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.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Senator Barack Obama spoke at length, consistently, and passionately about renewing citizenship in the US. I collected many of the key quotes here. There was a depth to these comments because Obama had worked for a faith-based organizing network, had studied Asset Based Community Development, had served on Robert Putnam’s Saguaro Seminar, and was married to the leader of a youth engagement nonprofit. He knew what he was talking about. And although he sought to lead the Democratic Party, he explicitly included Republicans and Independents in his call for civic renewal. However, the press ignored his citizenship theme, both during the campaign and later on (examples here). Policy wonks and Democratic Party elites also ignored it. I served on both the Education and Urban Policy committees of the campaign, and neither group generated strong policy proposals for enhancing civic engagement. Thus the administration–of which I am a defender, when it comes to mainstream matters of domestic and foreign policy–has done little to support enhanced citizenship in the US. A president cannot accomplish much alone, and if even his allies don’t hear his call for something as abstract as civic renewal, nothing will happen.
This summer, Pope Francis has made an impassioned call to the peoples of the world to organize from the bottom up to combat environmental crises. Like Obama’s call in 2008, this one is rooted in experience and theory–in the Pope’s case, extending back to his sainted namesake in the 13th century, but also including sophisticated modern theology. The Pope is the leader of Catholicism, yet he has explicitly included non-Catholics and non-believers in his call for global organizing. But again, the theme of civic agency has been lost on the punditocracy. The Pope’s speech at the Second World Meeting of Popular Movements was all about popular organizing, and yet the New York Times largely ignored that theme, summarizing his visit in these words: “Pope Francis met Thursday with President Evo Morales of Bolivia and apologized for the church’s ‘sins’ during Latin America’s colonial era. … But if Francis again called for change, he also offered no detailed prescription.”
Leaders alone cannot create social movements, but their words can be useful resources. Barack Obama gave us an opportunity in 2008; I do not think we (or he) took adequate advantage of it. The Pope is giving us another chance. How–concretely and practically–should we respond this time?
Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, pp. 3-35, pp. 163-82, 290-8
Danielle E. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown, v. Board of Education, pp 140-186
When people treat one another as friends, interactions have a special quality. This is not a naive point, for people want to have friendships and will sometimes put the development and maintenance of their friendships above other goals. Aristotle observed as much.*
One might suspect that only some cultures cultivate friendships that are strong enough to make people check their conflicting self-interests. We might find people acting as friends among the ruling classes of classical city-states, but surely not in atomized and materialistic America.
Based in part on the great book by Mansbridge assigned for this session, I would propose instead that whether people act as friends depends on the immediate situation. When interactions are sustained and face-to-face (or possibly online, given sufficient bandwidth); when interests are not too starkly opposed or the stakes are reasonably low; and when groups are tolerably small, modern Americans will put friendship ahead of narrow interests and will work hard and skillfully to preserve friendship.
For instance, I hypothesize that a group like the Summer Institute itself (22 activists and scholars from six countries, gathered for 63 hours of seminar time), if asked to plan a recreational activity for themselves, would be primarily concerned with preserving their friendship. They would, for instance, be reluctant to put options for activities to a vote. If time pressures forced them to vote, they would be highly uncomfortable to see a minority disappointed and would–at a minimum–seek to acknowledge and regret their sacrifice. (Allen’s book is focused on sacrifice and how to repair it). If even one person said that he could not participate in a given activity (for instance, he couldn’t go on boat ride because of sea-sickness), that idea would instantly be retracted. On the other hand, if an individual simply didn’t like a given activity, he would be unlikely to say so because expressions of self-interest would make him look like a bad friend.
We didn’t actually assign the exercise of choosing a recreational activity, because it seems better for members of the Institute to make individual choices about how to spend their weekends. But we talked about how such a conversation would likely go, and the predictions seemed insightful to me.
Two big questions are:
How can we create a degree of friendship in larger and less stable communities than the Summer Institute, or when the stakes are higher? Allen advocates “talking to strangers” in the US, to build sufficient friendship that we can govern ourselves justly. That requires, among other things, changes in the ways our cities are planned and our children assigned to schools. I doubt that Mansbridge would disagree, but her argument is that politics-as-friendship only works under certain objective circumstances, and when it is impractical, it is better to govern through explicitly adversarial politics.
