Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Populism and Civic Engagement

 “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for; nobody else is gonna rescue us.”

Civil rights song by Dorothy Cotton, Director of SCLC Citizenship Education Program, inspired by “Poem for South African Women” by June Jordan

 “The world is flooded with laws and policies, councils and committees. It is tragic that most of these deal with the structures of society, rather than the heart of society - the people. But the eternal truth of the democratic faith is that the solution always lies with the people.”

Marie Ström, Citizens at the Centre, IDASA HIV/AIDS training manual, adapted from Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

Signs of a shift from structure to civic agency are multiplying across the world, in many scholarly disciplines and fields of practice. The awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace prize to Mohammed Yunus for his pioneering work in micro-lending in Bangladesh and elsewhere is a case in point. Micro-lending is based on a deep respect for the capacities of poor people, especially poor women, to become agents of their own development and co-creators of their communities.  In 2006 in South Africa and Lesotho, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), a leading democracy group across Africa, trained local government officials and HIV/AIDS workers to think of themselves as “organizers not bureaucrats,” to conceive of “citizens at the centre,” co-creators of community solutions to the AIDS pandemic, and to see democracy mainly as a society, not a state.[5]

In the United States, scholars of civic initiatives such as Peter Levine, Cynthia Gibson, Carmen Sirianni, and Lew Friedland, among others, have chronicled multiple signs of civic ferment with a sense of co-creative civic agency.  In higher education these include strands of the service learning movement represented by the Ginsberg Center and efforts to strengthen public engagement such as Imagining America, the Diverse Democracy efforts of AAC&U and the American Democracy Project of AASCU. Broad based organizing efforts - cross partisan civic organizations affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, Gamaliel Foundation, PICO and DART - include more than 180 groups, several thousand congregations, and several million families. They often use the language of the citizen as “co-creator.” Many forms of “deliberative democracy” with a strong view of civic agency have developed in efforts associated with Public Agenda, the National Issues Forums, and the Study Circle Resource Center. There are large civic environmental initiatives like the National Wildlife Federation’s organizing of a community rooted conservation movement. We have found that Public Achievement, the youth civic education and engagement initiative whose central philosophical conception of citizenship is based on SCLC’s song, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” has broad resonance in many societies, from Northern Ireland and Scotland to many Balkan countries, Palestine, Israel and South Africa. Public Achievement’s growth suggests the potential global appeal of democratic populism.

All these express populist themes of civic power, culture change, and civic learning. Populism is emerging in electoral politics in the US. As Peter

Levine has noted, “It appears that the 2008 presidential campaign will offer several strong but contrasting flavors of populism.” Republican Sam Brownback and Democrats John Edwards and Barack Obama all voice versions of populism. For instance, Obama argues that “We are going to re-engage in our democracy in a way that we haven't done for some time.” He says his campaign is “not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation…It must be about us. It must be about what we can do together.”[6]  

The question is, how can all this ferment begin to come together in a movement?

In the last century and a half, there have been three broad democratic populist movements in the United States, with counterparts elsewhere in the world. The first emerged in the late nineteenth century among small farmers.  Populism resurfaced as a broad movement during the 1930s to defend democracy and to mobilize civic energies to meet the challenges of the Great Depression and fascism. The “people,” seen by intellectuals in the 1920s as the repository of crass materialism and parochialism, were rediscovered as a source of strength and hope. Many key architects of the third populist upsurge, the black freedom movement, had roots in the 1930s and 1940s’ movement. 

I believe that we are on the threshold of a fourth great populist movement. Each movement builds on earlier ones and also takes a character reflecting the challenges and resources of an age. Today’s best democratic understanding of populism weds civic life to organizing for people’s power. It is a movement with a cooperative, egalitarian, pluralistic ethos and civic learning features, strengthening communities in an age when local communities are everywhere endangered.  It can be called “civic populism.”  To make the case, it is necessary to analyze the legacy.

