Harry Boyte, "Reconstructing Democracy: The

Reconstructing Democracy:

The Citizen Politics of Public Work i

Harry C. Boyte

Visiting Scholars Lecture, the Havens Center

University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 11, 2001

If we are to revitalize government as an instrument of our common purposes, protect common properties, and successfully address the mounting public problems at the threshold of a new century, we need a new politics, in which the citizenry as a whole regains basic authority for public creations. Politics, in a democratic sense, is best understood as the public work of citizens. Its object is the never finished actions required to build and sustain “the commons,” the public institutions and collective resources of a democratic way of life. It combines messy, down-to-earth labors on projects of common benefit with a civic and moral imagination that asks “where are we going?”; “Is this where we should be going?”

A citizen-centered politics, “citizen politics,” has rich antecedents in our political culture and counterparts in cultures across the world. Yet it survives largely as a subterranean presence in crevices of contemporary society. Spreading citizen politics widely will require making much more interactive the relations between elected officials and government agency workers and citizens – “putting the ‘civil’ back in civil service,” as one professional in the Army Corps of Engineers put it. Elected officials, like government employees, have important roles as leaders who call people to public work, as context setters and tool providers, as articulators of public direction. But the political universe cannot revolve around them if we are to see wide civic engagement. Citizen politics will mean re-conceptualizing the ends of politics, from distributive views (“who gets what, when, how”) to a larger conception, the creation and sustenance of our common things. Finally, human service organizations need to shift their view of citizens, from seeing people as “clients” and “customers, ” to seeing people as creative actors. To relocate civic authority among the citizenry will take a Reformation and a Copernican Revolution, combined.

Politics as normally conceived revolves around the state. And it is seen as a quintessentially distributive activity. David Easton’s classic definition captures both the state-centered and distributive aspects of politics. Politics, said Easton, is the authoritative allocation of goods, services, and values.

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1 Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley, 1965). This is similar to the classic definition given by Harold Lasswell, who said that politics is the struggle over “who gets what, when, how.” By

Boyte, Citizen Politics, UW-Madison, April 11, 2001 1

In a world of exploding consumer demands, growing economic disparities, and redefinition of many public institutions in the language of the market (defining citizens as customers), distributive and state-centered politics continues to hold sway. Yet communitarians such as Robert Putnam, Amitai

Etzioni, Bill Galston, Alan Wolfe, Jean Elshtain, and Steven Carter point to some limits in this politics, called “liberalism” in theoretical terms. Recalling classic republican views which argued that public life should cultivate virtue, a sense of community, and concern for the common good not simply private interests, communitarians draw attention to public life’s educative possibilities. In a competitive age of growing mistrust, rancor and incivility, and hollowed-out moral language, their views have currency.

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Both liberal and communitarian conceptions of politics hold insights. Yet neither, alone nor in combination, suffices. The presidential election of 2000 can be taken as a case in point. In at least some ways the election can be understood as a contest between the redistributionist politics of Al Gore with his promises of drug benefits and his pledge to “fight for the people” against powerful interests, and the communitarian appeals of George Bush with his call to a version of citizenship -- compassionate conservatism -- “in which the strong are just and the weak are valued.” Both frames minimize roles of citizens. Gore won the popular vote. Bush won the “civic debate” in a way, as well as the election, by touting volunteerism.

3 Yet neither addressed, in any serious fashion, democracy’s future, the state of the mid-century, mainstream American liberals took this to take place within the framework of Federalist Paper #10 , which saw politics as the activity of the political class: “the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves convened for the purpose.” Sidney Hillman, the great 20 th century union leader, added strategic elements with participatory implications: “politics is the science of how who gets what, when, and why.” Hillman’s definition has continued to structure the predominant paradigm of progressive citizen action. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines politics as 1a: The art or science of government… 2: Political actions, practices, or policies; 3a: competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership in a government or other group.

2 For a conservative voice in this vein, see David Brooks, “The Organization Kid,” The Atlantic , April, 2001

3 On Bush as a communitarian – with support, surprising to some, from Democratic as well as Republican theorists in this vein -- see Dana Milbank, “Catchword for Bush Ideology: ‘Communitarianism’ Finds Favor,” The

Washington Post

, February 1, 2001; on criticism of Bush’s communitarianism from a populist, citizen politics stance, see Harry C. Boyte and Nancy N. Kari, “Condescending Conservatism,” The New Democrat ,

September/October, 1999, and Boyte, “Nation Needs to Return to Grittier Idea of Citizenship,” Star Tribune ,

January 30, 1001; on Al Gore’s conception of the citizen-as-customer and the way such politics infuses the new

Roosevelt Memorial, see Boyte and Kari, “Taking the Public Out of ‘Public Art,’ The Wall Street Journal August

6, 1997; and on the way Ralph Nader’s version of activist citizenship operated within a distributionist and statecentered political frame, see Boyte, “Nader’s Trial Lawyer Populism,” PPI-On Line www.ppionline.org

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commons, the feelings of powerlessness among the people themselves, nor the public problems spiraling out of control with governments unable to address them.

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What is to be done?

The following begins with an illustrative story of citizen politics, young people’s public work in a group called “the Public Achievement Bathroom Busters” at Andersen Open School in Minneapolis. It suggests a third way of politics, somewhat different than that of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and other neoliberals. Noting the crisis in government and other forms of the commonwealth, I then look at the ways in which citizens have, in a process like the Busters, gained a strong sense of ownership and stake in public institutions and common things historically in America as they helped create them.

This experience and language of public and political co-creation has radically eroded in our time.

Two recent, sophisticated expositions of current political positions illustrate. One is communitarian,

“Working Together,” by Cynthia Estlund. The other is broadly leftist in the Sidney Hillman tradition of participatory politics noted in footnote #1, above, “Deepening Democracy,” by Archon Fung and Erik

Olin Wright. Both, for all their differences, see politics as revolving around the state and as concerned with distributive struggles. The problem is that politics understood as “who gets what?” eclipses both the common “what” that needs to be created, and the “who” that creates it.

The argument then examines some ways we have sought to retrieve and develop the citizen politics alternative in practice and theory, especially through a look at our Public Achievement initiative.

In general, all our partnerships, including Public Achievement, seek not only to strengthen individual civic engagement but also to revitalize broader civic cultures of “mediating institutions,” a more political concept than social capital.

5 The gist of the argument is that citizen politics “works” to unleash civic energy and talent needed to address complex public problems. Though the focus here is on young people,

4 The sense that there are multiplying problems that governments are increasingly powerless to resolve has recently gained momentum in mainstream discourse. Thus Thomas Friedman, The New York Times

’ international columnist who was touting the benefits of globalization in the late 1990s, was arguing by 2000 that the election was failing to address most critical problems, while governments like Russia’s, no longer ideological threats, “threaten us by their weakness, not their strength.” “Code Red,” NYT , March 30, 2001. For the CIA’s treatment, see footnote 8 below.

5 In my other Havens lecture, “The Civic Renewal Movement: On Silences and Civic Muscle, or, Why Social

Capital Is a Useful but Insufficient Concept,” April 10, I argued that we need to revitalize the concept of “mediating institution,” intermediaries – including diverse educational institutions, from K-12 to higher ed to community-based


especially – I learned in the civil rights movement that young people can often take leadership in breaking out of orthodoxies, conceptual and social alike – citizen politics holds potential for reconstructing democracy in varied environments, including government itself.

