Monthly Archives: March 2016
What Is Democracy?
What Is Democracy?
What Is Democracy?
What Is Democracy?
So, "what is democracy?" And related, why, in the American context, did democracy have overtones of immensity? "A word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened...a great word, whose history remains unwritten," as Walt Whitman put it in Democratic Vistas.
Democracy means agency, citizen power, capacity of people to act to build a common life. In a time of bitter electoral division, when tools replace substance, remembering the larger meaning is crucial.
This brings me back to the "Citizenship Education Program," CEP, in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King's organization which I worked for from 1963 to 1965.
CEP organized "citizenship schools" across the south, informal learning sites drawing from Danish folk school traditions. Myles Horton, co-founder of Highlander Folk School which birthed the citizenship school movement, travelled through Denmark and was inspired by the folk school philosophy, "education for life." N.F. S. Grundtvig, the Danish philosopher of folk schools, saw them as sites for "the fostering of all our vital efforts." Grundtvig emphasized individual awakening and the potential of all occupations to contribute to a flourishing society.
Citizenship schools, like Meier's schools, were based on respect for the intelligence and other talents of everyday citizens. They included, of course, tools like elections for struggle against segregation. Restrictive voting disempowered people. More broadly they emphasized developing agency, capacity of people of all backgrounds for action on collective problems of all kinds (at one point a group of poor whites led by "Preacher Red" attended the Dorchester training center in Georgia, as Dorothy Cotton, SCLC's CEP director, describes in her book If Your Back's Not Bent).
Thus citizenship schools taught nonviolence, community organizing skills, literacy to help people overcome restrictive voting procedures. They were full of singing. Like Grundtvig, they conveyed love of country built through the labors of ordinary people, strange to postmodern, cynical ears ("We love our land, America!"), while also identifying with freedom struggles around the world. They described figures in black history who made people proud. Overall, the curriculum stressed the potential of people to act. I have the SCLC Citizenship Handbook from 1964 and look at it often.
Septima Clark, an early teacher and philosopher of citizenship schools, said that the purpose was "To broaden the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepen the concept to include every relationship." Here, the citizen is a co-creator of an empowering democratic way of life.
Dorothy Cotton sings a song which conveys this idea: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Everyone has potential. There is no outside savior. Education is about "freeing the powers," a phrase of Jane Addams. Citizenship schools are "freedom schools."
Democracy as agency is radically different than the shriveled sense of "democracy" in today's public discussion, where tools substitute for substance. The larger meaning is hollowed out. The collapse of content feeds a diminished view of human potential, a mood of scarcity, a sense that we're in a dog-eat-dog fight for shares of a shrinking pie. All the candidates for president on both sides define democracy as elections, though there are hints at something more -- Bernie Sanders' "political revolution," John Kasich's reminder that Republicans and Democrats are neighbors.
It's helpful to go back to the Greeks. According to Josiah Ober, the Greek classicist, the Greeks saw democracy as agency, the capacity to act (Ober's book, Democracy and Knowledge, is one of my favorites). In his essay "The Original Meaning of 'Democracy': Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule" (Constellations 2008) Ober analyzes the roots of "democracy," demos, whole people, and kratia, power.
In modern usage, observes Ober, power is assumed to mean "a voting rule for determining the will of the majority." But he shows that for the Greeks "demokratia ...more capaciously, means 'the empowered demos ... collective strength and ability to act...and, indeed, to reconstitute the public realm through action."
We are the ones we've been waiting for. Peter Levine, a leader in our movement called "civic studies," based on agency and citizens as co-creators, has a book from Oxford by this title.
It will be great to see schools integrate democratic decision making into cultures and practices which have agency-building as their aim. What might schools - and societies - look like with a view of democracy that means human potentialities for action? And work to realize it.
The Need for Engagement in Higher Education
Where we vote affects how we vote. So where should we vote?
According to a summary article by Ben Pryor in The Conversation/Scientific American, people’s votes are affected by the voting location. Voting in a church “prime[s] significantly higher conservative attitudes—and negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians.” On the other hand, “individuals voting in Arizona schools were more likely to support a ballot measure that increased the state’s sale tax to finance education.”
Pryor draws the conclusion that we should vote by mail–which, for most people, would mean voting at home. One objection is that home isn’t a neutral place. It will bring its own biases. I don’t know whether voting at home has been experimentally compared to voting at (say) a school, but let’s imagine that being home makes people more resistant to taxes. Why is that the most authentic, or most rational, or most autonomous perspective? To prefer the home seems to assume a rather contentious view of the relation between the public and private sphere. In political theorists’ terms, it’s a hyper-liberal view as opposed to a republican or communitarian one. Arguably, you should vote where you are primed to think about other people.
But isn’t it problematic that a church, for instance–with all the deliberate persuasive power of its iconography and architecture–should be the required context for voting in a secular republic? Well, maybe. But I don’t accept the view that citizens can be or should be disembodied and culture-free. The Progressive movement that achieved the secret ballot envisioned the ideal voter as a rational calculator of best interests (either his own interests or the nation’s). Progressive voting reforms were probably helpful, on the whole, but the guiding ideal seems both naive and a little unattractive. What, after all, is in our interests once we strip away values and group-memberships?
