By Harry C. Boyte
"The world is deluged with panaceas, formulas, proposed laws, machineries, ways out, and myriads of solutions. It is significant and tragic that almost every one of these proposed plans and alleged solutions deals with the structure of society, but none concerns the substance--the people. This, despite the eternal truth of the democratic faith that the solution always lies with the people."
-Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals 1946
WE ARE ON THE CUSP OF A NEW, INFORMATION AGE POPULISM. IT WILL generate immense changes in every institution and in society as a whole.
In the following I recover deeper meanings of populism and describe how information age populism, the politics of civic agency, differs from mass politics.
Recovering populism
IN RECENT YEARS, IN PUBLIC DISCUSSION "POPULISM" HAS MOST OFTEN MEANT A FOLKSY style, demagogic leaders who profess to champion victimized people, or regulatory, tax and other policies that champion common people against predatory interests.
Populism also has deeper meanings.
In the quote above, Saul Alinsky, the iconoclastic Jewish activist who is often called the father of community organizing in the United States, passionately restated the basic populist faith. Indeed, his only term of self-description was "populist." Alinsky's ideas were rooted in the great organizing efforts of the Great Depression and the Second World War, especially the experiences of anti-Stalinist public intellectuals and activists who liked "people's front" organizing--a term coined by the Communist Internationale in 1935-but didn't like Soviet-style Marxism. Alinsky s experiences were part of "people's fronts" around the world that gave birth to national liberation movements.
I never met Saul Alinsky, but my own life was profoundly shaped by the same history. My first encounter with the meanings of populism came in an incident that I describe in my recent book, The Citizen Solution. When I was nineteen, working as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964, I was caught one day by five men and a woman who were members of the Ku Klux Klan. They accused me of being a "communist and a Yankee." I replied, "I'm no Yankee-my family has been in the South since before the Revolution. And I'm a populist, not a communist. I believe that blacks and poor whites should join to do something about the big shots who keep us divided." For a few minutes we talked about what such a populist movement might look like. Then they let me go.
When he learned of the incident, Martin Luther King, head of SCLC, told me that he identified with the populist tradition and assigned me to organize poor whites. For young whites like myself in the movement, its examples of people becoming the shapers of their own destinies offered the possibility of redemption not only for blacks but also for ourselves. I became convinced of the destructive concept of "whiteness," and passionate about recovering my own Scottish heritage.
In the last century and a half, there have been three broad democratic populist movements in the United States, with counterparts elsewhere in the world. The first emerged in the late nineteenth century among small farmers, black and white. Populism resurfaced as a broad movement during the 1930s to defend democracy and to mobilize civic energies to meet the challenges of the Great Depression and fascism. The "people," seen by intellectuals in the 1920s as the repository of crass materialism and parochialism, were rediscovered as a source of strength and hope. Key architects of the third great populist movement, the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, had roots in the Thirties movement. King may have received a deeper knowledge about populism from them.
Today we are on the threshold of a fourth populist movement whose centerpiece is civic agency--the development of the creative powers and social intelligence of ordinary people and of societies to address our collective challenges, to build healthy communities, and to create sustainable democracies. It is fed not only by technological transformations such as the "co-creative" qualities of the Internet, but also by the spread of organizing. To make the case, it is useful to contrast populism with "mass politics."
Mass Politics and Beyond
THE DOMINANT STRAND OF LIBERALISM IN THE CENTURY HAS BEEN "MASS POLITICS," IT emphasizes universal claims, distributive justice, a view of the citizen as consumer, and individual rights. Mass politics is based on what the historian Steve Fraser in Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order called the concept of "a new man-existentially mobile, more oriented to consumption than production, familiar with the impersonal rights and responsibilities of industrial due process." Mass politics, Fraser observes, "was inconceivable apart from a political elite in command of the state, committed to a program of enlarged government spending, financial reform, and redistributive taxation, presiding over a reconstituted coalition in the realm of mass politics."
In my view, an outstanding contribution of Tikkun magazine has been to challenge the culturally uprooted and spiritually impoverished dynamics of mass politics. It is vitally important because mass politics has spread since the 1970s in what are called "mobilizing" forms of citizen action. Mobilizing approaches include the door-to-door canvass, direct mail fundraising, and recently, Internet mobilizations. All have been understandable as efforts to counter the assault by big business interests on consumer, affirmative action, environmental, and tax gains of the 1960s movements.
But mobilizing on the Left has come at a severe cost. It is based on a formula: find a target or enemy to demonize, stir up emotion with inflammatory language, create a "script" that defines the issue in good versus evil terms and shuts down critical thought, and convey the idea that elites who champion the victims will come to the rescue. Hillary Clinton's experiences were closely associated with mobilizing networks. Most large environmental, public interest, and other progressive civic groups, as well as election campaigns, use mobilizing as a matter of course. Mobilizing approaches also more subtly shape professional practices of all kinds.
This is because higher education prepares students to be mobile individualists, detached from the communities in which they work and the cultures from which they come, who see people in terms of their deficiencies, not their capacities. The historian Thomas Bender calls this shift over the last fifty years in the United States the change from "civic professionalism" to "disciplinary professionalism." For instance, in seminaries and divinity schools, according to Mary Fulkerson, a professor at Duke Divinity School who studies theological education, the "practice courses" typically pertain to matters internal to the life of the congregation, such as preaching, counseling, and church organization. Teaching skills and habits needed to engage with people in places where congregations are located is slighted. When such learning is absent, graduates see themselves as detached experts providing solutions for people, not as citizens working with fellow citizens on public problems. In the November/December 2007 issue of Change magazine, Parker Palmer described the weak sense of civic agency and the posture of "value free" practice that result. "The hidden curriculum of our culture portrays institutions as powers other than us, over which we have marginal control at best."
Less visibly, in the 1970s an alternative populist strand of "organizing politics" also began to develop, in networks descended from Saul Alinsky. Such groups engage in what they call "broad-based organizing," consciously contrasted with mobilizing. Organizing involves intense focus on developing the public skills of participants to work across differences on common challenges. Members and leaders of broad-based organizations made up of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim congregations learn to understand the stories and motivations of others of different income, religious, cultural or partisan backgrounds. They become skilled at working through conflicts of viewpoint and interest in ways that avoid violence and produce beneficial public outcomes. They learn to build "public relationships" across differences for effective public action. They pay close attention to local cultures and networks. They foster what Doran Schrantz, an organizer for the Gamaliel Foundation, calls people's "public growth."
The presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has shown how the methods and mindset of such populist community organizing can be translated into much larger political contexts. Obama was a Gamaliel organizer in the early 1980s. His first autobiographical book, Dreams from My Father, contains striking accounts of how "organizing" teaches public skills and develops public identities, including his own.
The organizing message of self-directed collective action forms the heart of his campaign. "I'm asking you not only to believe in my ability to make change; I'm asking you to believe in yours," reads his web site. It finds expression in campaign slogans such as "yes we can," and "we are the ones we've been waiting for," drawn from a song of the freedom movement of the 1960s. Thousands of participants have received basic organizing training. As Tim Dickinson, a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, put it in a review of the field operation, "[The] goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers,' said [campaign field director Temo] Figueros. 'We wanted to train organizers--folks who can fend for themselves."'
How a new populist movement of civic agency develops--and whether it can effect a "revegetation" in communities ravaged by technocratic clear-cutting over decades--remains to be seen. But a new populism is stirring. And I believe the world will change.
Harry C. Boyte, founder and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute, is author, most recently, of The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008).
