Commons Sense

...Commons Sense Democrats, as well as Republicans, need to unhook themselves from the central state by Jonathan Rowe Critics called Michael Dukakis a "technocrat" during last year's campaign...

...The high-water mark of commonwealth idealism in America was the agrarian populist revolt of the late 19th century...

...If national Democrats see public space as a land of elections and programs—as a gaping void waiting to * Common Wealth...

...Together, he says, these disparate influences helped shift the Democrats' center of gravity from local involvement to a redistributive managerial state...

...Agreed, and nicely said...

...Based in Minneapolis, he has long experience in local organizing...

...The Baltimore Commonwealth also will give communities more say in the running of the schools (one hopes Baltimore will learn from the experience in New York City, where community school boards became cesspools of corruption...

...Such as this startling revelation from Robert Dahl: "A has power over B to the extent he can get B to do something that B would not do otherwise...

...the candidate himself thought so, hence his pathetic protests in the second debate that yes, he really cared deeply about things...

...Still, at its core, CommonWealth says perhaps the single most important thing that national Democrats need to hear...

...Boyte is especially insightful regarding Students for a Democratic Society, which posed a brief intellectual challenge to this liberal technocracy...

...This doesn't refute Boyte's case for a return to commonwealth politics...

...Black Americans may know that better than anyone...

...Unfortunately, the style of CommonWealth is oddly out of synch with its message...

...There is much tedious exposition of the obvious and much burdening of points with superfluous academic authority...

...The technocracy problem went a lot deeper of course, and not just for Dukakis but for the Democratic party itself...

...In much milder forms, early 20th century liberals such as Croly also talked about the "great community" of the state, which would control the trusts and manage the economy, leaving little for individual citizens to do but make the most of the economic opportunities thus provided...

...Gliding past the middle class is a rather serious omission, if one is talking about political revival in America...

...But the police dogs were real...

...The great community The commonwealth ideal is perhaps the most noble in the Western political tradition...

...for which the self-indulgent anarchy of Woodstock was the perfect embodiment...

...Alinsky became cynical toward the end of his life, Boyte notes, and lapsed into a mode that oddly mirrored the Democratic polity generally...

...SDS talked about community, Boyte observes...

...Thus welfare rights groups could pursue self-interest agendas as parochial as those of the American Petroleum Institute, resting on the de facto virtue of the interests they represented...

...But exactly what that meant was usually a bit obscure...

...Marx saw history the way free market economists do, as restraining and benighted, a weight to be shed...

...Boyte finally cuts loose from the thesis mode when he comes to how modern liberals lost touch with this populist tradition...

...They speak at voters from the standpoint of government, rather than at government from the standpoint of voters...

...But his argument would be richer if he had confronted such difficulties more...

...Jonathan Rowe is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...It is about the blight that has encroached upon public space...

...Their "cooperative commonwealth" was basically free enterprise without money sharks...

...If national Democrats see public space as a land of elections and programs—as a gaping void waiting to be filled with "policy'—then to Republicans it shouldn't even exist...

...Former SDSer Todd Gitlin called it a "transcendentalist fantasy of the wholly, abstractly free individual, finally released from the pains and distortions of society's traps...

...It was rather to restrain the railroads and other monopolies and to provide a system of credit that gave the small producer a chance...

...Rooted as much in religion as in politics, the idea does not parse out along modern notions of "Left" and "Right...

...This sense of property (but mainly land, a distinction Boyte misses) as public trust barely exists today...

...The problem was that organizers of such groups, motivated themselves by passionate ideals, buried their values in the process of organizing," Boyte writes...

...But that doesn't confront the middle-class aspects of the idea—in particular, the tensions between community and property that are the central challenge today...

...It's especially a shame because commonwealth thinking is showing up in all sorts of middle-class contexts: environmentalism and recycling, for example...

...Reagan appealed to the same kind of romantic individualism, the fixation on personal fulfillment...

...Like the old village greens in New England towns," Boyte writes, "the [Baltimore] Commonwealth created a new forum, both city-wide and in the tangible, localized spaces of particular schools, through which diverse elements of Baltimore could meet, identify problems, disagree, find areas of agreement, plan, work on programs together...

...It wasn't communities in which people actually worked and lived...

...The sentence is an example of the prolixity that tends to blur Boyte's argument with a verbal haze...

...He focuses instead on urban radicals, such as the ones in Philadelphia who challenged the merchant Robert Morris for shipping grain outside the city at a time of local scarcity...

...They felt themselves to be motivated by powerful democratic aspirations...

...The role of government was neither to manage the economy nor to redistribute wealth...

...The heroes of CommonWealth are Saul Alinsky and his followers at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago...

...In the American Revolution, leading Republicans included middleclass lawyers and businessmen such as John Adams and Ben Franklin...

...be filled with "policy"—then to Republicans it shouldn't even exist...

...As Harry Boyte suggests in his new book, Common Wealth: A Return to Citizen Politics,* the Democrats long ago became the national party of experts and programs...

...The populists were neither central statists nor against private property...

...followed the Alinsky model, got caught up in the pursuit of power...

...Most socialist thought has assumed that a sundering of people's communal and historical identities—of `their roots'—is the indisputable prerequisite to freedom," Boyte writes...

...They redefined community as a marketplace in which the only legitimate activity is the pursuit of self-interest...

...But he lost out to the interests who wanted nothing more than a cheap source of energy...

...Most important, Boyte gives short shrift to the rich historical dimensions of the commonwealth theme...

...He identified with neighborhood leaders, rather than with the politicians on whom they exerted pressure...

...The historical research is patchy...

