In Education, Justice & Democracy, edited by Danielle S. Allen and Rob Reich, all the chapters address the topic of educational equality in the US. The section headings are “ideals,” “constraints,” and “strategies.” In a longish review essay for Theory & Research in Education, I argue that good citizens explore just these three issues whenever they consider any important topic. In fact, you might define good citizens as people who take ideals, constraints (or, I would say, “facts”), and strategies seriously and act accordingly. However, the three issues are badly segregated in modern intellectual life, with whole disciplines given over to the assumption that one should seek value-free facts, other disciplines happy to explore values without thinking about strategies, and some professional programs focused on strategies with a narrow conception of ideals. What we call “Civic Studies” is a deliberate effort to reintegrate thinking about social concerns from a citizen’s perspective, which inevitably combines ideals, constrains, and strategies. I chose to review this volume because it exemplifies Civic Studies, although I offer some critical thoughts about parts of the book.
Please save the date for Frontiers of Democracy: June 23-25, 2016 at Tufts University’s downtown Boston campus.
Frontiers is an annual conference that draws scholars and practitioners who strive to understand and improve people’s engagement with government, with communities, and with each other. The format of Frontiers is highly interactive; most of the concurrent sessions are “learning exchanges” rather than presentations or panels. We welcome proposals for learning exchanges for 2016. Please use this form to submit ideas.
We aim to explore the circumstances of democracy today and a breadth of civic practices that include deliberative democracy, civil and human rights, social justice, community organizing and development, civic learning and political engagement, the role of higher education in democracy, Civic Studies, media reform and citizen media production, civic technology, civic environmentalism, and common pool resource management. See more about past years here.
You can enter your information here to let us know that you are interested in attending and to ensure that you receive additional information about the agenda and registering for Frontiers.
All are welcome at Frontiers, a public conference that follows immediately after the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, a 2-week seminar for scholars, practitioners, and advanced graduate students. The Summer Institute requires an application, and admissions decisions are usually made in May. Prospective applicants should sign up here for more information.
Civic engagement is important to measure both as an intrinsic good and as a predictor of various desirable outcomes for the individuals who engage and for their communities and governments. Organizations–from individual schools and nonprofits to the Census Bureau and Corporation for National & Community Service–often ask survey questions that measure it. But there are many available survey measures, and organizations often wonder which ones to use and how to cluster them. Here is a simple table that produces six categories, with sample survey items for each.
Citizens engage …
with each other
with institutions
by communicating
attending meetings
discussing public affairs
posting/reposting social media about public issues
reading/watching news
contacting officials
contacting media
protest/civil disobedience
by acting/working
working to fix a community problem
volunteering
doing one’s job with a public purpose*
voting
boycotting/buycotting
working in government (including AmeriCorps)*
social entrepreneurship*
by forming relationships
membership in groups
leadership roles in groups
trust in other people
service on boards and advisory committees
confidence in institutions
A few observations:
Deliberative democracy is the first row. Public work is the whole table.
With the exception of trust and confidence, these are measures of action, not of attitudes or knowledge. I include trust and confidence basically as proxies for actual working relationships, which would be ideally measured more directly. Attitudes and knowledge are also crucial, but they would require another table.
Asterisks denote constructs that are rarely measured and for which the items seem to be relatively weak.
I prefer survey measures of basic constructs that are relatively invariant across contexts. For instance, I don’t care whether people post on Facebook (which we may all stop doing in a few years, anyway), but I do care whether they communicate with fellow citizens about public issues. Likewise, I would count someone as doing public work whether it’s paid or not, so I am less interested in whether people spend hours volunteering than in whether they work on public issues. The challenge is that survey measures of abstract categories are hard to understand, but measures of highly concrete activities (like volunteering hours) tend to miss the point a bit. But we do our best with proxies.
One way to turn these separate items into larger wholes is psychometric–looking empirically at which clusters of items go together in a population, because clusters would ostensibly measure underlying psychological factors. I think that is valuable work but not the only way to proceed. These are not strictly psychological measures, manifesting the mental states of individuals. They have a lot to do with institutions and varying social needs. Further, we are not looking for individuals who approximate good citizenship as a psychological state. Rather, we are trying to improve democracy. That may require a division of labor in which, for instance, some people specialize in protest and have low confidence in institution, while others have high trust and volunteer a lot. What kinds of civic engagement we need is a social/political question, not a psychological one.
In The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer explains why Twitter seems not to be as fun or as socially satisfying as some other networks. He thinks it uncomfortably and unsuccessfully “smooshes” together aspects of oral communication (spontaneity, rapidity, and interactivity) with aspects of written communication (permanence, sharability, and the capacity to reach strangers). Meyer thinks that “the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi [that should actually be magna opera], but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh. Visual conversations have stayed chatty, in other words.”
