Commonwealth Democracy
Boyte, Harry C. & Kari, Nancy N.
[lin a larger sense, we cannot . • . consecrate . . . this ground. The brave men . . . who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. . . . It is for us the...
...Today, when the majority of people have little sense that government belongs to the citizens and when appeals for justice fall largely on deaf ears, Lincoln's way of thinking about citizen-government partnership can speak to the crisis of democratic politics...
...The council defines civil society as "those relationships and institutions that exist in a sphere of society largely separate from both the institutions of government and the dynamics of the market economy...
...Pettus and his neighbors described Lake Union as part of the public wealth of the people of Seattle—"a gift to us from the Ice Age...
...This formulation suggested a reciprocal relation between citizens and their government...
...Three-quarters believed that government should help redistribute wealth...
...The IAF approach has resurfaced the potential power that ordinary people can gain through the production of public things...
...Cooperative extension had a robust democratic mission...
...There are the rudiments of an infrastructure of such groups across the country that potentially can articulate this argument...
...But the key was that workers believed themselves to have helped create the New Deal in many ways, from voting to union activism to public work programs like the WPA and CCC...
...It had currency especially in what historian Michael Kazin has called the "producerist" tradition of progressive and populist politics...
...Its limit, however, is that its organizations continue to operate mostly out of an old-fashioned populist analysis of power, where the major players are corporate interests...
...The sense of popular ownership can come only from a broad movement that rebuilds public culture in fundamental ways...
...Moving into power," in Taylor's view, means being prepared "to negotiate, to understand that others have power and different ways of viewing the world...
...Getting close to customers" is the watchword these days throughout every government agency...
...On the one hand, he was greatly influenced by the ideologues of the scientific elite...
...The Clinton administration has a different approach...
...Newfound faith in the state and the unions was not preordained," observes Cohen...
...Similar ideas influenced a variety of New Deal programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Federal Writers Project and other cultural efforts that promoted public work, and in its early years, the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...But to participate in creating history, one must move into power...
...Briefly jailed in the 1950s during the McCarthy period, Pettus understood that the houseboaters could not survive through protest politics...
...Kautz describes Burnsville as a "commonwealth" and a "community of abundance...
...They argued that government, through expert engineering, could become a rational instrument for democratic control of "the mighty commercial forces...
...Work was more and more specialized, losing visible connection to what was produced and becoming a means to a paycheck rather than a worthy activity in itself...
...The definition of wealth changed dramatically in this process...
...To develop a broad movement for the democratization of modern society requires retrieving older catalytic models of professional and government work that were reflected in such traditions as Jane Addams's Hull House, cooperative extension, and New Deal public work projects...
...We've lost the 'civil' in 'civil service,' " one federal worker recounted in the sessions on citizen alienation that the Center for Democracy and Citizenship held in 1994...
...Most people in Seattle saw them, at best, as scruffy oddballs...
...The balance between public life and private pursuits has always been precarious...
...We help call meetings together in the neighborhoods or with business or with schools...
...Indeed, workers' sense of the possibilities of governmental activism rapidly outran that of most New Deal leaders...
...Commonwealth was once a luminous and potent political term...
...For instance, the Council on Civil Society, a joint project of the University of Chicago Divinity School and the bipartisan Institute for American Values, argues that "the possibility of American renewal in the next century depends decisively upon the revitalization of our civil society and our rediscovery of the American idea...
...community development corporations...
...Even the founder of modern market economics, Adam Smith, recognized the importance of public things: The last duty of the commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number...
...Surveys found a strikingly class-aware population...
...Most organizing strategies, he believes, hold little hope of making a significant impact on national and international trends...
...He simultaneously honored Union soldiers and reminded the country that democracy was an unfinished labor of all the living...
...This perspective has gained a wide following in recent years...
...Voting, mobilizing, and advocating for rights and benefits alone are not sufficient...
...People's work is limited by the dominant definitions of those "served" as clients or consumers rather than co-producers...
...They blurred the boundaries between themselves and government...
...Many activists in the environmental and neighborhood movements of the 1970s and 1980s trace their lineage directly to its work...