The opposite view–just for the sake of argument–is that we construct communities that are redolent of values. That’s why they are full of religious buildings, public structures with inscriptions and allusive architectural styles, businesses that promise various versions of the good life, and even natural spaces that we interpret as having moral significance. Communities govern themselves by making decisions, and a vote is one important moment for decision-making. Each person’s vote is profoundly influenced by the community context. Yet individuals push back. While the average voter may be influenced in a conservative direction by voting in a church, some are probably alienated by the context and pushed in the opposite way.
On every day, not just on Election Day, the community changes as people build, alter, and decorate its physical spaces and communicate in more ephemeral ways. For instance, the church in which a polling place may be located was built by people who wanted to change local values and commitments. They were not satisfied with whatever religious structures and institutions already existed, but chose to make a new one. That was part of an endless process of community-formation. The material with which we reason and choose is given to us by the community so far, but we can change it one piece at a time. The real me doesn’t emerge when I am inside the home that my family has privately decorated. I am really “me” everywhere I go, and that means that I am always being shaped by my context and often pushing back.
See also: on voting by mail and voting and punishment: Foucault, biopower, and modern elections.
The ‘There’ There
In 1933, after visiting her hometown of Oakland, CA, Gertrude Stein remarked that “there is no there there.”
Among many in the much maligned city, accustomed to defending themselves against such abrasive attacks, the remark has often been taken as a slight: as if Oakland were such a wasteland as to be little more than a desolate limbo.
Our more privileged neighbors across the bay have certainly said worse.
But this reading misrepresents the sentiment.
Stein had moved to Paris in 1903. She returned to her hometown thirty years later to find the city developed and her childhood home destroyed.
She wrote:
…anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there. …but not there, there is no there there. … Ah Thirteenth Avenue was the same it was shabby and overgrown. … Not of course the house, the house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not there any longer existing, what was the use …
Stein lived in Oakland from six to seventeen. When she returned she found it was not the city she had left behind – and she was not the person who had left it.
There was no there there.
Stein writes of the loss of place as the loss of of something more – the loss of memory, the loss of identity, a meaningful loss of self.
“When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing,” Stein writes.
And then, one day, you return to find that this thing which you knew so well has become another thing.
You don’t recognize it; and, surprisingly, it doesn’t recognize you.
Or, perhaps worse yet, you do recognize it. You know every corner, every nuanced shade. You are intimately acquainted with the place, yet find yourself a stranger. You find that you know these details not at they are, but only as they were. Every sight becomes a haunting memory of the past. A faded ghost just beyond reach.
This is how I read Stein when she writes that there’s no there there.
Oakland as a place is really just an aside. Surely lacking in the luster of Paris, perhaps shabby and overgrown (I say with great love), but really just a place that was not the place she expected.
It was not natural – how could she have come from this place which was not her place? Where was that big house? Those Eucalyptus trees? The rose hedge and the big garden? Where was that life she had left behind?
And who was she, this strange person visiting this strange place?
The dissonance in place led to a dissonance in self.
Oh, how time goes by.
But there is a there there. Stein had become a new person, just as Oakland had become a new city. The confluence of the new can be unsettling; can be distressing; but ultimately – it is just the growth of life.
The there you remember is replaced by a new there – cherished by new generations and new children who will grow up, travel, and return home to find their there no longer there.
No there there, and yet – still there.







What Does it Mean to Transform Governance?
Back in February, NCDD member and Public Agenda staffer Matt Leighninger penned the article below on his trip to a democracy conference in Manila, and we wanted to share it here. In it, Matt shares some great insights on what it means to “transform governance” and improve democracy that really get at the heart of what many in our field are seeking to do. We encourage you to read his article from the PA blog below or find the original post here.
One Week in Manila: Democracy, Development, and “Transforming Governance”
This week, I will join a group of people from around the world meeting in Manila to talk about how to make democracy work in newer, better ways. Convened by Making All Voices Count, a collaborative of the Omidyar Network, the US Agency for International Development, the UK Department for International Development and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the group will include Asian and African democracy advocates, civic technologists and researchers.
In the Manila meeting, the participants will be using the term “transforming governance” to describe the changes they seek. The central question of the gathering is: If we want to ensure that citizens have meaningful roles in shaping public decisions and solving public problems, can technologies play a role in helping them do so?
They are asking a very old question, but with new hypotheses, new tools and new principles in mind. It is increasingly clear that the older democracies of the Global North do not have all the answers: citizens of those countries have increasingly lost faith in their political institutions. Northerners cherish their human rights and free elections, but are clearly looking for something more. Meanwhile, in the Global South, new regimes based on a similar formula of rights and elections have proven fragile and difficult to sustain. And in Brazil, India and other Southern countries, participatory budgeting and other democratic innovations have emerged.