Meyer’s theorists are Walter Ong and Bonnie Stewart, but there are also hints of Habermas in the article: Ong is quoted on the “human lifeworld,” and Meyer notes ways that the public and the private “get smooshed.”
A core Habermasian insight is that there are different norms appropriate to private and public speech.
In public, you must make arguments that can persuade strangers. You must therefore provide adequate reasons and explanations for everything you say. Since you can’t assume that strangers understand your assumptions and experiences, you must make them evident. You are accountable for your remarks and should be responsive to reasonable critiques. You should (generally) take the same positions when talking to different people. When Mitt Romney complained to donors about the 49% of Americans who were “takers,” but he didn’t want the 49% to hear him, he became one of many public figures who have been caught violating the norms of public speech.
In private, the norms are authenticity, spontaneity, and responsiveness to the concrete other people with whom you have relationships. You should (generally) say what you really feel in the moment, although you are also obligated to care about what the individual who hears you thinks and feels. That may require tact. You need not fully explain your thoughts, and your explanations certainly need not convey entire, self-sufficient arguments to strangers. You are not responsible for treating everyone alike. In fact, you are obligated to favor some people, the ones you love and who love you. You have a right to privacy, so if you are videotaped saying something that you wouldn’t want strangers to hear, that is a violation of your rights.
It is dangerous to confuse these domains, to “smoosh” the public with the private. Often, marketing and political propaganda consists of pretending to have an authentic private conversation while actually influencing strangers. Voters mistakenly choose candidates based on their impressions of politicians’ private lives, which are irrelevant at best and fictional at worst. Meanwhile, powerful people privatize the public sphere by making policy decisions on the basis of personal relationships and inventing spurious justifications or avoiding rationales entirely. Prying journalists and governments violate privacy. And sometimes ordinary people retreat from the public sphere and either take no positions at all or develop irresponsible positions on public matters because they can’t or won’t interact with strangers as if they were real decision-makers.
I am not sure, however, whether Twitter exemplifies the smooshing of public and private that worries Habermas. Twitter is a fairly flexible platform. You can use the 140 characters to address the public, although that will often require embedded links. Or you can use the 140 characters to keep your close friends informed about your social plans. You can develop a persona as a public person or as a private one. The two can be confused, and awkwardness can arise. For instance, as Meyer notes, disclaimers that “RTs do not constitute endorsements” are odd ways of distancing a Tweeter from the content. But it could be that Twitter is a useful vehicle for both public and private conversations, and the feeling of tension simply reflects the parlous condition of our public life, more broadly.
(En route to Storrs, CT) Corruption is no minor issue, nor is it mainly a concern for fastidious bourgeois reformers in rich countries. Consider, just for instance, that one quarter of India’s teachers are missing from school on any given day but are still being paid. Few investments in the world benefit human beings more than educating Indian children, yet a quarter of the available teacher/time is being lost because of that one form of corruption–not to mention bribery in school construction, college admissions, and hiring, from primary schools to graduate programs.
In countries like Ukraine, which I visited briefly this summer, corruption is a primary obstacle not only to economic development but also to fairness, good government, and reconciliation. And here in the United States, perfectly legal transactions–ones that politicians even brag about, such as collecting private money for judicial elections–easily meet my definition of “corrupt.”
It seems surprisingly hard to find trends in levels of corruption over time, so that we would be able to see which anti-corruption strategies are effective. Experimental programs are often evaluated, but even when they work, they are typically too small to make a difference at the scale of a nation. It is not clear that a true victory over corruption would come from assembling lots of specific programs, such as websites that disclose government contracts or increased pay for bureaucrats. By the way, a major reason for the lack of trendlines is the difficulty of measuring corruption even at a given moment–in part because corrupt acts are typically secret.
I start with the assumption that there are two basic categories of human problems: sometimes we want or value the wrong things; and sometimes, even though we want good things, we can’t get them because of the ways we interact. Corruption may involve both categories.
Corruption is a problem of what we want or value to the extent that people do not distinguish properly between legitimate transactions and illegitimate ones, or between public and private interests. Following Zephyr Teachout, I think that the US Supreme Court’s decisions regarding lobbying reveal the degeneration of fundamental republican virtues in this country. In 1870, confronted with a situation involving a paid lobbyist for an economic interest, the Court assumed that his job must be “steeped in corruption” and “infamous” and proposed that if such “instances were numerous, open, and tolerated, they would be regarded as measuring the decay of the public morals and the degeneracy of the times.” The Court voided the lobbyist’s contract. By Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Court was no longer able to detect any difference between a citizen speaking up in a republic and a donor pursuing an economic interest for money.