...Conventions are reduced to advertisements...
...Public work is the action principle of the commonwealth...
...But the Progressives who shaped the politics of the first decades of the twentieth century had little use for a democracy of ordinary people...
...Public projects give a sense of hope, a feeling of pride and accomplishment...
...Our experience of public life has changed radically...
...There is, however, a forgotten but quite different and more democratic underside of the Progressive era, one that reflected the commonwealth tradition, in which the idea of a "citizen government" remained central...
...The term also emerges from the social histories of immigrant groups where it meant the "commons" (that is, roads, pasture lands, waterways, public buildings, and public services) that everyone was involved in helping to create and maintain...
...Roosevelt contributed to the New Deal transformation in political culture by constantly depicting government as the agency of the people...
...They sponsored tours, involved the media and schools in historical research, organized social events and festivals, and made alliances with neighborhood groups across the city...
...It involves engagement with others rather than protest as the primary strategy...
...Even establishment leaders who fought the community activists acknowledged the benefits...
...However sensitively done, such a focus makes government the center of the action, and the public "outside" the object of the action...
...This means recognizing that power is in a sense "locked up" in human service, educational, and government institutions today...
...Through this process, the legacy and symbolism of the lake acquired vibrant power...
...Teddy Roosevelt embodied the contradictory currents of Progressivism...
...Reinventing Government is billed as an effort to regain support for "smaller, less bureaucratic, more entrepreneurial and flexible government...
...Indeed, the term commonwealth was used interchangeably to mean both the general citizenry and democratic government...
...Indeed, many Republicans back projects like the Youth Corps, and some, such as former Bush policy adviser Jim Pinkerton, have called for a new Civilian Conservation Corps...
...Communitarianism The other dominant framework for citizen action stresses community-building, deliberation, and social responsibility...
...But most of the answers have to come from within the community...
...But the communitarian approach obscures power rela46...
...They argue that to adapt to an information age with diverse life styles and more highly educated and therefore more demanding consumers, government must not simply produce standardized services...
...It was called first "Commonwealth Builders, Inc...
...Jeffrey Isaac articulated this difficulty in Dissent ("The Poverty of Progressivism," Fall 1996) when he argued that democratic possibilities are largely confined to "scattered oases of civic activism...
...It aimed at solidifying the houseboat community, and it championed their cause through retrieval of the commonwealth tradition...
...The Floating Homes Association was formed as an alternative strategy...
...And it needs to go beyond both progressive and communitarian approaches to develop a conception of government of and by the people—the catalyst and tool for citizens doing public work that builds the commonwealth...
...At best this individualism fueled an entrepreneurial spirit that has been a source of constant innovation and healthy restlessness...
...Civil society's fundamental purposes in this view are to generate social trust and develop civic virtue...
...Now we serve more as the catalyst," explains Konat...
...Moreover, its focus on such values as responsibility can easily lead to exhortations to conform to conventional middle-class norms...
...But the vast majority of Chicago's working people believed that the federal government and strong labor unions were essential counterweights to the power of industry...
...It enabled those on the margins to demand full inclusion based on the civic authority they gained through their public contributions, not through appeals to sympathy...
...Every society has a commons that forms its physical and social scaffolding: the physical infrastructure like dams, waterways, roads, bridges, and parks, and also lasting political and cultural institutions upon which all depend...
...Along the shores, speakeasies and brothels were scattered through the small shacks and apartments...
...In a time of massive hostility toward government, the result is a defensive stance that considerably limits any possibility for generating broad democratic movement...
...The Burnsville initiative hinges on a fundamental redefinition of government...
...Meanwhile, reinventing government has been met with a giant public yawn, as the management guru Peter Drucker observed in the Atlantic...
...false choices and poll-driven posturings in elections...
...They combined an overriding faith in the power of science and the wisdom of scientifically trained professionals...
...now we're outside, doing things for the people or to the people...
...Public issues are polarized, often inflamed...
...The story of a community battling for survival in Seattle suggests how such retrieval can have wide effects...
