Pope Francis and the Struggle for Democracy
This week is an opportunity to connect Pope Francis to the concept of democracy as a "way of life," once widespread in America. The concept lived in the public work of settlers and immigrants who built schools, towns, local governments and local economies, what the historian Robert Wiebe called "portable democracy."
Pope Francis and the Struggle for Democracy
This week is an opportunity to connect Pope Francis to the concept of democracy as a "way of life," once widespread in America. The concept lived in the public work of settlers and immigrants who built schools, towns, local governments and local economies, what the historian Robert Wiebe called "portable democracy."
Pope Francis and Citizen Politics
We need a Copernican Revolution in political thinking. Pope Francis can help.
Pope Francis and Citizen Politics
We need a Copernican Revolution in political thinking. Pope Francis can help.
Pope Francis and Citizen Politics
We need a Copernican Revolution in political thinking. Pope Francis can help.
Pope Francis and Citizen Politics
We need a Copernican Revolution in political thinking. Pope Francis can help.
Pope Francis and Citizen Politics
Pope Francis and Citizen Politics
We need a Copernican Revolution in political thinking. Pope Francis can help.
In Laudato Si', the climate encyclical, Francis has a good deal to say about politics different than "a politics concerned [only] with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population... driven to produce short-term growth." As in his Latin trip, he argues for popular organizing. "Public pressure has to be exerted in order to bring about decisive political action. Society through non-governmental organizations and intermediate groups, must put pressure on governments... unless citizens control political power - national, regional, and municipal - it will not be possible to control damage to the environment."
As I earlier argued in "The Pope, Civic Studies, and Public Work," in my view Pope Francis also mistakenly separates politics from civic life where public work takes place.
Since the beginning of our work through the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College), we have seen the importance and usefulness of highlighting the political qualities of public work, not only in addressing issues of injustices, but also in creating things of lasting public value. Citizen politics, not ideological or party politics, is crucial for effective "world building" action. When co-creating the world, not simply fighting over its resources, is named in political terms, it affects a Copernican Revolution in political thinking -- politics revolves around citizens not politicians.
Laudato Si's implications for the public work of building democracy itself if we effect such a reframing of politics is illustrated by kindred political developments. In Great Britain over the past several years the Blue Labour movement represents a new democratic political project which redresses Francis' mistake, while having parallels with Laudato Si'.
Blue Labour grows from the broad-based community organizing group London Citizen. It was first articulated by the political theorist Maurice Glasman, working with Luke Bretherton, both long active in London Citizen, as a way to generalize community organizing themes. Glasman and Bretherton saw such politics as an alternative to the technocratic, centralizing, deregulatory "Third Way" politics of Tony Blair in the Labour Party and the "Red Tory" agenda of the Conservatives which touted agency without politics.
Blue Labour, many of whose leaders are drawn from Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant communities, draws strongly on Catholic social teachings, especially the concepts of subsidiarity and a civic economy. Subsidiarity is the principal that power needs to be dispersed downwards to communities and institutions best suited to exercise it - locally run schools, housing, hospitals, municipal authorities.
The "civic economy" seeks to transcend debates between the left and the right about the market, arguing that the market must operate within a moral framework and that profit and public benefit can coincide if rewards, risks, and responsibilities are shared among all stakeholders including owners, managers, workers, consumers, suppliers, and communities where businesses are located.
Bretherton argues for a citizen politics of public work in his chapter in the collection, Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics. "The political vision... holds that if a group is directly contributing to the common work of defending, tending and creating the commonweal then they deserve recognition as a vital part and co-labourer within the broader body politics," says Bretherton. "It is the very emphasis on participation and contribution to the building up of a common life that allows for a greater plurality and affirmation of distinct identities and traditions, as each is able to play a part in this common work." Put differently, while "Blue Labour" has implications for electoral politics, its fundamental aim is reframing politics as the activity of the people acting as citizens, not politicians or voters.
