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Monthly Archives: September 2016
two kinds of populism
Last May, at a campaign rally, Donald Trump said, “the only important thing is the unification of the people – because the other people don’t mean anything.” Jan-Werner Müller quotes that phrase both in his book What is Populism? and in a useful summary article that he wrote for The Guardian. Müller defines “populism” so that it describes Trump, Hungry’s Viktor Orbán, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Britain’s Nigel Farage, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but not Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. The difference isn’t their placement on a left-right spectrum but their attitude toward diversity. In his book (p. 101), Müller writes:
Not everyone who criticizes elites is a populist. In addition to being antielitist, populists are antipluralist. They claim that they and they alone represent the people. All other political competitors are essentially illegitimate, and anyone who does not support them is not properly part of the people. When in opposition, populists will necessarily insist that elites are immoral, whereas the people are a moral, homogeneous entity whose will cannot err.
Müller thinks that populists despise actual participation because the bestpolicy can already be deduced from a correct understanding of “the people.” If populists support referenda, it’s only because they expect their view to win. When they lose elections, they are prone to declare them illegitimate. Their fundamental stance is inconsistent with immigration and an independent civil society, both of which threaten an imagined uniformity of identity and beliefs.
The results are very dangerous (p. 102):
Populists can govern, and they are likely to do so in line with the idea that only they represent the idea of the people. Concretely, they will engage in occupying the state, mass clientelism and corruption, and the suppression of anything like a critical civil society. These practices find an explicit moral justification in the populist political imagination and hence can be avowed openly.
Note that Müller’s account avoids attributing views to populists that they would dispute. It doesn’t assume, for instance, that Trump is a representative of “deplorables,” defined by their racism and sexism. It takes his explicit views at face value and explains their dangerous implications.
That said, “populism” can have a different meaning. It can be explicitly and fundamentally pluralist. In her recent book Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America, Laura Grattan writes:
Radical democratic actors, from grassroots revolutionaries, to insurgent farmers and laborers, to agitators for the New Deal, Civil Rights, and the New Left, have historically drawn on the language and practices of populism. In doing so, they have cultivated peoples’ rebellious aspirations not just to resist power, but to share in power, and to do so in pluralistic, egalitarian ways across social and geographic borders.
In the examples that Grattan explores, populists who celebrate “the people” (in contrast to corrupt elites) do not merely tolerate diversity or accommodate themselves to it. They are actively enthusiastic about pluralism, inventing “alternative” spaces and styles of engagement, inviting disparate actors to join in their festivals and parades, emphasizing freedom of speech and assembly as core values, and usually preferring to retain some distance from the state. In fact, one of their political liabilities is their tendency to splinter because they fear uniformity.
In the US context, being populist in that sense requires a concern for racial and ethnic inclusion. However, traditions of pluralist populism go back to Old World countries that were more ethnically homogeneous. Mikhail Bakhtin recovered the medieval spirit of carnivals, of special feast days, and of places set aside to be fairs. In the carnival, all social strata, deviant groups, odd individuals, and exaggerated behaviors were welcomed and expected to mix on terms of equality. The spirit of carnival was populist in the sense that it encompassed the whole people and undermined hierarchies and distinctions, but at the same time it celebrated differences, novelties, and creativity. It was part of what Grattan calls “the language and practices of populism.”
The carnival was a world apart. It didn’t reliably improve the everyday world of authority and control except by giving people circumscribed times and places in which to escape and create ephemera together. Democratic revolutions drew on the carnival tradition, but not in sustained or satisfactory ways. I think that countering Trumpian populism requires liberal norms: limited government and individual rights guaranteed by written laws and independent courts. These protections are necessary but not very vibrant and participatory. We also need a dose of pluralist, carnivalesque populism to answer the grim version on offer from men like Donald Trump.
Here is Grattan’s talk at this year’s Frontiers of Democracy Conference.
See also: is Trumpism akin to the European right?; the word “populism”; why the white working class must organize; Gerald Taylor on property, populism, and democracy; against a cerebral view of citizenship; St. Margaret of Cortona and medieval populism; and a darker As You Like It.
Analytic Visualization and the Pictures in Our Head
In 1922, American journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann wrote about the “pictures in our head,” arguing that we conceptualize distant lands and experiences beyond our own through a mental image we create. He coined the word “stereotypes” to describe these mental pictures, launching a field of political science focused on how people form, maintain, and change judgements.
While visual analytics is far from the study of stereotypes, in some ways it relies on the same phenomenon. As described in Illuminating the Path, edited by James J. Thomas and Kristin A. Cook, there is an “innate connection among vision, visualization, and our reasoning processes.” Therefore, they argue, the full exercise of reason requires “visual metaphors” which “create visual representations that instantly convey the important content of information.”
F. J. Anscombe’s 1973 article Graphs in Statistical Analysis makes a similar argument. While we are often taught that “performing intricate calculations is virtuous, whereas actually looking at the data is cheating,” Anscombe elegantly illustrates the importance of visual representation through his now-famous Anscombe’s Quartet. These four data sets all have the same statistical measures when considered as a linear regression, but the visual plots quickly illustrate their differences. In some ways, Anscombe’s argument perfectly reinforces Lippmann’s argument from five decades before: it’s not precisely problematic to have a mental image of something; but problems arise when the “picture in your head” does not match the picture in reality.
As Anscombe argues, “in practice, we do not know that the theoretical description [linear regression] is correct, we should generally suspect that it is not, and we cannot therefore heave a sigh of relief when the regression calculation has been made, knowing that statistical justice has been done.”
Running a linear regression is not enough. The results of a linear regression are only meaningful if the data actually fit a linear model. The best and fastest way to check this is to actually observe the data; to visualize it to see if it fits the “picture in your head” of linear regression.
While Anscombe had to argue for the value of visualizing data in 1973, the practice has now become a robust and growing field. With the rise of data journalism, numerous academic conferences, and a growing focus on visualization as storytelling, even a quiet year for visualization – such as 2014 – was not a “bad year for information visualization” according to Robert Kosara, Senior Research Scientist at Tableau Software.
And Kosara finds even more hope for the future. With emerging technologies and a renewed academic focus on developing theory, Kosara writes, “I think 2015 and beyond will be even better.”
The Next Generation of Our Work
The 6-page article, The Next Generation of Our Work (2014), by NCDD’s own Co-Founder, Sandy Heierbacher, was published in the Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 10: Iss. 1. In the article, Heierbacher shares her unique view of the rapidly growing dialogue and deliberation field and lifts up the shifts in the field that shape the next generation of D&D work. Changes are happening in regard to:
– collaboration with government
– openness to online tools for engagement
– consistently rapid growth
– increased energy devoted to collaborative efforts
– re-focus on the power of local
– funders are coming around
– attention to infrastructure
Read the article in full below ind the PDF available for download on the Journal of Public Deliberation site here.
From the article…
How does one comment on the state of a field that seems to be ever growing yet constantly in flux? As the director of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), I have a bird’s eye view of this burgeoning, vibrant field. Yet I realize I see only a fraction of the great work that is being done to engage people in the decisions and issues that effect their lives.
Here are a few of the trends I have been noticing from my vantage point.
Collaboration with government. Many engagement practitioners are accustomed to working outside of government out of necessity, pushing on the edges of power but rarely getting through. This has been gradually changing with innovations like the Citizens Initiative Review and Participatory Budgeting being embraced by local and state governments. Additionally, government networks like the National Council on State Legislators and the International City/County Management Association are beginning to recognize deliberative public engagement as vital to effective governance.
Openness to online tools for engagement. Many group process experts are still skeptical that quality dialogue and deliberation can happen online. Yet there has been a growing interest among NCDD members to understand how they might utilize technology to engage new audiences and to support their face-to-face efforts. The popularity of our Tech Tuesday events and the quick acclimation our members have shown to our own online programs using tools like Codigital, Maestroconference and Hackpad are a testament to this shift.
Although skepticism is still par for the course among dialogue and deliberation practitioners who understand the power of in-person engagement, we are learning how to selectively invest our time and energy in online technology so we are not left in the dust as the world rapidly becomes more connected and digitized. Some examples of successful online engagement include recent experiments like Creating Community Solutions’ Text-Talk-Act project (www.creatingcommunitysolutions.org/texttalkact), which utilized text messaging technology to guide groups of young people through in-person dialogues, and our successful use of Codigital to get the NCDD community to crowdsource, hone and prioritize ideas for our upcoming conference. These experiences show how the deliberative democracy field is learning to appreciate the continuum Ethan Zuckerman of MIT Media Lab refers to as “thin engagement” (for texting, voting, clicking, sharing) and “thick engagement” (for the work our field is all about).
Consistently rapid growth. If NCDD’s membership is any indication, the deliberative democracy field is growing rapidly. After launching in 2002 with 50 organizational members, we now have more than 2,050 members and 33,500 subscribers. Lately, it seems like someone new finds and joins NCDD every single day, and we constantly learn of new organizations, networks and innovators we would love to bring into the network.
Increased energy devoted to collaborative efforts. Many in the dialogue and deliberation community recognize that their hopes for this work cannot be realized unless we combine efforts. An important recent example of cross-organization collaboration in the deliberative democracy field is Creating Community Solutions, an alliance of six organizations—AmericaSpeaks, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Everyday Democracy, the National Issues Forums Institute, the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, and the University of Arizona’s National Institute for Civil Discourse— which organized hundreds of dialogues across the country as part of Obama’s National Dialogue on Mental Health.
