The Growth of Citizen Politics

...Who should I say is calling...

...But they are not 516 • DISSENT Citizen Politics necessarily the best way to develop a citizenled politics...

...We want to know why you're in the U.S...

...The "Moral Majority" battled "Peace and Justice...

...Politics is seen as an arena of cynical electoral and interest-group competition—a means to narrow objectives...

...Local communities across the South where African Americans discussed issues of the day revived a conception of politics as an interac tion among equals...

...Citizens would become "co-creators of history," in the phrasing of Gerald Taylor, a remarkable organizer for the BUILD group during the period it created its Baltimore Commonwealth program to revive the public schools...

...Rather than dry "civics courses," exhortations to vote, or protest politics, we need to show how public engagement can be a satisfying theater of action and development...

...And where is it practiced...

...Such learning must begin with people's everyday concerns and teach the craft of cooperative public problem solving...

...On campuses it was one thing to condemn the war...

...Those who consider themselves "politically correct" (sometimes simply "PC") seem little interested in reaching the unconverted...

...Yet, while critics of various persuasions call for a revitalized citizenship, few people are listening...

...and it is too one-dimensional for a world full of complexity and ambiguity...

...It changed the political balance in San Antonio, electing a Mexican and black majority to a city council that had earlier had no minority representatives, propelling Henry Cisneros to the mayor's position...

...Each issue became a theater for the righteousness of one's own side and the depravity of the other...

...Citizenship Schools connected voting to a dynamic conception of public action...

...But while effective in specific efforts, issue organizing cannot generate an overarching engaging view of public life...

...The mistake of the first forty years of Alinsky organizations was the absence of political education," he argues...

...We're here to get to know you...

...The result is a politics that leaves scant room for engagement with other traditions...

...The IAF addressed this need through a broad concept of public life...

...But an inflamed moral language cannot engage a citizenry with vast differences in moral traditions...

...Such community action had roots in African-American tradition...

...The past decade dramatized questions of popular participation in politics on a global stage—but with some irony...

...When leaders of Baltimore BUILD, the nation's largest mainly black local organization, first met with Senator Paul Sarbanes, he smiled, took out his notebook and asked, "What can I do for you...

...Moving into power," in Taylor's terms, meant being prepared to "negotiate, compromise, understand that others have power and ways of viewing the world different than your own...

...Being politically correct entails a commitment to being "antiracist," "antisexist," "antihomophobic," as well as support for causes like abortion rights, opposition to American policy in Central America, and affirmative action...

...To draw citizens back onto the public stage, we need civic learning that takes place through voluntary organizations of all sorts as well as through formal education...

...Senate, what are your interests and concerns...

...Large national coalitions have been developed, such as Citizen Action, Clean Water Action, the National Toxics Campaign, ACORN, and National People's Action...

...And it meant a recognition that seemingly vast, impersonal structures like the school system or the local economy are human creations, subject to reconstruction...

...They are those things that a turbulent political process identifies, provisionally, as objects for broad community collaboration...

...In the Citizenship Schools of SCLC, local leaders learned how to teach blacks to read and write in order to pass the arduous literacy tests that authorities used to disenfranchise poorer citizens...

...Its themes have taken root in citizen groups today...

...But to participate—to develop a sense that you are creating history—one must move into power...

...Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "children of light versus children of darkness" electri fied a national audience when the struggle was in behalf of the dignity of blacks...

...This construction of the public terrain led IAF organizations to a number of other insights...

...IAF practice redefined "commonwealth" by changing the static idea of the common good into a much more dynamic notion...

...Most strategies for citizenship education make for a moralized politics, pressing citizens to "put aside" their self-interest in behalf of some hypothetical common good...

...We were very good at the action, clever and imaginative, but we didn't make a commitment to the growth process of people...

...The movement also drew on the idea of the public acting as direct problem solver, not simply judicious spectator...

...This perspective draws on older populist traditions that had their bases in America's voluntary civic life...

...People have scant experience of a "middle ground," where there is no eternal struggle between saints and sinners, but rather an interplay among interests, values, traditions, and ways of looking at the world...

...By the early 1980s, IAF groups across the country began to take leading roles in policy initiation, especially around key questions of infrastructure...

...Saul Alinsky was the main figure in this transition...

...Understanding public life as a world of diverse interests inoculated them against single-issue or sectarian activists...

...They used as their primers documents like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bible...

...In IAF terms, basic public goods cannot be presumed to exist outside of politics...

...In northern cities like Chicago, the racism of white ethnics was intertwined with class and ethnic conflicts...

...Its conceptualization as a craft—like the craft one cultivates in music—means that people must lessen personal vulnerabilities and concentrate on public skills...

...And it won victories against entrenched business and other interests, redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars toward infrastructural improvements in the barrios...

...Neither anti-abortion leaders nor left-wing grouplets, for instance, were able to gain much of a following...

