Last night, Secretary Hillary Clinton made history by becoming the first female to be the presumptive presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party.
Republican commentator Ana Navarro commented on Twitter, “Confession: Thought woman thing wouldn’t mean much to me, but yes, feel something I can’t quite articulate seeing 1st woman nominee #History”
Among my own circles, I saw mothers and fathers alike thrilled to be able to share the moment with their daughters. Who watched with pride and hope as Secretary Clinton declared “tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”
It’s a historic moment for women in this country, and I’m glad that many are finding it so moving and powerful.
But, for me…it feels oddly flat.
Ezra Klein posits that many have met this moment uninspired because Secretary Clinton is “winning a process that evolved to showcase stereotypically male traits using a stereotypically female strategy.” Or, more generally, “there is something about us that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement.”
In Klein’s view, the strength of a candidate is traditionally measured by how rousing their speeches are; how fiery their rhetoric. But those aren’t Secretary Clinton’s strengths. Not only is she “not a natural politician,” but – as a woman – she would be socially penalized for being too loud; too outspoken.
Instead, Secretary Clinton’s strength is that she’s a relentless coalition builder; “arguably better at that than anyone in American politics today.” This relationship-building is a critical political skill, but it’s also what makes her seem so establishment. She seemingly had the primary locked up before it even began – establishment, perhaps, but the result of decades of painstaking relationship building.
Klein argues then that if Secretary Clinton’s victory feels hollow it is because of the norms we’ve imposed – because we undervalue the traditional feminine skill of relationship building while overvaluing traditionally masculine oratory.
This argument is intriguing, but still somewhat misses the mark. I’m skeptical of Klein’s gendering of rhetoric and relationship building – do those really break down as a masculine/feminine dynamic?
Of course, this in part is what makes patriarchy so intrenchant – the nuances of sexism and double standards are so subtle as to be commonly overlooked entirely. The biases are so pervasive that I honestly couldn’t tell you how these misguided norms warp my own view.
Yet, as I reflect on my own dispassion for Secretary Clinton’s victory, I like to think that it’s neither personally nor politically motivated. Indeed, I have a great deal of respect for Secretary Clinton.
Instead, as we mark this historic moment, as Americans declare their pride at finally selecting a female nominee, I’m reminded of the many, many, many women who have served as heads of governments and heads of state around the world.
Despite what several articles have written, Secretary Clinton is not the first woman to be nominated by a major political party – rather she is the first in the U.S.
Not to downplay the significance of that achievement, but I suppose I’m having a hard time feeling the thrill of a liberal victory when the fact that we’re just now getting to this moment highlights just how painfully un-progressive our country can be.
As Steven Colbert cleverly quipped, electing a female candidate “is something you could only see in a sci-fi novel…or any other country in the world.”
So while I suppose that later is better than never – this momentary breath of parity seems like little to preen ourselves over.
And while there may be important symbolism in this moment, I can’t help feel that symbolism does me little good if nothing really changes.
Just last week a white man was given a light six month sentence for the violent rape of a woman while the perpetrator’s father complained that even that minimal sentence ruined his son’s life for “20 minutes of action.” You can read the woman’s own powerful statement here.
And this story is just one of far too many incidents of rape and sexual assault which occur regularly across this nation. RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) estimates that 1 in 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. And nearly 2 out of 3 rapes go unreported.
So forgive me if I find myself unmoved by symbolism; if I want more from my country.
Following the election of President Barack Obama, there was much hope that entering an era where a black man could indeed become president meant we had entered an era where we could truly confront and dismantle our country’s deep racism.
Unfortunately, over the last eight years the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, and far, far too many other people of color show just how little progress we have truly made. There is so much work to be done.
I am satisfied with the nomination of Secretary Clinton, and I am optimistic that come January we will finally have a woman in the white house. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this moment means as much as we would like it to mean.
This is a historic moment, perhaps, but one that is scandalously far past due. And with the deep, entrenched and often violent misogyny unrelentingly still faced by women in our country today, it is a moment which highlights not how far we have come – but how shockingly further we still have to go.
(Amtrak) I’m on my way home from a meeting with my friends at Cities of Service and their network of mayors and city officials. I’m struck by how many of these people are uniting two traditionally opposite strands of government reform, not only in their important work with Cities of Service but in their other projects as well.
