Everyday Politics

Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life

Harry C. Boyte

• Editore: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812204216
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Civics & Citizenship

Increasingly a spectator sport, electoral politics have become bitterly polarized by professional consultants and lobbyists and have been boiled down to the distributive mantra of "who gets what." In Everyday Politics, Harry Boyte transcends partisan politics to offer an alternative. He demonstrates how community-rooted activities reconnect citizens to engaged, responsible public life, and not just on election day but throughout the year. Boyte demonstrates that this type of activism has a rich history and strong philosophical foundation. It rests on the stubborn faith that the talents and insights of ordinary citizens—from nursery school to nursing home—are crucial elements in public life.Drawing on concrete examples of successful public work projects accomplished by diverse groups of people across the nation, Boyte demonstrates how citizens can master essential political skills, such as understanding issues in public terms, mapping complex issues of institutional power to create alliances, raising funds, communicating, and negotiating across lines of difference. He describes how these skills can be used to address the larger challenges of our time, thereby advancing a renewed vision of democratic society and freedom in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1

The Stirrings of a New Politics

The American political culture is rooted in two contrasting conceptions of the American political order, both of which can be traced back to the earliest settlement of the country. In the first, the political order is conceived as a marketplace. . . . In the second, the political order is conceived to be a commonwealth. . . . These two conceptions have exercised an influence on government and politics throughout American history, sometimes in conflict and sometimes by complementing one another . . . with marketplace notions contributing to shaping the vision of commonwealth and commonwealth ideals being given a preferred position in the marketplace.

—Daniel Elazar

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.”¹ Today, politics, as conventionally understood, illustrates the unspoken dangers in Moynihan’s observation. Current politics reflects broad cultural trends that point not toward success but toward social failure.

Elections are the only way in which whole societies can decide about the future. Yet increasingly over the last generation, electoral debates have become polarized and the outcomes less productive. Today’s problems— whether corporate scandals or global warming—often quickly become yesterday’s forgotten headlines.

This unproductive politics contrasts with older, richer senses of what politics can mean. Politics, when engaged in by the broad citizenry, is the way a society as a whole negotiates, argues about, and understands its past and creates its present and its future. Such expansive politics depends on a feeling of ownership by citizens. And it requires citizens to have many settings for interaction and engagement with each other across lines of difference, beyond elections alone. Today, the “red” and “blue” electoral map of America marks an electorate bitterly divided by cultural patterns and life styles as well as by partisanship. The nation urgently needs a politics that engages citizens across these lines, just as politics has largely become a spectator sport run by professionals with disdain for ordinary people.

Joan Didion details this pattern in her book, Political Fictions, based on her New York Review of Books essays on American political campaigns from 1988 to 2000. Among most Democratic candidates and their staffs, she found a palpable assumption of superiority. “I recall pink-cheeked young aides on the Dukakis campaign referring to themselves, innocent of irony and so of history, as ‘the best and the brightest,’” she writes. Conservative pundits and politicians were as arrogant.²

“Given their obstinate lack of interest in the subject, asking a group of average Americans about politics is like asking a group of stevedores to solve a problem in astrophysics,” wrote Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor of the Weekly Standard in 1996. “Before long they’re explaining not merely that the moon is made of cheese, but what kind of cheese it is.” The impeachment controversy of the late 1990s, according to Didion’s account, illustrated how widespread the political establishment’s sense of superiority and detachment from most Americans has become.³

A 1998 New York Times editorial by Senator Alan Simpson argued that Republicans’ failure to win impeachment would have little consequence, since “the attention span of Americans is ‘which movie is coming out next month?’ ” But the impeachment debate revealed a wider pattern. “What remains novel, and unexplained, was the increasingly histrionic insistence of the political establishment that it stood apart from, and indeed above, the country that had until recently been considered its validation,” argued Didion. “Under the lights at CNN and MSNBC and the Sunday shows, it became routine to declare oneself remote from ‘them,’ or ‘out there.’ ”⁴

Politicians’ rhetoric illustrates the erosion of the role of citizens in public life. President Bush invoked citizenship often, but he defined the idea in private ways, as individual acts of kindness. America’s greatness, he argued in his convention speech in 2000, is to be found “in small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial.”⁵ Yet after the attacks of September 11, 2001, his call for “all of us [to] become a September 11 volunteer, by making a commitment to service in our communities” turned citizenship into a sentimental footnote to the undertakings—the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq—through which his administration sought to reshape the Middle East and the world.⁶ In less turbulent times, former President Clinton put citizens on the therapy couch. “I feel your pain,” was his mantra.