...You're the mayor...

...Elections, in the view of COPS or United Neighborhood Organizations or East Brooklyn Congregations and similar groups, are important...

...This vision of the dynamism of political life has enriched internal organizational cultures...

...By the end of his career, Alinsky ridiculed any larger discussion of values as ideological distractions...

...It also recalled town meetings and the long history of voluntary activities from barnraisings and quilting bees to 4-H clubs and mutual-aid groups—community-wide mobilization around common problems...

...But there was no way to realize fully the democratic potential of the civil rights movement...

...But it breaks with the classical republican view, which assumes that citizens should forgo personal concerns and wear the mantle of "civic virtue" when entering the public realm...

...In community organizing, public life is first of all a place for difference...

...Churches, for instance, were no longer seen as "a family...

...Just when millions of people look to America as inspiration for democracy, our own politics is a mess...

...Organizing gave such leaders new recognition and skills, attracting moderates and conservatives, as well as liberals, in large numbers...

...Most important, there was the intuition that such a combination of power and responsibility would change citizens' stance from that of supplicants to actors...

...others have different ways of understanding the issue...

...This strategy proves successful in particular fights...

...This leads to a recognition of the moral ambiguity of politics, an awareness that we cannot simply impose our values...

...COPS each year had five or six thousand delegates at its annual convention...

...Fifteen years later, IAF organizers continue to see this structured listening as the singular genius of their work, a contrast to most forms of political communication that rely on one-way efforts to mobilize constituencies...

...Classically, community organizing reacted against any language of civic virtue...

...It is this stance that produces the "Not In My Backyard" syndrome...

...They witness the dangerous rise of a tribalist conservatism that excuses racist, sexist, and homophobic expressions as legitimate reactions to left-wing "excess...

...Issues like busing lacked the clear-cut fervor of a call to dismantle American apartheid...

...Problems facing America today require a level of public judgment and social change that can come only from widespread citizen involvement...

...However, it also cast politics in a protest language of good and evil, which still shapes mainstream politics...

...Public life is now seen as an arena of problem solving by groups with diverse interests, backgrounds, and values...

...FALL • 1990 • 513 Citizen Politics While public is here distinct from private life, the two exist in a dynamic interdependence...

...There may be several hundred large community organizations in the country that work with this view of public life...

...It generates public relationships based on attentiveness to the interests of others...

...More than a dozen training centers teach the principles of issue organizing...

...Such a "way of life," in his view, is "possible only when the members of a community trust and respect one another," in "mutual commitment to a common good...

...Further, citizen politics assumes one can develop various abilities—judgment, the exercise of power, listening...

...This also prompts serious thought about the public dimensions of voluntary organizations...

...While working on local issues, groups like COPS create a public arena, replete with conventions, political actions, and campaigns that bring people together across large differences...

...In the early 1970s, organizing strategy at the grass roots shifted from moral appeals to a more practical focus on "issues" around which constituencies could be mobilized...

...We realized after the first year that issues were the dessert, not the main meal," said Andres Sarabia, first president of Communities Organized For Public Service (COPS), a Mexican-American organization in San Antonio...

...Several thousand block clubs were formed in New York City in the late 1970s, working on projects that ranged from urban gardening to crime control...

...Following an adage of Alinsky, they hold that the organization of only a relatively small percentage of the population is sufficient to win major victories for poorer and minority populations...

...Organizers could mobilize communities to end segregation, but they simply did not know how to move to a second stage, building organizations through which poor blacks could seek power after the demonstrations ended...

...it was another to romanticize the National Liberation Front or to pose as innocent "flower children...

...The first struggle for the black community, coming out of a segregated history, is the fight to be recognized...

...But in the real world where people struggle to pay their bills, this language comes across simply as rhetoric...

...Issue Oriented Work at the Grass Roots Off campuses, however, alternative political language and practices have slowly emerged over the past two decades...

...Declining voter turnout, declining interest in public service careers, little knowledge about how the government operates, the disengagement of the young from politics—all illustrate the erosion of public life...

...action on racial conflict, poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, and environmental degradation—all these seem unlikely to be addressed successfully by experts, professionals, or large-scale corporate or government systems alone...

...Highly polarized positionings continued through the 1970s and 1980s, as both left and right employed an inflamed moral vocabulary...

...Both terms derive their sense from the idea that we are by nature political beings...

...The antiwar movement successfully contrasted America's idealistic rhetoric with the brutality of Vietnam...

...Participatory Politics and Civil Rights The civil rights movement among African Americans resurrected participatory politics after the Second World War...

...Nothing," replied the leaders...

...True, grave injustices remain...

...Support for quality education...

...Further, the focus on a balance between public and personal life gave leaders and organizers a space for their private concerns, unusual in citizen activism...