The Historical Meaning of Populism: [7] Academic and left-wing critics commonly have charged that populism’s idea of who makes change - “the people” -- is a loose and ill-defined compared to the rigor of class-based or interest group politics. Many on the left also charge that populism isreformist , focused on practical ends, with only vague long term goals like “breaking up concentrations of wealth and power.”[8]

If one is skeptical about sweeping blueprints for the future or precise definitions of who should lead the process of change, these features are strengths. Thus, the porousness of the concept of “the people” allows inclusive understandings when movements seek allies and when organizers have a democratic orientation. Similarly, populism’s practicality - a “politics of getting things done,” as Stephanie DeWitt has put it - comes from its grounding in the gritty concerns and everyday problems of living communities.[9]

Populism’s themes reflect a different way of looking at the world than structures and blueprints, as Marie Ström conveys in her quote above, a language of what Mary Dietz calls “roots.” Sheldon Wolin argued that populism is the “culture of democracy” itself:

Historically [populism] has stood for the efforts of ordinary citizens and would-be citizens to survive in a society dominated by those whose control

over the main concentrations of wealth and power has enabled them to command the forms of technical knowledge and skilled labor that have steadily become the hallmark of so-called modernizing societies. A culture of survival is very different from a… market-culture littered by the disposable remains of yesterday and shaped by manipulation of attitudes and desires…

A culture of survival is conditioned by the experiences of hard times in a changing world...of drought, depressed markets, high railroad and grain storage rates, and manipulated currencies… Its practices issued from taking care of living beings and mundane artifacts, from keeping them in the world by use and memory. To sustain the institutions of family, community, church, school and local economy demanded innovation as well as conservation…

The reason why democracy should be grounded in a populist culture is not because those who live it are pure, unprejudiced, and unfailingly altruistic. Rather, it is because it is a culture that has not been defined by the urge to dominate and that has learned that existence is a cooperative venture over time. [10]

The values of community and equality that Wolin notes are central to populism are not unique to groups struggling for survival. They can also be sustained by the anchoring institutions of civic life in middle class communities, such as family, congregation, cultural groups, schools, or local businesses with community roots. And these values can be articulated at every level of society, as in the case of the cultural workers of the Great Depression, later discussed. But Wolin is right in the intuition that egalitarian communal values often find sustenance in communities “struggling for survival,” like nineteenth century farming communities, or African American communities that resisted the brutalities of segregation by forming networks of self-help and mutual aid, or today’s new immigrant communities trying to preserve some sense of heritage in the cultural maelstrom of a degraded, hyper-competitive, consumerist and individualist society.  The insights from cultures of survival sharply challenge the condescension of elites, and, as I will argue, recast conventional discussions of racism and identity politics. 

“To-day is election day,” John Dewey wrote from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to his wife, Alice, traveling in Paris in 1894.  “I should like to have voted for a few Populists…but the atmosphere [around here] looks very republican.” Through his life, Dewey referred positively to the Populist Party, formed in 1892. Thus he favorably quoted Fred E. Haynes - whom he described as “one of the most careful and thorough of the historians of American political life” -- as saying “with great justice” that whatever limits there might have been in features of their platforms, the leaders of the Populist Party were “Fundamentally sound in their opposition to the growing power of wealth…”[11]

Populism included the electoral party to which Dewey referred that went by the name of Populist, or People’s Party, formed in 1892 from the merger of farmers cooperatives, the Knights of Labor, and other groups. But it was a broader movement and philosophy than a party. “People’s politics” has

roots that reach back to Greek and Roman popular revolts. Populism drew specifically from eighteenth and nineteenth century traditions such as Jeffersonian democracy and, in Europe, Romanticism and Scandinavian folk schools. As a modern politics by the name, populism took shape in both Russia and the United States in late nineteenth century agrarian movements. These blended forward looking themes with traditions of “the commons,” cooperative rural practices of deliberation and public work, and working class mutual aid traditions.[12]

Historian Gianna Pomata has detailed how Russian populism crystallized Romantic themes in European intellectual life which held that “a way into the future could be found that would not destroy the ancient folkways but rather give them new value and meaning…The Populists advocated the defense of the Russian agrarian tradition and of Russian village life, with its spirit of equality and solidarity.” In the twentieth century, populism gained renewed support after the October revolution of 1917 as a potent alternative to Stalinism in the Soviet Union. In the mid-thirties it was ruthlessly suppressed by Stalin, who saw populists as his chief enemies. The Stalinist doctrine advanced the necessity “to annihilate the influence of Populism as the worst of the enemies of Marxism and of the whole cause of the proletariat.” As Pomata noted, “An impenetrable silence fell on populism” that affected subsequent European intellectual and political life as well as Soviet historiography.[13]