The Bathroom Busters

Public Achievement is a civic education and engagement initiative sponsored by the Humphrey

Institute’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship which has proven a rich action research laboratory for theorizing a number of political questions. In Public Achievement, young people learn civic skills and an understanding of politics through doing “public work projects” of their own design and implementation, with the aid of adult coaches. At the heart of Public Achievement is a conception of the citizen as “cocreator” of the common environment, and of politics as the messy, largely practical public work of making that environment. Coaches help young people understand specific problems as instances of larger public issues (which range widely, from teen pregnancy, racism, and school violence to land mines or global warming), and then turn problems into actionable projects. The projects must be legal, nonviolent, and “make a public contribution.” Sometimes the process surfaces unexpected interests.

Public Achievement began at Andersen Open School in the low income Phillips neighborhood of

Minneapolis in the fall of 1997. Fifth and sixth graders, meeting in what is called an “issue convention,” identified issues and problems they wanted to work on over the course of the school year. In Andersen that year, their coaches were members of the City of Lakes AmeriCorps program.

One group of eight boys, a racial and cultural mix of Mexican immigrants, Native Americans, and

European Americans, expressed fury at the state of their bathroom. The stalls had no doors. Toilet paper and other supplies were missing. The walls were covered with obscenities. They named themselves “the

Bathroom Busters,” and decided to take action.

Two AmeriCorps coaches helped them to understand the issue in “public” terms larger than the bathroom (the issue was twofold -- students’ disrespect for common property; and the school system’s disrespect for students). The coaches also helped them map the complexities of power and politics around their problem. They were dealing with a highly inefficient bureaucracy. The school principal had been learning sites -- between everyday life and the large world of policy and public life through which people can act


unable to get the central school district to paint the bathrooms for four years. Unions had to give approval.

Funds had to be found. Moreover, the group had to learn how to make themselves understood. Half its members had difficulty speaking English.

Yet, as often is the case in Public Achievement, youthful determination mixed with good coaching got action that many adults thought was impossible. The team created an alliance with sympathetic administrators, teachers, and parents. They contacted district officials. And they achieved a seemingly great success. The walls were painted.

The next year, however, graffiti again began appearing on the walls. Caesar, a Mexican American youngster who had been involved the year before, chose to work on the problem again. His team met with other children who used the bathroom. “This is our property. What can we do to prevent graffiti?” was their question. Out of these discussions came a plan to create a mural, the composite of many kids’ ideas and suggestions. As the mural took shape, the bathroom became graffiti-free.

It also turned into a symbol of school pride. A string of visitors – the Minneapolis congressman,

Martin Sabo, the Vice President of the Commission on National Service, Jim Scheibel, and other political and civic leaders – came to see the school that year. All were taken to the bathroom. They heard the explanation by Caesar (who became known for his exuberant eloquence on the topic) and his team: “This is our property. We have to take care of it!”

The Crisis of the Commons

Where is Caesar when we need him? has been my thought over the last year.

The story of the Bathroom Busters is interesting on a number of levels – as a tale of youthful energy and determination, latent political skills, cross-cultural cooperation, successful changes in youth cultural norms around graffiti, to name several. But perhaps most interesting is the contrast between its seemingly simple, straight-forward, and common-sense “solution” to the enormous threat facing common properties of all sorts in American society, and the infrequency of that solution’s employment in the contemporary rough and tumble of politics.

6 with power and develop political savvy. On the web, www.ssc.wisc.edu/havenscenter/boyte.htm

6 There are multiplying expressions of alarm about the threat to common properties, understood as the broad, multifaceted public infrastructures and goods on which we all depend. The American Society of Engineers recently


Today, those Americans who shape dominant views of society seem to understand the relationship between co-creation and increased stake-holding and feelings of ownership in almost every realm except politics.

Businesses offer employees multiple ways to “feel involved” – from quality circles that tap their interests and ideas to stock ownership options. The new trend in philanthropy is to connect donors directly to projects they are interested in. In pedagogical theory – if yet still unusual in practice – the ideas of “learning communities” and “students as co-creators” is gaining currency over the concept of

“instruction.” Even in as highly expert-dominated a domain as health care, watchwords now include

“alternative medicine” and patients as “co-producers” of their health.

Moreover, in actual practice, government agencies at every level have begun to involve citizens more directly in co-production of public goods and services.

7 Building on ideas and practices of public participation beginning with the “maximum feasible participation” of the 1960s and expanded during the

Carter administration, federal agencies during the Clinton years experimented with a wide variety of citizen involvement strategies. These often embodied civic learning about what makes for reciprocal and productive partnerships between citizens and communities with government workers, on issues ranging from environmental sustainability to housing and crime prevention. In the second presidential debate of

2000, Al Gore alluded to such changes and civic learning in his response to George Bush’s charge that he favored “command and control” environmental policies. “I’m not for command and control techniques,” declared that America needs a massive 1.5 trillion dollars in basic infrastructure improvements simply to stay in place. Meanwhile, the New America Foundation has initiated a large project, “Reclaiming the American

Commons,” which has detailed the threats. As their new report by David Bollier, Public Assets, Private Profits:

Reclaiming the American Commons in an Age of Market Enclosure, puts it: “Many of the resources that

Americans own as a people – forests and minerals under public lands, public information and federally financed research, the broadcast airwaves and public institutions and traditions – are increasingly being taken over by private business interests. These appropriations of common assets are siphoning revenues from the public treasury, shifting ownership and control from public to private interests, and eroding democratic processes and shared cultural values.” (Washington, 2001). The project is crucially important, but it also illustrates the reigning political paradigm of politics, in which the state is the central actor -- a perspective in this case coming from public interest advocacy:

“Federal, state, and local governments can and should help bolster a social and ethical commons for market activity; stop the giveaway of taxpayer-owned resources; create stakeholder trusts that pay dividends to all citizens from collectively owned assets; and capture capital gains from public infrastructure,” argues Bollier. p. v. Of course government should do these things – at our discretion, and as our instrument, as citizens.

7 This was a major finding of the New Citizenship project with the White House Domestic Policy Council from

1993 to 1995, coordinated by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. Carmen Sirianni, research director of the

New Citizenship, and Lew Friedland build on these findings in their forthcoming book, Civic Innovation in

America (Berkeley: University of California, 2001), as well as their case studies at the Civic Practices Network web site, www.cpn.org

. For local government examples, see Harry Boyte and Josh Zepnick, “We Own the Store,” at the

Pew Mapping Project, www.publicwork.org

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replied Gore. “I’m for working with groups. Not just with industry but also with citizen groups and local communities to control sprawl in ways the local communities themselves come up with.”

Yet as far as I know, this was Gore’s solitary reference on the national stage to such examples of citizen-government partnership in public problem solving. Since the election, the Democrats, facing the

Bush campaign to pass a tax return of 1.6 trillion dollars have rarely used the concept of common properties and common wealth. And even when it is invoked (“It’s your money. It’s also your schools, your traffic jam, and your government,” said Senator John Kerry), there is scant reference to citizens’ direct involvements in the creation or sustenance of the commons.

8 The 1992 campaign of Bill Clinton had far more discussion of citizen-government partnership than contemporary Democratic discourse.