On the other hand, it has been possible to forge such distinctions. In 1621, Sir Francis Bacon was impeached for acts that had been widespread and unchallenged a few years earlier. Elizabethan judges had openly accepted payments from litigants, and ambassadors had received huge cash gifts from the monarchs of their host countries. Bacon was made a scapegoat and brought down by his political enemies. But it was also true that a new concept of public offices and of public versus private goods was emerging, and it ultimately served Britain well. That is an example of a positive shift in values.
More generally, corruption is a failure to value the commons: that which we own collectively or which is not owned at all. The commons is not an idea for leftists alone, for even radical libertarians view the government and the law as public property and the atmosphere and oceans as un-owned. Attitudes toward the commons vary, and I suspect that a valuable way to reduce corruption is to raise people’s sense of concern for the various commons around them.
But corruption also exemplifies a collective-action problem. If everyone else is paying bribes, you won’t make the system any better by refraining, but you may hurt yourself (or your children, or your employees). So even when everyone thinks that bribery is bad and the commons is precious, almost everyone may still pay bribes.
One type of solution to collective action problems is an external monitor/enforcer that protects the common interest. Singapore has “gone from being one of the more corrupt countries on the planet to one of the least.” Its success depends upon an authoritarian state that happens to be genuinely opposed to financial corruption. I wouldn’t want to generalize the Singapore example, for two reasons: an authoritarian solution denies people the right to govern themselves, and benign authoritarians are strikingly scarce. Most dictators who jail or shoot people for taking bribes are perfectly happy to accept bribes themselves. In fact, by investigating corruption, a state learns who is corrupt and can use selective prosecution or the threat of it to extract additional benefits. That temptation dooms almost all top-down solutions.
A different type of response to collective action problems is a movement from the bottom up. For instance, people can make mutual pledges not to give bribes and can hold each other accountable. They can also vote en masse for anti-corruption candidates. I am convinced that making government information transparent is valuable just to the degree that people organize themselves to use the data effectively and constructively; on its own, transparency accomplishes nothing.
Bottom-up efforts are difficult: it is always easy to cheat, to lose momentum, or to encounter disabling divisions within a popular movement. But I think that if popular movements are worth anything in the 21st century, they must take on corruption. And unless corruption is addressed from the bottom-up, it will continue to block social justice around the world.
If you are reading this, you are in an extraordinary position.
It has never been more possible for you to have a meaningful, positive impact on a massive scale. With the rise of evidence-driven interventions, we each have an unprecedented opportunity to save lives and prevent unnecessary suffering.
Effective Altruism is a growing social movement that combines both the heart and the head: compassion guided by data and reason. It’s about dedicating a significant part of one’s life to improving the world and rigorously asking the question, “Of all the possible ways to make a difference, how can I make the greatest difference?”
Here is one interpretation of the movement: It is about guiding the allocation of discretionary assets (mainly, charitable contributions) to improve other people’s welfare, which is measured in utilitarian terms. Utilitarians disagree about the appropriate proxy measure of welfare (subjective happiness, preference-satisfaction, purchasing-power, Disability-Adjusted Life-Years, etc.), but Effective Altruists can sidestep that debate by focusing–appropriately–on the world’s poorest people, who score low on all those measures.
My objections to this version of Effective Altruism:
Discretionary philanthropic decisions aren’t very consequential. Americans give about 2% of disposable income to charity. Our choices as voters, political activists, investors, and consumers are hugely more important than our decisions about where to give money.
Effective Altruism seems to be about a donor affecting other people. (“How can I make the greatest difference [to them]?”) But in making unilateral decisions, even with the best intentions, I am exercising power over fellow human beings. I am deciding what counts as a good end for them and good means to that end. I am also influencing their longer-term capacity to make decisions themselves. I could help them with that–for instance, by subsidizing the education of young girls in poor countries, I might boost their voice and political agency. But I could also undermine their capacity for self-government while assisting them in an immediate, material way. For instance, I could build dependence and reduce autonomy. In Self Reliance, Emerson says about his own charity, “Though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.” Emerson took the argument far further than I would, but there was truth in it.
The definition of altruism seems to be that person A will try to improve the situation of persons B, C, and D without regard to A’s interests. But social improvement typically comes from people acting in their own interest, albeit effectively and wisely–with an eye to the longer term and a broad definition of interests. I am highly skeptical of any large-scale social strategy that relies upon altruism, especially since the only people in a position to be effectively altruistic at large scales are the ones with a lot of resources. At best, I doubt they have enough leverage. At worst, I don’t trust them to work in other people’s interests. Witness the arguments by some Effective Altruists that we ought to protect humanity against asteroid strikes. That sounds like a fun way for a tech. billionaire to allocate tax-deductible charitable contributions, but not exactly what the world’s poorest people would ask for.
An Effective Altruist can acknowledge all those criticisms and respond that the movement is not just about the allocation of discretionary philanthropic resources. If, for instance, the best way to improve lives is to enhance the political agency of poor girls in developing countries, that’s what the Effective Altruist should invest in. If a US citizen can do more good by supporting a given political campaign than by giving money overseas, then the former is the right choice. And if a donation would create a relation of dependency, the Effective Altruist can refrain from spending money that way.
