Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Populism and John Dewey Convergences and Contradictions

Harry C. Boyte

University of Michigan Dewey Lecture, March 29, 2007

Table of Contents

Introduction. 3

Populism and Civic Engagement 5

John Dewey’s “Modernizing Populism”  19

Populism Versus Technocracy in the 2008 election season  35

Notes 39

Introduction

Populism is unsettling the powers of the world and John Dewey can add to the agitation. The term, populist, is most often used to describe leaders who champion “the people” and rail against establishments. In the 1980s, Reagan was called a populist for his calls to “return power to the people,” away from “big government.” The 2006 US elections were interpreted as resurgent populism on the Democratic side. “Incoming Democrats Put Populism Before Ideology,” read the headline in theNew York Times .[1]

Politicians play a role but populism is more than the rhetoric of politicians. It is the “different kind of politics” described in my 2002 Dewey lecture, a democratic, citizen-centered politics for the 21st century that is emerging in many different settings. There is evidence that such a politics is especially attractive to the “Millennial Generation,” born after 1982.[2] I thank the Ginsberg Center for the chance to develop these arguments.

Political knowledge is importantly social and experiential, as Lawrence Goodwyn has put it. My first encounter with deeper meanings of populism came in an unforgettable experience when I was nineteen, working as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964.

One day I was caught by five men and a woman who were members of the Klu Klux Klan. They accused me of being a “communist and a Yankee.” I replied, “I’m no Yankee - my family has been in the South since before the Revolution. And I’m not a communist. I’m a populist. I believe that blacks and poor whites should make joint to do something about the big shots who keep us divided and held down.” For a few minutes we talked about what such a movement might look like. Then they let me go. When he learned of the incident, Martin Luther King, head of SCLC, told me he identified with the populist tradition and assigned me to organize poor whites. Experiences organizing poor whites taught me the enormous and wide impact of the newcollective power of historically marginalized African Americans. Poor whites I worked with constantly remarked that blacks “had really got their act together; we should do the same thing.” For white southern students in the movement, its examples of power offered the possibility of redemption not only for blacks but also for ourselves and our families.

As a democratic movement and philosophy, populism has three elements. It is a movement building popular power to break up unjust concentrations of wealth and power. It is a culture-making movement, sustaining and advancing values of community, liberty, and equality. And it is a civic learning movement, developing people’s civic identities, imaginations, and skills.  The freedom movement had strong populist aspects, in ways that are neglected. Thus, SCLC sponsored citizenship schools across the South, directed by Dorothy Cotton, in which people learned skills of community organizing. Andrew Young once called these “the invisible foundation of the whole movement.”

The silence about populism’s meaning indicates a larger crisis. Populism highlights the feelings of pervasivepowerlessness that today feed the disengagement of citizens from public life and isolation from each other.

Powerlessness generates hopelessness and the substitution of personal solutions for public approaches.  Powerlessness, with its cynicism and fatalism, is a problem behind the problems of our age. Feelings of powerlessness are widespread not only on “the Arab street” but also in suburbs, inner cities, and the University of Michigan. Redressing powerlessness is essential to meet other challenges facing humanity, from global warming and sectarian warfare to growing divisions between rich and poor, from pandemics like AIDS to erosion of communities.

Populism’s focus on culture-change and culture-making -- wedding popular power with egalitarian communal values and civic development -- makes it the alternative to the political projects that shape the world: state-centered democracy, on the one hand, and market-oriented politics -- the “Washington consensus” or “neo-liberalism” - on the other.[3]   It also highlights their core similarity: a deracinated view of the human person, whether “new man” orhomo economicus. [4]  

Populism as a tradition and political philosophy can ground today’s civic ferment in the US. Putting populism and John Dewey in conversation illuminates this potential. John Dewey, a pivotal figure in educational reform and pragmatic scientific inquiry, is a foundational theorist for today’s civic engagement movement in higher education and elsewhere. Dewey sought to counteract trends that remove the human being from living communities. He had a decidedly populist bent. But Dewey also embodied what might be called the democraticaspirations of intellectuals - wish without much power.  A major flaw in today’s civic ferment is an insufficient understanding of the power dynamics involved in culture-making.

In the following I begin with connections between civic engagement efforts and populism, drawing attention to the capacity- building operations of power at the heart of democratic populist movements. Such a concept of power answers the main objection raised by progressives to populism: what about its “dark side,” the way populist-sounding movements can be reactionary or vehicles for demagogues? I then explore the work of Dewey in relation to themes of civic development and power. Dewey had rich insights about civic learning, but a weak theory of power.  I conclude by suggesting how populism, challenging domination by experts outside civic life, can recast the way we think about the period from now until the 2008 election and the meaning of that election.