The memory of populism was radically attenuated, but Pomata also observed similarities in Russian students of the 1870s and activist students like herself in Milan, Paris, and Berlin who “returned to the people” a hundred years later. The parallel, as she said, was the desire to find “...a more authentic culture and the belief that this culture was to be found among ‘the people,’ in the heritage of memory, experience, and struggle…”[14]

In the US in the nineteenth century, the Populist Party grew from two decades of movement building in the rural South and Midwest that began after the Civil War, in 1866, with the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, continuing with a huge network of cooperatives in the 1880s across the South and Midwest in the farmers’ alliances, black and white. The alliances shared with the Grange a strong emphasis on civic development, organizing neighborhood gatherings, newspapers, lecture circuits, and reading circles. Alliance economic efforts aimed at freeing farmers from the domination of banks and railroads through cooperative purchasing and marketing and produced policy ideas like progressive income taxes and easier credit.  Organizing generated what the Lawrence Goodwyn has called a “movement culture,” based on an ethos of respect, cooperation, self-help and a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” to replace the dog eat dog capitalism of the late 19th century. The farmers’ movement included tentative interracial alliances, always in tension with the ancient legacy of racial bigotry that was a defining element of southern culture.[15]   The black historian Manning Marable recounts his family’s oral history about his great-grandfather:

During the 1880s, many black and white farmers in Alabama joined the Alliance, a radical agrarian movement against the conservative business and planter elite. Morris was attracted to the movement because of its racial egalitarianism. Throughout Georgia and Alabama, black and white Populist Party members held joint picnics, rallies, and speeches. Populist candidate Reuben F. Kalb actually won the state gubernatorial contest in 1894 [though electoral fraud prevented his taking office]. On the periphery of this activity, in his small rural town, Morris Marable became sheriff with the support of blacks and whites. He was intensely proud of his office, and completed his duties with special dispatch…Morris carried a small Bible in one coat pocket at all times and a revolver under his coat. In either case, he always planned to be prepared. [16]

Populism has many ripples. Thus, for instance, David Mathews, a formative voice in the Kettering Foundation for which he serves as president and the broader deliberative democracy movement, proudly traces his family’s political lineage to the same movement as Marable. His ancestors were leaders in the Alabama and Texas branches of the Populist Party. In the 1898-1899 session of the Alabama legislature, his grandfather's father, James Waldrum Mathews, opposed the planter-sponsored constitution that effectively disenfranchised poor black and white farmers.[17]

At the core of democratic populist movements is a philosophy of civic independence that distinguishes populism from either socialism or unbridled market capitalism. As Eric Foner has observed, the relative absence of a strong socialist or labor party did not signal a void, but rather the presence of something else. “Precapitalist culture…was the incubator of resistance to capitalist development in the United States,” wrote Foner:

“The world of the artisan and small farmer persisted in some parts of the United States into the twentieth century, and powerfully influenced American radical movements…These movements inherited an older republican tradition hostile to large accumulation of property, but viewing small property as the foundation of economic and civic autonomy…Not the absence of non-liberal ideas but the persistence of a radical vision resting on small property inhibited the rise of socialist ideologies.[18]

Themes of civic liberty have run through every democratic movement in America, from labor organizing of the 19th century to the women movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

America, like Europe, has also experienced amnesia about populism as a serious political and intellectual project. Elite condescension toward “the plain people” has been a significant factor. As Goodwyn described inThe Democratic Promise, progressive historians by the 1960s had reduced “populism” to a caricature of backward-looking nativism and parochialism, a portrayal with virtually no relation to the actual movement. 

Populist movements also speak a different language than modern, “scientifically minded” elites. They are culturally based more than structurally based. Their agent, “the people,” is not historically indeterminate, but it is a different kind of category than “class” or “interest groups,” a different idiom than charts and statistics of modern social science, a different politics than political campaigns with their focus groups

and poll-tested sound bytes. Populism challenges the culturally uprooted, individualized thinking characteristic of professional elites and systems, left and right. Populist movements are narrative. They grow from the sense that an elite is endangering the values, identities, and practices of a culturally constituted group of people, its memories, origins, common territory and ways of life.  “People” is understood through language, stories, symbols, oral traditions, foods, music, ways of remembering. A people may have a moment of birth, sacred texts, foundational spaces. A people can also have dual identities, as conveyed in W.E.B. Du Bois’ great work,The Two Souls of Black Folks.