While many factors were undoubtedly at work in the campaign and continue in the Washington political budget wars – including the differing political proclivities of Gore and Clinton, and the domination of modern politics by consultants with an advertising mindset – a crucial ingredient is the dramatic weakening of a sense that democracy is something which we, collectively create. This weakening becomes more apparent through a look at the vernacular language of democracy in our history.

Citizen Politics and the Commonwealth

In America, the commonwealth has been vital to the extent that people have had a strong sense of ownership and role in helping create it. This role, lingering as a distant echo in the term, “productive citizenship,” was especially expressed in practical, down-to-earth projects through which people helped build public things and solve common problems. In the process of often “sweaty and muscular work,” as

David Mathews has put it, citizens developed a larger public view. It confounded normal left-right categories. Without in any sense romanticizing the American past or glossing over its injustices, a considerable body of scholarship has now illuminated the importance of work-centered understandings of democracy, and have shown the ties between such work-centered democracy and the vitality of the

8 An exception here is Anthony Lewis, “The Feeling of a Coup,” The New York Times , October 31, 2001. Lewis quotes Michael Dombeck who resigned as head of the Forest Service with a letter to Ann Veneman, Secretary of

Agriculture, urging her not to carry out the proposed abandonment of bans on roads. “Doing so would undermine the most extensive multi-year environmental analysis in history,” he wrote, “a process that included over 600 public meetings and generated over 1.6 million comments.”


“commonwealth” idea in American political culture. Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, democratic citizenship in America was indelibly tied to what might be called a work-centered commonwealth view. Citizenship was understood not as the high-minded, virtuous, and leisure-time activity of gentlemen. Rather, it was the down-to-earth labors of ordinary people who created goods and undertook projects of public benefit. Citizenship was public work.

Citizenship as public work lent dynamism, spirit, and an everyday political-ness to American democracy. It accorded honor and authority to those, whatever their birth or educational status, who were

"builders of the commonwealth." The authority gained through work with civic overtones meant that relatively powerless groups had multiple potential resources for gaining power. The people not only made the commonwealth. They were the commonwealth. And they had high regard for the commonwealth which they helped to make: schools and libraries, parks and bridges, local art fairs and civic holidays, public things and public spaces of all kinds.

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With a work-ethos spreading out widely, Americans radiated a boldness in action and pride in work that amazed foreign observers. The civic aspects of work of many different kinds turned America into a seedbed for insurgent movements, utopian experiments, and popular politics. Those excluded from the commonwealth, such as slaves, women, and the poor found in it resources for democratic action.

The sense of the commonwealth (and Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people” as well as “for the people”) crossed political divisions. Thus, one of the most powerful articulations of commonwealth philosophy in the mainstream was voiced by Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1908 “New

Nationalism” speech:

The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they themselves called into being.

9 One of the most significant signs of an incipient “citizen movement” in our time is the explosion of interest and examples of citizen-created public spaces of all kinds, as a counter to the soulessness and dehumanization of most modern spaces: revitalized public markets and parks, train stations and traffic plazas, schools and federal buildings.

These include enormous initiatives such as the work to turn New Jersey train stations into vital civic squares, and a new “Education Expo” on the three acres in front of the Department of Education illustrating creative, participatory educational innovations. Expo is to serve as an exemplar for schools across the nation. See the Project for Public

Spaces web site, for a very large number of examples in the US and around the world: www.pps.org

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Yet Roosevelt’s simultaneous embrace of an “expert” class as the best judges of policy embodied the contradictions of his age. As the historian Daniel Rodgers has described in his Atlantic Crossings: Social

Politics in a Progressive Age , ongoing citizen involvement in politics was viewed by elite policy makers with skepticism at best, and often with downright hostility. A new generation of academics and policy makers, armed with new scientific knowledge, saw the process as simply too arcane, complex, and specialized for the average person to understand or to be concerned with.

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Still, citizen politics remained as a strong underground current in American political culture and experienced a resurgence during the New Deal. As Lisbeth Cohen has cogently argued, citizens felt such strong identification with New Deal programs because they felt involved in their construction, not because they saw them as government benefits.

11 When we did interviews across Minnesota with veterans of the Civilian Conservation Corps, we found the view that “government worked for us” as well as strong pro-government sentiment among CCC veterans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

During the 1950s, however, America’s political identity – and understanding of democracy itself

– underwent profound transformation. We shifted from a “producer” democracy to a “consumer” democracy. This was dramatized by the Nixon-Khruschev debate in 1959 in a model US kitchen in

Moscow, called the “Kitchen debate.” There, Richard Nixon, Vice President of the United States, defined freedom itself as a matter of consumer choice, saying the capacity of Americans to select appliances such as those which surrounded the two men meant that the American way of life was sure to prevail.

For all the changes of the last half century and with exceptions, such as the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the view of democracy as largely something “we get things from,” not something we create, has continued and even expanded. Democracy is seen by liberals largely as a matter of distributing resources and rights. Communitarians of varying views stress allocating and cultivating values. But both see politics generally as state centered and distributive. Two fine treatments of civic life and democracy,

10 Rodgers described the pattern developing from 1900 to 1945, “Students of the first German-trained economists…establish[ed] new forms of authority by colonizing the social space between university professorships and expert government service. Their efforts came to define a central structural element of American progressive politics.” Atlantic Crossings (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), p. 108.

11 As Cohen shows, people felt involved in the work and politics in a myriad of ways, from voting to union activism to settle house organizing to public work projects such as the WPA and CCC. Making A New Deal .


one communitarian, the other left in approach, illustrate. For all their far ranging differences, both share ultimately similar views of “politics.”

Putting Work back into Civil Society: Cynthia Estlund’s “Working Together”

In a recent, extended article Cynthia Estlund, professor of law at Columbia University, seeks to put work and the workplace back onto the civil society map from which they have been removed in most recent political and civic theory. We share a common criticism of the way conventional theory in recent years has redefined civil society to focus singularly on the “voluntary sector,” different than markets or government. We differ in our views of politics and the centrality of power to issues of work.

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Estlund brings together a wealth of theoretical perspectives on civic action and political culture

(especially Tocqueville and Durkheim in historical terms, and contemporary theorists such as Robert

Putnam, Jurgen Habermas, and Iris Marion Young) with a large body of social science literature and examples from popular culture (splendid treatments of television shows, for instance) to argue that the workplace may furnish resources for social integration, social capital, and deliberation in ways current theorists neglect. A virtue of her treatment is its complex, many-sided realism. Estlund fully acknowledges the hierarchies, exclusions, and continuing patterns of discrimination, domination and alienation that workers experience in most workplace environments. But she makes a compelling case that, nonetheless, workplaces with all their contradictions and complexities are still the only environment where most people are likely to have sustained encounters with others of differing racial, cultural, and ideological backgrounds. Moreover, they have such encounters under conditions sufficiently conducive to interaction and collaboration – relative civility, and practical, goal directed tasks -- that people often develop enhanced respect for others different than themselves, reduce their prejudices and stereotypes, build trust, develop civic skills, and create cross group networks. For instance, Estlund observes

It is not just the friendship potential of workplace relations that makes it a promising source of interracial contact; the process of working together…is generally cooperative and directed toward

12 “Working Together: The Workplace, Civil Society, and the Law,” The Georgetown Law Journal Vol. 89:1

(2000), pp. 1-96. Estlund’s argument, in its critique of the civil society map, is like my own in “Off the Playground of Civil Society,” a lecture delivered at Duke on October 23, 1998, which became the basis for the two part symposium on Commonwealth, Civil Society, and Democratic Renewal in A Pegs Journal: The Good Society Vol.