...In view of the local scarcity of bread, they argued, Morris's property rights were held in check by the social origins of property and the needs of the community...
...Gerald Taylor, IAF national staff organizer, described the creation of such forums as the move from simple protest to governance: "The first struggle for the black community, coming out of a segregated history, is the fight to be recognized...
...Not since the resignation of Richard Nixon has the public expressed such pessimism about America's future...
...In the 1990s, two main conceptual maps of citizenship dominate—the progressive and the communitarian...
...The nature of government work also changed, with specialization and experts coming to dominate...
...As the public face of wealth disappeared, citizens lost the authority they gained FALL • 1997 • 43 Commonwealth Democracy through its creation...
...Terry Pettus, a newspaperman and union organizer, moved to Seattle in the 1920s...
...But its rationale as well as its scale are different...
...At the heart of each was the notion of the commonwealth...
...Only as we renew cultures and practices of public work on a large scale will we be able to regenerate the sense that government is ours and that we are the authors of our common destiny...
...Cooperative extension's philosophy was similar to the approach of Progressives such as Louis Brandeis, Jane Addams, and W.E.B...
...The welFALL • 1997 • 49 Commonwealth Democracy fare debate suggests one possibility...
...From their perspective, government did not displace self-initiated action, as many communitarians argue today...
...Both have resources for thinking about citizen effort...
...Groups easily come to portray themselves as uniquely aggrieved...
...Describing public jobs as much more than transitions from welfare—as illustrating an entirely different understanding of the relationship of citizens and government —furnishes a potentially potent argument for such jobs...
...But he declared that such problems were challenges, not obstacles...
...The Lake Union campaign helped catalyze a generation of citizen activism...
...Yet the IAF still shares with other progressives a view of government as largely distributive and "outside" of the people...
...By the late 1930s, the political culture had experienced profound change...
...Democratic action needs to integrate the direct power focus of groups like the IAF with the specific cultures and dynamics of the institutions that constitute contemporary civil society...
...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," declared Roosevelt...
...Wealth was once understood to include many nonmonetary things: schools, human talents, cultural and natural resources...
...Rather than just provide services, we've redefined our overall objectives as helping to build community...
...In the mid-1930s, Pettus helped organize labor unions, farmers, and neighborhood groups into a progressive movement akin to many others in the country of that period...
...Popular organizations and people's government were the indispensable foundations for struggles for justice and challenges to concentrated wealth and power...
...Four states are official commonwealths...
...Boatyard workers, sailors, students, poor people, and bohemians mingled with retired radicals from the Industrial Workers of the World...
...Terry Pettus chaired the commission that developed the guidelines and helped to write the legislation...
...The Seattle Example In recent decades it has taken conscious effort to retrieve the idea of the commonwealth...
...the problems of a complex civilization...
...it must get "close to the customer...
...Government has a role...
...This grows from the Total Quality Management movement in business, which has sought to "flatten the hierarchy" and create teamlike work communities more responsive to customers...
...q 50 • DISSENT...
...One of the most successful, the Milwaukee Service Corps, is an urban version of the CCC...
...A myriad of current initiatives reflect this view of citizen action: community service and service-learning, character education in schools, national initiatives to promote volunteerism...
...We are the land of colorful entrepreneurs, gold diggers, and lottery winners...
...At its best, such a perspective retrieves the important concept of public judgment as opposed to mere private opinion...
...But in an era of limited resources and great challenges, I can't pretend to fix things anymore, and neither can anybody in government...
...For instance, Elizabeth Kautz, the mayor of Burnsville, a Twin Cities suburb in Minnesota, ran her election campaign with the slogan, "Government doesn't have to be bad...
...Resources for this task can be found in the commonwealth tradition...
...This shift in identity is not easy for a lot of people in government, but it's critical," says Konat...
...To cope with these massive changes, entrepreneurial governments have begun to listen carefully to their customers, through customer surveys, focus groups, and a wide variety of other methods...
...If you count in a variety of other groups such as community foundations...
...But over time democracy was defined by the language of service delivery and the marketplace...