The cultural themes of populism always are contested. But in democratic populism, as people defend their ways of life they develop in democratic ways. They become more conscious of other groups’ interests, more inclusive in their understandings of “the people,” and more expansive in their vision of future possibilities. Anyone involved in broad organizing or movements like the sixties’ freedom struggle has seen this.

If attended to, such cultural discontents provide immense resources for democratic change in an era like ours, when egalitarian and community values are under assault by marketplace dynamics and cultural forces around the world fueled by growing disparities of wealth and power. How populism develops depends on who organizes its discontents. The questions of which elites threaten the people, what strategies are available, who the people include, all are dynamic and open. A populist perspective helps to make sense of the “culture wars.” It also shows the need for a populist alternative to the “populism” on the right that purports to champion rooted culture but leaves marketplace dynamics untouched, and “populism” on the left, which challenges marketplace triumphalism but reproduceshomo economicus in its theory of the “new man and woman.”

Culture theory on the right: Buffers against modernity. The last generation’s conservative politics in America has been associated with the theory that “culture,” what conservatives understand to be ways of life that teach responsibility, loyalty, connection, initiative, and self-reliance, are under siege in the modern world.  Cultural values and their foundations are especially endangered by government and by professions that turn people into clients or consumers of services.  Such views grow from a long tradition of conservative thought. Dating from writers like as Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke, the English conservative who championed “little platoons” of communal life against the modern age, conservatives in this vein have seen community-rooted settings as the bulwark of liberty and tradition against the winds of modernity. Robert Nisbet, a pivotal figure for cultural conservatives, argued that Nazi Germany was the culminating fusion of state power and modernist culture, destroying autonomous local structures:

“All autonomous organizations were destroyed and made illegal: professions, service clubs, voluntary mutual aid groups, fraternal associations, even philatelist and musical societies. Such groups were regarded, and correctly, by the totalitarian government as potential sources of future resistance.[19]

Nisbet also emphasized dangers of the capitalist marketplace. In his view, the market celebrates an acquisitive individualism that erodes the authority of the church, the family, and the neighborhood. It corrupts civic character, public honor, accountability, and respect for others. Capitalism alone produces a "sand heap of disconnected particles of humanity," he said. But he had scant ideas about how to counter marketplace dynamics. Like his conservative followers, he overwhelmingly focused on “big government.”[20]

By the beginning of the 1980s, conservatives such as Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus, co-directors of the Mediating Structures Project of the American Enterprise Institute, were giving practical application to the idea of the colonizing, destructive power of government. To Berger and Neuhaus, big government “aspires to an all-comprehending jurisdiction.” Acting out of its bureaucratic imperatives, justified by ideologies of equality, justice, and the public good, the state tends inevitably to expand its power, scope, and authority at the expense of such small-scale “structures of daily life” as families, churches, neighborhoods, and cultural and voluntary groups. Stripped of any attachment to particularity of background - religion, race, or group identity - the state is the ideal expression of professional culture and the “general will.” But there is terrible cost: “A growing trend toward legally enforced symbolic sterility in public space” that denies the authority of communities to make public their traditions and values; the weakening of family and small-group bonds and the widening intrusions of experts and professionals into the most private realms of life; and, accompanying such processes, the erosion of those buffers that protect the individual against what they called “the mega-structures” of modern society.[21] They also despaired, that nothing could change the mega-structures. Peter Berger voiced such pessimism, writing with Brigitte Berger:

“We are quite capable of imagining forms of Gemeinshaft that we would find more appealing than the American class system. Unfortunately these are not realistic options…the realistic question is the extent to which the totalitarian tendencies of [government] may still be curbed.” [22]

In their perspective, mediating structures are defensive buffers against the modern world.  Intellectuals with a conservative cultural bent such as David Brooks, Michael Joyce, Bill Schambra, Bob Woodson, and Mary Ann Glendon have developed these themes. In their view, mediating structures of family, religious congregation, cultural and ethnic group, and neighborhood are threatened by social engineering and by liberalism that defines freedom as escape from communal restraint.