9, No. 2, pp. 1-23; and Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. (1999-2000)


shared objectives; much of it is sustained, personal, informal, and one-to-one; it is often in the a context of equal status, at least in the sense that status is not determined by race; and it has the approval of managers and the society as a whole (p.25).

Estlund notes changes achieved through social movements such as unionization and civil rights, which functioned in interactive ways with changes in the law. Thus, Section 7 of the Wagner Act, in part the product of New Deal reform and organizing, created “a kind of rudimentary system of civil liberties within the workplace” which in turn allowed further organization and action by workers. Title VII’s equal protection of the law provisions – enshrining in words, at least, “the notion that people should not be segregated or subordinated on the basis of their race or certain other immutable traits” -- was the result of civil rights efforts. Though the work is not completed, it furthers democratic purposes. “Title VII …has transformed the workplace into a particular and unique kind of mediating institution” whose democratic character comes from “convening strangers from diverse backgrounds and inducing them to work together toward shared objectives under the aegis of the societally imposed equality principle.” (p. 65)

Despite the strengths and nuances of her treatment, Estlund’s workplace has a static, “given” quality that removes it from serious possibility of democratic reconstruction. She notes that the

“rudimentary civil liberties” of the workplace might be built upon, but sees little realistic prospect that workplaces might experience widespread democratization or become sites of democratic power. More broadly, reflecting communitarian themes, Estlund’s criteria for the civic success of the workplace are its integrating and bonding qualities. For her, “the workplace offers an especially promising institutional setting for the formation of connections of social solidarity, empathy, and communication in a diverse society” and is “a particularly promising incubator of connections across lines of race and ethnicity.”

These are certainly positive features, but by themselves they do not develop the power of workers individually nor collectively. Nor do they address the erosion of public purposes and the very idea of public things. The workplace, for Estlund, is decidedly apolitical.

Indeed, few settings are political in her understanding of politics. “Other than by voting, the ordinary citizen rarely attempts to influence the political process,” she argues (p. 53). “She may write an occasional letter to the editor or participate in a political demonstration, or she may join – that is, in most cases, write a check to – an advocacy organization. But…as a descriptive matter, ordinary citizens are largely left out of the [political] picture.”


Estlund argues that the form of “deliberation” that takes place at the workplace, while salutary in developing cross-group understanding and a larger, more “public” viewpoint, has little to do with politics.

Cynthia Estlund sees politics as a narrowly state-centered and distributive activity. The workplace, like other institutions of civil society, is a support mechanism, part of the civic scaffolding essential to a healthy democracy. It is not in itself a theater for political engagement nor public creation.

How might broader civic energies be mobilized and tapped to address complex problems of modern settings? What happens when “politics” that occurs within and through government as presently constituted is deeply and increasingly inadequate to confront the tasks and challenges of the modern environment? How do we address the delegitimation of government and other public things in a world of rising demands and increasing pressures toward privatization on every front?

To address such questions, it is worthwhile to examine efforts that seek to extend the practice of

“politics” on a significant scale, beyond Estlund’s acts of voting and check-writing. In this regard, the

Real Utopias Project of the Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is exemplary.

Empowered Deliberative Democracy: A View from the Left

In their framing essay for a forthcoming issue of Politics and Society , Archon Fung and Erik Olin

Wright take up precisely the narrowness of reigning understandings of politics. “’Democracy as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially-based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices,” they write.

Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and implementing public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy society, and in more radical egalitarian versions of the democratic ideal, assuring that all citizens benefit from the nation’s wealth.

They see more than failure to realize democratic ideals at work; they see dangers. “The thrust of much political energy in the developed industrial democracies in recent years has been to reduce the role of politics altogether,” they write. The unbridled market threatens to become Karl Polanyi’s “Satanic Mill,” destroying the social and moral foundations of its very existence.

In view of the Bush administration’s repudiations of effort to reduce global warming begun during his father’s own administration; roll back of safety regulations for millions of workers; weakening


of limits on arsenic in the water and other measures, what might have sounded alarmist begins to read like the daily headlines. In some ways both Estlund and Fung/Wright are talking about forms of commons at risk (in the first instance, our sense of commonality and common destiny; in the second, especially public institutions). Thus, Fung and Wright’s exploration of strategies which they believe hold promise to “elicit the energy and influence of ordinary people, often drawn from the lowest strata of society, in the solution of problems that plague them” is important, for its insights and its limits, alike.

Their aim is to generalize from real world examples, answering “a fundamental challenge for the

Left…to develop transformative democratic strategies” for advancing values such as egalitarian social justice, individual liberty combined with popular control, community, and the flourishing of individuals.

Fung and Wright look at five experiments in what they call “empowered deliberative democracy,” or

EDD. Examples range from neighborhood governance councils in Chicago and habitat conservation planning under the Endangered Species Act to participatory budget discussions in Porto Alegre, Brazil, sponsored by a coalition of parties led by the left wing Workers Party, that have taken power in that city.

The authors, within the relatively limited space of their article, treat some of the complexities and problems and questions that emerge from such processes, as well as what they see as their merits (the three case studies noted above are treated at greater length in the special issue of the magazine). Most of their attention goes to laying out what they call “an abstract model of Empowered Deliberative

Democracy” which they believe has broad applicability.

Fung and Wright seek to distill three central principles from the examples: all have a practical focus on specific, tangible problems; all involve ordinary people affected by the problems and officials close to them; all rely on what they call deliberative development of problem solving. They note three institutional design features (devolution of state authority to local units; creation of formal linkages that connect local units to each other and to more central authorities; and use of new state institutions to support and guide these problem-solving efforts, making them “state-centered not voluntaristic”), and background conditions such as literacy and rough equality of power among participants.


These experiments in participatory decision making are certainly worth exploring. But there are two problems with Fung and Wright’s theoretical framework. These have to do with an ideological casting of the theory and their view of politics and civic agency.

Why should the project of democratization be defined as the distinctive work of “the left?”

Although the left is now a lonely and crucial voice in defending public instrumentalities, it does not exhaust the wellsprings of democratic energy that need to be enlisted in a broad process of democratic renewal. In my examinations of citizen action over the last generation, left approaches are likely to target corporate power (and conservatives), but are often highly inattentive to the ways in which human service structures and modernizing professionals can disempower families, neighborhoods, religious congregations and other rooted and culturally grounded institutions of many sorts. While the values Fung and Wright lift up (social justice and equality, liberty, individual expression and the like) are certainly part of the constellation of democratic values, they by no means exhaust them. A stress on the dignity of labor; the sacredness of the human person; the limits of materialist conceptions of wealth; the importance of continuities, memory, and “thick” relations of place and culture, and multiple opportunities to participate in public life itself are all essential to human flourishing, as well, in my view. This range of values are often in tension and even conflict (for instance, between individual expression and “thick” relations of place and culture). Yet, as I argued some time ago, these latter sorts of values also point to well-springs of popular power, associated with populist politics but slighted or opposed by the left.

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Secondly, Fung and Wright see civic agency in its most robust sense as “deliberative.” While beginning with a real strength in their reading of the challenges of contemporary politics, this view is far from the Copernican revolution that is needed in political imagination.