...He shifted the meaning of the word from public ceremony enacted by officials to the public work that ordinary soldiers did on behalf of the nation...
...More than four-fifths believed in strong labor unions...
...In their terms, empowerment means market choice...
...On the other, he was an ally of many who believed in government as the instrument of an independent citizenry...
...Roosevelt, of course, spoke in a social and economic context far different from the agricultural and artisanal world of the late eighteenth century...
...Urbanization, the rise of scientifically credentialed experts, mass communications, and industrialism posed new challenges for those who envisioned an active democracy in which ordinary citizens had voice and standing...
...The belief that even private wealth had a public dimension served as rallying cry for many groups...
...The labels that proliferate illustrate the point: "children at risk," "culturally deprived communities," "underserved populations," "welfaredependent mothers...
...Today, most progressives see government as a protector of rights and a mechanism for distributing benefits and services...
...Meanwhile, civic organizations, educational institutions, and social protest groups now also offer benefits to "customers...
...After World War II, Americans experienced a dramatic shift in public and civic identities, the consequences of which haunt us today...
...It was neither a gift bestowed by an aristocracy, as in France, nor the benevolence of a paternalistic state, as in Prussia...
...But the deeper problem is that people have lost the sense that government is "ours...
...The campaign was able to get the city council to block industrial use of a large area, move the city to acquire twenty-three acres to create a public park, and inspire the state legislature to pass one of the nation's strongest shoreline management control acts...
...More than a century later, in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt's influential "new nationalism" speech calling for government regulation of trusts and large corporations used a similar rationale based on the civic authority of those who created the nation's wealth...
...There is an urgent need for a renewed investment in our common life...
...The network of citizen groups founded by Alinsky, called the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), is a striking example, for it has come to see the limits of citizen action based on a struggle of the have-nots against the haves...
...I will work with you to open some doors...
...Over the next two decades he was a leading figure in many popular movements: labor organizing, the fight for public utilities and rural electrification, and a campaign to win industrial-accident insurance and old-age pensions...
...Conservatives argue that it is precisely citizenship that is jeopardized by the program: why should the federal government promote compassion or pay for volunteers...
...Yet in a context of economic anxiety, stagnating or declining wages, and corporate downsizing, consumerism feeds a scarcity consciousness and a mood of whininess...
...From the vantage of the Christian right, secular humanists and liberal cultural elites undermine traditional values and discriminate against religious believers...
...It required workers to make significant breaks with previous values and behavior and to adopt new ones...
...We no longer see ourselves as part of the citizens...
...DISSENT Commonwealth Democracy tions...
...Increasingly, people came to understand themselves as consumers, not producers...
...In her splendid book Making a New Deal, historian Lizabeth Cohen details the way workingclass communities in Chicago came to feel strong support for the New Deal, labor unions, and the federal government...
...This view positions professional and volunteer helpers as active agents and their clients as needy recipients...
...It also produces a sentimentalized view of the citizen as a volunteer...
...Though examples are scattered—still far from the widespread and multilayered cultural transformation that will be needed—there are nonetheless intimations in government practice and public policy that suggest stirrings of a new commonwealth movement...
...In all of these, citizens are called to be responsible for families and communities—to be helpful, thoughtful, or caring...
...The American commons differed from its counterparts in other nations...
...Engaging a broad public, addressing practical issues of work and wealth, and renewing popular government: these are the keys to democratic power...
...It was used by Theodore Roosevelt, and also by activists such as the African-American poet Frances Harper and the feminist writer Frances Willard, by populists like Henry Demerest Lloyd and socialists like Eugene Debs...
...Chicago working people were unlike European socialist workers...
...Indispensable to the houseboaters organizing was a renewal of the Washington Commonwealth Federation's notion of government as the instrument of the whole people...
...Groups like the Milwaukee Corps stress the dignity and importance of work with public meaning that makes an obvious contribution to the life and well-being of communities...
...Only a renewed emphasis on citizenship as productive public work and government as the instrument and catalyst for such work offer serious hope for generating new democratic energy on a significant scale...