Blue Labour, allied with Pope Francis' wing of the Catholic Church, can be seen as a sign of an epochal shift in the project of democracy. Through the modern period, "democracy" was mainly a modernizing project led by highly educated secular groups who took science as their touchstone. The new citizen politics of public work aims at a relational politics of civic agency, collective capacities to work across differences to address common challenges and negotiate a common life. In such citizen politics religious groups with a pluralist orientation often take key leadership. Indeed, this democratic project confounds conventional distinctions such as "modern" and "traditional," "secular" and "religious," "scientific" and "cultural."
I saw such a democratic politics with religious leadership in the civil rights movement. It also appeared in the anti-apartheid struggle. But such religious leadership has been more generally submerged in democratic struggles of the modern era, as the political theorist Michael Walzer makes clear in The Paradox of Liberation.
Looking at three democratic liberation movements - in India, Israel, and Algeria - Walzer shows that such movements "imitate the politics of the European left... a secularizing, modernizing, and developmental creed." Walzer argues that the modernist creed was at some distance from the common people. "Leaders of these movements, when they exercised political power, did so with a sure sense that they knew what was best for their backward and often recalcitrant peoples."
Popular cultural continued to exert a stubborn resistance. "The old ways were sustained in temples, synagogues, and mosques... in interpersonal relations, in families, and in life-cycle celebrations, where the sustaining behaviors were hardly visible" to leaders "busily at work on the big project of modernization."
Over time, in each of these societies, such resistance led to religiously-based counterrevolutions. In other societies led by parties descending from the secular left, there are now also strong anti-democratic trends. A recent article in The Guardian by Harriet Sherwood details the new controls on independent civic groups in almost half the nations of the world. "Over the past three years, more than 60 countries have passed or drafted laws that curtail the activity of non-governmental and civil society organisations," writes Sherwood. "Ninety-six countries have taken steps to inhibit NGOs from operating at full capacity, in what the Carnegie Endowment calls a 'viral-like spread of new laws' under which international aid groups and their local partners are vilified, harassed, closed down and sometimes expelled."
In South Africa, where I live part of the year, the dominant faction of the ruling party, the African National Congress, now touts anti-democratic China as its model. South Africa needs a democratic project that can reactivate the great wells of democratic energy like the religious communities which once played such central roles in the struggle for a "nonracial democracy."
In such a context, Laudato Si' provides a politics of hope.
In Laudato Si', the climate encyclical, Francis has a good deal to say about politics different than "a politics concerned [only] with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population... driven to produce short-term growth." As in his Latin trip, he argues for popular organizing. "Public pressure has to be exerted in order to bring about decisive political action. Society through non-governmental organizations and intermediate groups, must put pressure on governments... unless citizens control political power - national, regional, and municipal - it will not be possible to control damage to the environment."
As I earlier argued in "The Pope, Civic Studies, and Public Work," in my view Pope Francis also mistakenly separates politics from civic life where public work takes place.
Since the beginning of our work through the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College), we have seen the importance and usefulness of highlighting the political qualities of public work, not only in addressing issues of injustices, but also in creating things of lasting public value. Citizen politics, not ideological or party politics, is crucial for effective "world building" action. When co-creating the world, not simply fighting over its resources, is named in political terms, it affects a Copernican Revolution in political thinking -- politics revolves around citizens not politicians.
Laudato Si's implications for the public work of building democracy itself if we effect such a reframing of politics is illustrated by kindred political developments. In Great Britain over the past several years the Blue Labour movement represents a new democratic political project which redresses Francis' mistake, while having parallels with Laudato Si'.
Blue Labour grows from the broad-based community organizing group London Citizen. It was first articulated by the political theorist Maurice Glasman, working with Luke Bretherton, both long active in London Citizen, as a way to generalize community organizing themes. Glasman and Bretherton saw such politics as an alternative to the technocratic, centralizing, deregulatory "Third Way" politics of Tony Blair in the Labour Party and the "Red Tory" agenda of the Conservatives which touted agency without politics.
Blue Labour, many of whose leaders are drawn from Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant communities, draws strongly on Catholic social teachings, especially the concepts of subsidiarity and a civic economy. Subsidiarity is the principal that power needs to be dispersed downwards to communities and institutions best suited to exercise it - locally run schools, housing, hospitals, municipal authorities.