They justify their state-centric approach by way of contrast. Sixties movements, and the “new social movement” offspring like environmentalism, neighborhood revitalization, worker health and safety efforts and other forms of citizen action, “seek to influence state outcomes throughout outside pressure.”

In doing so, however, “they leave intact the basic institutions of state governance.” In contrast, their EDD approach aims at impacting the culture and decision making processes within the state itself.

13 Boyte, “Populism Versus the Left,” democracy #2 (1981).


These experiments are less radical than most varieties of activist self-help in that their central activity is not “fighting the power.” But they are more radical in that they have larger reform scopes, are authorized by state or corporate bodies to make substantial decisions, and, most crucially, try to change the central procedures of power rather than merely attempting occasionally to shift the vector of its exercise…These experiments re-constitute decision processes within the state and firm.

I agree that strategies for system change are an urgent need in our age of global corporations and financial markets; transcontinental communications systems; and, increasingly illicit international cartels trafficking in human misery, bringing in its wake vast dangers.

14

The problem is that their conception of civic agency is not sufficient to generate system change on anything remotely like the scale needed. To imagine citizens as deliberators of public affairs – even if such deliberative mechanisms as those they describe could somehow be vastly and rapidly multiplied in number – is to freeze citizens in the role of consumers of politics and democracy itself, not its creators.

Indeed, they define citizens precisely in these terms: “By implication, these transformations attempt to institutionalize the on-going participation of ordinary citizens,” they write, “most often in their role as consumers of public goods , in direct determination of what those goods are and how they should be best provided.” (italics added, p. 31)

Given the dramatic challenges that we face – collectively, as a species, and specifically, as those deeply committed to a more humane and democratic society – we need far more than growing numbers of deliberative consumers in politics. We need the explosion in civic power and talent that can only come from re-conceiving citizens as co-creators of our common world. We need a politics built on such a

14

As if the dramatic threats to the commons were not enough, the new report from the Central Intelligence Agency,

Global Trends 2015 that was released at year’s end, 2000, shows a world spiraling out of control. “International affairs are increasingly determined by large and powerful organizations rather then governments,” it reads, including alliances between international crime groups, their money coming from “narcotics trafficking; aliens smuggling; trafficking in women and children; smuggling toxic materials, hazardous wastes, illicit arms, military technologies, and other contraband; financial fraud; and racketeering.” Such cartels will hold potential to “corrupt leaders of unstable, economically fragile or failing states, insinuate themselves into troubled banks and businesses, and cooperate with insurgent political movements to control substantial geographic areas.”

The report sites many threats – biological and chemical weapons, the spread of nuclear weapons, growing population and, most dramatically in Africa, AIDS, famine, sectarian warfare, three billion people expected to live in areas of short water supply. In the face of these dangers, it concludes, “governments will have less and less control over flows of information, technology, diseases, migrants, arms, and financial transactions whether licit or illicit.” Quoted from Global Trends 2015 , a paper approved for publication by the National Foreign Intelligence

Board under the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence, in author’s possession.


conception, which envisions institutions and environments of all sorts as works in progress, and appropriate settings in which to practice citizen politics as we constantly create and re-create them – higher education and K-12 schools; human services; communications and entertainment systems; businesses, as well as government. And we need a rich civic learning that accumulates knowledge about how the democratic power now “locked up” in such institutions can be unleashed.

Politics, Jazz, and System Change

In vernacular terms, “politics” has much richer meanings than simply state-centered action. Thus, terms like “office politics”; “church politics”; “politics of the shop floor”; “school politics” all make common sense. Moreover, while politics in this sense often have overtones of “competition for scarce resources,” as the dictionary defines politics, this zero-sum competition is not politics’ constituting feature. Everyday politics also suggests a more productive process through which people make decisions, think strategically about questions of power, interests, and purpose in order to take action to shape their environments.

Politics (whether in government or the workplace or the neighborhood) is certainly often like football, with winners and losers. But it can also be like jazz, in the sense that Wynton Marsalis articulated in the Ken Burns PBS series: “In American life you have all of these different agendas. You have conflict. And we’re attempting to achieve harmony through conflict. It’s like an argument you have with the intent to work something out, not with the intent to have an argument.” I believe that precisely such a productive, everyday sense of politics prompted Marsalis to liken jazz to democracy. In the final show, he argued, “You have to have a question of the integrity, the intent, the will to play together. That’s what jazz music is. You have self, individual expression, and then you have to negotiate that expression in the context of that group. It’s exactly like democracy.” 15

15 As he elaborated in the first Burns show, “The real power of jazz...is that a group of people can come together and improvise art...negotiate their agendas with each other. Bach improvised, but he wasn't going to look at the second viola. Whereas in jazz I could go to Milwaukee and there would be three musicians in the bar at 2:30 in the morning...and you never know what they're going to do. The four of us are going to have a conversation in the language of music.”


The cultivation and practice of productive, everyday politics intimates, at least, far wider transformations in the institutional fabric of the world than a state-centered understanding would allow.

Change through politics understood in these terms comes not mainly through legal action (in Estlund’s account, a singularly important engine of change) nor from pressure from the outside, nor from the highly complex design apparatuses described by Fung and Wright, nor from the Manichean division of the world into the forces of good versus the forces of evil which continues to structure contemporary citizen mobilization approaches like the door to door canvass, direct mail, and many other strands of protest or advocacy.

16 While all these play various roles in democratic change, the essential ingredient is citizen politics of public work.

The map people use to understand politics matters a great deal in this regard. People can reshape their environments if and when they re-imagine themselves as first class citizens and develop the political skills for effective action. Where does this notion come from? How might it be developed?

Citizen Politics, Past and Future

Citizenship and politics understood as public work largely disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s as

American identities became redefined as “consumers,” not “producers.” Today, most civic activism has a far different character, asking for things, taking the stance of aggrieved outsiders. Meanwhile conventional accounts of citizenship, like George Bush’s compassionate conservatism, obliterate questions of power and politics altogether.

17 Yet it has been the premise of our work at the Center for

Democracy and Citizenship that a new information economy, with its changing power dynamics, holds potential for reviving a citizen politics of public work, a sense that public things, including government, are our common creation.

Theorizing citizenship as the activity of co-creating the commonwealth and understanding citizen politics as public work have been central to the practical action research partnerships of the Center for

Democracy and Citizenship over the last twelve years. Here, I will describe our work especially through

16 A critique of the narrow, zero-sum understanding of power, as well as truncated public leadership development, involved in mobilization technologies is developed in “The Civic Renewal Movement” lecture, see footnote 5.

17 See for instance Gordon Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution and Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: A

Cultural History of Democracy , and Harry Boyte and Nan Kari, Building America .


discussion of lessons and experiences from Public Achievement. Elsewhere, we discuss in more detail what citizen politics looks like when translated into partnership work with higher education, with families, with new immigrants and geographic communities, and other groups.

18

A core premise of our explorations is the need to think in sustained conceptual and practical terms about the public dimensions and meanings of work.

Public Achievement, like other aspects of our work, has roots in the freedom movement of the

1960s, especially in the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) of SCLC in which I worked as a young man, as well as a reading of American political history which stressed the distinctive, populist, and workcentered democratic traditions, different than the conventional left-right spectrum. CEP sponsored what were called citizenship schools -- informal training and discussion groups organized in clubs, beauty parlors, church basements and other settings. In these, I often saw profound changes in outlook and identity among kids younger than myself, as they came to think of themselves as “first class citizens.”