To what extent should friendship be a normative ideal? Philia may be a virtue, as Aristotle said, but it trades off against other virtues, such as freedom and equality. For instance, when trying to be friends, people may hide genuine interests that they should be free to express and act on. And that suppression may not play out equally.
Background on the two assigned books
Mansbridge emerged from the New Left of the 1960s and 70s, where she observed small groups , “appear[ing] everywhere like fragile bubbles” that had certain features in common. Decisions were made in face-to-face meetings, after much discussion, when someone expressed the consensus of the group. There were no formal distinctions among participants or offices. And there was a strong norm against making self-interested statements.
These forms seemed naïve from the perspective of what Mansbridge calls “adversary democracy,” which presumes that interests conflict and there must be winners and losers in decisions. Yet they seemed to work somewhat well and to have certain advantages.
She studied two examples. Helpline is a commune of the New Left: urban, somewhat racially diverse, aimed at social change. The other case is a Vermont Town Meeting in a rural, socially conservative white community. They differ, too, in that Helpline codifies the principles of “unitary democracy,” whereas Selby has official votes and office-holders and exercises powers granted by the state. And yet Mansbridge finds many similar practices.
This leads her to generalizations about where and when “unitary democracy” can work. She also finds convergence between the two examples.
Allen begins with the observation that democracy requires sacrifice. Some lose when others gain, and the losses are not fairly distributed. Her question is how you can build some kind of “friendship” when some must sacrifice?
Her friendly critique of Habermas: He explains why people will speak with reciprocity if they are in a setting where they are aiming for consensus, but not why they would enter such a space in the first place. She writes,“Friendship is not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty, and differences of personality, experience, and aspiration. Friendship is not easy, nor is democracy. Friendship begins in the recognition that friends have a shared life—not a ‘common’ nor an identical life—only one with common events, climates, built-environments, fixations of the imagination, and social structures. Each friend will view all these phenomena differently, but they are not the less shared for that” (pp. xxi-xxii).
*Our next business after this will be to discuss Friendship. For friendship is a virtue, or involves virtue; and also it is one of the most indispensable requirements of life. For no one would choose to live without friends, but possessing all other good things. … Moreover, … friendship appears to be the bond of the state; and lawgivers seem to set more store by it than they do by justice, for to promote concord, which seems akin to friendship, is their chief aim, while faction, which is enmity, is what they are most anxious to banish. And if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them; whereas merely to be just is not enough—a feeling of friendship also is necessary. Indeed the highest form of justice seems to have an element of friendly feeling in it. And friendship is not only indispensable as a means, it is also noble in itself. We praise those who love their friends, and it is counted a noble thing to have many friends; and some people think that a true friend must be a good man (Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1155a3, 20)
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 18-25, 37-48, 240-7
“Hannah Arendt” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I first asked participants to name various kinds of freedom, and categorized the answers as positive and negative, inner (such as freedom from anxiety) and outer (such as freedom from coercion), and individual and group.
Arendt’s reading of the American Revolution: the founders were after freedom, which they didn’t initially define all that sharply but which probably meant mostly negative individual freedom: “the more or less free range of non-political activities which a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who constitute it” (p 20). But in creating new institutions that would protect that kind of freedom, they discovered public freedom—the freedom to create together. And this was a source of happiness for them. P. 24: “they were enjoying what they were doing far beyond the call of duty.”
In the French Revolution, however, the leaders felt themselves compelled by great forces beyond their control and they also lost interest in creating new institutions or even following the rules they had constructed as they declared the “social problem” the only thing that mattered. As a result, they lost all forms of freedom (pp. 40-1).
Relation between freedom and equality
Many might see freedom and equality in tension. But for Arendt, public freedom requires equality. People are not naturally equal but they are made equal in “artificial” political spaces, “where men [meet] one another as citizens and not as private persons” (p. 21.) The tyrant, the master and the slave are not free because they are not engaged in equal politics.
Politics as performance and self-discovery
Arendt is not a deliberative democrat, envisioning public life as a discussion about what should be done, in which people try to discipline their own interests and personalities in the interests of the common good. She appreciates competition and the pursuit of excellence in public life. And people discover their full humanity by displaying their personalities in public. “Freedom was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man required the presence of others. Freedom itself therefore needed a place where people could come together—the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper” (p. 21)
Civic republicanism/liberalism
Arendt sees political participation as a source of happiness (at least for some) and self-discovery. It is thus an intrinsic good, not just a means to justice, or security, or happiness, or other goods. And you need government not so much to guarantee good outcomes for communities as to be a space for politics.