How can our democratic formulas be adjusted so that they are more sustainable, powerful, fulfilling – and, well, democratic? Some of the new answers come from the development of online tools and platforms that help people to engage with their governments, with organizations and institutions, and with each other. Often referred to collectively as “civic technology,” these tools can help us map public problems, help citizens generate solutions, gather input for government, coordinate volunteer efforts and help neighbors remain connected.
Despite the rapid growth of these forums and tools around the world, in most cases they are not fully satisfying expectations. One reason is that they are usually disconnected from one another, and from other civic engagement opportunities, so are not reaching their full civic potential. Another is that some are designed mainly to gather small scraps of feedback from citizens on a government service, with no guarantee that government will be willing or able to use the input, so they only have limited civic potential.
But while it is unfair to expect any new technology to automatically change our systems of governance, we should certainly have these tools in mind – along with the many processes for productive public engagement that do not rely on technology – when we think about how to redesign democratic systems.
In that conversation, “transforming governance” can be a helpful term because it urges us to think more broadly about democracy, and about the power of democratic systems to improve our lives. There are at least three ways in which these positive transformations can occur:
- Changing how people think and act in democracies, by giving them the information they need, the chance to connect with other citizens, the opportunity to provide ideas and recommendations to public officials and public employees, the confidence that government is accountable to citizens’ needs and desires, and the encouragement to devote some of their own time and energy to improving their communities.
- Changing how governments work, so that public officials and employees can interact effectively with large numbers of people, bridge divides between different groups of citizens, provide information that people can use, gather and use public input, and support citizens to become better public problem-solvers.
- Changing how civil society organizations (‘intermediaries’) and information mediators (‘info-mediaries’) work, so that they are better able to facilitate the interaction between citizens and government, monitor and report on how decisions are being made and problems are being solved, and provide training and support to new leaders.
These changes can add up, in many different combinations, to democracies that are more participatory, energetic, efficient and equitable. In Manila and elsewhere, we should face the old questions with new tools, new visions and new hope.
You can find the original version of this Public Agenda piece at www.publicagenda.org/blogs/one-week-in-manila-democracy-development-and-transforming-governance#sthash.OzbfQ9g9.dpuf.
Human Trafficking: How Can Our Community Respond to This Growing Problem? (NIFI Issue Guide)
The 8-page issue guide on National, Human Trafficking: How Can Our Community Respond to This Growing Problem? was posted on National Issues Forums Institute website and it was collective effort of a few groups. The guide was created in 2016 by the Maricopa Community Colleges Center for Civic Participation, Spot 127 Youth Media Center, the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research, Arizona State University School of Social Work. The issue guide can be downloaded for free from NIFI’s site here, and also available is a moderator’s guide and information on Human Trafficking to inform deliberation participants.
Many Americans are unaware of the extent to which human trafficking is an issue in their communities. Others may be aware of some aspects of the problem, but may feel powerless to do anything about it. But as law enforcement and others document a growing industry in human trafficking across the country, what can and should our community do to combat the problem?…
This discussion guide was compiled by the Maricopa Community Colleges Center for Civic Participation, with support and guidance from Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, Director of the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research, Arizona State University School of Social Work; and with input from the youth journalists at the Spot 127 Youth Media Center.
This issue guide presents three options for deliberation:
Approach One: “Focus on Families’ and the Community’s Roles”
According to this approach, many minors end up being trafficked after experiencing problems at home. This approach says we need to do more to help parents and families to be successful in providing safe and supportive homes. It also argues that community members in general need to do more to be informed about trafficking issues and engaged in looking for and reporting suspected trafficking situations.
Approach Two: “Focus on Schools, First Responders and Other Professionals”
This view says that professionals working in schools, medical and mental health professions, and emergency first responders are best suited to identify and respond to instances of human trafficking. It suggests having these professionals all be held accountable and provided support to more actively combat human trafficking.
Approach Three: “Reform Laws and Policies”
This approach says that we need to reevaluate how we arrest and prosecute crimes related to prostitution and gang activity in order to identify victims of human trafficking and get to the leaders and organizers of these criminal enterprises. Law enforcement reform should treat trafficking victims as victims in need of support, rather than criminals.
Below is a video produced by students at the KJZZ Spot 127 Youth Media Center for the Maricopa Community Colleges Center for Civic Participation:
About NIFI Issue Guides
NIFI’s Issue Guides introduce participants to several choices or approaches to consider. Rather than conforming to any single public proposal, each choice reflects widely held concerns and principles. Panels of experts review manuscripts to make sure the choices are presented accurately and fairly. By intention, Issue Guides do not identify individuals or organizations with partisan labels, such as Democratic, Republican, conservative, or liberal. The goal is to present ideas in a fresh way that encourages readers to judge them on their merit.
Follow on Twitter: @NIForums
Resource Link: www.nifi.org/en/groups/human-trafficking-how-can-our-community-respond-growing-problem-issue-guide-maricopa