In his presidential announcement speech on February 10, 2007, Barack Obama said that as a young community organizer in Chicago, "I received the best education I ever had." Later that year, at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, he expanded. As a community organizer, he said, "I found a community that embraced me; a church to belong to; citizenship that was meaningful; the direction I'd been seeking."

The lesson he took for the general citizenry was service. "Every American can give back to their communities and help their fellow citizens through service," said Obama on September 12, 2008, during the campaign. "Many Americans serve their nation through military service. Others serve by volunteering in schools, shelters, churches, hospitals, and disaster relief efforts. Still more are firefighters, teachers, or police officers. As a young man, I served as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where I learned ways to create opportunities for other people to achieve their dreams. Our nation faces serious challenges in its neighborhoods and schools, and we must empower Americans with the resources they need to give back and improve their communities."

In fact a different kind of politics that engages people across their differences is the genius of the kind of broad-based community organizing he experienced in Chicago. Such organizing revived the older non-ideological, productive meaning of the term.

Long-time community organizer and philosopher of organizing Gerald Taylor describes such politics as a shift "from protest to governance, moving into power." For Taylor "moving into power means learning how to be accountable, being able to negotiate and compromise. It means understanding that people are not necessarily evil because they have different interests or ways of looking at the world."

Obama clearly took these ideas about a different kind of politics with him after community organizing into his political career. They formed the centerpiece of his second book, The Audacity of Hope. He brought them to the campaign and his early years as president, when he sought to bring them to Washington.

"What's stopped us from meeting [our] challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans," he continued in his announcement in 2007. "What's stopped us is...the smallness of our politics -- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems."

One unmistakable lesson of Obama's presidency is that "a different kind of politics" is not going to trickle down from Washington. His efforts to work across the aisle brought scant success and a great deal of derision from pundits and Washington insiders.

Obama has long championed active citizenship. "The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote," he declared in his victory speech after the 2012 election. "America's never been about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government." But through his presidency, as during the 2008 campaign, he has consistently equated citizenship with service, not politics. Service can be important, but it doesn't teach the lessons of democratic politics.

In fact, acquiescing to the ways of Washington, the president has often taken a top-down approach, the opposite of engaging people in ways that respect their interests and their agency.

In foreign affairs, however, Obama's willingness to try a different kind of politics, seeking to understand and engage others of diverse interests and backgrounds, has been an outstanding feature of his administration. Such politics may well have prevented foreign policy disasters like the Iraq invasion. And it has paid off in the new nuclear agreement with Iran. As Peter Baker put it in a New York Times analysis of the difference between Obama and critics of the accord, "What distinguishes Mr. Obama is his willingness to see the situation from the other side's position, a trait that tends to outrage domestic critics because the other side is generally viewed as loathsome."

In an interview with Thomas Friedman, Obama argued that engaging others offers hope for change that demonization and polarization cannot generate. "When we are able to see their country and their culture in specific terms, historical terms, as opposed to just applying a broad brush, that's when you have the possibility of at least some movement."

Beyond the posturing and ad hominem attacks we can expect in the forthcoming national argument about the nuclear deal, it is good to keep in mind the elemental point of politics. Politics in the older sense of the word, descending from the Greeks, conveys the practice humans have developed to negotiate the irreducible plurality of the human condition. It is the method to negotiate different, often conflicting interests and views in order to get things done.

At times diverse interests can be integrated through politics, but the aim is not to do away with conflict--politics is a never-ending "rough and tumble" activity. Sometimes it surfaces previously submerged clashes of interest. Rarely does it achieve consensus. Politics aims rather to avoid violence, contain conflicts, generate common work on common challenges, and achieve beneficial public outcomes.

Making the connection between politics and citizenship is up to all of us. At home as well as abroad - and in every environment, not simply government -- we need productive politics if we are to navigate the dramatic challenges of our time.

The Iran nuclear agreement offers an example of politics' possibilities.

Harry Boyte edits Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt, 2015), with many contributors describing a different kind of politics.

As if Republicans did not have enough to worry about with Donald Trump, the visit of Pope Francis to the United States in September, which includes an unprecedented address to a joint session of congress, may portend even more trouble.

In the long run, Pope Francis' message could also be as unsettling to liberals as it is to conservatives.

For Republicans, the pope's visit in September is likely to cause acute discomfort. As Suzanne Goldenberg wrote in the British Guardian last month, "Leading figures on the American right are launching a series of pre-emptive attacks on the pope... hoping to prevent a mass conversion of the climate change deniers who have powered the corps of the conservative movement for more than a decade."