...Thus, Roosevelt established the Country Life Commission in 1908, which proposed a nationwide system of county agents, called "cooperative extension," supported by government and employed through land-grant colleges...
...Here, the left follows the formulation of the late Saul FALL • 1997...
...The houseboaters tied their fate to the future of the city, the lake, and the environment...
...They developed boldness for action and confidence in their own authority...
...Remaking the Commonwealth Surveys in 1997 find most Americans deeply discouraged about our collective ability to address growing national challenges...
...Haubrich says, "We're always looking for larger, bigger, more crucial projects...
...They were reasons for "hope," not "despair...
...We hold service of the vessel," they argued, "because it constitutes a considerable part of the advantage [the workers] hoped to derive from their labors...
...Current examples of public work that grow out of WPA and CCC traditions suggest this rationale...
...FALL • 1997 • 41 Commonwealth Democracy Commonwealth themes formed a powerful axis for democratic politics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, different from both a state-centered left and a market-oriented right...
...In addition to examples like Burnsville, instances of how policy can be recast in commonwealth ways have begun to multiply...
...The skateboard story is one example of a wide effort at civic renewal in Burnsville called "Partnerships for Tomorrow...
...Public work projects made the New Deal the people's creation...
...It receives a good deal of its funding from AmeriCorps, but its staff disagrees strongly with the AmeriCorps approach...
...We can provide certain expertise...
...Citizenship turned into a sentimentalized version of volunteerism—what one does "after work," disconnected from sources of democratic power...
...Even the most effective citizen organizing has yet to reclaim a full sense of commonwealth democracy...
...The irony is that conservative strategy mirrors the progressive pattern...
...Public projects give a sense of purpose...
...We see service as the byproduct of work, not work as the byproduct of service," says Joel Haubrich, information director...
...Working with several adults, the teenagers negotiated agreements with neighborhoods, city agencies, businesses, and insurance companies...
...But this is the curious empowerment characteristic of our age, when market language has taken hold in almost every sector of society...
...Appeals to public sympathy or even an attempt at an alliance among all those victimized by developers stood little chance of success...
...When you've been out of power so long, there's a tendency to not want to be responsible or to be held accountable...
...But historically, the individual pursuit of private wealth was counterbalanced by a commonwealth politics that generated popular authority and democratic power through its valuation of the public world that the people created...
...Finally, for people in service jobs it redefines "clients" or "customers" as co-producers...
...Thus, in the midst of the economic crisis in Philadelphia in 1779, artisans challenged Robert Morris, a wealthy merchant, for shipping grain outside the city...
...In political terms it recalled English antimonarchical traditions of popular government...
...While city government continues to emphasize "quality service," government workers have shifted their focus away from "customer service...
...A major complaint against the houseboaters was sewage pollution on the lake...
...An instructive comparison is with the 1920s, when voting levels and people's disaffection with government were as stark as they are today...
...Today, both the practice and spirit of commonwealth have all but disappeared...
...An enormous chasm has opened between the people and public institutions...
...Today, when establishment voices like the New York Times worry about the privatization of "common pools" of resources and when all signs point to a pervasive sense of powerlessness among the citizenry, the commonwealth tradition and the way it fused citizen labors with popular government merit another look...
...He saw work as prior to capital, as the source of wealth...
...It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced . . . that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth...
...An increasing professionalization of unions, political parties, and reform organizations took place parallel to such changes in government...
...Terry and his wife, Berta, lived in a freewheeling houseboat community on Lake Union near downtown Seattle...
...Abraham Lincoln had long held to a labor theory of value...
...If you get us a skateboard park, we'll stop skating where we're not supposed to," they said...
...Today, this percentage has dropped to the low twenties, and most people believe the federal government does more harm than good...
...Consequently citizens express a pervasive sense of powerlessness...
...From a progressive perspective, the enemies are the corporate elite and their reactionary allies...
...This approach means a change in identity for city workers...
...Revulsion at Watergate and other scandals...
...and policy groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the beginnings of a critical mass appear...
...Few favored "socialism," or governFALL • 1997 • 47 Commonwealth Democracy ment ownership of industry...