It is impossible to understand the “culture wars” without taking into account these cultural arguments, the anxieties and discontents they address, if often defensively, and the lack of progressive response. The pseudo-populist argument of Thomas Frank that working class whites, befuddled by cultural appeals, ignored their “self-interests,” defined economically, in voting for Republicans reduces culture to false consciousness. His book,What’s Wrong with Kansas?, was a hit with Democrats after the 2004 elections. But its popularity on the left shows the problem.

Republicans have been making hay out of Democratic obliviousness to cultural discontents and their hidden power dynamics for a generation by speaking in populist accents - the reason for the journalistic equation of “populism” with Republicans like Reagan and Bush. Thus, in the 1980 election, Reagan declared that, “Thousands of towns and neighborhoods have seen their peace disturbed by bureaucrats and social planners through busing, questionable educational programs, and attacks on family.” In his words, it was a time for “an end to giantism” and “a return of power to the people.”  Similar views were voiced by Michael Joyce in the fall of 1992.  Joyce said that “Americans are sick and tired of being told they’re incompetent to run their own affairs. They’re sick and tired of being treated as passive clients by arrogant, paternalistic social scientists, therapists, professionals and bureaucrats.”[23]

“Populists” on the right in the US, Europe and elsewhere have put progressives on the defensive. To understand why requires a look at cultural theory on the left.

Culture on the left: Brake on critical, cosmopolitan consciousness. In recent decades in the US, left oriented citizen action has often invoked “populism,” reflected in Frank’s approach and many issue groups’ self-description. But its approach has also been highly economistic. Put differently, in recent years left populism has had scant connection to cultural wellsprings of American democracy or discontents about disruption of communal ties. As Dana Fisher shows inActivism, Inc., a disconnection from community cultures on the issue-based left and election campaigns is embodied in techniques like the door to door canvass.  It flows from a cultural stance: progressive activism, however named, has reflected an anti-traditionalist cultural theory descended from the Enlightenment, with new expressions in the culturally uprooted activism of the late sixties.

From Enlightenment theorists of the 18th century onward, the tendency on the left was to see the sundering of people’s communal, particular, and historical identities - their “roots,” in the words of the French philosopher Simone Weil[24] - as an indispensable, if perhaps tragic, prerequisite of cosmopolitan consciousness. Left intellectuals proposed, in place of community weakened or lost, community based on “new relationships.”[25] While they were eloquent about human dislocations, the dominant trend in the views of both Karl Marx and Frederich Engels was to see workers’ break with rooted, communal traditions as necessary for progress. Marx called for a “radical rupture” with particular identities such as religion, place, and ethnicity. For Engels, “tradition is the great retarding force…but being merely passive is sure to be broken down.”[26]  

Gianna Pomata described the differences between populist and socialist intellectual currents in Europe. “The Populists called into question one of the most basic tenets of European political thought - the belief in progress…Populism and Marxism thus came to represent two contrasting positions.” This difference included differing conceptions of the future and also of agency. The peasant class which Marx argued “represents barbarism inside civilization” was for Populists “the leadership in the struggle for a better future.”[27]

If such views simply reflected notions of nineteenth century theorists they would make little difference now. But they have continued to shape the progressive imagination. On the socialist left, the view of cosmopolitan consciousness as a process of breaking with local, particular, national, and traditional identities has been the pattern, with exceptions like William Morris or Martin Buber here and there. It informed Michael Harrington’s view of a “rational humanist moral code,” which he saw replacing “traditional moral values.” T he socialist view was succinctly summarized by Stanley Aronowitz in his essay entitled, appropriately enough, “The Working Class: A Break with the Past.” According to Aronowitz, all particular identities of “race and nationality and sex and skill and industry” are obstacles to the development of cosmopolitan and oppositional consciousness.

