The Backyard Revolution

...Near hysterical reaction to the Moral Majority, despair in the face of popular votes slashing funds available to state and local governments, and righteous indignation at the success of New Right politics combine to suggest that the people are the problem and the isolation of their leaders is in fact a badge of honor...

...Boyte correctly responds: "Where do ordinary people, steeped in life by experience of humiliation and self-doubt, gain the courage, the self-confidence, the mutual trust, above all the hope, to take action on their own behalf...

...In the seventies, Boyte argues, when better known activists revolted against an "excess of democracy" or went to work for public or private agencies, grass roots battles against corporate capitalism continued in neighborhood and citizen action, in community organizations, public interest lobbies, community development corporations and self-help programs, in workplace organizing against brown and black lung disease, racial and sexual discrimination, and union-busting firms and consultants...

...Conservatives destroy neighborhoods to broaden the tax base, liberals to provide more efficient development...

...The specter of a state by state battle over a pro-life amendment to the constitution stands before us, threatening to institutionalize the divisions within the Democratic party and allow an alignment to the right which has not yet taken place...

...A willingness to look and to share, to decide to be with, and not only for, the people, is the indispensable requirement of progressive renewal in the 1980's.newal in the 1980's...

...Mencken...

...While corporations launched a powerful counterattack on liberal assumptions, and intellectuals warned against excessive moralism and activism, thousands of Americans organized against redlining of neighborhoods, utilities rip-offs, environmental destruction, tax abatements for corporations and a thousand other of the day-to-day atrocities which mock the pretensions of democracy...

...For those who will look in the right place, "a good sense of community" can be found...

...Overwhelmed by political reaction, consumer and welfare capitalism and cultural Babbitry in the 1920's, intellectuals, and reformers blamed their power-lessness on the people, the "boobs" and "yokels" of H.L...

...That the people might have their own concerns and agendas and that successful politics must ultimately serve their priorities occurs to today's liberals no more easily than it did to Mencken or Hofstadter...

...He sees among organizers a growing sophistication and a new ability to be self-critical...

...it can even be shared...

...Low voter turnouts and some liberal successes indicate that not all are fooled, but at the very least it should be clear that cultural issues cannot be ignored or belittled...

...It could do so because the combination of economic expansion, the Cold War and the growth of public bureaucracies institutionalized the "do-gooder" values of middle class reform: power in the hands of the right people would do more for social justice and civil equality than the people could possibly do for themselves: Even those who recognize the continuing presence of what Boyte calls "the citizen advocacy tradition" have lacked a theory to justify it and a program to mold it into a national political force...

...Nader-style public interest research and lobbying provides another expression of citizenship, attracting professionals and college students...

...The New Right has affirmed their cultural conservatism and, in the absence of alternatives, has persuaded them to try the nostrums of supply side economics...

...Most notable are neighborhood, "turf" organizations of the Saul Alinsky tradition, modified by experience, in dozens of communities around the country...

...Who will play the role of villain in the 80's: right-to-lifers, ardent evangelicals, ordinary people, dumb enough to deny that democracy really requires abortion clinics, and easy bail for violent offenders, or uneducated enough to refuse the choices of high property taxes or low public services, urban decay or gentrification...

...The Democratic party provided welfare state compensations and modest regulation of the economy, but in the process ignored and eroded local government and surrendered any aspiration to economic democracy...

...One reason is that such insurgency has always been grounded in what intellectuals perceive as "cultural backwaters": families, churches, ethnic groups, local voluntary associations...

...Predictably, American liberals are in danger of adopting a similar reinterpreta-tion of American popular democracy in light of the recent overthrow of liberal policies and politicians...

...David J. O'Brien Eisenhower era, liberals discovered that American popular culture had always been anti-intellectual, bigoted, and irrational...

...In the 1950's, stung by McCarthyism and the middle browxonformity of the THE BACKYARD REVOLUTION: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW CITIZEN MOVEMENT Harry C. Boyte Temple University Press, $14.95, 271 pp...

...In the twenties the enemies of liberals were Roman Catholics and Methodists, the former the ignorant bourgeois bigots of Studs Loni-gan, more pitied than hated, the latter the prohibition and anti-evolution zealots whose political success, marked the failure of democracy...