That reflects what is now being called the “civic republican” tradition, in contrast to what is sometimes called “liberalism,” which holds that politics and governments are costs we must pay to get benefits. The liberal tradition encompasses a great variety of answers to the question: how much government and politics do we need? (Some liberals say: a lot.) But all see government and politics as a cost, whereas Arendt sees politics as a benefit and government as the space that allows politics.
Must/should everyone participate?
The civic republic tradition poses the question: who should participate? Granting that politics has intrinsic value, does it have value for all (or only some) and is it the highest value or only one valuable pursuit?
On p. 271, Arendt suggests that there are just some “who have a taste for public freedom and cannot be ‘happy’ without it.” And it’s OK not to participate, because “one of the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world [is] freedom from politics.” (p. 272)
But on p. 247: “no one could be called happy without his share in public happiness, that no one could be called free without his experience in public freedom, and that no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public business.”
How to keep public freedom alive?
Most of us are not in the position of the American founders, able to discover happiness and freedom by creating institutions and feeling that “man is master of his destiny, at least with respect to political government” (p. 41).
So what are some options?
Frequent revolutions?
Co-creation in other domains? (What about a startup enterprise?)
Radical decentralization—Jefferson’s proposal for “ward” government?
Private and public
In the civic republican vein, Arendt is a great defender of public life. But she is also an explicit and strong defender of the private life and, indeed, of privacy. Sometimes she takes the latter to a fault, as in her “Reflections on Little Rock,” where she argues that sending paratroopers to Arkansas was a violation of the private sphere. But it makes sense that we need a strong private domain to create an impressive public space. The “four walls, within which people’s private life is lived, constitute a shield against the public aspect of the world. They enclose a secure place, without which no living thing can thrive” (Between Past and Future, p. 186). After all, her public space is not about agreement but contention, and one needs a private space to develop enough individuality to contend.
(on the DC-Boston shuttle) Over the past 48 hours I have participated in three consecutive meetings in which an important point of debate has been whether to reform or rebuild institutions–flawed and disliked as they may be–or to look for “disruptive” changes and looser forms of community. In one meeting, in a tech space in Cambridge, I was one of the most “institutionalist” participants and was invited to defend that view. In a different meeting, near Dupont Circle in DC, I was perhaps one of the least institutionalist.
This is why I believe what I do. The graph shows levels of engagement for working class American youth in the 1970s and 2000s, using the kinds of survey measures developed in the seventies. Note that all forms of engagement are down except for volunteering, on which more below.
Note also that each of the key institutions that recruited working class youth in the 1970s had: a business model that allowed it to grow large and to be independent; arguments for joining that didn’t require any preexisting interest in civic engagement; incentives to recruit working class younger Americans; and a self-interest in making these members interested in politics. The newspaper offered sports and classifieds but put news on the front page. The church offered salvation and family but socialized people to participate. The party offered jobs and other benefits. You joined a union because the job was unionized.
All these institutions are shattered today. The only form of engagement that has expanded–volunteering–has become more of an institution. Many schools and some large districts require service. Others fund service programs and recruit volunteers. That is why volunteering has grown.
I know we live in an age of networks and personal choice. I still believe that unless we can build functional equivalents to the institutions of the later 20th century, we will not have mass participation in our democracy.
In the following passage from On Revolution (pp. 42-3), Hannah Arendt is criticizing the Hegelian tradition of German philosophy (including Marx) that purports to find fundamental meanings in the narrative of world history. I think that her words would also describe mainstream social science, which attempts to explain ordinary events empirically rather than philosophically:
Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle. But this fallacy is relatively difficult to detect because of the truth inherent in it, which is that all stories begun and enacted by men unfold their true meaning only when they have come to their end, so that it may indeed appear as though only the spectator, and not the agent, can hope to understand what actually happened in any given chain of deeds and events.
The more successful you are in social science, the more you can explain who acts and why. By explaining “deeds and events” that have already happened, you make them look determined. You seek to reduce the unexplained variance. But when you are a social actor, it feels as if you are choosing and acting intentionally. The unexplained is a trace of your freedom.
