providence, RI) At an Everyday Democracy board meeting here today, we met Barnaby Evans, the charismatic founder and leader of WaterFire Providence. Every couple of weeks, the downtown of this old city is transformed by the lighting of fires that float above the river. Boats bearing fires, flowers, and people also pass by, and the crowds are entertained and challenged by performances–music, dance, real funerals, libations, and other displays that evoke the myriad cultures of the state. Literally millions of people have observed and participated, and thousands help as volunteers.

I draw a few general lessons:

    1. The success of WaterFire depends on a fruitful interaction between a visionary individual with a non-profit corporation, on one hand, and all the performers and active audience members who use his framework to express and exchange their own ideas. Without either the centralized control or the open space for public creativity, the whole would not work.
    2. Important civic ideas (in this case, diversity and unity) can be communicated without words. WaterFire generally discourages narration and explanation in favor of movement, music, and symbol.
    3. It is effective to draw people into a public space with a glamorous, marquee event and then expose them to much more challenging and interactive events and activities.
    4. Attractive public spaces strengthen public life. The general degradation of American public buildings undermines civil society. But a beautiful public space can be created at relatively low cost through regular events. To be sure, downtown Providence had assets before Barnaby Evans founded WaterFire: 18th-century steeples and roofs on the skyline, and a tidal river in the heart of town. But downtown was generally considered ugly and deserted. Lighting the fires transformed the space immediately, and since then, the millions of visitors who have come to watch have encouraged private and public construction. Thus the durable infrastructure of downtown Providence is better because of the ephemeral fires.

Like the anti-fascist movement of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement of 1950-1965, a 21st century movement for democracy would need its own aesthetic and symbolic language. It would need more than programs and policies–also images, stories, and sounds. WaterFire is by no means the only example, but in its openness to mass public engagement, its commitment to volunteer labor (even if paid workers would be more efficient), its enthusiasm for cultural diversity, and its effort to create one common public space, it is exemplary.

Young Voices in Rhode Island

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(Providence, RI) I am here for several meetings. Right now I am with members of Young Voices, a statewide organization that involves teenagers in research and advocacy on school reform. The organization’s homepage displays lots of examples of the members’ formal testimony before state and local boards and committees. Of the 20 young people with me today, almost half have given such testimony. They are practicing how to write and deliver testimony right now, as part of their Leadership Transformation Academy (LTA). They also conduct impressive research on the climate and policies of their schools. Participating with Young Voices is a powerful learning experience for the kids (who are poised and effective–and quick to engage me as an adult visitor); but even more promising is the program’s impact on the school systems of the state.

how conservatives can reclaim the civic ideal

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In constructing a position for one’s own side, one must always debunk a caricature of the opposition. That seems to be an iron law of political rhetoric. Thus I don’t take it too seriously or complain too strongly when Yuval Levin argues that the “progressive view of government has long involved the effort to shrink and clear the space between the individual and the state.”

In a Weekly Standard article, Levin asserts that both the Democrats and the Republicans in the 2012 campaign recognized only the state and individuals. Both missed the value of “religious congregations, civic associations, fraternal groups, and charities, especially in providing help to the poor.” The Democrats, in particular, “fail[ed] to grasp” the value of civil society.

Although that may be an accurate portrait of some liberal political theorists (see my critique of Martha Nussbaum), it is manifestly not true of President Obama (a former member of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America and a theorist of community action), nor is it a fair description of the administration’s policies, which tend to favor independent local groups, from local health centers and charter schools to service programs like City Year and YouthBuild. Obama adopted the position that Levin recommends, about as explicitly as one can, at the conclusion of his Convention speech:

We know that churches and charities can often make more of a difference than a poverty program alone. We don’t want handouts for people who refuse to help themselves, and we certainly don’t want bailouts for banks that break the rules. … We don’t think the government can solve all of our problems, but we don’t think the government is the source of all of our problems.

Nor is Levin right that the “ballooning growth of government” has damaged civil society. On the contrary, the correlation between the size and robustness of independent voluntary groups and the size of government is positive, whether at the state or international level. Unfortunately, the government is generally shrinking along with civil society in the US.

All that being said, Levin is trying to restore to conservatism a genuine respect for voluntary associations, self-sufficient and self-governing communities, and “government as a preserver and protector of the space in which our society thrives—of the social architecture of American life.”

This is all to the good. We need a conservative movement that offers positive ideals (including positive but genuinely conservative ideas about government). We need conservatives who can enter public deliberations, making arguments that can appeal to everyone, including the poor. And specifically, we need conservative voices in the debate about civil society.

After all, enthusiasm for local, voluntary, explicitly-value laden and tradition-bearing associations is a conservative heritage, although nowadays its strongest proponents are leftists like James C. Scott. It would benefit American civil society if the parties began debating how best to support voluntary associational life—whether by shrinking the state (as Levin argues—although that’s not his only proposal), by directly funding social enterprises (as the Obama Administration has done), or by other means entirely.

In this debate, the conservative side would defend associations against regulations that restrict their value-choices, such as anti-discrimination laws applied to religious congregations. Conservatives would also defend local groups that make conservative choices, such as charter schools that teach creationism. For their part, liberals would emphasize the material needs of grassroots groups and the benefits of government aid and would defend the liberal decisions of local groups (such as charter schools that teach gay history). The net effect could be quite good.

At a recent Hudson Institute event on Civil Society and the Future of Conservatism, participants discussed Yuval Levin’s article along with two of Harry Boyte’s recent pieces. During the campaign, Boyte had argued that the Republicans were forgetting the ideal of a commonwealth in favor of a pure rhetoric of privatization. He also argued that the language of work—much invoked during the campaign—could create common ground between right and left. Work is not just a matter of holding a job and collecting a paycheck; it creates public goods and builds the commonwealth. People want to work and they can do valuable work in the public, private, or nonprofit sectors. But meaningful, productive, collaborative work is scarce, and liberals and conservatives should offer competing ideas for how to change that.

Democracy in Motion

(Dayton, OH) I strongly recommend Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement (Oxford University Press, 2012), edited by Tina Nabatchi, John Gastil, G. Michael Weiksner, and Matt Leighninger.

The authors address most of the basic questions for the field of deliberative democracy, including “Who Deliberates?, “How People Communicate During Deliberative Events,” “Does Deliberation Make Better Citizens?” and the impact of deliberation on communities and on policy.

The idea for this volume was cooked up–appropriately–in a deliberative meeting of scholars and practitioners that I participated in. One of the priorities that the whole group selected was to write a multi-authored book covering the fundamental issues of the field. It is exciting to see that this collaboratively-developed idea is now an Oxford University Press book. It really is the “state-of-the art” and offers, in my opinion, the most comprehensive coverage of many basic topics. For instance, I’ve noted that there isn’t much research on how people actually reason in public settings (what kinds of arguments they offer and respond to), but Laura W. Black has a very helpful chapter on just that topic.