Politicians express cultural dynamics as well as shape them, and political language is no exception. Broad trends feed the problems with politics and the loss of a public life. Public spaces like community centers and lodges (or, in Robert Putnam’s famous example, bowling leagues) that used to bring people together across lines of difference have eroded. We are, increasingly, a society of gated communities, not only of neighborhoods but also of imaginations. Interests, ideologies, races, and classes separate us from each other. Housing designs reflect the pattern: front porches used to connect homes to the public world. Today, they have been replaced by recreation rooms in the basement, or decks in the back yard.

At the same time, in the last generation, weekend therapy sessions and television talk shows, the total quality management movement and the language of self-esteem have mingled with varieties of New Age phenomena. All this has generated a personalized culture of encounter among strangers. Today’s public stage is often a fantasy world of instantly shared vulnerabilities. Quick fixes take the place of substantial engagement with others unlike ourselves.

The terms of the marketplace, giving a price tag to everything, have spread to the crevices of our society. “Some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s Mastercard,” the television ad declares. The number of things money cannot buy seems constantly to shrink.

Superficial sloganeering, domination by marketplace modes of thought, and bitter sectarian divisions, all larger cultural patterns reflected in election campaigns, made being political an accusation of choice in the 2002 elections, even while political professionals thought themselves a breed apart. Yet it is worth recalling that Moynihan also offered a redemptive alternative: “The central liberal truth,” he said, “is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”⁷

Everyday Politics rests on the conviction that politics, in the longer term, beyond the elections of 2004, holds resources to reverse the negative directions of our society and to renew democracy. The question is what a redemptive politics might look like.

For all the travails of what passes as politics, the United States in the last generation has also been a laboratory for creative civic experiments, with parallels in other societies. These have generated an everyday politics of negotiation and collaboration that is more concerned with solving problems and creating public goods than with placing blame. This different kind of politics is rooted in local cultures, not only places but also cultures of institutions where people encounter each other on a regular, face-to-face basis. It is philosophical and practical, not ideological or partisan, based on values such as participation, justice, community, and plurality. And it is not owned or controlled by professional politicians or by professional activists. Everyday politics is of the citizen, in the original Greek meaning of the term, politikos. Interestingly, despite the rationale that the professionalization of politics is inevitable in a complex, information-saturated world, the experiences of the last generation have shown dramatically that everyday politics, when it taps and develops the public talents of ordinary citizens, can be far more effective and productive than politics dominated by experts. Everyday politics has grown under the surface of mainstream attention across lines of partisan and other differences around tough public problems, from housing shortages to environmental hazards.

It is the central argument of Everyday Politics that such hands-on, accessible, and community-rooted politics is an alternative to politics as usual with far ranging possibilities. Everyday politics reconnects citizens and public life. It holds the potential to re-knit the two strands of populism—progressive challenges to corporate power and conservative challenges to liberal professionals—that have bitterly divided America into blue regions and red regions on the electoral map. Across the world, everyday politics can generate the civic energy and talent to address the multiplying problems that governments alone cannot solve, but which cannot be solved without government. It is also a democratizing politics, the way to revitalize the public life of institutions, from schools to universities, religious congregations to public health clinics and neighborhood associations, where a narrow, meritocratic professionalism now stifles citizen creativity.

To develop and spread such a politics will require a continuing process of learning across national boundaries. But the core elements are already clear.