Arendt does not assert that the spectator’s perspective is epistemically wrong, but that it reflects a political fallacy. It has the political consequence of reducing freedom.
On p. 46, she gives an example: the French Revolution has been understood in ways that hamper the agency and creativity of subsequent revolutionaries. She even argues that revolutionary leaders have submitted to being tried and executed because they assume that revolutions must end in terror. Thus all later upheavals have been
seen in images drawn from the course of the French Revolution, comprehended in concepts coined by spectators, and understood in terms of historical necessity. Conspicuous by its absence in the minds of those who made the revolutions as well as of those who watched and tried to come to terms with them, was the deep concern with forms of government so characteristic of the American Revolution, but also very important in the early stages of the French Revolution.
If you are a political agent, you believe that you can invent or reconstruct “forms of government” to reflect your considered opinions. Deliberate institutional design and redesign seems both possible and valuable. But if you think of history as inevitable and driven by grand forces (the World Spirit, the class struggle), by root causes (capitalism, racism), or by empirical factors (income, gender, technology), then institutional design seems to be an outcome, not a cause; and the designers appear to lack agency. “Civic Studies” can be seen as a reorientation of the humanities and social sciences so that they take an agentic perspective and therefore avoid the “political fallacy” of determinism.
The Google Civic Innovation Team (Kate Krontiris, John Webb, Chris Chapman, and Charlotte Krontiris) have released an important strategic report based on original research. They argue that 48.9% of American adults are “Interested Bystanders” to civic life. These “people are paying attention to issues around them, but not actively voicing their opinions or taking action on those issues.”
Looking more closely at how the Interested Bystanders think about politics and civic life (and the actual civic actions that they take), the Google Team uncovers some interesting gaps. For instance, “many Interested Bystanders believe they have the most power at the local level, [yet] most participants reported voting only at the national level.” They also divide the 48.9% into eight archetypal groups, each of which would respond to different messages and opportunities.
The main implication for civic organizers and innovators: “you don’t have to design for activists or the apathetic. You can design for Interested Bystanders and still reach a huge market of people and have a huge impact.”
Kate Krontiris and colleagues advocate a strategy that sounds, at first glance, different from the argument of my book We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For and the findings of “America’s Civic Renewal Movement: The View from Organizational Leaders” by Eric Liu and me. Both documents argue that we ought to focus on a small (but demographically diverse) cadre of civic leaders in America–not 48.9% but more like 0.5% of the population–because only about one million grassroots organizers have the experience and motivations to engage other Americans in civic life. These are the people who not only attend meetings but call meetings; who not only vote but get out the vote. They are already at work on civic renewal in America but need better tools, policies, funds, and other supports.
It’s important to have more that one strategic proposal on the table, so I enthusiastically welcome the Google report even if it lands in a different place from my own work. In any case, these strategies may turn out to be complementary. The “One Million” grassroots civic leaders about whom I write are essential for reaching the “Interested Bystanders” whom Kate and her colleagues describe. In some ways, the Google Team is writing for the One Million–or for an even smaller set of national leaders who have the capacity to engage the One Million through their organizations. They advise these civic leaders to engage the next 48% of the population, which sounds smart to me.
It is a familiar option to try to change a society by engaging a relatively well-placed minority as leaders. Consider W.E.B Du Bois’ early embrace of the Talented Tenth strategy, for example. The advantage is realism: not everyone is ready to participate, and anyone who tries to catalyze a significant change has too few resources to engage the whole population. The potential disadvantage is exclusivity. Marxist revolutions based on “vanguards” have all turned, in my view, into nightmares.
Thus it is very important to my argument that America’s grassroots civic activists are (empirically) a diverse group–diverse in terms of demographics, styles of engagement, and substantive beliefs. My paper with Eric Liu begins to explore the kinds of people who engage through Ducks Unlimited, PICO, Tea Party Patriots, and United We Dream, among others. Their diversity is important not only for equity and representativeness but also because there is no serious prospect that people this different from each other could turn into a clique or interest group. The question is whether we can get them all working–in different and even competitive ways–to engage their fellow citizens in public life. The “Interested Bystanders” report is a helpful step.
