Relational Power and Citizen Politics Are Key to the Future of Democratic Society

Relational Power and Citizen Politics Are Key to the Future of Democratic Society
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The report from the National Association of Scholars, Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics, claims to have uncovered a diabolical plot, “a major new movement in higher education,” said David Randall, its author. The movement is made up of service-learning, community involvement projects, internships and other student educational experiences outside the classroom. “We call this movement the New Civics,” he said. “By pretending to be old-fashioned civics, the new civics has captured an extraordinary amount of university resources and student time that’s supposed to be devoted to civics education.” Randall argued that the new civics has a hidden agenda. “The movement is one of the most successful tactics by radical left activists from the 1960s to revolutionize America.”

The youth civic education initiative Public Achievement was at the center of the story line. “The ideas of Saul Alinsky have entered into higher education,” says Making Citizens. “The most serious such transfer occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, via [the] Public Achievement movement.” Public Achievement, it proposes, is smaller than service-learning and other forms of community involvement, “but with a harder political edge. Service-learning generally works to forward progressive political ends. Public Achievement works toward these ends with more focus and organization, via the Alinskyite method of community organizing. The Alinskyite tactical model of Public Achievement is what makes the New Civics formidable.” Public Achievement, concludes the report, is “camouflaged Alinskyism.” Public Achievement “relies on the Alinskyite emphasis on power, which reduces politics to the use of force to defeat hostile opponents” (italics in text).

In the spirit of exploring differences and stimulating a robust discussion of citizenship education, Deborah Meier and I invited David Randall to participate in our weekly conversation on Education Week, Bridging Differences,” and it has extended over three weeks. Randall and Meier alike suggested that more needs to be said about Saul Alinsky and his role in our work. I am delighted to respond.

Unilateral power does, indeed, animate Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's last book, published in 1971. The book fed mobilizing approaches to civic action and political campaigns. Mobilizing include the door-to-door canvass, robo-calls, direct mail fundraising, internet mobilizations, and other mass communications methods. Mobilization has taken "us versus them" to new levels of psychological sophistication, using advanced communications techniques based on a formula: find a target or enemy to demonize, stir up emotion with inflammatory language using a script that defines the issue in good-versus-evil terms and shuts down critical thought, and convey the idea that those championing the victims will come to the rescue.

Mobilizing is the approach of the right as well as the left. Thus, as Elizabeth Williamson described in the Wall Street Journal, "Two Ways to Play the 'Alinsky' Card," January 23, 3012, Alinsky's book is widely used by Tea Party activists. Mobilizing approaches culminate in Donald Trump.

As I detail in Everyday Politics (PennPress, 2004) and later in Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert (Kettering Foundation, 2009), based on my experiences in the 2008 Obama campaign, Public Achievement draws from traditions different than mobilizing. These include the early Alinsky and, even more important, the nonviolent citizenship schools of the civil rights movement.

Alinsky always had an iconoclastic tone, but his early efforts were shaped by a movement of anti-communist public intellectuals and activists who focused on countering the dangers of fascism. They hated the Marxist-Leninist division between "mass" and "scientific vanguard."

Alinsky's first book, Reveille for Radicals, reflected this movement. It emphasized the need for popular organizations to be rooted in local community life. "The foundation of a People's Organization is in the communal life of the local people," he said Efforts at democratic change must build from local values, not seek conversion. "The starting of a People's Organization is not a matter of personal choice. You start with the people, their traditions, their prejudices, their habits, their attitudes, and all of those other circumstances that make up their lives."

By the 1960s, Alinsky had radically shifted his view. Rules for Radicals was an attempt to create a realistic "primer for radicals." The irony was that what he called "the world as it is” embodied the estrangement of mass consumer society and the existentially uprooted person. As Sandy Horwitt described in Let Them Call Me a Rebel, Alinsky rejected place as a civic site. "For more than a decade, as people scattered to the suburbs, he had talked about the declining importance of the old geographical neighborhood."

Alinsky's approach had always stressed beginning with "the world as it is." But by the 1960s, Alinsky's depiction of the "world as it is" denuded political life of its cultural and normative dimensions. In the "world as it is," he said, "morality is to a significant degree a rationalization of the position which you are occupying in the power pattern of a particular time." In Rules, Alinsky proposes a strategy to unite the "have nots" and the "have some, want mores" in alliance against the "haves." This was a reductive view of politics, power, and the human person. It made his book a bible for mobilizing politics.

Mobilizing politics has the unilateral view of power which Making Citizens describes. This view has come even to structure the way "nonviolence" is defined, as a strategy, not a philosophy of human interaction in the vein of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Gene Sharp led in this shift. He argues in The Politics of Nonviolent Action that "Power may be briefly defined as the capacity to control the behavior of others. Political power is that kind of social power which is wielded for political objectives." In nonviolence as strategy, the point is resistance. In This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, a book which has won rave reviews from prominent figures on the left, Mark Engler and Paul Engler build directly on Sharp. They propose the aim of nonviolent strategy is winning support from one's friends and polarizing them against one's enemies. "This is not an unintended consequence. It is central to how [disruptive actions] work."

Working with a team, I started Public Achievement in 1990 with the aim of countering mobilizing politics and unilateral power. We called the alternative "citizen politics." Citizen politics retrieves the skills of association which Alexis de Tocqueville described in the 1830s. “In democratic peoples, associations must take the place of the powerful particular persons,” he wrote in the classic, Democracy in America. “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.”

Citizen politics teaches how to work across partisan and other differences on constructive civic projects that build an inclusive, more egalitarian civic life, across partisan divides. Public Achievement also has the nonviolent, relational view of power I learned in the civil rights movement and saw in cross-partisan strands of community organizing. Relational power is based on the concept that power interactions, even in situations of inequality, always involve changes on both sides. Power is interactive and evolving. It is "power to," the capacity to act.

These features of Public Achievement won it support from conservative foundations like the Bradley Foundation as well as progressive foundations like the Kellogg Foundation. In a feature story on CBS Evening News, May 24, 1992, Scott Pelley contrasted citizen politics with the polarized debates and popular rage in the public culture. Public Achievement was praised by the bipartisan National Commission on Civic Renewal.

In the age of Trump and escalating protests against him, we need relational power and citizen politics more than ever. I am not naive about the obstacles. I am also convinced that nonviolent relational power and citizen politics are essential not only for civic education.

They are key to rebuilding the civic life of our democratic society.

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