In short, I have accused Effective Altruists of ignoring politics and power, but they can reply that their analysis should (or does) include just these issues.
My objections to that broader version of Effective Altruism:
It doesn’t seem original in the way implied by its slogans: e.g., “It has never been more possible for you to have a meaningful, positive impact on a massive scale.” If questions of governance, politics, power, agency, and culture are also relevant, then we have been debating how to have a “positive impact” at large scales for two millennia. I believe that we know less about 21st century political-economic systems and how to change them than we knew about the issues that faced industrialized nation-states in 1950. For instance, there may be no more important question today than how to reduce endemic corruption without resorting to authoritarianism. I don’t believe there are any “evidence-driven interventions” for that problem.
If power and agency matter, then decisions ought to be made by groups that include the poor as well as the rich, and that requires a different set of ideas and skills than the ones that Effective Altruism offers. I say that the right question is not “How can I make the greatest difference?” but “What should we do?” An Effective Altruist could reply that what I should do is always fundamental, because I have to decide what groups to join and how to interact within them. For instance, in a deliberation, what arguments should I personally offer–and to whom–and what responses should I find persuasive? I agree, to a point, that my choices are a primary concern for me. Yet Effective Altruism puts the focus on the wrong intellectual skills. It is all about means/ends rationality to guide individual choice: what are the consequences of my actions? If instead we ask, “What should we do?” then we need skills of listening, interpretation, diplomacy, responsible persuasion, and inspirational leadership.
This version of Effective Altruism still seems vulnerable to the critique J.S. Mill leveled against the early British Utilitarians: it overlooks the cultivation of the inner life. The classical utilitarians had defined the goal of life as happiness and had argued that a society could maximize the happiness of its members by getting its laws right. Mill grew up in that milieu, as the son of a great classical utilitarian. As a young man, he became deeply depressed. He asked himself:
“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.
I elaborate Mill’s point as follows: it seems to be necessary for human beings to be involved in making themselves happy or satisfied; no one can simply do that for us. Some people who know no physical pain and have plenty of money are nevertheless miserable to the point of suicide. Poor villagers who live under a repressive government can be happier than wealthy suburbanites who are well treated by the state. Even if the goal were to maximize everyone’s happiness, that couldn’t be accomplished by a world of individuals who were concerned only with others. They would also have to be responsible for themselves. Pure altruism or other-regardingness is not the ideal, because there would then be no one in a position to make each individual happier.
Mill’s ultimate response was to reemphasize the inner life. “The important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances.”
I suppose an Effective Altruist could deflect Mill’s critique by saying: “We don’t attach exclusive importance to outward circumstances; we just try to make other-regarding efforts more effective. As long as Americans give just 2% of disposable income to charity, they are hardly at risk of neglecting themselves. They can cultivate their internal cultures all they want. We just help them to spend that 2% better.” And I think that’s fine–as far as it goes. I am just not sure it offers any hope of addressing the problems that keep me up at night, such as:
Corruption (writ large), meaning the capture of public goods for private profit.
Massive collective-action problems, especially global warming.
Hatreds of various kinds: religious, racial, national.
Discouragement about democracy and the potential to improve the world from the bottom-up.
The global shift to oligarchy.
Authoritarianism, especially of the macho, xenophobic, militaristic variety that unites Putin and Trump as well as many others.
A new paper by Richard Freeman, Eunice Han, David Madland, and Brendan Duke, Bargaining for the American Dream: What Unions do for Mobility is getting a lot of attention. A key finding is that a parent’s union membership boosts the economic prospects of the children as they grow up and form their own households. The effects are large and especially pronounced for working-class union families.
That result deserves headlines, but I will focus on another significant finding, because it relates to civic engagement. Freeman and colleagues find that labor union membership boosts the economic mobility of all children in the community. They control for a range of relevant factors that might explain away this positive effect (for instance, the makeup of local industry and the progressivity of the tax code.) They find that labor unions have positive effects for non-members.
That finding contributes to a larger literature about the positive economic outcomes of various kinds of civic associations:
Freeman and colleagues build on the influential research by Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez (2014). Chetty and colleagues found that the odds of moving up the socio-economic ranks are very strongly linked to the community where you grow up, and the main features of the community that matter are: having less residential segregation, less income inequality, better primary schools (measured by income-adjusted test scores and dropout rates), more family stability, and higher social capital. Their main measure of social capital is an index of “voter turnout rates, the fraction of people who return their census forms, and various measures of participation in community organizations.”