One strand is all about efficiency, transparency, measurement, and data. It goes back to the Progressive Era and agencies like New York City’s Bureau of Municipal Research, founded in 1907. Its ambition is to bring science and/or business practices into municipal government. That basic impulse has been constant for a century, but the tools and techniques have grown more sophisticated.
When you consider how much good you can do for people and the environment by measuring and tracking, it’s clear that this agenda remains essential. For instance, we heard a great presentation by Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Minor about my hometown’s use of remote sensors to identify where water is leaking and pipes are about to break, thus saving the city millions. Searching for her work, I instead came across a 1922 article entitled “Measurement of Water Supply by the Pitot Tube in Syracuse, NY.” The author, a Mr Starbird, begins by lamenting the failure to install measurement tools in the city’s intake pipes, which would allow Syracuse “quickly to detect any considerable loss that might occur in the conduits between these points.” Nearly a century later, Syracuse is dropping censors into water pipes and sending the data into “the cloud.” The agenda is the same; the need remains urgent.
The other strand of municipal reform is more populist, little-“d” democratic, and concerned with diversity. It begins with the recognition that many of the people who are most affected by city government and urban issues aren’t asked what they think about these issues, let alone empowered to address them. Teenagers struggling in high school, seniors in retirement communities, and homeless mothers are just some of the groups who lack voice and power. So the municipal reformer seeks to consult them, or better, to engage and empower them.
These two strands tend to appeal to different kinds of people. Metrics sound exciting to nerdy people who often have backgrounds in business or science, who are comfortable with math and technology, and who typically have attained advanced education. Popular engagement sounds good to community organizers, grassroots leaders, and some elected politicians who have roots in the marginalized neighborhoods of a city.
But the two impulses can go together. The great populist, democratic educator Jane Addams was also responsible for Hull-House Maps and Papers, a compendium of rigorous, plot-level data, subtitled “a presentation of nationalities and wages in a congested district of Chicago, together with comments and essays on problems growing out of the social conditions.” According to the title page, the authors of the book were “Residents of Hull-House.” Maps and Papers was a sophisticated presentation of data produced by, as well as for, the poor residents of a 19th century slum in partnership with some college-educated women who lived with them.
Indeed, these two impulses must go together. Efficient, data-driven management will do little good unless the public supports the city’s use of data. Municipal governments can’t solve problems unless they get help from other organizations and from active citizens. Data can help autonomous organizations in civil society to coordinate their efforts.
Besides, all data is value-laden, and people have the right to make judgments about what to measure and how to interpret the results. Data also confers power, and unless you trust the government implicitly and permanently, you should want diverse citizens to produce and use data so that they share power over it.
At the same time, because data is power, grassroots organizers and networks need it. They can’t afford not to be efficient, effective, responsive, and cognizant of precise costs and benefits. Strengthening democracy is not about replacing data and businesslike practices with raw popular voice. It’s rather about sharing the power of data.
See also this post on “smart water“; the rise of an expert class and its implications for democracy; what would Jane Addams say?; empowering citizens to make sure the stimulus is well spent
NCDD’s 2016 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation is coming up this October 14-16 in the Boston area.
NCDD conferences bring together hundreds of the most active, thoughtful, and influential people involved in public engagement and group process work across the U.S. and Canada. Our last national conference (DC in 2014) had 415 attendees, and we hope to beat that number this year!
If your work involves dialogue and deliberation, or you want to get involved with this work, you’ll love this conference. Imagine spending three days with some of the most amazing leaders in this field, forming new relationships and reconnecting with old colleagues and friends, hearing about innovative new approaches to the challenges you’re facing, and exploring together how we can shape the future of this important movement, all while using innovative group techniques… there’s really nothing like it. (See our 2014 Conference Storify page for quotes and pictures.)
Today we’re announcing our call for proposals for our concurrent sessions for NCDD 2016. We’re interested in finding creative ways to highlight the best of what’s happening in public engagement, group process, community problem-solving, and arts-based dialogue — and we know you have lots of ideas!
Check out the Application for Session Leaders now to see what we ask for, and start cooking up those great proposals we’ve come to expect from our network! If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration, look over the comments on this blog post, where we asked the NCDD community to share what they’d like to see happen at NCDD 2016, and peruse the fabulous sessions offered at the 2014 and 2012 NCDD conferences.