The "civic economy" seeks to transcend debates between the left and the right about the market, arguing that the market must operate within a moral framework and that profit and public benefit can coincide if rewards, risks, and responsibilities are shared among all stakeholders including owners, managers, workers, consumers, suppliers, and communities where businesses are located.
Bretherton argues for a citizen politics of public work in his chapter in the collection, Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics. "The political vision... holds that if a group is directly contributing to the common work of defending, tending and creating the commonweal then they deserve recognition as a vital part and co-labourer within the broader body politics," says Bretherton. "It is the very emphasis on participation and contribution to the building up of a common life that allows for a greater plurality and affirmation of distinct identities and traditions, as each is able to play a part in this common work." Put differently, while "Blue Labour" has implications for electoral politics, its fundamental aim is reframing politics as the activity of the people acting as citizens, not politicians or voters.
Blue Labour, allied with Pope Francis' wing of the Catholic Church, can be seen as a sign of an epochal shift in the project of democracy. Through the modern period, "democracy" was mainly a modernizing project led by highly educated secular groups who took science as their touchstone. The new citizen politics of public work aims at a relational politics of civic agency, collective capacities to work across differences to address common challenges and negotiate a common life. In such citizen politics religious groups with a pluralist orientation often take key leadership. Indeed, this democratic project confounds conventional distinctions such as "modern" and "traditional," "secular" and "religious," "scientific" and "cultural."
I saw such a democratic politics with religious leadership in the civil rights movement. It also appeared in the anti-apartheid struggle. But such religious leadership has been more generally submerged in democratic struggles of the modern era, as the political theorist Michael Walzer makes clear in The Paradox of Liberation.
Looking at three democratic liberation movements - in India, Israel, and Algeria - Walzer shows that such movements "imitate the politics of the European left... a secularizing, modernizing, and developmental creed." Walzer argues that the modernist creed was at some distance from the common people. "Leaders of these movements, when they exercised political power, did so with a sure sense that they knew what was best for their backward and often recalcitrant peoples."
Popular cultural continued to exert a stubborn resistance. "The old ways were sustained in temples, synagogues, and mosques... in interpersonal relations, in families, and in life-cycle celebrations, where the sustaining behaviors were hardly visible" to leaders "busily at work on the big project of modernization."
Over time, in each of these societies, such resistance led to religiously-based counterrevolutions. In other societies led by parties descending from the secular left, there are now also strong anti-democratic trends. A recent article in The Guardian by Harriet Sherwood details the new controls on independent civic groups in almost half the nations of the world. "Over the past three years, more than 60 countries have passed or drafted laws that curtail the activity of non-governmental and civil society organisations," writes Sherwood. "Ninety-six countries have taken steps to inhibit NGOs from operating at full capacity, in what the Carnegie Endowment calls a 'viral-like spread of new laws' under which international aid groups and their local partners are vilified, harassed, closed down and sometimes expelled."
In South Africa, where I live part of the year, the dominant faction of the ruling party, the African National Congress, now touts anti-democratic China as its model. South Africa needs a democratic project that can reactivate the great wells of democratic energy like the religious communities which once played such central roles in the struggle for a "nonracial democracy."
In such a context, Laudato Si' provides a politics of hope.
Hope and Higher Education — The Role of Citizen Professionals
There are new resources for a "long march through the institutions and professions" of modern society that works democratizing change. That was my argument in a talk the other day at the University of Cape Town (UCT), "Democratizing Universities and the Future of Democracy - The role of citizen professionals."
Citizen professionals will be key architects of such work, in collaboration with self-organizing lay citizens.
One can see early intimations in places like Augsburg College, where their commitments to preparing "citizen nurses" and "citizen teachers" as change agents in systems. Many faculty and staff also have begun to think of themselves as "citizen professionals." The Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota has gained international visibility for similar work. Albert Dzur chronicles hidden democratizing professional and institutional changes, across many fields, in "Trench Democracy," a blog for the Boston Review.
At UCT, I told the story of my first encounter with South African university students in 2002. Dr. Mzwanele Mayekeso, a lecturer in planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who knew of my work on community organizing and democratic change, invited me to speak to his class.