In the first instance, politics needs to be owned by the people, not professionals. It is rooted in everyday settings, not in government or elections or mobilization campaigns. It is thus populist, in the sense that Thomas Jefferson once argued, resting on the premise that the only safe repository of the powers of the society are the people themselves. Politics is the practice of power wielding to get things done in complex, heterogeneous societies.⁸

In the second instance, everyday politics is also civic. It weds concrete self-interests to constructive work that contributes to the life of communities and the well-being of the society. This civic aspect means understanding politics not only in distributive terms, as a fight over scarce resources—who gets what—but in productive terms as well, about problem solving and culture-creating. Everyday politics adds to as well as allocates our public wealth.

Over centuries, the public world had vitality in America largely because it was felt to be the product of the cooperative but also self-interested, practical, down to earth work of citizens. This was what David Mathews has called the “sweaty and muscular” tradition of citizenship, in which people built schools and roads, libraries and cultural festivals.⁹ E. J. Dionne and Kayla Me1tzer Drogosz get at this sense of citizenship in the introduction to the Brookings Institution volume, United We Serve: National Service and the Future of Citizenship. They propose that when service takes the form of public work, it “is the essence of the democratic project.” Such public work means keeping in mind larger civic ends. “Public work entails not altruism, or not only altruism, but enlightened self-interest—a desire to build a society in which the serving citizen wants to live.”¹⁰

Public work is central to the idea of productive, everyday politics. Such politics means change in individuals’ identities and practices as well as social change. It leads to people seeing themselves as the co-creators of democracy, not simply as customers or clients, voters, protestors, or volunteers. To highlight the creative, educative, and productive dimensions of politics, public work can be best defined as sustained effort by a mix of people who solve public problems or create goods, material or cultural, of general benefit. Public work is work that is visible, open to inspection, whose significance is widely recognized, and which can be carried out by people whose interests, views, and backgrounds may be quite different.

Historically, as people saw themselves creating American democracy, they became more public people, with the habits, virtues, identities, knowledge, and public reputations needed to make and sustain the public world. James Weldon Johnson, an architect of the Harlem Renaissance, captured the way the cultural work of blacks in Harlem, expressing the interplay between public and self-creation, also forged a powerful resource for the public struggle against racial injustice. “Harlem is more than a community; it is a large-scale laboratory experiment,” wrote Johnson. “Through his artistic efforts the Negro is smashing immemorial stereotypes.” Johnson saw the black American as “impressing upon the national mind the conviction that he is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature; that he has given as well as received; that his gifts have been not only obvious and material, but also spiritual and aesthetic.” The creative contributions of African Americans expressed in the Harlem Renaissance meant that the black American was to be seen as “a contributor to the nation’s common cultural store; in fine, he is helping to form American civilization.¹¹

Practices of public work, everyday nonprofessional politics, and democracy as a way of life profoundly impacted the political culture of the first half of the twentieth century. They reemerged again in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. Stirrings of their resurfacing appear again in the twenty-first century. But in recent decades, these themes have also sharply eroded in the political culture, in ways that need elaboration.

From Producer to Consumer

Mark Ritson illustrates the erosion of public life in his study of the Minnesota State Fair, held each year at the University of Minnesota. True to the university’s land grant history and its partnerships, especially through university extension, with rural farming communities, the State Fair embodied productive, work centered themes. As one example, for instance, each year young people from 4-H clubs across the state would showcase their baked goods and livestock as well as their community betterment projects. 4-H arts and theater presentations were attended by tens of thousands of people.

Using quantitative and qualitative indices, Ritson shows how the State Fair changed its focus in the 1950s from production to consumption. Ritson compared premium list data (cash prizes awarded to exhibitors for winning displays of production skill) to revenue from concession stands, food tents, and commercial stalls for the period 1883 to 1995. He also conducted a detailed thematic analysis of speeches, brochures, news reports, and other material to discover “what did the fair mean to the people who organized and attended the event, and how did these meanings change over time?”

Ritson describes three distinct pe...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Developing a Theory and Practice of Everyday Politics
• 1 The Stirrings of a New Politics
• 2 Populisms
• 3 The Growth of Everyday Politics
• 4 Citizenship as Public Work
• 5 Citizen Education as a Craft, Not a Program
• 6 The Jane Addams School for Democracy
• 7 Professions as Public Work
• 8 “Architects of Democracy”
• 9 Spreading Everyday Politics
• 10 Freedom
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments