Last Saturday’s Women’s March has been widely praised as one of the largest acts of protest in US political history. Attendees talked about the amazing sense of camaraderie, and the inspiration of seeing more people than they could imagine taking to the street.
But, of course, the march isn’t without its disagreements. Now that it’s over, skeptics will ask “but how do we turn this into real action?” And leading up to the march, there were a number of difficult and important questions: who is represented in the women’s march? Who is really represented? What is the role of violence in protest?
There have been a number of great pieces about the racism of the white feminist movement, which has historically, unapologetically, sidelined women of color. In the New York Times, Jenna Wortham reflected on a picture from the Women’s March: Angela Peoples holding a sign that reads, “Don’t Forget: White Women Voted for Trump.” Wortham writes that of all the iconic images to come out of Saturday, this was the one she found most resonant: “It felt indicative of the ways in which the day’s events could be viewed as problematic: the notion that women’s rights were suddenly the most important cause in our nation, or that there haven’t been protests and activist movements worth attending until the election of Donald Trump.”
There have also been interesting discussions about core beliefs required for feminism, as a feminist anti-abortion group was removed from the list of official march partners.
Finally, the march has also raised important questions about the role of violence in protest – and the role of the police in responding to protest. The women’s march was praised for it’s lack of violence – which some have attributed to divergent police response to a largely white protest. That praise also overlooks the work of the Black Bloc – which sought to disrupt the status quo during inauguration and resulted in an infinitely meme-able clip of a neo-Nazi getting punched in the face.
In the Nation, Natasha Lennard argued that while such protests are often greeted with distain by more mainstream activists, their work is essential to to overall goal we seek. Most of us are free riders, benefiting from their actions while distancing ourselves from their tactics. As Lennard writes:
To talk with any romance for the black bloc risks falling into the worst tropes of bombastic revolutionary writing. We don’t don black masks and become instant revolutionary subjects. We don’t necessarily achieve more with property damage than a larger, more subdued rally achieves. In every case, the standard of achievement depends on the aims of the action, and all of us are far from creating the rupture we want to see in the world. One broken window, or a hundred, is not victory. But nor is over half a million people rallying on the National Mall. Both gain potency only if they are perceived as a threat by those in and around power. And neither action will appear threatening unless followed up again and again with unrelenting force, in a multitude of directions. You don’t have to choose between pink hat and black mask; each of us can wear both.
I raise this topics of disagreement around the march, because they are all important questions and they will not go away. Coalitions are hard to build and maintain, and we won’t ever agree on everything – from policy to tactics.
There’s a conventional wisdom that conservative win because they are better at collectively getting on message, while liberals are lost arguing amongst themselves.
But I don’t think that failure and disorganization are a intrinsic part of pluralism. As we continue in the work that comes out of the Women’s March, I don’t want to see us brush these disagreements under the rug – I want to see us embrace them. We need to keep raising these issues, keep having these conversations – and we need to keep working together.
I don’t think those ends are incompatible.
We wanted to share an insightful article from NCDD member org the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation that shares lessons we can learn about avoiding pitfalls of long-term public participation projects from participatory budgeting in NYC. The piece focuses on PBNYC, but breaks down universal issues in engagement like waning interest from politicians and the ever-important problem of scaling up. We encourage you to read the piece below or find the original here.
To engage those often left out of democratic decision-making, Council Member district staffs and their volunteers rely on resource-intensive outreach work. They hand out flyers, knock on doors, staff booths at neighborhood events, and host information sessions at community centers.
Each district runs at least three events targeted to areas with less mobile populations or marginalized communities, such as NYCHA housing developments or senior centers. These face-to-face interactions have built trust – and proven crucial to engaging a rich cross-section of the city.
Behind the scenes, the City Council Speaker’s office offers centralized resources and guidance to help each participating district run its process. Meanwhile, nonprofit partners such as the Participatory Budgeting Project and Community Voices Heard spend hours building resources, running volunteer trainings, and evaluating the results of the process.
All of this work adds up to a voter base that is more representative of New York’s diverse population than general elections or other political processes. In 2014-2015 (the last cycle to produce detailed demographic data), 57% of PB voters identified as people of color, compared to 47% of local election voters.
Nearly a quarter of PBNYC voters would have been ineligible to vote in general elections, including 12% who were under 18 and 10% who were not U.S. citizens. It’s a dynamic and inclusive process that more and more Council Members want their districts to join.
Yet as PBNYC continues to grow to more districts and more voters, the long hours and large volunteer commitments become less and less sustainable. It would be tempting to use digital outreach to reach more residents more efficiently. But analysis of past PBNYC cycles shows that tactics like social media and emails from Council Members engage a disproportionately white, highly-educated, and high income group, to the detriment of more diverse voices.
The city faces the challenge of including more residents in the process without drowning out the voices PB was meant to raise up.
In meeting this challenge, PBNYC has rightly put its values first, continuing to emphasize the type of face-to-face outreach that pulls in new participants. The task going forward is to translate those values into new outreach tactics.
For instance, the city should explore digital technologies that expand participation rather than limiting it: using SMS texting rather than online applications, and providing communal digital resources at libraries and community centers. Central staff should continue streamlining their processes and reducing resources needed on the back end. Partnerships that let grassroots organizations continue to take the lead will allow PBNYC to bypass red tape and avoid getting stuck in bureaucratic slowdowns.
Now that the initial excitement has worn off, how can PBNYC continue to improve?
City Council districts vary widely in their demographics, physical characteristics, and needs. Each district’s staff and volunteers must decide what a successful PB cycle looks like. Should they provide translated ballots for those who speak the 5th most common language in the district? The 6th? The 10th? In a world of limited time and resources, how much outreach is enough?
In addition to this district variation, the devolution of decision-making to the district level makes it challenging for central staff to oversee performance or hold districts accountable to any particular standard. In the past, central staff have worked to ensure accountability and consistency through personal relationships. Districts that strayed from best practices were given extra attention and guidance. But as more districts participate, this level of oversight becomes difficult.
Meanwhile, political incentives have inevitably shifted. The original flurry of media attention and public praise has died down. And while there are plenty of incentives for a new Council Member to set up a PB process in her district, doing it well – engaging more voters and ensuring the process is truly inclusive – may seem to offer diminishing returns and little public recognition.
How can PBNYC build structures and incentives for accountability? One promising approach would be to provide more transparency for the public, in the form of open access to PB data. Central staff have considered posting a PB project tracker online to help the public track the progress of projects that have won funding.
The tracker would serve as a focal point for district-by-district praise or analysis, both of which would incentivize districts to continue improving their process. Publicizing yearly statistics on vote counts and other metrics would also help the public judge their districts’ performance and encourage improvement over time.
With the initial excitement worn off and longer-term results not yet visible, the program risks entering a dead zone of usefulness to politicians. As a particularly resource-intensive process, PB needs to start demonstrating tangible benefits or risk being on the chopping block.
Tracking and sharing longer-term results could provide evidence for the broader benefits that advocates have touted – benefits like more equitable government spending, happier communities, and more engaged citizens. Such results have started to come in from PB processes that began several years ago in Brazil. Evidence of longer-term benefits to communities would help re-engage politicians in the process, and would bolster New York City as a national leader in the civic engagement space.
The PBNYC example reminds us that pilot programs are useful testing grounds, but promising experiments are unlikely to translate into large-scale successes without careful effort. Such a transformation requires shifts in strategy and tactics, matched with steadfastness in mission and values. Those interested in government innovation can learn a lot from watching PBNYC as it charts this course for participatory budgeting processes around the world.
You can find the original version of this piece from the Challenges to Democracy blog at www.challengestodemocracy.us/home/pbnyc-the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-scale/#sthash.Hp0uKvoD.dpuf.
In lieu of a substantive new post here today, I’ll link to an essay of mine on the Oxford University Press blog, “Fighting Trump’s populism with pluralist populism.” It concludes, “We need a dose of populism that neither delivers power to a leader nor merely promises fair economic outcomes to citizens as beneficiaries. In this form of populism, diverse people create actual power that they use to change the world together.”
In lieu of a substantive new post here today, I’ll link to an essay of mine on the Oxford University Press blog, “Fighting Trump’s populism with pluralist populism.” It concludes, “We need a dose of populism that neither delivers power to a leader nor merely promises fair economic outcomes to citizens as beneficiaries. In this form of populism, diverse people create actual power that they use to change the world together.”
The ideal of democracy gets weak support today.
Republican presidents from T.R. to George W. Bush presented the United States as a champion of democracy. But a current conservative talking point holds that the US is meant to be a republic, not a democracy, and only the opposition party favors democratic forms of government.
It’s my anecdotal impression that not many Democratic voters are all that enthusiastic about democracy, either; they see a population that likes Donald Trump enough to give him a near-majority, and they are not sure they want that majority to rule.
Overseas, the suppression of the Arab Spring, the frailties of the EU, the rise of popular ethno-nationalists in many countries, and the strong performance of China’s authoritarian regime have left small-d democrats with a hangover. Julia Ioffe is just one of many well-informed commentators who recalled recent failed democratic uprisings when she observed this weekend’s marches. “Talking to the protesters in Washington today, it was hard not to hear the echoes of the weakness of the Moscow protests five years ago: a vague, unstructured cause; too much diversity of purpose; no real political path forward; and the real potential for the meaning of the day to melt into self-congratulatory complacency.”
Meanwhile, impressive scholarly evidence continues to build that people make political choices on the basis of social identities, not by forming independent opinions of issues; that our conflicting moral views have unconscious bases that are “nearly impregnable to arguments from outsiders“; and that voters are badly uninformed. Walter Lippmann (1925) and Joseph Schumpeter (1942) already held this general view, but the accumulating evidence must be taken seriously.
Many thoughtful people have accepted the diagnosis in full. They are aware of democracy’s real maladies. Unfortunately, their commitment to finding cures is much weaker.
After all, any political system is only as good as we make it. There are generic arguments in favor of core principles of democracy, such as “voting equality at the decisive stage” (Dahl 1989), but there are also generic problems with it, such as majority-tyranny, propaganda, free-riding, motivated reasoning, the “iron law of oligarchy,” and polarization. An actual system based on voting equality will work well only to the degree that we build institutions and norms that can counter its weaknesses. For instance, a city newspaper can address low information and polarization in a metro area–as long as it finds a market and uses its revenues to inform the public. A grassroots political party can overcome free-riding problems by getting citizens involved–but only if it engages citizens.
If we want to build the new institutions and norms that can make democracy work in the 21st century, we need a lot of people to see its potential. We must be hard-headed designers and reformers of institutions, our eyes open to human limitations; but we must also hear old Walt Whitman’s music:
The purpose of democracy … is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself. …
Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges, and schools — democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy. I have intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists or champions, or has been essentially help’d, though often harm’d, by them. …
I submit, therefore, that the fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future.
Whitman saw glimpses of that future in his own time, and I think hundreds of thousands of people–including me–scanned new democratic vistas on Saturday. That was the first essential step toward actually repairing our democracy together.
I’ve been thinking lately of John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down. It’s a tale of resistance. The story of how a a small town is swiftly conquered by an overwhelming force whose power is so absolute there is nothing the people can do to resist.
Then slowly, steadily, something changes. Resistance builds. The people who have been stripped of all power find that it is in fact their conquerors who have no power at all. In the slow fight for freedom; it is the conquered who will always win.
I excerpt a long passage below:
The days and weeks dragged on, and the months dragged on. The snow fell and melted and fell and melted and finally fell and stuck. The dark buildings of the little town wore bells and hats and eyebrows of white and there were trenches through the snow to the doorways. In the harbor the coal barges came empty and went away loaded, but the coal did not come out of the ground easily. The good miners made mistakes. They were clumsy and slow. Machinery broke and took a long time to fix. The people of the conquered country settled in a slow, silent, waiting revenge. The men who had been traitors, who had helped the invaders – and many of them believed it was for a better state and an ideal way of life – found that the control they took was insecure, that the people they had known looked at them coldly and never spoke.
And there was death in the air, hovering and waiting. Accidents happened on the railroad, which clung to the mountains and connected the little town to the rest of the nation. Avalanches poured down on the tracks and rails were spread. No train could move unless the tracks were first inspected. People were shot in reprisal and it made no difference. Now and then a group of young men escaped and went to England. And the English bombed the coal mine and did some damage and killed some of both their friends and their enemies. And it did no good. The cold hatred grew with the winter, the silent, sullen hatred, the waiting hatred. The food supply was controlled – issued to the obedient and withheld from the disobedient – so that the whole population turned coldly obedient. There was a point that food could not be withheld, for a starving man cannot mine coal, cannot lift and carry. And the hatred was deep in the eyes of the people, beneath the surface.
Now it was that the conqueror was surrounded, the men of the battalion alone among silent enemies, and no man might relax his guard even for a moment. If he did, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he went alone to a woman, he disappeared and some snowdrift received his body. If he drank, he disappeared. The men of the battalion could sing only together, could dance only together, and dancing gradually stopped and the singing expressed a longing for home. Their talk was of friends and relatives who loved them and their longings were for warmth and love, because a man can be a soldier for only so many hours a day and for only so many months in a year, and then he wants to be a man again, wants girls and drinks and music and laughter and ease, and when these are cut off, they become irresistibly desirable.
And the men thought always of home. The men of the battalion came to detest the place they had conquered, and they were curt with the people and the people were curt with them, and gradually a little fear began to grow in the conquerors, a fear that it would never be over, that they could never relax or go home, a fear that one day they would crack and be hunted through the mountains like rabbits, for the conquered never relaxed their hatred. The patrols, seeing lights, hearing laughter, would be drawn as to a fire, and when they came near the laughter stopped, the warmth went out, and the people were cold and obedient. And the soldiers, smelling warm food from the little restaurants, went in and ordered the warm food and found that it was oversalted or overpeppered.
Then the soldiers read the news from home and from the other conquered countries, and the news was always good, and for a little while they believed it, and then after a while they did not believe it any more. And every man carried in his heart the terror. “If home crumbled, they would not tell us, and then it would be too late. These people will not spare us. They will kill us all.” They remembered stories of their men retreating through Belgium and retreating out of Russia. And the more literate remembered the frantic, tragic retreat from Moscow, when every peasant’s pitchfork tasted blood and the snow was rotten with bodies.
And they knew when they cracked, or relaxed, or slept too long, it would be the same here, and their sleep was restless and their days were nervous. They asked questions their officers could not answer because they did not know. They were not told, either. They did not believe the reports from home, either.
Thus it came about that the conquerors grew afraid of the conquered and their nerves wore thin and they shot at shadows in the night. The cold, sullen silence was with them always. Then three soldiers went insane in a week and cried all night and all day until they were sent away home. And others might have gone insane if they had not heard that mercy deaths awaited the insane at home, and a mercy death is a terrible thing to think of. Fear crept into the men in their billets and it made them sad, and it crept into the patrols and it made them cruel.
The year turned and the nights grew long. It was dark at three o’clock in the afternoon and not light again until nine in the morning. The jolly lights did not shine out on the snow, for by law every window must be black against the bombers. And yet when the English bombers came over, some light always appeared near the coal mine. Sometimes the sentries shot a man with a lantern and once a girl with a flashlight. And it did no good. Nothing was cured by the shooting.
And the officers were a reflection of their men, more restrained because their training was more complete, more resourceful because they had more responsibility, but the same fears were a little deeper buried in them, the same longings were more tightly locked in their hearts. And they were under a double strain, for the conquered people watched them for mistakes and their own men watched them for weakness, so that their spirits were taut to the breaking point. The conquerors were under a terrible spiritual siege and everyone knew, conquered and conquerors, what would happen when the first crack appeared.