The class, all black, about 30, mostly came from nearby townships like Soweto and Alexandra. I described traditions of empowering professional practices that the Center for Democracy and Citizenship seeks to renew, which I had seen across the South in the civil rights movement. These involved "citizen professionals," civic leaders with a large sense of public purpose who know how to work as equals in public problem solving, with their specialized knowledge "on tap not on top." Citizen teachers, citizen doctors, citizen nurses, citizen clergy, citizen city planners are examples.
The students were furious. "Why haven't we heard anything about this?" they asked. "This is why we came to the university - to learn how to go back to our communities, not to leave them, and work in an empowering way."
"If we were learning this in university, there wouldn't be the brain drain we see today." This is a story of young people's aspiration to be "world-creators," through work that is socially useful.
The student aspirations furnished a counterpoint to Ethan Zuckerman's keynote address last May to Re:Publica, the European Internet and Society conference, which Mary Hess, a friend at Luther Seminary, had drawn my attention to. The address, "The System's Broken - That's the Good News," is a skillful overview of recent change efforts in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Zuckerman's "third way" strategy is also deeply pessimistic about any possibilities for changes such as the Wits students wanted.
Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, brought together a significant body of research which suggests that while protests can play crucial roles in highlighting injustices, and while elections are important ways to affect public policy, neither alone makes substantial social change. He analyzes movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados movement in Spain, the Arab Spring, the Turkish protests in 2013 which brought more than 3 million people into the streets, and the anti-government protests in Brazil, as well as the experiences of insurgent parties like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.
Such movements, he concludes, "throughout Europe, North and South America have demonstrated huge energy and enormous popular support. But it's hard to point to tangible, systemic changes that parallel the scale of mobilizations that have taken place." Zukerman suggests a number of reasons -- protests are different than fixing problems. The internet is good at getting people out in the streets, but internet mobilizations short-circuit the relational, face to face organizing that went into earlier large movements.
The structural constraints of the global economy are increasingly severe. "We can oust bad people through protest and elect the right people and put them in power, we can protest to pressure our leaders to do the rights things, and they may not be powerful enough to give us the changes we really want."
But the challenges he outlines dwarf his strategies for change. He said that his students at MIT distrust all sorts of institutions -- schools, banks, businesses, nonprofits, churches - not simply government, and proposes that the world is dividing between "institutionalists" who work in institutions and "insurrectionists" who "believe we need to abandon these broken institutions and replace them with new, less corrupted ones or with nothing at all." Zuckerman's "third path" beyond elections and protests includes monitoring institutions from outside to holding them accountable; starting new institutions from scratch; and abandoning the idea of institutions altogether.
Such strategies may have impact. But they are not going to significantly affect the power relations of modern societies. The Wits students were hoping for something else. They wanted to change the world through their actual professions, in institutions as well as beyond them.
But why, many ask, is there reason to believe this is possible? As Aaron Schutz has observed, scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings (especially in her marvelous book Dream-Keepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children), have described teachers who are highly effective in motivating African Americans and other disadvantaged students by working with the unique strengths and backgrounds each child can bring to their learning. But they despair about changing the educational system.
At UCT, I outlined three resources which hold potential to crack what Max Weber called "the iron cage" of growing bureaucratization:
• New understandings of the ways technocracy has replaced relational cultures with informational cultures, brilliantly illuminated in Pope Francis' new climate encyclical, and new practices for reversing the process;
• Understandings of politics that focus on self-interests and power rather than ideology, growing from broad-based community organizing methods. There is growing evidence that these can be translated into professions and systems;
• The concept and practices of "free spaces," where people develop civic agency.
My talk summarized the argument, and my academia.edu site is reorganized to highlight these resources. They are not exhaustive but all are important. The book collection Democracy's Education is full of other examples.
I believe the discussion is just beginning.
Harry Boyte edits Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt, 2015)
Citizen professionals will be key architects of such work, in collaboration with self-organizing lay citizens.
One can see early intimations in places like Augsburg College, where their commitments to preparing "citizen nurses" and "citizen teachers" as change agents in systems. Many faculty and staff also have begun to think of themselves as "citizen professionals." The Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota has gained international visibility for similar work. Albert Dzur chronicles hidden democratizing professional and institutional changes, across many fields, in "Trench Democracy," a blog for the Boston Review.