...American traditions show a strong bias in favor of equalitarian democracy," Hofstadter wrote, "but it has been a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity...

...He notes the role played by Catholic churches in community organization around the country...

...The voters, and the people who do not vote, appear as inert, manipulated by the New Right...

...Long marked by internecine conflict and turf wars, community organization networks are increasingly willing to consider cooperation and joint action, recognizing that they must build a national movement if they are to reach the structures of corporate power and cultural domination which prevent real democratization in local communities...

...At the same time they ignore the demand for economic democracy, for some process of corporate accountability to local communities and the public good...

...In the fifties, it was the new suburbanites, selfish, other-directed, affluent, content with the mindless drift of Eisenhower politics and the amiable sweetness of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians...

...New "majoritarian strategies" have developed in mass-based multi-issue coalitions to confront utilities, government buraeaucracies and the local branches of multi-national corporations...

...Recognizing the limitations of citizen action to date, he nevertheless finds in the grass roots a vitality of democratic expression which promises well for the future...

...The best of our contemporary social commentators understand that our nation requires a rebirth of social consciousness...

...It is neither treason nor neo-conservatism to suggest that the progressives badly need to rethink some of their basic assumptions and reexamine some of their policy options...

...The New Right would use the people's fears to justify inequality and legitimate the status quo, liberals use their needs to justify their version of progress and legitimate their claims to "reason" and "common sense...

...To pose such a question is to challenge the fundamentals of political orthodoxy...

...Led by Richard Hofstadter, tired progressives saw the mainstream American tradition as "intensely nationalistic, for the most part isolationist...

...Political commentators have noted for a decade the economic progressivism and cultural conservatism of minorities, workers, lower middle-class ethnics...

...In fact, social reform through government action and popular democracy aimed at "citizen power over both public and economic activity" have always been uneasy bedfellows, from the days when intelligent realists persuaded the Populists to fuse with Bryan's Democratic party through Franklin Roosevelt's uneasy marriage of legal and economic experts with urban political machines to John Kennedy's charismatic alliance of urban ethnic and Harvard intellectuals...

...business erodes families by imposing poverty and joblessness, liberals by institutionalizing dependency...

...Harry Boyte provides considerable evidence that around the country many people are giving life to what John Kenneth Galbraith told last year's graduating class at Berkeley was America's greatest need: "a strong revival of what anciently has been called the social ethic, what more simply is a good sense of community...

...Former Senator George McGovern, for example, bewails the indefensible tactics of the New Right and speaks of "a dangerous trend that has been gathering force in recent years . . . the substitution of unthinking emotionalism and cleverly marketed extremism for reason and common sense in public affairs...

...Harry Boyte thinks the answer is to be found in citizen action aimed at decentralization and economic democracy...

...New organization drives among public employees, service workers and minorities have expanded the membership of some dynamic unions, while grass roots insurgency among miners, textile workers, women in offices and factories, and workers in communities faced with, runaway shops all manifest the continuing awareness of ordinary citizens that America's political economy does not work in their behalf...

...He reminds those fearful of the "moral majority" that the nation's largest conservative denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, as recently as 1978, adopted a very progressive stand on matters of domestic and foreign policy...

...Liberals like McGovern, nevertheless, continue to regard opposition to the ERA, and abortion, and support for traditional and family values as reactionary and emotional...

...Harry Boyte is an optimist...

...fiercely individualistic and capitalistic...

...In seeking to do things for the people, liberals have all too often threatened the very foundations of popular democracy...

...Writing off popular concern about abortion and family life, McGovern admits no failure in dealing with the economy, the arms race or the environment, the "common sense" issues...

...Fortunately, the question has always been asked, in the action of protest if not in the theory of social science bureaucracies...

...If they have grown suspicious of traditional liberal public policies and downright hostile to governmental bureaucracies, it is possible that they have good reason...

...Harry Boyte reminds us in his passionately optimistic account of citizen activism that progressive politics require voter support...

...While some scholars may find Boyte's analysis naive, there is in fact a large new literature of labor, urban and political history which confirms his argument that democratic empowerment must be grounded in local experience...