In our own work, we also found strong economic benefits from what we called “social cohesion” at the community level. We defined that as the degree to which residents socialize, communicate, and collaborate with one another. Separately, we looked at the number of nonprofit organization in a community. Both social cohesion and nonprofit density were strong predictors of economic success for communities, even after we adjusted for many other factors like those considered by Chetty et al and Freeman et al. Just as an example of our findings, “An employed individual in 2008 was twice as likely to become unemployed if he or she lived in a community with few nonprofit organizations (the bottom five percent in nonprofit density) rather than one with in the top five percent for nonprofit density, even if the two communities were otherwise similar.”
A union could be considered an example of social capital. (It is an organization of members.) However, Freeman and colleagues controlled for social capital and still found a strong effect for unions. Their method distinguished union membership from civic participation, and the result was a distinct advantage for unions. That raises two questions: 1) Why would civic participation in general have anything to do with economic outcomes at the community level? And 2) Is the case of unions special? For both questions, I would like to focus on the benefits to non-members, because belonging to a union, a church, or an NAACP chapter can have direct and easily explained value for the individuals who join.
Social cohesion, social capital, and nonprofit density (which are overlapping but not identical constructs) could have economic benefits because: active and organized citizens obtain better governance and better laws; they gain skills and values from participation that they also use to help others in their communities; the associations they form reduce community-level problems, such as crime; these associations spread information and raise knowledge; or these associations build norms of trust and collaboration that enable people to contribute to the economy. There is literature to support each of these mechanisms, but no way to be sure whether they contribute to the patterns we see here.
Unions could fit into any of these stories. For instance, unions seek legislation and they may teach members how to collaborate and trust one another. Unions could also be seen as a special case because they have collective bargaining power. Also, people typically join a union because the workplace is unionized, not because they go out looking for a union to join. A knitting club seems very different: highly voluntary, trust-driven, but lacking in explicit economic power. So there could be an economic explanation applicable to unions alone, e.g., by bargaining for higher wages in their own industry, they send positive ripples through the local job market.
Still, I wouldn’t differentiate too starkly between unions and other associations. It is always a bit misleading to see membership as pure individual choice. People join knitting clubs and soccer leagues because someone else has organized these groups (which is hard and skillful work) and has recruited members. So organizing and outreach are always fundamental.
In short, I would posit that all associations–including but not limited to unions–use a set of similar means to improve economic welfare and mobility in their communities. Some of their means run through the state–they obtain better governance–and some of them result from voluntary action apart from the state. Unions do have some special features that allow them to grow to large scale when conditions are favorable and that give them bargaining power. Although their special features are important, unions are also part of a larger story about organized civic life in the US.
Civic Science is an emerging scholarly conversation, and today we held a discussion of it at Tufts. In my group, we agreed that scientists are not value-free but are indeed defined by certain values. We went back to the list of four values that Robert K. Merton identified in 1942. Per Wikipedia, those are:
Communalism all scientists should have equal access to scientific goods (intellectual property) and there should be a sense of common ownership in order to promote collective collaboration, secrecy is the opposite of this norm.
Universalism all scientists can contribute to science regardless of race, nationality, culture, or gender.
Disinterestedness according to which scientists are supposed to act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for personal gain.
Organized Skepticism Skepticism means that scientific claims must be exposed to critical scrutiny before being accepted.
These “CUDOS” norms emerge from the practices of actual scientists, yet they are aspirational. In fact, they may be rarely honored in a given population of scientists, but they would still reflect the ideals of science. They thus provide tools for the critical assessment of actual science.
We proposed adding:
Openness: meaning not only openness to data and evidence, but to diverse perspectives and voices.
Democratic Engagement It’s not enough to decide that your scientific work is disinterested. You owe an argument to fellow citizens for why it actually is in the public interest. At the same time, you must influence public priorities. If, for instance, there is no funding for addressing a disease suffered by the world’s poor, that means that you cannot just go out and study it. But you can advocate for funding.
Service This goes beyond “the benefit of a common scientific enterprise” to encompass benefit to the world (human beings and other species)
This is highlight #2 from our recent time in Italy. Lucignano is a small medieval town in Tuscany, notable for its street plan of concentric ellipses capping a steep hill. During the middle ages, it was contested by larger city-states, but it sometimes enjoyed a degree of independence or civic freedom. It certainly had its own town hall and, within that building, a Sala di Consiglio or council chamber.
At first, this room was decorated by one large fresco of the Madonna in Majesty. If I recall correctly, the inscription under her picture reminded Lucignano’s leaders to listen to both sides of every dispute. Then, between 1438 and 1475, the town’s councilors contribruted personal funds to cover the ceiling with frescoes of exemplary figures from history, each labeled with a name, and most accompanied by an instructive quotation. “Virgil the poet” is shown above.
Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier offers excellent background information on this decorative scheme.* It was not uncommon to depict heroes from the past (often known as “worthies”) in public spaces. And there was a very famous model of a council chamber decorated with frescoes about good (and bad) government in nearby Siena. But the Lucignano frescoes were unique in that the list of exemplary figures came from a specific source, Dante, who also provided many of the quotations painted on the ceiling.
Dante held an elaborate political theory that I will not attempt to summarize comprehensively here. But it seems to me that Lucignano’s civic elders borrowed the following elements of his thought for their council chamber:
Civic responsibility. Cicero is depicted as one of the exemplars (no surprise there); but as Joost-Gaugier notes, it was thanks to Dante that Cicero came to represent “the value of active participation in civic life” and the “civic spirit of Roman law as it centered on the complete man espousing the common good.” The Lucignano frescoes emphasize not only the value of participating in everyday civic affairs but also the need for sacrifice. For instance, the Roman heroine Lucretia is shown. Her suicide sparked the revolt that founded the Roman Republic.
Lay government. One saint (Paul) is depicted among the worthies, but his quote from Romans 12:17-19 is about obeying the law. Figures like Justinian are deeply Christian, but they mingle on the chamber ceiling with pagan Romans and ancient Jews without distinction. The Roman republic and empire were Dante’s political models, and they were led by laymen rather than clergy. Although Dante and the medieval leaders of Lucignano believed that law should be consistent with scripture, the point emphasized in the Council Chamber is the primacy of law.
Independence: Joost-Gaugier notes a subtle dig at Siena, from which Lucignano had won its freedom. Siena claimed to be founded by Remus, who was its mascot, but the frescoes in Lucignano suggest that Rome had been founded by the god Janus and not by Romulus and Remus at all. While Lucignano’s elders may have simply had a quarrel with Siena, they also hoped to govern their community free of any outside domination. Self-governance is an implicit theme here.
The unity of history. Ancient Romans, Jews, and Christians all look alike in these frescoes. That is partly a result of the historical naivety of Lucignano’s artists. They had no idea that Samson and Virgil should be dressed differently from a Tuscan of the 1400s. At the same time, however, Dante offered a more substantive reason to treat all these worthies as similar. He held that world history had a unity determined by providence. See Paradiso VI, where Justinian mentions several of the other figures shown on the ceiling at Lucignano as bearers of God’s unfolding will.
People who thought in this way were liable to see themselves as appropriate heirs to the republican citizens of ancient Rome, capable of self-governance, obligated to sacrifice for the common good, and committed to the same law that had prevailed in Rome. This room is a vivid illustration of the idea that civic republicanism flourished in late-medieval Italy and came to the Atlantic world from there.
*Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, “Dante and the History of Art: The Case of a Tuscan Commune. Part II: The Sala del Consiglio at Lucignano,” Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 11, No. 22 (1990), pp. 23-46.
I departed from the prepared text a fair amount in order to address the audience of civic innovators who had gathered in Austin. By the time I spoke, I knew more about their projects. These are the prepared remarks:
A presidential election cycle is a great civic ritual. Even though only about 60% of adults vote—when we’re lucky—a national campaign still touches most Americans in one way or another. It challenges us to consider fundamental issues. And it connects us to our political heritage, for many of the greatest moments in our political history have been presidential elections.
As the 2016 cycle heats up, what should we expect from this great national civic experience? What do we have a right to expect from the election?
I would say …
The campaign must engage all Americans, without respect to wealth, social status, age, race, gender, disability, and political and religious opinions.
It must give all Americans equal weight and importance, honoring the fundamental principle of one person/one vote. It must make our leaders accountable to the people as equals.
The campaign must provoke a serious conversation about the most fundamental issues facing us as a country.
It must enlist our higher instincts. It is absolutely fine for citizens to retain their diverse political ideologies and their various and conflicting interests. But we must all be reminded of the more generous and idealistic aspects of our own views and interests—or what Lincoln called, after the fateful campaign of 1860, “the better angels of our nature.”
During a national political campaign, Americans must have respectful interactions with fellow citizens who hold different views from their own. The goal is not consensus but mutual understanding and an awareness that we are all legitimate participants in one great political debate.
Some of our interactions must be personal, in the sense that we get to know one another and can actually reply to each others’ ideas—whether online or face-to-face. In other words, it’s not enough to relate to politicians and other celebrities by following what they say. We must also relate to one another.
Citizens must see ways of acting on their political values that go beyond casting a ballot in November, important as that is. If, for instance, you are moved by the problem of climate change or concerned about moral decline, the campaign should inspire you to reduce carbon or to restore traditional values by working with neighbors and peers. The act of voting should be just one of the political efforts that you undertake as a result of the election.
Finally, a diverse set of new actors must see openings to enter political life, whether as campaign volunteers and staffers, independent activists, or reporters, artists, and bloggers. Presidential elections are entry points for new generations of activists and leaders.
I have described a national election in rather glowing terms, but we all know that the reality falls far short.