Please note that the deadline for proposals is Friday, July 8th. We look forward to seeing what you’d like to offer!
Here is some guidance for those thinking about presenting sessions at NCDD 2016…
Our theme for the 2016 conference is Bridging Our Divides, and we invite workshop proposals that in some way build upon or engage the ideas around this theme. NCDD 2016 is taking place a month before the 2016 Presidential election, and in light of the extreme rhetoric and partisan rancor in this election cycle, we want to share stories about healing the partisan divide and about creating and implementing strategies that will help us move forward together in addressing our shared problems.
But the divide between left and right politics is not the only divide that we as a field need to help our country address – the Bridging Our Divides theme is an invitation for us to address the most persistent of our gaps in our society. We want this conference to lift up stories and strategies about people working together across our race divides, our religious divides, our economic divides, our divisions around gender, orientation, and expression, our generational divides, our divides between government officials and everyday citizens, and others.
We invite session proposals that will highlight work being done to bridge divides on all levels – from organizations, to neighborhoods, to cities, to the whole country. We also invite sessions that have a special focus on the role of media and the press in bridging our societal divisions, especially through partnership with the dialogue & deliberation field. Your proposal will be evaluated, in part, by its relevance to our theme and goals.
Some advice for potential session leaders:
Not quite ready to draw up a proposal yet? Use the comment field (and/or the NCDD listserv) to float your ideas by other NCDDers and members of the planning team. We may be able to match you up with potential co-presenters who can address the same challenge or issue you’re interested in focusing on.
Look over the comments on our engagement of members around what they would like to see at the conference, on the blog and the listserv. There is a wealth of ideas and insight in those results!
Deadline for submissions
To be have your session proposal considered, we need you to submit the session application by the end of the day on Friday, July 8th. Members of the conference planning team will review the proposals and respond by email to the first contact listed in your proposal by the end of the day on July 22nd.
I have a strong and general dislike for portmanteaus – words which have “two meanings packed up into one word,” as Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
I mention this definition because it was the first use of “portmanteau” for this purpose. An origin which is particularly amusing when you consider that our egg-shaped friend was clearly bloviating and most likely invented all the definitions he elects to confer on poor Alice.
But I digress.
At the time of Carroll’s writing, a portmanteau was most commonly known in English as a suitcase which opened into two equal sections. Thus a single word such as “slithy” is a portmanteau – in Dumpty’s reckoning – between the two component words “lithe” and “slimy.”
The word comes from the French porte-manteau, from porter, to carry, and manteau, cloak.
To be clear, I don’t have a distain for all portmanteaus. A word like ‘smog’ – smoke/fog – for example, seems to be appropriate name for something we wouldn’t otherwise have a word for. It is neither smoke nor fog, but we experience it as some novel combination of the two.
Other words, such as ‘sitcom’ – situational comedy – or ‘motel’ – motor hotel – seem like reasonable abbreviations for phrases which would otherwise be antiquated and somewhat nonsensical. Fine. I will accept these into my lexicon.
But a broader persual of English portmanteaus reveals a long list of cutesy words which are not nearly as amusing as I imagine their originators think they are. Please. Just stop it.
I suppose that this is the natural course for a living language, though. People will create portmanteaus which will be trendy for a time before most fade from use altogether. The useful ones will last.
Interestingly, portmanteaus are common in languages around the world. In French, this is described through the back-translation mot-valise (‘word-suitcase’) which subsequently became Kofferwort in German. I’m not aware of a specific Japanese term for this, but its linguistically common to combine and contract words.
While I’m in no position to comment on the worthiness of portmanteaus in those languages, the broad existence of this trend in human language seems to indicate that there is something to be said for the practice of smooshing words together and seeing what comes out.
But mostly, they just annoy me.
Because usually, we don’t need a term for whatever the portmanteau intends to convey. And if we don’t need some cutesy, made-up name for some thing that may or may not even need to exist, let us, please, just stick with the real words we already have.
There’s a lot to love in this New York Times profile of the Mister Softee/New York Ice Cream feud:
“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. ” Every truck has a bat inside.”
