The end of the year is always a reflective time, and recently, I saw a truly inspiring Bill Moyers interview with cultural critic and scholar Henry A. Giroux, whose insightful critique of the state of democracy and reflections on what is possible for its future remind me why I originally wanted to work in public engagement. Though the book discussed in the interview, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, sets up a rather bleak premise, we at NCDD see our own vision and values in Giroux’s analysis of what democracy could be like – if we work for it. The interview is deep and rich with insight, and we highly recommend that you give it a look.

I’ve pulled out a few key insights that Giroux shares below, but you can watch the full (fairly long) interview on that originally aired on Moyers & Company by clicking here or read the full transcript of the interview here.

The Crisis in Democracy

From the beginning of the exchange, Giroux’s belief in the importance of real democracy comes through loud and clear:

Moyers: There’s a great urgency in your recent books and in the essays you’ve been posting online, a fierce urgency, almost as if you are writing with the doomsday clock ticking. What accounts for that?

Giroux: Well, for me democracy is too important to allow it to be undermined in a way in which every vital institution that matters from the political process to the schools to the inequalities that, to the money being put into politics, I mean, all those things that make a democracy viable are in crisis.

And the problem is the crisis… should be accompanied by a crisis of ideas, [the problem is] that the stories that are being told about democracy are really about the swindle of fulfillment. The swindle of fulfillment is what the reigning elite, in all of their diversity, now tell the American people, if not the rest of the world: that democracy is an excess. [Democracy] doesn’t really matter anymore, that we don’t need social provisions, we don’t need the welfare state, that the survival of the fittest is all that matters, that in fact society should mimic those values in ways that suggest a new narrative.

That narrative, Giroux continues, offers us “the most fraudulent definition of what a democracy should be,” and it is encompassed in “a vicious set of assumptions” which include

…the notion that profit making is the essence of democracy, the notion that economics is divorced from ethics, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism, the notion that the welfare state is a pathology, that any form of dependency basically is disreputable and needs to be attacked… How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public… [even] public engagement, is a pathology?

Many of us have met resistance or been discouraged in this work because of that discourse of “engagement as pathology.” In many venues civic venues and levels of government, we find those who are skeptical of efforts to involve average people in government and decision making and want to leave things up to experts and professionals instead. This skepticism seems to be based on the internalization of many of our officials and institutions of the “vicious set of assumptions” about democracy the Giroux describes. In far too many cases, especially when it comes to finances, we hear arguments that claim government couldn’t possibly solve difficult problems and involve the public at the same time.

Yet we are involved in this line of work because we know that everyday people working together and forming real relationships is the heart of a robust democracy, and we are committed to helping that work and those relationships thrive. But as Giroux’s “zombie” metaphor suggest, the politics we see today are not those that nurture a healthy civic life:

Moyers: My favorite of your many books is this one, “Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, “zombie” politics?

Giroux: Because it’s a politics that’s informed by the machinery of social and civil death… The zombie metaphor is a way to sort of suggest that democracy is losing its oxygen… It’s losing its spirit. It’s losing its ability to speak to itself in ways that would span the human spirit and the human possibility for justice and equality…

[Zombie politics are] a death machine because, in my estimation, it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency…

This lost sense of agency in our politics and civic life is real. We all know people who explain their non-participation in civic life or public decision making processes because they think that nothing will change, that the system is too corrupt, or otherwise have the general feeling that “participating won’t make a difference, so why bother?”  That lost sense of agency – and the lack of visible examples where small groups of average citizens do make a difference – is a big part of what NCDD and our field is working to shift every day as we engage and empower average people.

But it’s more than a lost feeling of agency. There has also been an actual erosion of what we know as democracy in our country.

I think that it is crucial for our field to reflect on and take seriously what Giroux is saying here about what he calls “casino capitalism” – our very economic system – as an active threat to democracy. He warns that this casino capitalism

…doesn’t just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That’s different.

That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it’s an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

And it basically has nothing to do with expanding the meaning and the substance of democracy itself.

[Casino capitalism] believes that social bonds not driven by market values are basically bonds that we should find despicable….we have an economic system that in fact has caused a crisis in democracy. What we haven’t addressed is the underlying consensus that informs that crisis.

In my opinion, Giroux is right: the drive to treat more and more sectors of society as markets that must create ever higher profits has encroached on so many venues of civic and political life that it has pushed the public out of spaces that are essential for real democratic governance. So we are left with a zombie democracy, complete with “people” – that is, corporations – that don’t have souls and can’t feel pain, but can and do hold more sway in our elections and government policy than flesh and blood citizens. And this creates a vicious cycle that feeds the real and perceived loss of civic agency.

Our Opportunity

One of the challenges of overcoming the “machinery of social and civic death” that Giroux lays out is the challenge of finding ways to “develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we’re facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language.”

In many ways, this challenge lands squarely in our lap as a individuals and as a professional field. The way I see it, a field like ours has unique potential to initiate momentum that can reverse this shift and, in a way, raise politics from the “undead” and keep our democracy from being completely bought out by casino capitalism. But this won’t happen by accident, we have to intentionally decide to shift that momentum.

The work of dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement is about connecting people to each other and their visions for their communities in real ways. Much of it is an outgrowth of the humanistic values and spirit of democracy, what Giroux calls “the human possibility for justice and equality.”

And in the coming year, it seems more important to me than ever that we reflect on how to make questions of justice, freedom, and equality more central in our work.

This may force us to struggle with concepts of neutrality and norms of professionalism that animate parts of our field, as talk of justice, freedom, and equality often naturally tend toward advocacy. But in my opinion, we should be struggling with ourselves about what it means for professionals in roles and work such as ours to also advocate for democracy itself, because if something doesn’t change, we may not have much of a genuine democracy left to work for. Only by continuing to ask ourselves tough questions can we find productive ways of imagining what it might look like for our field to play a role in staving off a zombie apocalypse for our democracy.

These questions, in Giroux’s mind, are posed by the actual state of affairs we are in.

We have to acknowledge the realities that bear down on us, but it seems to me that if we really want to live in a world and be alive with compassion and justice, then we need educated hope. We need a hope that recognizes the problems and doesn’t romanticize them, and also recognizes the need for vision, for social organizations, for strategies. We need institutions that provide the formative culture that give voice to those visions and those ideas.

Giroux adds that what is missing now ”…are those alternative public spheres, those cultural formations – what I call a formative culture – that can bring people together and give those ideas, embody them in both a sense of hope, of vision and the organizations and strategies that would be necessary… to reconstruct a sense of where politics can go.”

I believe that NCDD and the many practitioners, organizations, and indeed the movement that we represent can be thought of as the kind of formative culture that Giroux describes, and that we are capable of building the kind of institutions he calls for – those that can help people work through questions of justice, freedom, and democracy in our society in a way that is accessible, that will give loud voice to visions for a better future, and that can reconstruct a sense of where politics can go.

Though we clearly have a long way to go, I think that we still have reason to keep a firm grasp on this “educated hope” – hope that recognizes challenges and takes them seriously, but that feeds the growth of visions and strategies to create the changes we need.

As we transition into 2014, I invite you to reflect with me on how we can make this work more about developing strategies for confronting and overcoming the real threats to democracy posed by zombie politics and casino capitalism. I also invite you to share in the hope that we can actually do it.

Giroux leaves us with a vision for what is needed for that change: “The real changes are going to come in creating movements that are longstanding, that are organized, that basically take questions of governance and policy seriously and begin to spread out and become international. That is going to have to happen.”

Here’s to making it happen. Happy New Year.