In fact, many of my friends and colleagues who do civic work at the local level and in nonprofit settings don’t want to have anything to do with national elections. An esteemed colleague who works mostly with adolescents in an urban context recently remarked, “I have never seen anything big that’s good.” I suspect that the programs she admires are ones where human beings voluntarily relate to each other as individuals. They know the other participants’ names and interests. They can act and see the consequences of their actions. The problems that arise in these settings are problems of relationships—individuals being selfish or prejudiced or antagonistic. And so the solutions involve improving the relationships by talking and listening.
In contrast, a national election is impersonal and detached. It’s about millions of people. It’s about casting a secret ballot for a person you will never meet. The consequences of your individual vote are tiny. And the election is not really voluntary because it will yield a new president and a new Congress who will govern us—whether we like it or not.
If you see politics as impersonal—as a matter of mass voting by secret ballot—then I would recommend that you pay some attention to the settings where fellow citizens do come together to talk and work voluntarily. That is the relational bedrock of American democracy, and it is in weak shape. We need more of it. You should help support dialogues and deliberations, community organizing efforts, civic education in schools, community service programs, civic journalism, and new media. The movement to expand these programs is what I call “civic renewal.” It is important.
But if all you do is to create opportunities for voluntary interactions among people who know each other personally (or who can get to know each other), then I would press you to think also about the mass scale. It is not enough for us to build online communities and face-to-face discussions or service opportunities for a small proportion of the population. Decisions of enormous importance are being made every day by national governments and massive corporations. Even if you are not interested in them, they are interested in you. We must work at that level too. Otherwise, our efforts are just cute and nice; they are not real politics.
At the mass scale, politics is no longer relational. It’s not about getting to know people personally and influencing their ideas and values. It’s about leverage—causing other people to act from afar. A vote, for instance, is a small act of leverage. So is a strike or lawsuit.
Some people are busy at the grassroots level engaging with their fellow citizens, discussing issues, developing relationships, and working on important issues and problems. They are quietly rebuilding our civil society. The question is: Where can those good citizens obtain large-scale leverage in a nation of 300 million that has very rigid institutions? One possible answer is: during a national presidential campaign.
In fact, when the 2008 presidential election was first heating up, many of my colleagues saw openings to bring civic renewal into national politics.
First of all, both parties had competitive primary elections that year, so lots of the presidential campaigns were startups. They were eager to incorporate newcomers as volunteers or even as paid staffers and eager to experiment with new tools and methods. There were openings for newcomers to enter politics through the campaigns. Many of today’s younger civic activists cut their teeth working for a 2008 presidential candidate.
Second, because most of the campaigns were long shots to begin with, they were willing to try risky strategies that empowered their grassroots volunteers. They allowed robust discussions on their websites and let their volunteers develop strategies and methods that would work in their own communities.
Third, several of the campaigns offered genuine ideas about civic renewal. John McCain advocated a dramatic expansion of civilian national service, joining Senator Obama in New York on the auspicious and politically precious day of September 11 to call for tripling the size of AmeriCorps. That was a policy to enhance civic participation in America, and it was part of a larger message that also connected to Senator McCain’s service in uniform.
It is widely forgotten now, but John Edwards was committed to a national citizens’ deliberation on important policy ideas that would generate official federal legislation. That was a different kind of policy proposal—and also quite promising.
Finally, Barack Obama spoke about the citizen’s role in politics with more depth and commitment than any presidential candidate since Bobby Kennedy in 1968. That is my judgment, anyway, and I have written about it in some detail. Senator Obama made civic renewal a signature campaign theme. He developed various appropriate policy proposals, from transparency in government to expanded national service.
But perhaps more impressively, his campaign embodied his message of civic engagement in the way it organized itself. Grassroots volunteers were no longer asked to reach certain numbers of voters with scripted messages. Instead, they were trained to form relationships with people in their communities and to develop their fellow citizens’ leadership skills. They were given the power to create their own messages and were held accountable for the number of true relationships they built. This was a great example of a mix of relational politics and mass politics, and it carried Obama all the way to the White House.
Is the 2016 election another source of leverage, another opening for improving American democracy?
On the day after the election, November 9, 2016, some people will be happy. A candidate whom they admire will be the incoming president of the United States. I understand and appreciate their enthusiasm and do not want to rain on their parade. They will have worked for a cause and won it, fair and square.
Still, I think most of us will reflect back on the 2016 election and say: “That was a … [let me think of a word I can use at a polite forum at UT Austin] … that was a …. disaster!” Measured by all of the criteria that I mentioned when I began this talk, the campaign will look like an almost absurd failure, a travesty.
Will all Americans be engaged and will they count equally? Absolutely not, in an election cycle expected to cost $5 billion. A few individuals will personally contribute amounts in the hundreds of millions, and they will certainly count for more than you and me. Candidates are openly boasting of their success in lining up big donors right now, during what is openly called the “money primary.”