Mr. Vega, 41, said that if he comes across a rival on his route, “I jump out and say, ‘Listen young man, this is my route, you gotta get out of there.”
Battle lines being drawn around ice cream sales in Midtown Manhattan is the kind of story meant for a Disney movie. Or maybe something R-rated, just for the bravado of “Every truck has a bat inside.”
I’ve always hated the local ice cream trucks, which are really trying to overcharge my for ice cream by training my daughter to have a melt down if I force her to eat store-bought ice cream instead of the overpriced stuff being advertised with a racist tune. (Well, maybe not. But still…) And now it turns out that they really are scary:
“If one of my drivers goes to Midtown, they’ll bring their trucks in and surround them — a bunch of guys,” said Peter Bouziotis, who runs the Softee depot in the Bronx, which covers Manhattan. “They’ll start banging on the windows.”
In various spots, I’ve seen this bad behavior tut-tutted and blamed on capitalism. But I suspect that this particular case (as well as most of the cases like it) actually has very little to do with capitalism and everything to do with the fundamentals of a non-capitalist economic system: common pool resource management.
This kind of social norm enforcement through threats and violence is a fairly common way of organizing property regimes when social or legal factors prevent privatization and legal exclusion. The technical definition of a common pool resource requires that the resource be rivalrous (able to be used up) but non-excludable (it can’t be locked away.) Tourists are both, even though they don’t think of themselves as resources or property.
The commons is precisely not “private property.” It’s commonly held. This caused many modern economists to argue that there was a “tragedy of the commons” whereby commonly-held goods would be used up rather than stewarded: each user would have an incentive to maximize–privatize–as much of the common-pool resource as possible, and so the commons would be ruined. These economists argued that only private property–and thus capitalism–could save the earth from overuse. Thus, for instance, we need to have “cap-and-trade” regimes so that corporations will maximize the profit to had from their privately-held shares of pollution, and this is supposed to be better than taxing pollution or simply regulating it away.
But in practice, the economists were wrong, as Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington Workshop showed: commonly-held goods can be protected and managed as effectively as privately-held goods, and under conditions where private ownership is impossible to enforce. Unless the community is heavily disrupted (for instance by imperialism or police occupation) common-pool resources aren’t overused because users are understood to have a “share” by communal norms rather than legal title: exceeding one’s “share” is punished by the community of users.
In common-pool resource management systems, social norms take the the place of physical exclusions, and these norms include the ability to sanction–often physically sanction–potential interlopers. Crucially, this requires all sorts of negative emotions and actions that liberals such as myself don’t like: shame, resentment, contempt, us-v.-them tribalism, and even violence (on the small-scale “get the bat” variety or large-scale “revenge-killing” variety.) Common-pool resource management requires insiders to sanction poachers, and that’s what New York Ice Cream is doing here:
“From 34th to 60th Street, river to river, that’s ours,” he said on a recent afternoon, moments after handing a chocolate cone to a delighted-looking little boy. The vendor would not allow his name to be published for fear of losing his job.
Look at Maine lobstermen (cf especially Acheson’s The Lobster Gangs of Maine) or fisheries management in Taiwan or Chile or water rights on the West Coast and you see the same behaviors emerging organically. We also see it in drug distribution, it’s true. Recall Vanda Feldab-Brown’s work on illicit markets and violence:
It is not inherent that illegal economies, including the drug trade, are violent. There is great variation. But there are other factors apart from the quality of law enforcement, such as the central balances of power within the criminal market. Are there few groups that have developed a balance of power and defined territories, or many small groups that constitute a slim market of mom-and-pop types of enterprises that do not have the capacity to trigger or generate any violence?
Violence is a tool for exclusion. That sounds like a universal evil, but it’s not; it’s just as much a tool for the maintenance of contested common pool resource systems as it is a tool for more deeply problematic exclusions. My own preferences are for a violence-free world; but this of course just means that my taxes pay others to credibly threaten interlopers for me, as well as actively utilizing violence on my behalf.