...But his narrowness brought results: detailed techniques for citizen action have grown up around Alinsky's conception of self-interest, such as phone and door-to-door canvass and direct mail...

...Discussions of the nature of power, leadership, and self-interest were made the core of political education...

...Neorepublicans hope for a level of trust and solidarity that does not and probably cannot exist...

...Interviewing as a Political Skill This focus on human development emerged from individualized, face-to-face meetings that were central to post-Alinsky IAF practice...

...Redefining Commonwealth Finally, the concept of a public realm of FALL • 1990 • 517 Citizen Politics various differences, combined with personal development, leads to a pragmatic understanding of a "commonwealth" that points toward a fresh politics...

...Negative advertising alternates with ideological combat: prolife and prochoice, affirmative action, prayer in the schools, animal rights...

...Recalling civic movements like Lyceum and Chautauqua, this public was far different from the atomized 514 • DISSENT consumers of information summoned by conventional politics and journalism...

...Principles like accountability, respect, and recognition take center stage...

...In contrast, a third stage of organizing can be found in some citizen initiatives of recent years...

...In recent years, however, an alternative understanding—what might be called a citizenbased politics—has emerged out of a number of local initiatives...

...But it gives little attention to how the ideas and arts of citizen politics might be taught to other groups and institutions...

...What their lessons suggest in broad terms is a fundamentally different approach to citizenship education if we are to begin to tap fully the energy, imagination, and skill of ordinary people...

...COPS formed more than an electoral lobbying group or an "issue organization...

...Commonwealth enlarges particular interests in a fashion that Hannah Arendt described as the characteristic feature of public life: "care for the world...

...As twentieth-century society became more managerial and therapeutic in language voluntary groups shifted from problem solving to providing services for clients...

...Not only individuals but groups of citizens can develop the political arts...

...This approach does not usually make the sweeping moral claims of the civil rights or antiwar movements or today's campus political warriors...

...The concept of a human arena for all citizens has developed especially in community organizations associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF...

...In this world, laws are written for the lofty aim of 'the common good' and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed . . . where 'good' is a value dependent on whether we want it," wrote Alinsky in Rules for Radicals...

...But community groups, like everything in human affairs, are marked by their cultures and histories...

...Organizers learned how to interview people regularly within religious or neighborhood groups and the broader community to find out "who people are," what motivated them, what were their concerns...

...But their political experience included almost no wisdom about how ordinary people might be organized for democratic action...

...Interviewing as a political method has proved effective as a way to break down cultural stereotypes...

...One day during Cortez's term as president of COPS, Henry Cisneros, mayor of San Antonio— whom Cortez had known all her life— called her on the telephone line at home she used for COPS business...

...Cisneros replied, "Tell her it's a special friend...

...This understanding reflects several decades of grass-roots action, as organizing strategies moved from a reliance on moral appeal to practices grounded in everyday concerns...

...Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of this kind of organizing...

...At that point, Cortez proudly recounted, the girl recognized his voice and replied, "On this line, you're not a friend...

...IAF reconceptualized politics as animated by concerns forged out of people's personal experiences...

...For effective public action, however, one has to express these personal concerns in ways that differ from private life...

...The idea of "self-interest," Alinsky's starting point for successful organizing, increasingly turned to particular issues around which lowand middle-income citizens could be mobilized: utility rates, taxes, insurance premiums, toxic waste, consumer ripoffs, and the like...

...The first stage of IAF evolution came through a deeper appreciation for the human development that takes place in successful organizing...

...In the beginning, moral dramatization was effective...

...Most important is the concept of a public realm, distinct from but drawing on private life: FALL • 1990 515 Citizen Politics people develop unique political capacities for dealing with the world of diversity and domination by experts and large institutions...

...This arena, where ordinary people reclaim authority for community concerns, is different from classical republican theory, where virtuous citizens put aside their interests for the common good...

...At just the moment when democratic values need skillful advocacy, the campus left embodies assumptions about what people should believe and how they should act in ways that make change or serious encounter almost impossible...

...For instance, Stages in Local Community Organizing William Sullivan, a neorepublican theorist who coauthored Habits of the Heart, contrasts liberal concepts of citizenship with what he terms "commonwealth" ideals...

...Each issue carries its own logic, even its own political culture, often insulated from the others...

...Attention to this wide scope produced large local organizations by the late 1970s...

...repair of our infrastructure...

...Americans need to get the message: the public realm offers many pleasures and opportunities for constructive use of power beyond claiming unique possession of justice and right...

...Extensive training, reflection on experience, and vigorous intellectual discussion all are central...

...Citizen groups became a "university of public life where people learn the skills of discourse and action," as Ernesto Cortes, first organizer of San Antonio COPS, summarized it...

...Taylor saw this action as the shift from protest to participation in governance...

...Here, too, the civil rights movement renewed older themes by coupling citizen rights with responsibilities...