I was in Spain this past week for a pair of political science conferences. My visit came soon after an election in which two new parties emerged: Podemos (leftist and innovative in how it engages voters) and Ciudadanos (center-right and also somewhat innovative). Naturally, many conversations turned to these parties and to party competition in general. I return feeling jealous of multi-party systems because they present opportunities for civic innovation.
The United States has had the same two parties for 155 years because we use single-member districts. A third party that at first attracts less than 50% of the vote in every district wins no seats at all and can’t get off the ground. Also, despite our important regional differences, we have essentially one national public sphere, so regional parties don’t arise to win majorities in their own areas. A case like Bernie Sanders from Vermont is anomalous and arguably getting more so. In 2012, voters chose straight Democratic or Republican tickets more than at any time since 1952.
If the question is how best to represent the public, a two-party system is not intrinsically worse than a multi-party system that emerges from proportional representation. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves that no system is really ideal in that respect. If voters are given many choices, no party is likely to gain a majority, and then either a minority leads the legislature or there must be some horse-trading to produce a majority coalition that voters did not deliberately select. In a two-party system, the people choose the majority, but only because their choice has been restricted.
The problem, then, is not that our system is especially unrepresentative but that certain kinds of innovations and opportunities are blocked. In the US, as everywhere else, people form new groups that reflect their views, not only about how the world should be but also about how they will relate to each other and make decisions. These groups vary enormously, from terrorist cells led by charismatic clerics to New Left assemblages in which all the decisions are made by consensus and anyone can enter or exit at will.
Let’s assume that some groups are better than others and, indeed, that a few are very good. Because they start as small associations, they cannot directly govern at large scales. They need more than ideals and ways of interacting with their own members; they also need strategies for influencing law, government, and the economy. In a word, they need leverage.
In a system that encourages new parties to form and compete for power, one powerful form of leverage is available. The intellectuals and grassroots activists who emerged from the Occupy-style social movement in Spain naturally formed a political party, Podemos, to reflect both their views of national policies and their ways of self-organizing. It remains to be seen whether they can remain faithful to their origins as a social movement now that they are a formal political party with seats in the legislature and control over some cities and provinces. But that path was available and they took it.
Innovation is not intrinsically good. ISIS is highly innovative. But it is crucial that a political system allows new entrants: not just individuals who haven’t run for office before, but new kinds of people with new ideas. Otherwise, it hardens into an oligarchy.
In the US, people still come together in all kinds of movements and networks within civil society. #BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, and the Tea Party are just some of the high-profile recent examples. If you looked more closely, you would see many more of these groupings, some with narrower ranges of issues, less explicitly political agendas, or more idiosyncratic organizational forms.
Such movements and networks often talk about scale and leverage. In the US, they think first about trying to change public opinion, influence the media, or recruit new members. Occasionally, they also talk about running candidates for office. In the Tea Party’s case, they have used primary campaigns to obtain some influence over a major party. But they cannot gain momentum by launching new parties of their own and coming before the electorate with their own platforms, leaders, and organizational structures. And this is why the discussion of large-scale strategy is so frustrating in the US.
This problem is going to be especially acute for the left for the next few years. On the right, the Tea Party and libertarian movements have found ways to compete within the GOP. The seemingly open and competitive Republican primary campaign means that conservative activists have a strategy for leverage: pick one of the candidates. Although only two or three of the Republican contenders have plausible chances, the competitive start of the campaign makes the GOP presidential primary look like an opportunity for diverse activism on the right.
On the Democratic side, the unprecedented dominance of Hilary Clinton means that supporting a campaign is really not a way to innovate in politics. Clinton and her staff can innovate if they want to. As a voter, you can support Clinton if you agree with her more than with the Republicans. Otherwise, you must innovate outside of formal politics.
I exaggerate because there are other Democratic presidential candidates, and more could enter. But the lack of a candidate who reflects (for instance) any of the recent ferment about race and racism is a symptom of our situation.
My point, again, is not that our elected leaders fail to represent the people. Some Democratic Members of Congress represent predominantly urban African American communities and are reasonably in sync with their constituents. The point is rather that no one–other than established party leaders–can seriously innovate within electoral politics on the Left for the time being. I predict that will produce a lot of frustration unless someone can figure out an alternative form of leverage.