...One broad survey of high school programs found that they featured objectives such as "self-esteem," "a sense of personal worth," "self-understanding," "consciousness about one's personal values," and the "exploration of new identities...
...As contributing members of society, they made no apologies" for the federal benefits they received...
...The term fused themes from both political and social history into a conception of government of the people...
...The translation of this caring and communitybuilding ethos into human service systems generates a professional practice based on a pervasive view of people on the margins as deficient...
...The challenge in renewing democracy is to translate these practices and this political language to the larger "system worlds" of government, education, and human service that were denuded of civic muscle as they became service providers...
...groups like the Industrial Areas Foundation, whose affiliates are now considering a major push for WPA-style jobs...
...Conventional wisdom points to many explanatory factors...
...She meant to return to a view of government as a catalyst, not mainly a service provider...
...We've had to get beyond customer service, so that public outcomes are widely owned by the citizens," explains Kautz...
...The power of the houseboaters' campaign derived from the questions it posed about the importance of the environment and the meaning of progress in the context of a revitalization of "government of the people...
...It frames "problem solving" (far too instrumental a language to convey democratic purposes) in a fashion that draws attention to the larger significance of local and community efforts—what it is that people actually create or build of lasting social and civic value...
...I knew we could never win by debating percentages," said Pettus...
...Ninety percent of the unskilled workers and 81 percent of semiskilled workers favored Roosevelt's New Deal...
...the authority that people once derived from engagement in public work and the sense that government is an instrument for civic effort have been lost...
...Government can help...
...This requires retrieving for our time professional practices that were aimed at cultivating and "freeing" the energies and talents of the citizenry...
...The Clinton administration has also sought to address the crisis in citizen-government relationships through a complementary communitarian approach that urges a new era of volunteerism—what Clinton called "Big Citizenship" at the Presidential Summit—to make up for the reduced government role...
...Seattle had a major era of citizen participation," said James Ellis, a man sometimes called the informal leader of the city's elite...
...45 Commonwealth Democracy Alinsky, architect of the direct action organizing that developed in the 1970s and 1980s...
...In 1924, less than a third of foreign-born workers turned out for the presidential election...
...In 1962, city officials moved to evict boaters in order to clear the lakefront for apartment buildings and other development projects...
...Work identities pattern power relationships with co-workers, clients, and communities...
...We want to argue that current conceptions of citizenship and government, detached from everyday life, cramp what Americans might otherwise be able to accomplish with a renewed commonwealth perspective...
...City Manager Greg Konat points out that this is difficult, given dominant assumptions...
...He called upon the citizenry to find through "government the instrument of our common united purpose to solve...
...AmeriCorps backers claim that the community service program is an antidote to "me-first selfishness" and declining rates of voluntary involvement...
...But "Reinventing Government" is a vivid illustration of progressive politics in a consumer culture where citizens are imagined as the recipients of government largess...
...Government work has been redesigned and clustered in six priorities set by citizens (safety, youth, neighborhoods, development, environment, and transportation) with substantial partnerships and citizen involvement in each area...
...They raised money, developed a design and gained support from the city to build the park...
...The New Deal was not simply "for the people...
...They held workshops on how to weld pipes and hook them up...
...The most substantial effort to address citizen disaffection has been the "Reinventing Government" initiative spearheaded by Al Gore...
...They develop through a long socialization process including formal credentialing and incentive systems...
...It also advanced a normative ideal of a just commonwealth in which the distribution of wealth and power was equal enough to allow self-governance...
...the corruption of politics by the unquenchable drive for money—all these contribute...
...As the campaign developed, houseboaters defended the idea of the lake as an environmental resource, a working lake with a rich history 44 • DISSENT Commonwealth Democracy of multiple uses—boat building, commerce, residency, recreation, all interconnected...
...Big 48 • DISSENT Commonwealth Democracy Citizenship's flagship initiative is AmeriCorps, which has undertaken projects reminiscent of the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal public work efforts...
...In Rules for Radicals, his 1972 best-selling organizing manual, Alinsky argued that progressives should organize broad alliances of "have-nots" and "have-some-want-mores" against the "haves...