Such sentiments also infused liberal thought. The cultural stance of liberalism has held that enlightenment comes from intellectuals at the center, not the backwaters. Garry Wills expressed such a view in his critique of proposals for decentralized power. “The smaller the locale, the stricter the code; and this code…has always been at odds with the social openness, the chances for initiative, praised by liberals.” In his reading, “What our history actually reveals at the community level is local conformity, rigid mores, religious and other prejudice, aristocracy and control.”[28]

In the 1960s, these views became intertwined with generational experiences to produce a sweeping alienation from mainstream America, its groups, symbols, stories, and traditions. Alienation found expression in the slogan, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!”, or the sophisticated but disastrous generational statement by Paul Cowan of 1968,The Making of an UnAmerican. After the 1960s, a new generation of young activists worked to get beyond disdain for Americans. But their issue-focused approaches which came to characterize most progressive activism had little cultural rootedness.[29]

Cultural estrangement hides power and sustains technocracy. Technocratic politics - domination by experts removed from a common civic life -- has spread throughout contemporary society like a silent disease. It is a politics without a name, presenting itself as an objective set of truths, practices, and procedures and, on the left, informed by values such as social and economic justice, equal opportunity, and human rights.  However well intentioned, technocratic politics turns groups of people into abstract categories. It decontextualizes “problems” from the life of communities. It privatizes the world and creates cultures based on scarcity. It erodes the experience of equal respect. All these features can be seen in modern political campaigns, with their “outsider” flavor, as if candidates are marketing to voters as customers choosing among different brands of toothpaste and posing themselves as something of a combination between super-hero and American Idol, whose election will solve all our problems.[30]

There are also many democratic stirrings that do not fit the conventional left-right spectrum, as civic scholars have described. The question is, how can such stirrings generate a larger, self-conscious movement? I believe a deeper theory of culture and power is an essential element.

Toward a Populist Theory of Culture and Power: Alternative voices in recent years offer material for moving beyond static views of culture and for developing a populist theory of culture and power based on appreciation of the immense resources within communities and societies. In contrast with progressive theories of community cultures as brakes on cosmopolitan consciousness, a new generation of social historians concerned with the actual development of popular movements - how it is that ordinary people, steeped in experiences of subordination, develop the courage, spirit, and confidence to assert themselves -- has produced a rendering of the roots of movements with far more nuance.[31] Social history draws attention to the contradictory quality of community settings and cultural traditions, full of oppositional currents, democratic elements, and insurgent themes as well as hierarchical and repressive ones. Social historians have described the ways in which powerless groups draw inspiration from cultural elements that many write off as simply oppressive.

Sara Evans and I, drawing on such social history as well as our experiences as southerners in the civil rights movement - white southerners in the movement, in my experience, had to come to terms with the ironies of culture in a way that many northerners could avoid - conceptualized the democratic potentials of culture with the idea of free spaces.[32] The concept aims to show how powerless groups draw on and transform inherited resources as they develop public skills, public identities, and power.

We defined free spaces as places in the life of communities with public qualities, in which powerless groups have capacity for self-organization, for engagement with alternative ideas, for development of public skills and identities. These entail new self-confidence, self-respect and concern for the commonwealth. In free spaces, people create culture. They draw confidence from inherited traditions and rework symbols, ideas, and values to challenge ruling ideas. Free spaces highlight what can be called the prophetic imagination as an alternative to outside critic. The prophetic stance finds in a society’s cultural repertoire many treasures for developing new visions of the future and for reconstructing the story of who “the people” are and how they came to be.[33]

Thus, for instance, the historian E.P. Thompson in his work,The Making of the English Working Class , described places such as taverns and sectarian churches in which working people found space for intellectual life and democratic self organizations, separate from the gentry and the crown. [34]   Women in 19th century conservative but publicly active women’s organizations defined by domestic roles developed the confidence and power that laid groundwork for 20th century suffrage. In the long history of the African American freedom movement, blacks forged spaces for culture making even in overwhelmingly oppressive settings, such as the slave system.  Christianity was taught to slaves by slave owners in an effort to break their ties with African roots and socialize them into passive, docile roles. Yet Christianity provided rich materials to use in fashioning strategies and language for everyday resistance (for instance work songs and Gospel music) as well as far ranging radical insurgent visions of a transformed racial and political order (such as the Exodus narrative). Ideals of freedom

and equality from the Declaration of Independence were also appropriated by a long line of black leaders.[35]