Also, two notable collaborative events are being planned to coincide with the National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in October. First, the Mediators Foundation will lead a meeting-of-the-minds of top leaders and influencers in transpartisan dialogue work. Second, the CommunityMatters Partnership will convene a summit on civic infrastructure bringing together leaders in various sectors of public work. Both events will encourage collaboration and relationship building among people doing parallel, but often disconnected, work.
Other examples of successful collaboration include last year’s effort by a group of NCDD members to organize a public-at-all-levels infrastructure for national dialogue on a shoestring budget. Additionally, the Kettering Foundation has increased its attention to the opportunities for deliberative democracy organizations to collaborate, and as a field we are recognizing and dealing with the various barriers and snags we face while attempting to work together. These efforts are just a taste of the collaboration that is happening across this field.
A re-focus on the power of local. Though President Obama’s attention to open government caused a temporary spike in our field’s hopefulness that public engagement would be supported from the national stage, I’ve seen a strong swing back to a focus on the local level. Many new ultra-local efforts have formed and thrived in the past few years. These efforts tend to be self-supported, innovative, timely, and practical. One of my favorite examples comes from an NCDD member in Denver, local playwright and actor Evan Weissman, who founded an effort called “Warm Cookies of the Revolution.” Warm Cookies has created a “Civic Health Club” in Denver that runs creative civic events on everything from water treatment to pro sports—and serves milk and cookies at every event for the hungry activists and curious citizens who attend.
Even national efforts like Transition Towns and Resilience Circles, which help prepare people for environmental and economic fall-out, prioritize the establishment of local level groups. And we were reminded of the power of local relationships while running Creating Community Solutions for Obama’s national dialogue on mental health, when support, publicity and creativity came through in abundance at the local level while we struggled for attention and funds at the national level.
Funders are coming around. Though the lack of funding is a much discussed challenge facing practitioners of work focused on “process,” more and more funders seem to be focusing on convening, facilitation, and stakeholder collaboration. The Kellogg Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation both produced gorgeous guidebooks on convening last year. Community foundations across the U.S. and foundations that work intensively in select communities, like the Orton Family Foundation, are embracing their role as catalysts for community-wide dialogue and collaboration. And many foundations are devoting significant resources to “Collective Impact” efforts, which bring together issue-focused groups that typically compete with each other for funding and public attention, and facilitate and support them in setting, measuring and achieving joint goals.
Attention to infrastructure. Leaders in the deliberative democracy field are increasingly focused on infrastructure. NCDD dedicated its last national conference to examining the concept of “civic infrastructure” – the underlying structure and supports people need so they can come together to address their challenges effectively. There are also many other examples of dialogue and deliberation organizations raising questions about infrastructure. For example, the Community Matters Partnership (www.communitymatters.org/who-we-are), an alliance of seven national organizations involved in community building, place making and grant making, have turned their attention to understanding and proliferating the concept. New Hampshire Listens is working to build a statewide infrastructure to support public deliberation on complex issues affecting New Hampshire residents, and UIC’s Institute for Policy & Civic Engagement studied Chicago’s participation and activist infrastructure in order to build a robust dialogue and deliberation network in the city.
The Creating Community Solutions’ partnership has been looking at what kind of infrastructure is needed to support future multi-method nationwide deliberation efforts. Finally, NCDD is working with the Kettering Foundation to gain a better understanding of the capacity and infrastructure that already exists throughout our field, in order to uncover how this capacity can best be utilized.
What’s next for the field? Much of NCDD’s time is devoted to keeping our network strong and active, and providing valuable content and programming for our members. This is a time of extraordinary momentum and productivity in our field, and we could easily fill our staff time simply by highlighting our members’ programs on our blog and social media, sharing their resources in our online resource center, and providing them with more and more ways to connect with each other about their successes and challenges.
Yet the trends I outlined above point to a strong yearning in our field to break out of our current constraints, to find ways to collaborate more effectively with each other, to combine forces with those outside our field, and to scale up our efforts. At the 2014 NCDD conference, we will be exploring all these trends as we rally around the theme “Democracy for the Next Generation.” What do we want the next generation of our work to look like, and how can we work together to get there? Now more than ever, we have both the opportunity and, increasingly, the imperative to bring this work to a much larger stage in order to build a stronger democracy that is able to address society’s most pressing challenges.
Download the article from the Journal of Public Deliberation here.
About the Journal of Public Deliberation
Spearheaded by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium in collaboration with the International Association of Public Participation, the principal objective of Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is to synthesize the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the emerging multi-disciplinary field and political movement called by some “deliberative democracy.” By doing this, we hope to help improve future research endeavors in this field and aid in the transformation of modern representative democracy into a more citizen friendly form.
Follow the Deliberative Democracy Consortium on Twitter: @delibdem
Follow the International Association of Public Participation [US] on Twitter: @IAP2USA
Resource Link: www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol10/iss1/art23
Public Opinion on Higher Education
The Bridge Alliance Presents “Moving America Forward”
The Bridge Alliance, an NCDD 2016 All-Star Sponsor, is hosting a free event in Washington DC this Thursday, September 15th exploring many of the same issues we will tackle together in Boston this October.
Moving America Forward, co-sponsored by the Bridge Alliance and Updraft America (an art installation to be unveiled alongside the event featuring 10,718 paper airplanes symbolizing a desire to rise above partisan politics), will feature a panel discussion on How To Bridge the Partisan Divide.
Moderated by author and journalist, Cokie Roberts, and featuring members of the Bridge Alliance, the panel will “present alternatives to the partisan narrative that permeates the political process and there will be presentations by organizations representing a cross-spectrum of civic engagement and collaborative problem-solving that is already present across America”.
The event is free but requires an RSVP and will be held at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center (4400 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC) beginning at 7:00 pm. Visit the Updraft America Reception page on Eventbrite to learn more and sign up!
Architecture of the Christian Science Center Plaza
For the last year, I’ve been working in a building on the Christian Science Center Plaza in Boston. I get a lot of questions about this building and the plaza’s architecture, but I never knew the answers. So – I set out to find out.
The plaza is home to the Mother Church of The First Church of Christ, Scientist – more commonly known as Christian Scientists. The broad topic of Christian Science is too much to cover in this post, the church was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1866 when, as their website describes, a critical injury caused her to understand her faith in a new way.
The oldest building on the plaza is the original Mother Church. The Romanesque Revival-style building was built in 1894 and was followed in 1906 by the Mother Church Extension, arguably one of the most beautiful buildings in Boston.
The building I work in, the Brutalist-style Administration Building tower, constructed in 1972 and now leased to office and academic tenants, is not.
The whole complex was designated a Boston Landmark in 2011.
The Boston Landmarks Commission, which made that designation, was kind enough to release a detailed public report on the features that make the plaza a notable landmark.
The complex contains six buildings – three original buildings, constructed in 1894, 1906, and 1937; and three newer buildings, constructed in the late 20th century along with the plaza that unifies them all.
The 1906 Mother Church Extension is perhaps the most interesting architecturally, described by the Commission as a “cathedral-scale, Byzantine and Renaissance Revival-style church.”
According to the Commission, the building I work in measures “approximately 183 feet long by 86 feet wide” and is “a 26-story office building, with an additional story below ground. The structure rises 355 feet from a rectangular footprint.”
Perhaps the most striking feature of the plaza is the Reflecting Pool, constructed during the 1970s expansion. The Reflecting Pool “measures approximately 690 feet long by 100 feet wide by 26 inches deep, bordered by an infinity edge of curved, polished Minnesota red granite.” Interestingly:
The Reflecting Pool was designed to be functional as well as aesthetic. Although the initial intent was that the Reflecting Pool also serve as the cooling system for the complex, it seems that this function was never implemented with any success. Based on early memos, correspondence, and discussions with facilities staff, it appears that some cooling system use was tried for a portion of one early season and then discontinued as impractical. When the cooling towers were installed at the fifth floor of the Publishing House Building in the early 1970s, the Reflecting Pool water connections for HVAC cooling were eliminated.
join us at the National Conference on Citizenship, Oct 13-14
The National Conference on Citizenship is always an important gathering of Americans who strive to improve our nation’s civic life. This year, the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University is an equal partner in sponsoring and planning the conference. It will be highly interactive and will focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I urge allies and colleagues to join us there. The official invitation follows:
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Are you concerned about civic life in America? Are you frustrated by fractured communities, divisive politics, and processes that exclude many of our people? Do you feel we can do better? Do you have solutions you want to share with others? Then join fellow citizens, government leaders, and innovative entrepreneurs who are working to design and support engaged and resilient communities at the 2016 Annual Conference on Citizenship in Washington, DC. The 2016 conference is Co-hosted by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and will specifically focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in civic life. Unless we make progress on these issues, we cannot move our country forward. Click here to view the agenda at-a-glance. The 2016 conference will be highly interactive. Participants will help shape the agenda for civic renewal in America and will leave with contacts and practical ideas to strengthen their own work. There will be opportunities to address unresolved and contested issues in civic life. The National Conference on Citizenship draws practitioners in fields like; democracy and political participation, service, civic education, community development, community organizing, public deliberation, health and wellness, youth development and workforce development, public arts and humanities, collaborative governance and work with government agencies, civic technology, and social entrepreneurship, and people from other fields interested in improving America’s civic life. Please join us for this important convening and invite other colleagues whose voices need to be heard. Register today! |
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