...As in the Lake Union story, welfare-to-work opens the potential to move beyond the scarcity mentality that demonizes welfare recipients, seeing them simply as a drain on society...
...Local communities and commonwealth policy initiatives should be seen as building blocks for a broader movement that needs to take shape in a large number of settings and institutions...
...Communitarians locate citizen action in "civil society," a sphere separated from government and work...
...The watchwords in government are "customer service" and "privatization...
...Public work calls for a seriousness of purpose...
...In the context of human service and educational institutions, communitarianism uses a language of concern, personal growth, and communitybuilding that hides power dynamics...
...By the middle 1960s, the association enjoyed remarkable popular support...
...they demand more for themselves, and tolerate, even applaud, cutbacks for everyone else...
...at worst, as disruptive radicals...
...In 1958, 73 percent of Americans believed that government "could be trusted to do the right thing most of the time...
...Driven by a primary concern for developing leaders in minority and working-class communities who have the confidence and skill to act boldly and effectively on public questions, the IAF stresses a strategy of building power relationships among groups with diverse interests in order to create things of common value...
...It was neither handed down from antiquity nor defined by authoritative religion...
...The IAF has successfully demonstrated that work on infrastructural projects like schools, water systems, and communications can bring groups with clashing world views together in forums that create work for a larger public purpose...
...Exactly what it includes can always be debated, but that it exists has been widely understood...
...The Milwaukee Corps is part of the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps, with well over a hundred members...
...Her story illustrates the sort of commonwealth politics that we need to renew...
...More generally, workers identified with ethnic organizations and employers who used a rhetoric of benevolent "welfare capitalism...
...Moving beyond the customer service model has meant that we had to recognize we can't do all the public tasks in government, even if we'd like to...
...The nation, he declared, had the means to act...
...Advocates advance the idea as a way to shatter bureaucracy, create flexibility, and "squeeze ever more bang for the buck...
...When the focus is on distribution and defense, citizen action operates out of a stance of collective grievance and shared victimhood...
...Thus, Lincoln articulated a powerful idea that has opened opportunities for democratic initiative throughout American history...
...neither are calls for community and responsibility...
...In America, the commons was created through cooperative and self-interested labor of the people...
...To which Kautz replied: "I'm not going to 'get' anything for you—that's not how I see my job...
...As a result, "there was an incredible flowering in the city...
...The irony is that supporters and critics equate "active citizenship" with volunteerism...
...America has had a strong strand of "get rich quick" individualism...
...Following this premise, technologies for mass mobilization were developed...
...After the Second World War, wealth was defined as the Gross National Product— a measure of commodities produced and financial transactions undertaken in the formal economy...
...In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln tied his view of labor to a broadened view of democracy that enlisted ordinary citizens—"government of the people, by the people, for the people...
...and later the Washington Commonwealth Federation...
...W]orkers were moving beyond the hierarchical authority relationship implicit in paternalism which made them dependents...
...Associated with these changes were wideranging shifts in citizens' relationship to government...
...It conveyed the conviction that all citizens are, at least potentially, civic producers —building and sustaining public goods and popular government through their work...
...The dilemma that progressives have faced in recent years has been that their distributive politics places people largely in an outsider and consumer role, asking for a fair share of goods and services...
...YouthBuild, a similar network of inner-city projects, has a hundred affiliates...
...For instance, work identities— whether as a carpenter or college professor — structure ways of naming problems and planning strategies for action...
...The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being...
...In the 1920s in Chicago, blacks overwhelmingly continued to back the Republicans—the "Party of Lincoln"—while most ethnic workingclass communities in Chicago had little use for the federal government in any sense...
...All of us together need to create a citizenry who is empowered to do the work of the public," she explains...
...Training centers taught the skills of advocacy, lobbying, and mobilization...
...Both helpers and those receiving help are trapped in roles that limit their productive energies and powers...
...The administration's metaphor for reinventing government defines the citizen as a customer...