A dynamic theory of culture that can be called populist is now appearing in anthropological and development literature. Thus, Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, editors ofCulture and Public Action, a splendid recent book from UN and World Bank experiences in development work across the world, emphasize the cultural dynamism that we sought to convey with the idea of free spaces.  It challenges individualist, economistic, and technocratic frameworks that dominated the development literature.  Rao and Walton define culture as “about relationality - the relationships among individuals within groups, among groups, and between ideas and perspectives.”  This definition draws attention to locally rooted cultures and to their foundations in families, cultural groups, congregations and the like, and also to larger cultural patterns in societies developing over long periods of time. As they put it “Culture is concerned with identity, aspiration, symbolic exchange, coordination, and structures, and practices that serve relational ends such as ethnicity, ritual, heritage, norms, meanings and beliefs.”[36]

They build on James Scott’sSeeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.  Scott shows how “high modernism,” infused with egalitarian ideals and combined with state power and weak civil society, has devastated local cultures, mores, and relationships all over the world. The irony is that this process has been carried out by progressives with the best of liberal, egalitarian intentions.[37]

InCulture and Public Action, the authors argue that development workers, to be successful, must shift from “one size fits all” technocratic interventions and instead recognize and tap the ingenuity and cultural resources of ordinary people in communities. Amartya Sen and Arjun Appadurai in particular also stress the dynamic, future-oriented qualities of culture, understood as meaning systems at multiple levels.

Thus, Arjun Appadurai argues that, “It is in culture that ideas of the future, as much as of those about the past, are embedded and nurtured.” Combining insights drawn from recent cultural theory with deeply appreciative participatory action research conducted with an affiliate of Shack Dwellers International, a poor people’s housing organization, in Mumbai, India, Appadurai develops the concept of the “capacity to aspire” on the part of the poor. He proposes that, “in strengthening the capacity to aspire, conceived as a cultural capacity especially among the poor…the poor could find the resources required to contest and alter their conditions of their own poverty.” Emphasizing the elements of future orientation in culture challenges conventional theory. As Appadurai puts it, “For more than a century, culture has been viewed as a matter of one or another kind of pastness—the key words here are habit, custom, heritage, or tradition.” Thus economists have had franchise over “development,” over the future. “Culture is opposed to development, as tradition is opposed to newness and habit to calculation.” 

In contrast to the tendency to see culture in static and past-oriented terms, Appadurai stresses culture’s open, interactive, fluid, dynamic, and created

qualities. People’s capacity to aspire is tied to “voice,” the development of power and recognition that people gain through sustained organizing. “Voice must be expressed in terms of actions and performances which have local cultural force.” The development of voice also means learning how to negotiate larger contexts. Such a process, in turn, can “change the terms of [their] recognition, indeed the cultural framework itself.”  To organize for voice and recognition requires cultural action and savvy strategic maneuvering. “There is no shortcut to empowerment. It has to take some local cultural form to have resonance, mobilize adherents, and capture the public space of debate.”[38]

A dynamic theory of culture suggests a capacity-oriented, relational theory of power.

Power as relational and generative : In the free spaces of populist movements, people have an experience of power that confounds conventional views. Most power theories are based on models of power as one way; the term “power” is largely synonymous with force, control, and rule. Power theory is drawn from scarce resource systems like land or money (or the hyper-competitive scramble for prestige and position in universities).  Such a view is present, for instance, in Steven Lukes’ classic work,Power: A Radical View. Lukes takes what he calls a “three -dimensional view of power, illuminating not only power to get others to act and power to prevent action but also power to shape language which makes certain issues relevant and suppresses others.[39]  

Here, power is one directional. Even power theories that are more relational usually conceive power as imposedon people. More recent theory in critical studies has described the ways in which dominating power relationships are “encoded” in languages, practices, and identities. Michel Foucault is especially influential in this school of thought. Such power theory is rich with insight, but it pays little attention to how human beings deepen democratic agency, the capacity to act to shape their worlds.[40]   Academic theories rarely see power as what peopledo in reciprocal interactions to get things done. More, there is no conception of the potential democratic power embedded in community life or in the motifs, stories, symbols and narratives of the larger society. Today’s critical theorists focus on critique and neglect power as cultural resources that can be drawn upon and developed to challenge and transform dominant powers and relations. 