The pope's approach to other issues will likely be equally disturbing. "The pope will come humbly but will talk clearly," said Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a leading adviser to Francis. On immigration and social and economic justice as well as climate, Pope Francis will be outspoken. "The desert cannot be a tomb or a cemetery," Maradiaga said, referring to the hazardous journey of many immigrants and the need for policies that are generous and welcoming.

Maradiaga also said the pope is sure to raise questions of inequality and justice. "Capitalism is not a God. The system is fostering tremendous inequalities," he explained.

If Pope Francis challenges pieties of the right, his message also challenges the left.

In 1902 in Democracy and Social Ethics the settlement house leader Jane Addams warned that a class of progressive "experts" was emerging who saw themselves outside the life of the people. In her view, detached expertise reinforced existing hierarchies based on wealth and power and created new forms of hierarchical power that threatened the capacities of communities to determine their destinies.

Over time, outside expert claims to unique authority based on positivist views of science and technology reshaped fields from education and health to race relations and economics, as well as professional practices in general which claim the imprimatur of science.

Andrew Jewett describes the dynamic of outsider knowledge based on positivist theories of science in Science, Democracy, and the American University. "The scientists who powerfully shaped the national discourse on science in the middle years of the twentieth century drew a sharp line between science and society," he says. "They sought to insulate the research process [as]... a space untouchable by both the state and the horizontal communication between citizens."

Leaders in today's progressive politics embody this stance of outside fixer often with the best of professed intentions. Thus Donna Shalala, former Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, later the most progressive member of the Clinton cabinet, and recently appointed head of the Clinton Foundation, illustrated this dynamic in a famous speech calling for renewal of the Wisconsin Idea in 1989, "Mandate for a New Century." Shalala called for universities to be at the forefront of action on problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental degradation, hunger and war.

She also redefined the older Wisconsin Idea into an unabashedly elite perspective. As she put it, "The ideal [is] a disinterested technocratic elite... society's best and brightest in service to its most needy [dedicated to] delivering the miracles of social science [on society's problems] just as doctors cured juvenile rickets in the past" (1989). In this framework the general population, no longer productive citizens, are reconceived as clients and consumers serviced by experts, while citizenship itself is narrowed to practices like voting, volunteering, or petitioning government for redress.

Her perspective is far from unique. It is embodied in one-way approaches to change in fields such as "translational science," in which experts usually claim the mantle of science to design and implement policies with little role for the lay citizenry except compliance. With exceptions, such as the research partnerships of the Kettering Foundation, the power patterns of such approaches have remained invisible in public discussion.

Pope Francis' Laudato Si' dramatically changes the game by putting the hierarchical power of technocracy front and center. Francis describes the shift that prioritizes informational approaches for dealing with human problems over relational and cultural approaches. "The basic problem," he argues in the section, the Globalization of the Technocratic Paradigm, "is the way that humanity has taken up... an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the concept of a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object." This is positivism. "Many problems of today's world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shaped the lives of individuals and the workings of society."

The result is a huge concentration in power. Technological transformations "have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them...dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world."

If the analysis is unsettling, the implications of this critique hold some measure of hope -- if the people act. As Pope Francis said in a speech to popular movements gathered in Bolivia, on July 9, "I would like to repeat: the future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of great leaders, the great powers and the elites. It is fundamentally in the hands of peoples and in their ability to organize."

In this spirit, we need to take the opportunity of Francis' visit in September to begin to organize in new ways and on a new scale to address our mounting problems. In the process we could well revitalize the democratic way of life.

--

Harry Boyte edits Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt, 2015), with many contributions on the democratization of technocratic power and the recovery of the democratic purposes of education.

As if Republicans did not have enough to worry about with Donald Trump, the visit of Pope Francis to the United States in September, which includes an unprecedented address to a joint session of congress, may portend even more trouble.

As if Republicans did not have enough to worry about with Donald Trump, the visit of Pope Francis to the United States in September, which includes an unprecedented address to a joint session of congress, may portend even more trouble.

Over the coming long months of public focus on elections, we need to talk about who owns democracy and what it means. College and university campuses, as well as other sites, have potential to be venues.

Both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are talking about democracy. Jeb Bush recently questioned his brother's efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Democracy promotion, he argued, "has to be tempered with the realization that not every country is immediately going to become a little 'd' democratic country." Rand Paul's skepticism runs deeper. In 2013 he told the Coalition of African American Pastors Leadership Conference that "We should never be for democracy," because it means majority will expressed through elections. "Jim Crow came out of democracy."

In contrast, Democratic candidates express enthusiasm for democracy as they understand it. On June 4, Hillary Clinton outlined her plan to revitalize democracy through protection and expansion of voting rights, new standards for early voting, automatic voter registration, and a constitutional amendment "to undo the Supreme Court's damage in Citizens United." Bernie Sanders, in his announcement speech, raised the question of ownership. "Enough is enough," he declared. "This great nation and its government belong to all the people and not to a handful of billionaires."