Also, the campaign battleground will be small, limited to swing voters in swing states and the very few competitive congressional districts. In vast states like Texas, voters will not be seen to matter much at all.
Will new people bring new ideas and energies into politics? Not, I fear, through the presidential campaigns, because the leading candidates on both sides are the opposite of startups. They are extremely experienced professional operations with little room for newcomers.
And while the innovations of the 2008 campaign involved empowering volunteers to develop their own messages and strategies, the main innovations since then have involved the use of Big Data to hone and test messages sent from campaign HQ to citizens. The whole point of these methods is to affect individuals in reliable and predictable ways—not to hear their views or empower them to act. The value of algorithms and data is rising; the role of volunteers is increasingly trivial.
Will we see a great conversation about the fundamental issues facing the country? I am sorry to say that also seems highly unlikely. In every modern campaign, so many factors direct the conversation into trivialities and distractions, not to mention fear-mongering and outright lies.
And this year, there is an additional reason to be skeptical about the national conversation. Realistically, a Democratic president will not be able to accomplish a domestic policy agenda in her or his first term, because Congress is almost certain to be controlled by Republicans. The most she or he can actually accomplish is to veto Republican legislation and negotiate the annual budget to the status quo. That means that the Democratic candidates must talk about what they would do if elected knowing that they actually cannot do very much at all. All the rhetoric from one side of the campaign will be basically false, which is not good for the discussion.
Republicans can be more genuinely ambitious but it remains to be seen whether any of them will put forward a serious platform.
Incidentally, the same situation applied in the 2012 election, which struck me as one of the least edifying dialogues in modern times. The televised debates between President Obama and Mitt Romney were dominated by each man’s saying: “You propose X,” and his opponent saying, “No I don’t.” They never got to argue about what they did support. The whole conversation was incredibly confusing and misleading.
Will the 2016 campaign touch the better angels of our nature and call us to work together on important problems in our own communities? I hope so, but again I am not terribly optimistic. Much of the $5 billion that will be spent in this cycle will be used to frighten and distract, not to inspire and empower.
Politicians always over-promise what they can deliver and try to persuade us that they will solve our problems for us. That is always a disempowering message. It will be worse than usual this time because few Americans really believe that national leaders can achieve anything significant, given the frozen political situation in DC. So the candidates will relentlessly exaggerate their own potential and thereby minimize the role of ordinary citizens.
I was asked to inspire you; that was my explicit charge for today. So far, I am doing a miserable job. I am painting a very depressing picture of the months ahead.
But I actually do intend an inspirational message. Imagine that it is November 9, 2016, the day after the national election. The official campaign, as waged by professional politicians and covered by the mass media, is just as I have predicted: a civic nightmare. But imagine that Americans do not wake up on the day after the vote and remark, “What a disaster!” Instead, imagine that they say, “This is the year that we the people reclaimed our political system. Yes, the candidates ran multi-billion-dollar campaigns using scripted, misleading messages to influence a few swing voters and demobilize their opponents through fear. But that is not the main story of the 2016 election. Despite the behavior of the candidates and their enablers among the donor class and the mass media, this election actually was a great discussion of fundamental issues. It actually did reach most Americans and it did inspire us not only to vote but to act in other ways to improve the world. We learned about each other and gained a measure of respect for our fellow citizens who disagree. We saw at least the dim outlines of true solutions emerge. We saw a role for ourselves in achieving those solutions. We still expect relatively little from Congress in the next months, but we expect a great deal from ourselves as a people. We are ready to step up to our responsibilities as a great self-governing nation.”
Why would that happen? In all seriousness, it would happen because of your work. It would happen because you have labored and innovated and collaborated. You have built apps and websites where citizens can genuinely discuss important issues with people who disagree. You have covered news in ways that bring out the real issues and engages diverse voices. You have empowered even the most disempowered Americans with tools and ideas and skills that reconnect them to politics and civic life.
None of you can accomplish that alone. The budget of each organization represented in this room is a tiny fraction of the weekly spending of one of the presidential campaigns that will be flooding the airwaves with fear and misinformation. But we can accomplish a great deal together and with the many willing allies who are not here with us today.
We need to find new ways to set common goals and collaborate effectively in our communities, holding ourselves accountable for common outcomes.
In Bolivia this month, Pope Francis reflected on the global impasse among political elites that is putting not just the US but the whole earth in danger. He said, “People and their movements are called to cry out, to mobilize and to demand – peacefully, but firmly – that appropriate and urgently-needed measures be taken.” He concluded his Bolivia speech by saying, “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.”
These are great and timely words. We are unlikely to hear them from our most powerful politicians, but we can make them the inspiration for our own efforts. This is the year that we can take back American politics. It is up to us.