The citizenship schools taught a philosophy of nonviolence and skills of citizen action. They were also infused with a deep, albeit critical, belief in the resources of American democracy, what Frederick

Harris has called the combination of “ruly and unruly” civic commitments that have historically characterized the African American freedom tradition. “We are redeemers, not revolutionaries,” said

Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, an African American minister schooled in this tradition. “We love

America. We love democracy. We are just critical lovers.” 19

Our work in Public Achievement also draws on historical accounts of democratic movements in

American history. In particular, we used the concepts of free spaces and populism. From our treatment of

18 On higher education, see Boyte and Hollander, The Wingspread Declaration: Renewing the Civic Mission of the

American Research University ( www.compact.org

); Boyte and Kari, “Renewing the Democratic Spirit,” in

Ehrlich, Ed. Higher Education and Civic Responsibility (Oryx, 2000); and the University of Minnesota Civic

Engagement Task Force web site, www.umn.edu/civic . We have worked with a variety of partnerships including

Community Education, Neighborhood House and Hmong and Latonio immigrant groups, the College of St.

Catherine’s; Augustana nursing home, public health units, and broad initiatives such as Bill Doherty’s Families and

Democracy projects, which seek to re-conceive the field of family practice in civic, public work terms (see www.familylife1st.org

; we have also interacted closely with people working on parallel tracks, such as the

Kettering Foundation. See David Mathews, Politics for People (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1999).

19 Frederick Harris, “Will the Circle be Unbroken? The Erosion and Transformation of African American Civic

Life,” Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy , 1998, pp. 20 - 26.


free spaces, we draw the importance of places which young people "own," where they can have wide latitude for experimentation, dialogue, creation, and self-definition.

20 From populism, we begin with the proposition that settings of widely differing ideological and political orientation can be the seedbed for democratic creativity. Thus we work with settings and institutions of many kinds – inner city public schools and left wing faculty groups, evangelical churches, Catholic schools, Junior ROTC.

21

Public Achievement began with three lessons I had drawn from community organizing: the heart of citizen action is civic learning and leadership development; when people help create something, it is

“theirs” with a depth and level of seriousness that does otherwise not exist; and although conflict and struggle are an essential and potentially healthy part of politics, most issues are far more complex than

“good” and “evil” language allows, and young people need to learn how to deal productively with those they disagree with and even dislike. To actualize these themes, we re-imagined politics itself with citizens at the center. This meant that we started in 1990 with a series of discussion groups among teenagers.

Although conventional wisdom in the US held that youth were apathetic and unconcerned, we soon discovered that young people -- every group talked with – had deep concerns and problems they worried about. These ranged from violence, teen pregnancy, school relationships, and racial prejudice to the environment. Many expressed anger at school policies they felt were unfair, or at teaching approaches that failed to recognize their interests and intelligence. What youth in all the groups said, and continue to say virtually unanimously, is that adults rarely ask the opinions of young people on such issues -- and almost no one imagines that young people can actually “take political action” to change the conditions and address the problems they worry about.

20 Sara Evans and Harry Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in American History (Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1992).

21 A small but growing number of political and cultural historians – beginning, in a sense with Larry Goodwyn’s path-breaking treatment of populism ( The Populist Moment , Oxford, 1978) – have made the point that American political culture, since Warner Sombert, has been wrongly understood as deficient for its lack of mainstream socialist politics. The real question of interest is not what was missing, but what was there instead – vibrant populist, radical and democratic currents. “Radicalism never completely repudiated the old republican axiom that active government was corrupt government…and as a result could not easily accept the role that socialism demanded of the state,” as Bruce Laurie put it. “One reason why…socialism was comparatively weak is that radicalism was so persistent.” Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Noonday Press, 1989), p.

12. See also Erik Foner’s essay on this topic, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History

Workshop, 17 (Spring, 1984), pp. 57-80; and Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the


The early experiences made visible the civic energy and talent that could be tapped by such a political reframing. One group of seventh grade girls, led by a girl who had previously been seen as having acute emotional disturbances and learning disabilities, developed a project which significantly changed the culture and behavior patterns of the school around sexual harassment issues. In the course of the year's organizing, she personally underwent a striking change in her own behavior and motivation, becoming poised, confident, and academically successful. A group of third and fourth graders organized their parents, churches and neighborhoods in a large peace march against neighborhood violence.

Teams of fifth and sixth graders worked for several years to build a neighborhood playground. They overcame opposition from residents, gained support from city officials and local businesses, raised over

$60,000, and completed the park (Public Achievement Works park, or PAWS ) in the fall of 1998.

Civic agency: Rebuilding the commons

Public Achievement (along with other partnerships of the Center, like the Jane Addams School for Democracy, and the work of colleagues in institutional culture change at the College of St. Catherine -

- see Creating the Commonwealth , Kettering, 1999) has proven a fertile ground for theorizing civic agency. Recent studies (e.g. the NAEP Report on the 1998 Civic Education Assessment; the Mellman

Group poll of college students in November, 1999), according to conventional wisdom, have demonstrated civic apathy among younger Americans. Yet on the basis of our experiences such findings seem functions of the weak conceptions of civic agency that structure the questions. A stronger view of civic agency -- such as that which implicitly structured the citizenship schools of the freedom movement -

- helps illumine the civic interests and energies of a generation that, far from apathetic, is deeply worried about the public problems of our time, and eager to have their energies enlisted in addressing them.

The parallels with the southern freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s have become clear in our work. The background of SCLC’s Citizenship Education Program was the civic ferment that followed

Brown V. Board of Education. It was evident, almost from the immediate aftermath of the decision, that the instrumentalities of government (neither courts nor formal politics) could even begin to desegregate the south, with the vast cultural and social transformations that would entail. Only a broad movement in

American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). I also developed this argument in CommonWealth ,


which ordinary citizens re-imagined themselves as co-creators of a new society could accomplish such a social reconstruction. To effect such a reconstruction necessitated redefinition of the very meaning of citizenship and democracy. This was M. L. King’s vivid sense in his description of the movement (in

Letter from a Birmingham Jail ) as “bringing the entire nation back to the great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the founding fathers.” It was also the structuring theme of the citizenship schools sponsored by CEP. “What is a citizen?” CEP leaders like Dorothy Cotton would ask those assembled in church basements, beauty parlors and elsewhere. Discussions would inevitably produce a sense of first class citizenship, ongoing responsibility for community life and the larger nation.

It turns out that young people today are powerfully engaged by a similar conception of civic agency as “co-creation.” Though conventional wisdom holds that there is no issue like segregation, I would argue that the technological transformations and associated social changes we are undergoing create an analogous period of upheaval. People feel, at least intuitively, that large threats loom over us: destruction of local communities and public life, depersonalization and the substitution of marketplace values for every other values, growing inequalities and, more subtly, the invisibility of large segments of the population. This sense is accompanied by feelings of powerlessness (what made Gore’s evocation of threatening “powerful forces” have traction in the election).

Young people, like adults but with less fatalism, are concerned about the basic direction of the society and afraid that things are spiraling out of control. In Public Achievement, young people often choose to work on environment-shaping projects -- commonwealth projects -- that convey the idea of citizen as co-creator and that revitalize a sense of common things and places, whether through building a park, changing a school regulation, or seeking to lessen school or neighborhood violence.