At UCT, I told the story of my first encounter with South African university students in 2002. Dr. Mzwanele Mayekeso, a lecturer in planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who knew of my work on community organizing and democratic change, invited me to speak to his class.
The class, all black, about 30, mostly came from nearby townships like Soweto and Alexandra. I described traditions of empowering professional practices that the Center for Democracy and Citizenship seeks to renew, which I had seen across the South in the civil rights movement. These involved "citizen professionals," civic leaders with a large sense of public purpose who know how to work as equals in public problem solving, with their specialized knowledge "on tap not on top." Citizen teachers, citizen doctors, citizen nurses, citizen clergy, citizen city planners are examples.
The students were furious. "Why haven't we heard anything about this?" they asked. "This is why we came to the university - to learn how to go back to our communities, not to leave them, and work in an empowering way."
"If we were learning this in university, there wouldn't be the brain drain we see today." This is a story of young people's aspiration to be "world-creators," through work that is socially useful.
The student aspirations furnished a counterpoint to Ethan Zuckerman's keynote address last May to Re:Publica, the European Internet and Society conference, which Mary Hess, a friend at Luther Seminary, had drawn my attention to. The address, "The System's Broken - That's the Good News," is a skillful overview of recent change efforts in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Zuckerman's "third way" strategy is also deeply pessimistic about any possibilities for changes such as the Wits students wanted.
Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, brought together a significant body of research which suggests that while protests can play crucial roles in highlighting injustices, and while elections are important ways to affect public policy, neither alone makes substantial social change. He analyzes movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados movement in Spain, the Arab Spring, the Turkish protests in 2013 which brought more than 3 million people into the streets, and the anti-government protests in Brazil, as well as the experiences of insurgent parties like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.
Such movements, he concludes, "throughout Europe, North and South America have demonstrated huge energy and enormous popular support. But it's hard to point to tangible, systemic changes that parallel the scale of mobilizations that have taken place." Zukerman suggests a number of reasons -- protests are different than fixing problems. The internet is good at getting people out in the streets, but internet mobilizations short-circuit the relational, face to face organizing that went into earlier large movements.
The structural constraints of the global economy are increasingly severe. "We can oust bad people through protest and elect the right people and put them in power, we can protest to pressure our leaders to do the rights things, and they may not be powerful enough to give us the changes we really want."
But the challenges he outlines dwarf his strategies for change. He said that his students at MIT distrust all sorts of institutions -- schools, banks, businesses, nonprofits, churches - not simply government, and proposes that the world is dividing between "institutionalists" who work in institutions and "insurrectionists" who "believe we need to abandon these broken institutions and replace them with new, less corrupted ones or with nothing at all." Zuckerman's "third path" beyond elections and protests includes monitoring institutions from outside to holding them accountable; starting new institutions from scratch; and abandoning the idea of institutions altogether.
Such strategies may have impact. But they are not going to significantly affect the power relations of modern societies. The Wits students were hoping for something else. They wanted to change the world through their actual professions, in institutions as well as beyond them.
But why, many ask, is there reason to believe this is possible? As Aaron Schutz has observed, scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings (especially in her marvelous book Dream-Keepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children), have described teachers who are highly effective in motivating African Americans and other disadvantaged students by working with the unique strengths and backgrounds each child can bring to their learning. But they despair about changing the educational system.
At UCT, I outlined three resources which hold potential to crack what Max Weber called "the iron cage" of growing bureaucratization:
• New understandings of the ways technocracy has replaced relational cultures with informational cultures, brilliantly illuminated in Pope Francis' new climate encyclical, and new practices for reversing the process;
• Understandings of politics that focus on self-interests and power rather than ideology, growing from broad-based community organizing methods. There is growing evidence that these can be translated into professions and systems;
• The concept and practices of "free spaces," where people develop civic agency.
My talk summarized the argument, and my academia.edu site is reorganized to highlight these resources. They are not exhaustive but all are important. The book collection Democracy's Education is full of other examples.
I believe the discussion is just beginning.
Harry Boyte edits Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt, 2015)