It would be naïve to ignore either extreme concentrations of power or power’s sometimes brutalizing operations in the modern world.[41] Here, the most effective local organizing of recent years offers considerable insights. Leaders in broad based organizing such as Ed Chambers, Gerald Taylor, Mike Gecan, Sister Christine Stephens, Ernesto Cortes, Rev. Johnnie Ray Youngblood, and Marian Dixon, as well as democratic theorists such as Benjamin Barber, Rom Coles, and Alison Kadlec, have sought to develop relational theories of power and politics. Organizers go back to the root of the word, power (frompoder, meaning to be able). They point out the sharp limits of academic theories of power because of their lack of attention to relationality. They argue that if one thinks about power as the capacity to act, not as what is done to someone else, power is always best conceived as

“two-way,” even in situations of considerable inequality. As Ed Chambers put it inRoots of Radicals, a compilation of insights from such organizing, “People who can understand the concerns of others and mix those concerns with their own agenda have access to a power source denied to those who can push only their own interests…There can be no creative power without some acknowledgement of the other’s interests, just as there can be no healthy love if the self is wholly lost in concern for the other.”[42] For poor and working class people, organizing for power in these terms means changing power dynamics to be more interactive and relational with positional leaders in politics and business, full of tension but also productive results. It also involves developing the public capacities of relational leaders, often women, at the center of community life.[43]

A populist theory of power creates a larger context than does broad-based organizing because its goal is building a movement, not simply organizations. Populist theory perforce must analyze cultural dynamics in the larger society, as well as interpersonal and local dynamics of particular organizations. Cultural power, like information power, highlights power’s generative, open qualities. Such power cannot be conceived adequately as a zero-sum force, powerover. Cultural power is powerto create -- identities, narratives, practices. It can involve innovation or restoration.  At the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, we have expressed the generative dimensions of power through the concept of citizenship aspublic work , highlighting the productive, not simply distributive, qualities of politics.[44]   A view of the generative qualities of power also explains the potential catalytic power dynamics in government and professions, where power is also a nonfinite relationship. In such systems of cultural and information-constituted authority, power can be dramatically increased as knowledge is pooled and cultural identities and relationships are valued and brought into a public mix.

A dynamic, capacity-oriented, and culturally rooted approach to power offers possibilities for moving beyond dead end debates. For instance, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in South Africa, read as a dynamic, culture-creating populist movement, offers an alternative to the wars surrounding identity politics. The BCM tied the development of pride in African traditions and cultures to community organizing and political activism. Xolela Mangcu, the main intellectual heir to Black Consciousness Movement founder Steven Biko, argues that the BCM was not “essentialist.”  It did not believe in the unique virtues of blacks. Biko’s key allies included the radical Afrikaaner theologian Beyers Naudé. Rather, Biko and others stressed communal and egalitarian values in African cultures as resources for challenging not only apartheid but also the dominant Western culture of materialism, individualism, and domination broadly. Their arguments closely paralleled Sheldon Wolin’s.[45]

This approach creates a populist alternative both to the identity politics widespread across the globe, and also to the posture of “objectivity” found among technocratic elites, left and right. It appreciates democratic and communal resources to be found in “cultures of survival” with which to mount challenges to the throwaway, isolating cultural currents of our time,

without claiming these cultures’ unique virtue. Our colleague Atum Azzahir, an outstanding public intellectual, founder of the Powderhorn/Phillips Cultural Wellness Center, begins with African themes and also makes much the same point about “indigenous cultures,” including European.[46]   The Cultural Wellness Center takes a sharply different approach than conventional “service delivery” efforts that focus on poor people’s deficits, needs and deficiencies. It emphasizes health as a civic and cultural question, not simply an individual question. Its philosophy of health is based on a deep appreciation for ordinary people’s capacities, the resiliency and resources to be found in communities, and the health-generating dimensions of cultural identities. The Center, like other Minnesota efforts such as William Doherty’s Families and Democracy Partnerships and the Neighborhood Learning Community, both later described, radically rethink professional work in civic terms that emphasize cultural grounding for public action and also the now untapped abundance of energies and civic talents in a sense frozen by one-way, technocratic patterns of service delivery. Such approaches open immense new strategic possibilities for crossing the conservative liberal divide in areas such as childhood development, health, education and other human service fields.[47]

They also suggest both the strengths and the limits of the work of John Dewey.