Building on such experiences, Public Achievement’s core theme is that young people are not simply citizens in preparation. They are citizens today. The culture of Public Achievement -- wedding an everyday politics of environment-shaping work and the relational qualities of good organizing and politics -- turns out to be a medium for the reconceptualization of politics generally. When Angela

Mathews, a young leader in Public Achievement/Northern Ireland, asked a mix of more than 100 PA and we have acted on it, with considerable success, in our citizen politics partnerships.


members whether they like politics, the majority (with no prompting or preparation) raised their hands.

“It’s because we are doing politics,” Angela observed. “It s not simply something politicians do.”

Learning Citizen Politics as a Craft-like Process

We know, from diverse forms of assessment, evaluation, and theory building, that Public

Achievement “works” in the sense of having often profound impact on children and young people involved, evident in such outcomes as self-confidence, ability to discuss and understand civic themes and use civic language, public skills such as public speaking, and the actual products that young people create, many of them with a commonwealth quality. Moreover, young people are able to describe how they translate civic skills and outlook from Public Achievement to other areas of their lives. Public

Achievement also impacts coaches and often teachers and school cultures as well. The Kauffman

Foundation evaluation found that coaches report much higher assessment of young people's public capacities and potential than before their experiences. In schools, 53% of teachers report significant changes in their own behavior as a result of Public Achievement, reflected in as higher expectations for kids; talking more about public affairs; offering more experiential and service opportunities. In the most successful Public Achievement sites, the broader school cultures have changed, as well, with teachers and staff thinking of themselves more as “co-creators” of the school culture, and schools coming to reclaim a role as civic centers for surrounding communities.

An especially significant feature of the citizen politics that characterizes Public Achievement, as well as other expressions of public work, is that it is best understood as a “craft,” not a conventional

“program.” It breaks open the preset, proscribed, and regulated environments in which young people live most of the time, and gives considerable space for invention and improvisation. Citizen politics as public work is like jazz, not Muzak. A craft approach stresses practice wisdom, and training and preparation based on apprenticeship, experiential learning, and decentralizied learning.

Most approaches in education resemble what has been called the bureaucratic administration of work. Analysts such as Arthur Stinchcombe have detailed the differences between craft and bureaucratic approaches based on a comparison between mass production industries and craft industries in ways that have relevance to civic education.


In bureaucratic approaches, both product and process of work are highly controlled and preplanned. Such approaches involve detailed, pre-set outcomes and the removal of decision making about key elements of the work process from the work crew itself. Procedures, tasks, distribution of work, scheduling and arrangement of work activities, and the criteria used to evaluate particular operations all are determined by people outside the work crew. Decisions are made by experts using criteria derived from academic theory, as opposed to practice wisdom.

In contrast, craft approaches found in construction (or sports or music or arts or entertainment), decentralize decision making about product and process. In construction, for instance, craftsmen carry the burden of much decision making, and hiring, firing, and specification of tasks are resolved at the level of subcontractor. There are high standards for work that are based in significant measure on empirical lore, or practice wisdom, taught through an apprenticeship system which socializes new workers. Stinchcombe argues against the classic theory that bureaucratization is inevitable. Building on such work, Walter

Powell has proposed that features of the global economy -- including the need for local knowledge and products based on local or particular identities, reciprocal norms that last over time, and learning cultures that are rich and multidimensional -- are generating new network forms of organization and administration. These are different than hierarchical firms or market transactions:. With network forms of organization, new forms of craft work have also begun to reappear. 22

It is useful to apply these distinctions to civic education, and they also have analogies in education generally. Thus, reformers such as Theodore Sizer have observed the correspondence of conventional education to factories. This is because of the resemblance of education to bureaucratic administration. Reformers like Sizer, Deborah Meier, and Howard Fuller argue for what can be called craft approaches to education. Their reforms couple calls for thinking of teaching in craft terms with

22 Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Bureaucratic and Craft Administration of Production: A Comparative Study, in

Administrative Science Quarterly . Walter Powell, Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: network forms of Organization,

Research in Organizational Behavior , Vo. 12 (1990), pp. 295-334.


measures such as decentralization of authority for educational decisions, smaller schools, and relational, co-creative, and contextual approaches to education that connect schools to parents and communities. 23

Features of Civic Learning

In a public work approach, and that of the most successful citizen organizing generally, the focus in learning the skills and outlook of creating the commonwealth is best seen as a democratic craft.

24 It has these elements, among others:



Civic learning and education through public work decentralizes much decision making to the team level, while it also passes on knowledge in apprenticeship-type patterns. Although some measure of pre-training in approaches to group work are helpful, mainly public work is learned through doing. Ideally, coaches also have guidance from "master coaches," who have coached before.



The civic learning associated with public work stresses a process of reflection, evaluation, and development of intellectual skills and public talents, in ways that are not possible with program approaches or learning too tightly tied to preset curriculum. it creates multiple spaces for young people to take public leadership on public and community issues of concern to them. In Public Achievement there are opportunities for young people to play diverse roles, and to develop different talents from public speaking to writing letters, team work, strategic research, and holding each other accountable. Public Achievement is attentive to arts of politics such as cultural context, preparing youth teams to understand the politics, power relations, culture of their setting, and developing relationships.



Civic learning associated with public work is also craft-like in its stress on the expression of distinctive and particular public “signatures” or identities, not uniform outcomes. The work itself emphasizes team action of originality, creativity, and distinctiveness (and creates

23 Sizer, Horace’ s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School , Houghton Mifflin, 1984; Deborah

Meier, The Power of Their Ideas (Boston: Beacon, 1995)

24 For instance, in my observations of community organizing and citizen action, by far the deepest, most multidimensional l public action and public leadership development have these characteristics of “craft,” and indeed creates far richer craft cultures than we have yet been able to achieve in Public Achievement. This is what makes networks like the Industrial Areas Foundation so distinctive, and so successful.


multiple public stages where such work is on display, and in which young people interact with others). Public work as embodied in Public Achievement also has come to reflect different cultures of different schools and communities; indeed, in the strongest of cases it has become a vehicle for the deepening and development of local public identities and cultures.

A Culture of Public Work

We have come to understand that citizen politics of public work is a powerful "language world," with meanings that expand considerably beyond team projects. Public Achievement began with a strong focus on the importance of political concepts (e.g. politics, citizenship, power, self-interest, public space, democracy) for the creation of meaning and the development of civic identity and leadership. This emphasis drew both from the power of the freedom movement, with its central themes of citizenship and democracy, and from observation of the most successful training in networks like IAF, which have a

"conceptual" approach rather than a predominant focus on techniques and skills. Over time, we learned that the use of concepts not only helps young people (and others) to name the world around them in civic and public ways. Such concepts also provide powerful tools for a deepened and more integrated sense of self and life direction, in a world of radical fragmentation and conflicted messages.