...What they need is a sense of small-d democracy that extends beyond constituents pressing claims upon Washington—a sense of life in the local public realm out of which a compelling national politics can arise...

...What middle class...

...But theirs is not the commonwealth upon which Boyte chooses to dwell...

...A community without history (parents...

...And even now, the best the Democrats can come up with is a bidding war, holding forth an IRA tax break for the merely wealthy to counter a Bush capital gains cut for the very rich...

...But .. . they saw the 'people' they worked for in a far more narrow and even cynical fashion...

...Unfortunately, Boyte gets so engrossed in the details of these efforts that when he resurrects the commonwealth theme, it's as though he's suddenly remembered what he's writing about...

...Mostly, it seemed a jab at Dukakis's affectless style...

...Harry Boyte...

...It is no wonder that Ronald Reagan and not Walter Mondale' could co-opt the mental rhythms of the Port Huron Statement—the SDS manifesto—with its invocations of "self-cultivation, self-direction, and selfunderstanding" and its injection into the political discourse of such matters as "finding a meaning in life that is personally fulfilling...

...The populists fought enclosure of grazing lands in Georgia as independent producers, not collectivists: no one, they argued, should be able to monopolize what was a free gift to all...

...Reagan's focus on the marketplace as the key public space for citizen activity—as consumers, not citizens—obliterated ground for common action, and with it, the possibility of public life itself," Boyte writes...

...If the Mondale-Dukakis mind was wired permanently through the institutions of government, then the Reagan mind ran a solipsistic loop back to self...

...Boston Common, once a community pasture, provides faint echoes of a world view in which community was more than the incidental sum of its constituent parts and free enterprise occurred within a context of communal concern...

...These diverted loyalty from the millenial imperative of class...

...Virtually every book from a Democratic standpoint these days sets forth a "new agenda" on something or another...

...As Boyte notes, Alinsky's signature organization, "Back of the Yards" in Chicago, turned racist in its later years...

...While rejecting Marxian class analysis, he is not immune to class bias...

...Their basic problem right now isn't lack of programs...

...The book began as a Ph.D...

...thesis and it shows...

...But it wasn't communities rooted in time, place, or mutual obligation...

...Tambourine Man...

...BUILD, the Baltimore organization, has achieved something called the Baltimore Commonwealth, which guarantees a college scholarship to any public-school graduate with good attendance and a B average...

...He worked through churches and labor unions and built on such institutional loyalties rather than supplanting them...

...It may be true that the civil rights era rendered liberals incapable of Jeffersonian thinking...

...So when he invokes it in the context of local organizing projects in Baltimore and other cities, it is flat and lacking in evocative power...

...Boyte speaks from the decentralist, Jeffersonian strain of the Democratic tradition, as opposed to the Hamiltonian, top-down view that dominates the party and its New Republic/Kennedy School intellectual axis...

...The property of the vessel is the immediate right of the owners," they argued, but "the service of it is the right of the community collectively with the owners...

...Common Wealth is about public space—how Americans define it, what they do to fill it...

...Amidst the centripetal forces of the New Deal, a few, such as Harry Hopkins, had a localist instinct...

...for some reason, much of the best material is relegated to footnotes...

...This centralizing impulse was the lineage of a Walter Mondale, to whom all problems traversed the mental circuit from interest group to Congress and thence to federal agency for administration...

...Alinsky was the former social worker who tried to revive local activism in Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods...

...Through the sixties and seventies, to be an "Alinksy organizer" was to be a kind of political Sam Spade, shrewd about self-interest and the ways of prodding it to action...

...In New Jersey, the latest development trend is to build new communities on the model of New England towns, with public spaces and town commons...

...There is little sense of political culture, of people solving problems on their own, beyond the biennial electoral flurry...

...A bigger problem is that Boyte can't quite figure out what to do with the middle class...

...Reagan appealed to the same kind of romantic individualism, the fixation on personal fulfillment...

...The Free Press, $22.95...

...Grass-roots groups like ACORN (Associated Community Organizations for Reform Now), which It is not surprising that so many from the Woodstock generation could feel comfortable in the Reagan camp...

...Boyte observes early on, for example, that small freeholders in 17th century England embraced commonwealth thinking in their fight against monarchy and aristocracy...

...They claimed public life in order to disparage it...

...David Lilienthal, for example, wanted the Tennessee Valley Authority to foster employeeowned businesses and local self-sufficiency...

...Nor is it surprising that so many from the Woodstock generation could feel comfortable in the Reagan camp...

...These are the intellectual scores he really wants to settle—with Marx on the one hand, and liberal centralists such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann on the other...

...By way of contrast, Boyte tells the stories of IAF organizing projects in such cities as San Antonio, Baltimore, and Brooklyn that embrace a more encompassing vision...

...It was the lineage as well of Michael Dukakis, to whom the problems of governance were essentially ones of program and technique...

...Boyte might have added that middle-class consumer advocates fell into the same trap, seeing public virtue in no larger terms than a better washer warranty...

...Radicals looked with condescension upon the churches, social clubs, ethnic groupings, small businesses, which were the basis of real life political engagement...

...communities can be benighted just like the federal government can...

...Then too, there have always been pretty good reasons for invoking the larger national community...

...Reaganite economics are the hedonism of the sixties drug culture, transferred to the economic realm...

...many still see small town Babbitts and Bull Connor's dogs behind any mention of local control or state's rights...

...Instead, there was the Peter Pan quality of Dylan's "Mr...

...Under Reagan, Boyte observes, Republicans redefined community in economic terms, as a marketplace in which the only legitimate activity is the pursuit of self-interest...