For all the differences, Republicans and Democrats define democracy in similar ways. "We know what democracy is supposed to be about," said Sanders. "It is one person, one vote, with every citizen having an equal say." Put differently, both sides see democracy as a trip to the ballot box in which citizens elect people to act on our behalf, with little or no attention to the everyday civic work of citizens between elections.

America was born with a different meaning. Unlike monarchies emerging from the dim mists of the past, or aristocracies ruled by landed nobility, or communist governments which claimed the label of "people's republics" guided by vanguards, in the United States the people were the agents and authors.

The revolutionary generation of the 1770s, drawing on decades of experiences in which settlers built towns and local governments, constituted themselves as the new political body. As the political theorist Sheldon Wolin argued in his great essay, "The State of the Union," in the New York Review of Books, reflecting on President Carter's address in 1978, the Declaration of Independence "set out a conception of collectivity that... attempted to ground public authority in the specific capacity of the people to constitute their own political identity." A decade later the Constitution "not only preserved the democratic conception of collectivity... but even conceded the most crucial element in it, the idea of a people who could act politically. The language of Preamble was unequivocal on that score [with] active verbs such as 'form,' 'establish,' insure,' 'provide,' and above all, 'ordain.'" These demonstrated "a conception of the 'people' as an entity which could develop and express its collective will."

Elite interests set to work immediately to undermine founding democratic definitions. One strategy was the Constitution itself, which followed the Preamble, full of mechanisms to dilute the voice of citizens. Another was the sustained and continuing effort to displace the authority and identity of the people with the authority and authorship of elites. This required redefining "people" as "electorate." In democracy-as-elections, citizens' work to build a democratic way of life disappears from view.

Yet elite definitions were fiercely contested in practice as well as theory. America continued to be the setting of robust self-organizing activities, from voluntary associations, common schools, and colleges to the abolition movement, slave rebellions, and struggles of labor and women which challenged exclusions from "we the people." Indeed Abraham Lincoln's formulation of "government of people, by the people, and for the people" was not only the crystallization of decades of self-organizing citizen labors, but also a challenge to definitions of democracy in which ownership was vested in the political class. For Lincoln, government was not simply based on popular consent. It grew from the people's civic agency.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and all the energies which grew from it revitalized for a time an understanding of democracy as a way of life. This was the participatory democracy which I learned from grassroots organizers like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Dorothy Cotton. Martin Luther King voiced this view in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," proposing that the movement was "bringing the country back to the great wells of democracy" created at the nation's founding.

Yet efforts to narrow democracy's meaning also reached a new level in President Jimmy Carter's state of the union address in 1978. Carter declared that to remedy the distance which had grown between people and government, "we must have what Abraham Lincoln sought -- a Government for the people." As Wolin observed, "in... appealing to the memory of the folk hero (Lincoln)... the president effected a distortion... that was as revealing as it was radical." Carter dropped government "of" and government "by." What was left was "for," government providing benefits and solutions, a bureaucratic conception of government in which the president is manager-in-chief and citizens are needy clients.

We saw further sidelining of citizens when we worked with President Clinton's Domestic Policy Council from 1993 to 1995 in the Reinventing Citizenship initiative. Our coalition of colleges and universities, civic groups, and foundations developed strategies for overcoming the citizen-government guide. We used the phrase "reinventing citizenship" to argue that government cannot reform itself -- "reinvent government" -- without a rebirth of a civic ethos and identity within government and the larger society.

We lost the battle. Citizen were redefined as customers across all federal agencies.

Vice President Gore asked me to speak to his annual Family Re-Union Conference on the eve of his president bid in 1999, I asked several colleagues with long experience in Washington what I might say. The best counsel came from David Mathews, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Ford administration and now president of the Kettering Foundation.

"Tell them we are not customers of government," Mathews said. "We own the store."

This is a point of view worth recalling in 2015 and 2016.

Harry Boyte, coordinator of the Reinventing Citizenship initiative with the White House Domestic Policy Council from 1993 to 1995, is also editor of the collection Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press 2015)

Over the coming long months of public focus on elections, we need to talk about who owns democracy and what it means. College and university campuses, as well as other sites, have potential to be venues.

Over the coming long months of public focus on elections, we need to talk about who owns democracy and what it means. College and university campuses, as well as other sites, have potential to be venues.

The Pope follows in the tradition of Martin Luther King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Keenly aware of the power of southern segregationists, they advanced a politics aimed at winning over the broad middle of American society.