Concepts provide rich materials for teams and coaches and others to make meaning from their practical activity doing public work and citizen politics. There is an inherent excitement in discussing and thinking with ideas like power or public (indeed, a number of youth groups have made up Public

Achievement games, using the language). The use of terms like “citizen” gives a dignity and station to young people, in a world which sharply delimits their talents and capacities. People clearly like the largeness of the task of “building democracy.” And we have seen, again and again, that a “citizen politics” in which young people can learn the skills of shaping their world has wide appeal. One eighth grade member of a rural team in Maryville, Missouri, identifying themselves as “Nic and the Messengers” on the Public Achievement list serve, described “politics of the modern citizen” this way:

Our group finally got around to discuss something that we thought might be interesting: We think that politics is mainly the public getting things accomplished. Politics has its very own kind of power. It is networking with the public to expand your knowledge. You contact with many different people to get where you want to get. Since in PA everyone is a citizen, [but] we all


aren't the sons and daughters of high political officials, PA is the politics of the modern citizen.

We like to think achieving something as a modern citizen is a movement... PA probably isn't the kind of politics the BIG DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS would use but I think it could be.

There are challenges to sustaining and deepening a culture of public work and citizen politics.

Concepts such as the citizen as co-creator, or power as relational and interactive, or public life as an arena of difference and practical work with others on significant tasks are powerful tools for civic education and citizenship. But they also go against the normal structures and practices of a highly commercialized and bureaucratized society. Few spaces or experiences exist which prepare people to think broadly about the

"why" of their efforts. Schools are usually dramatic examples.

Yet there are also signs of broader receptivity among the citizenry for this sort of citizen politics.

The fourth World Values Survey conducted by Ronald Ingelhart and Virginia Hodgkinson last August and September found growing distrust for established institutions, from Congress to the presidency to the media to the church. But it also found growing resistance to arbitrary authority; heightened concern for environmental protection; and growing tolerance for differences among groups, such as sexual orientation. Moreover, while there was widespread dislike for much of formal electoral politics, the survey found people “more interested in politics that involves personal participation.”

In 1999, the Minnesota Board on Aging found similar themes in a set of eight focus groups in

Minnesota, comparing views of baby boomers and older adults on questions of civic engagement. These were supplemented by a written survey filled out by 572 adults who stopped at the booth of the

Minnesota Office of Citizenship and Volunteer Services at the State Fair. Currently, most discussions of civic engagement leave out “citizen group action around issues and activities of common interest.” 25 This is what the Center for Democracy and Citizenship conceptualizes as “public work.” The Board of Aging used a frame drawing on an AmeriCorps curriculum, By the People , of the Center for Democracy and

Citizenship for the Corporation for National Service. Public work is defined as

The visible effort (paid or unpaid) of ordinary citizens who cooperatively produce and sustain things of lasting importance in our community, nation, or world. It solves common problems and creates common things. It is the action of producing and taking responsibility for the common world in which we live.

25 S.P. Osborne, “Conceptualizing Voluntary Activity,” Voluntary Organizations and Innovation in Public

Services (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 5-19.


Citizen politics as public work is different from volunteering, protest, or voting. It offers opportunities to work on major issues affecting communities and to draw explicit connections between their tasks and larger questions. It pays attention to what people are good at, what their interests are, how they can help the fabric of their communities. It teaches the skills and values that allow a mix of people to work on public projects. Many identify this civic learning dimension as a strong interest.

Focus group participants agreed that there is a role for public agencies in addressing community issues -- to provide reliable structures, necessary information, funding, and general direction. They also surfaced a strong interest in more citizen involvement in public work, voicing the view that “citizens are often not involved sufficiently in decision making processes.” These views were overwhelmingly voiced by survey respondents, 97.9% of whom answered “yes” that “citizens should be more involved in addressing the critical problems facing our communities, state, and the nation.” Participants also identified barriers to more citizen involvement such as lack of time; lack of “invitation to participate”; lack of structures to facilitate participation. Moreover, many expressed the beliefs that governmentsponsored programs often undermine self-reliance and increase dependency; and that current professional and political leaders and systems are condescending and diminishing about citizen intelligence and capacity. As the study concluded, “Participants think that public and private agencies do not recognize the strengths, talents, diversity of ideas, self-interests, and willingness of citizens to be involved with community problem solving.” 26 These views show the problem with the dominant map.

Citizen Politics in a Global Context

For all its apparent improbability I believe may be at the threshold of a new, broad "democracy movement." This time has parallels, perhaps, with the South in 1958, when there were widespread stirrings of new civic energy but little overall "movement consciousness." Indeed, citizen politics is emerging across the world in response to problems that governments have been unable to solve. As

David Bornstein observed in The New York Times in 1999, citizen movements and initiatives have been

26 Dean Mohs, “Celebrating and Encouraging Community Involvement of Older Minnesotans: A Snapshot of

Current Minnesota Baby Boomers and Older Adults,” Plan B Paper, Humphrey Institute, 2000. For another survey with some similar evidence, see Ready, Willing, and Able: Citizens Working for Change , a new study by the Pew

Partnership for Civic Change, April, 2001.


growing at remarkable rates, with large impacts – the defeat of apartheid, the fall of communism, the overthrow of right wing dictators in Chile and the Phillipines, the establishment of an international criminal court, the raising of village income, educational and health levels for millions of peasants by groups like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. Moreover, such efforts show signs of a cumulative process of social learning. William Drayton, president of Ashoka, an organization which seeks to catalyze citizen effort, argues that a movement culture is emerging: “A critical mass of institutions, people, and ideas [which]feed on one another and strengthen one another.” 27

These citizen initiatives and movements confound any simply description of citizen action as

“voluntary.” They often mix nonprofits, informal networks, and businesses with government. They involve a variety of paid forms of work, and suggest civic dimensions to whole occupations. Yet at the same time a “critical mass” may be appearing, theory of large scale networks and collaborations for civic action – how to create systems that are supportive, or at least not destructive – of citizen politics is at a early stage of development, in our world of immensely complex systems.

28

What we can say is that building blocks for a new politics have begun to appear in multiple locations. And we need a new map. Citizens need to put ourselves, our talents, energy, aspirations, and agency itself back at the center of politics. Further, we need a politics that asks new questions. If the issue is “who gets what, when, and how?,” the creation of the commons fades from view. There are better questions. What kind of democratic way of life do we want? Who are the achitects of our common fate?

What do we need to build together? These lead to different answers, not simply focused on what we get.

And they help us to understand that we can be co-creators of a democratic way of life. i Thanks to Sheilah Mann, Ed Fogelman, Mary Dietz, Lary May, Tom Ehrlich, Scott Peters, John Saltmarsh, Lew

Friedland, Dennis Donovan, Ellen Sushak, Jim Lewis, Elizabeth Hollander, and Peter Levine, as well as the students, faculty, and community participants in the lecture on April 11 in Madison for helpful comments. Special

27 David Bornstein, “A Force Now in the World, Citizens Flex Social Muscle,” New York Times , July 10, 1999. See also footnote 9 above. This public space movement is very international in flavor and scope.

28 See however, Sirianni and Friedland, Civic Innovation in America ; Paul C. Light, Sustaining Innovation (San

Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1998), for some broad lessons. One key area for theoretical as well as practical work, I’m convinced, is on the reworking of professions and fields as “public crafts.” See for instance Boyte, “The Public

Sides of Work: Building Mediating Institutions for the Information Age,” A Pegs Journal: The Good Society 9, #3

(2000), pp. 26-30, and “Professions as Public Crafts,” at www.publicwork.org

.


thanks to Nan Kari for sustained and extensive feedback on the piece as a whole. I am solely responsible for the argument here presented.


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