...The scale of issue-based organizing is vast...

...Participants saw the public as an informed critic of policy...

...The foundation of community groups shifted from visible public activists to a less visible tier of community leaders—most often women—whose central concerns were encased in community life: those who kept the church organizations going, went to the PTA, ran the bake sales...

...Many community organizations have gained a reputation for pursuing their particular objectives whatever the consequences for anyone else...

...Originally established by Alinsky, the IAF has grown considerably—it now has twenty-eight large associated projects— since his death in 1972, and its approaches have notably changed...

...Ed Chambers, IAF's director after Alinsky, sees the focus on development as the sharpest departure from the classic approach...

...Community groups like COPS are determinedly pragmatic, not revolutionary...

...Rather, people's longer-term interests involve their primary relationships and concerns in their everyday lives...

...The Citizenship Education program of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the related Freedom School effort by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, furnished a grass-roots base for a language of democracy as articulated by leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr...

...And the curriculum spanned an array of skills—how to register voters, combat illiteracy, and win government benefits for the poor...

...But his emphasis gradually shifted, becoming more and more narrow...

...In public life, we meet people from backgrounds unlike our own...

...Over time, the cultivation of listening as the key to democratic action changed IAF's understanding of self-interest, the nature of leadership, and relations between different ethnic and racial groups within organizations and with those in the world outside...

...The "main meal" was citizen power and values like community renewal...

...When you've been out of 518 • DISSENT power so long, there's a tendency not to want to be responsible or to be held accountable...

...In microcosm, campuses today continue the pattern...

...Organizers of the schools avoided academic approaches and treated students as peers who could come and go as they pleased, bring sewing to classes, or chew tobacco...

...Still confined to local organizations, they nonetheless have considerable potential for achieving a citizen politics that engages large numbers of people...

...The basic premise of democratic politics needs to shift from protest to citizen problem solving...

...in private life one expects loyalty, love, and intimacy...

...We never would have been able to challenge the priest to stop acting like our `father' without this sort of training," said Beatrice Cortez...

...Her daughter answered and at first didn't recognize his voice...

...Organizing became, in IAF terminology, "value based" rather than "issue based...

...Calls to "off the pigs" or relabeling the nation as AmeriKKKa replaced serious politics...

...Conflict is often healthy, but it also oversimplifies moral questions...

...It grows out of grass-roots networks that have discovered that working around local issues, while stressing the revitalization of public life, is a powerful way of sustaining commitments...

...They have shifted from a focus on particular issues to larger concepts that offer considerable resources for democratic politics...

...In private life, we associate with people who share our own outlooks and values...

...Or it is viewed as a morality play of exhortation and protest...

...The National Commission on Neighborhoods found in its 1979 report that eight thousand large community organizations had appeared in the decade...

...Self-interest, for instance, was divorced from particular issues and distinguished from selfishness...

...They do not expect a rapid transformation of national power structures, only a steady accumulation of local power by citizen groups...

...The first principle should not be that "we're all the same" (which favors dominant cultural groups) but rather the presumption of difference...

...What, then, does "citizen power" mean in a more detailed sense...

...For Sullivan, commonwealth means an almost unbounded "covenant morality" where "as citizens we make an unlimited promise to show care and concern to each other...

...Moreover, leaders develop skills in understanding how personalized gestures often confuse real power relations in a public setting...

...IAF groups saw benefits to taking on certain responsibilities for large-scale community goods: education in the intricacies of policy issues, a deepened sense of "stakeholding" in community life, working with others of different backgrounds...

...Moreover, it led to a new attention to the role of concepts in framing action...

...He preached the need to "listen" to community traditions...

...We think that will help us develop a working relationship over time...

...In mainstream politics one gets elected by portraying the utter corruption of one's opponent...

...We began to see every action as an opportunity for education and training," says Maribeth Larkin, a former organizer with the United Neighborhoods Organization of the IAF in Los Angeles...

...Meanwhile, student activists on northern campuses were inspired by the civil rights movement's vision of "participatory democracy...

...A father's anger at his child's mistreatment in school or a young woman's humiliation by a sexist boss, for instance, are the sorts of deep passions that can motivate people to take action in the larger world...

...Citizen politics requires neither cynical manipulation nor civic virtue...

...she asked...

...In the absence of democratic organizations through which to translate ideas of citizenship into political practice, the social movements of the 1960s increasingly adopted an inverted cold war demonology, turning the division of "Free World" and "Iron Curtain" into the purity of the movement opposing the "evil" of mainstream America...

...As the 1960s proceeded, movement rhetoric became more extreme...

...The notion of citizen is unintelligible apart from that of commonwealth," writes Sullivan...

...But a strongly polarized language of moral politics worked less well in settings Citizen Politics of greater complexity...

...Its power came from moral protest against the inhumanity of segregation...