Now, many people object when I use the explanation for the violence in the illicit economy that leads many of our students at the prison to be incarcerated. And indeed, I don’t think that all of their behavior is defensible in this way. But it’s important to understand just why illicit markets are violent: participants lack access to legal title to their businesses and to legal conflict resolution mechanisms. Largely because of racism and racist educational systems, they are unable to participate as equals in the legal labor market. They’re thus thrown into the grey and black market for labor, where they cannot access police and courts. Under those conditions, where none of their property is protected, participants in the illicit market are thrown back onto traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, which emphasizes honor and uses credible threats of violence to enforce property and contract rights.
If anything, New York Ice Cream is like the ideal of labor organizing; they were working for Mister Softee and tired of being exploited by licensing fees–payments to capitalists by laborers for the privilege of laboring–so they expropriated the means of production and locked the bosses out of the factory, that is, out of Midtown. Then, they made life difficult for the scabs:
The rift between New York Ice Cream and Mister Softee goes back to around 2013. According to court documents, Mr. Tsirkos held at least a dozen Softee franchises at the time, mostly in Midtown. Several of his drivers said that he was upset at high franchise fees and inflated prices for supplies. So he took his trucks (they are owned by individuals, not Mister Softee), added sprinkles and a waffle cone to the logo, and struck out on his own….
Ironically, the one place we don’t see poachers sanctioned is in heavily-policed high-oversight free-market property regimes (aka capitalism) because that’s where the rich are able to control things using rules and courts instead of social solidarity. In those situations, they often use the ideology of fair competition to force insiders to compete with poachers and scabs.
To be clear, I’m not endorsing drug markets, or even beating up your food truck competitors. But I find it strange when ordinary human behavior–often the laudatory kind that is responding to a larger abuse of power with small-scale violence–is pathologized by my fellow liberals who recognize the small-scale violence but ignore the larger abuses.
New York Ice Cream’s drivers have bats; Mister Softee’s drivers have been slashing tires, making death threats, and now the owners have the court system extracting six-figure judgments from the people doing the work and giving it to the people who hold the private right to the intellectual property:
Mr. Tsirkos has been ordered to compensate Mister Softee for his misdeeds. Last week, a federal judge ordered him to pay Softee $287,858.44 in lawyers’ fees, bringing the total he owes to over $767,000. (So far, Mister Softee’s lawyers say, Mr. Tsirkos has parted with only $2,426.)
So my expectation is that this short-lived Paris Commune of frozen dessert distribution will soon come to an end.
When civic studies scholars write about civics and citizens, as Peter Levine does today, we will usually mention the following trinity: facts, values, and strategies. Here’s Levine:
The citizen is committed to affecting the world. Some important phenomena may be beyond her grasp, so that she sees them but sees no way of changing them. But she is drawn to levers she can pull, handles she can grab onto. To choose an action, she combines value-judgments, factual beliefs, and tactical predictions into a single thought: “It is good for me to do this.”
Citizens seek facts and work with beliefs; they orient their efforts with regard to values and judgments; and they develop and use strategies, tactics, and reliable predictions to achieve those values in light of the facts as they understand them.
There is much that this trinity illuminates about citizenship, but it can be contested too. The fact/value dichotomy is frequently challenged, and “strategic” thinking is often criticized for its instrumentalism. In general, the terms are discrete. So consider some alternatives:
Obviously, each of these sets of distinctions (call them paradigms) is itself value-laden and rooted in some set of beliefs about the facts. I’ll note that my preferred paradigm is a mixture of #1 and #2, following Rachel Maddow, though I draw from each as it seems appropriate or as my audience requires.
What strikes me as particularly important is that each of these paradigms indicates a particular strategy. When I dither, as I often do, between these paradigms, I do so primarily because I wonder which metapolitical view of the world–which schematic of the effective levers and knobs of citizenship–is really correct.
Peter Levine always seems to work hard to accommodate conservative voices in his own paradigm. I’ve long suspected that he is motivated by the belief that many of our fellow citizens will answer best to that description, and that the solutions to our problems are most likely to be found in collaborating with our more conservative neighbors, which makes it important to find ways to accommodate oneself to them.
But this is most often at odds with that technocratic view of activism which seeks to steer the levers of bureaucracy that I find attractive: there, it’s more important to speak the language of the state and the market in order to be heard. Yet there’s a real risk that when you ignore your neighbors in favor of trying to make those larger institutions listen to you, you will both go unheard and find yourself corrupted by too-long attention to the state’s and the market’s values and worldview.