...Instead of claiming "less responsibility" than others for lake pollution, to the consternation of City Hall, the houseboaters demanded that they be permitted to pay for sewer lines to their boats...
...The overall objective is to rebuild the community by tapping latent human talents and other resources in new ways...
...Its organizers teach that the public world is an arena where one learns to work on projects of value with people of radically different backgrounds and interests...
...They were proud of their identities as workers and bold in asserting their prerogatives...
...Few knew that the boaters' sewage was a minuscule one-half of 1 percent of the total that was dumped from the city's thirteen sewer lines...
...Despite its symbolic importance, AmeriCorps is still a tiny program...
...It assumes that politicians' self-interests are necessarily different from those of the general citizenry and maintains strong strictures against its leaders' running for office...
...But neither addresses the central dilemma of democracy in our time— the fact that government has come to seem alien to most citizens...
...But you're going to have to organize the community yourselves...
...Property is subject to the commonwealth, they continued: "The property of the vessel is the immediate right of the owners, but the service of it is the right of the community 42 • DISSENT Commonwealth Democracy collectively with the owners...
...The IAF does not imagine government as a catalyst for citizen efforts...
...High school community service programs, for instance, emphasize personal development and the experience of service itself...
...Key to the strategy was connecting the heritage of the city and the lake to ideas of work and contribution...
...When teenage skateboarders got in trouble for skating in school buildings, Kautz asked them what could be done to change their behavior...
...Well into the 1940s the commonwealth generated a political vocabulary for challenging unbridled private power and for popular participation in government and public life...
...It sees politicians and professionals as mainly serving the interests of business...
...In the 1940s, the Commonwealth Federation enjoyed majority support in the state...
...To realize this potential will require broadening the rationale for public work jobs from arguments about their benefits to welfare recipients (as a "transition" to "real work") to an emphasis on how poor people can create public goods of benefit for all...
...It highlights the roles of local and small scale community institutions...
...It was not a simple or quick process—in the 1960s, much of government and many popular organizations still carried a larger public mission...
...Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863 incoln's famous call to take up "the unfinished work" of those who fought for the Union drew its power from the way he redefined consecrate...
...If a commonwealth framing for popular action can have such success in a contemporary setting, why isn't this approach used everywhere in response to the enormous civic and economic challenges facing the nation, from corporate layoffs to the closing of hospitals to welfare reform...
...The Commonwealth Tradition The commonwealth idea was taken up by many different political figures and movements in the broad progressive tradition...
...Yet the story of Lake Union also presents an obvious puzzle...
...Ethnic political loyalties were to the local ward boss...
...The focus is not on learning to be bold, accountable public actors...
...For architects of the extension system, the idea of "public work that builds the commonwealth" formed a scaffolding for a process of citizen empowerment catalyzed by government...
...Commonwealth (or often in party platforms and reform manifestos, "the cooperative commonwealth") was both descriptive and prescriptive...
...David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, whose Reinventing Government is the main textbook of current efforts, explicitly advocate a shift from seeing citizens as clients to seeing them as customers...
...Here and there, public leaders articulate a commonwealth approach...
...A number of dynamics contributed to the transformation of political culture: the benefits that people received in a time of crisis, shifts in the Catholic church and Chicago politics, Roosevelt's success in transferring the personal loyalties workers had once felt toward ethnic groups and employers to himself...
...Limits of Contemporary Frameworks The categories people use to imagine who they are and what they can do shape the range of their efforts...
...Rather, government agencies interacted with an array of institutions to create the tools through which ordinary citizens could shape the larger world...
...Political campaigns now resemble the selling of toothpaste, requiring an endless search for dollars...
...Du Bois...
...As people created the commonwealth, they also became the commonwealth...
...Our workers don't show up with a smile on their face saying 'we want to serve.' They come because they want to get their lives turned around through getting a job...
...It returns "civil" to civil service, with city employees coming to see themselves as citizens working with other citizens...
...This story reveals multiple resources for democratic action...
...In his second inaugural address, he painted the portrait of a nation where millions were "denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot . . . one third of a nation illhoused, ill-clad, ill- nourished...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
