Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

John Dewey’s “Modernizing Populism”

John Dewey’s biographer Alan Ryan locates Dewey’s views and identifications in the broader populist strand of American political and cultural history:

Although Dewey was not in the Marxist sense an enthusiast for class warfare, he had the old populist inclination to divide the world into the privileged and the people… the upholders of the partial interests of particular social groups and the upholders of the interests of ‘the people.’ He did not espouse a backward-looking populism or hanker after agrarian radicalism…he was a forward-looking, modernizing populist.” [48]

Dewey’s philosophy, pragmatism, and his commitments to “democracy as a way of life” advanced themes in the populist tradition, especially civic learning. At the same time, since democratic populism, based on a dynamic sense of cultural resources, dissolves sharp distinctions between “backward-looking,” on the one hand, and “forward-looking” and “modernizing,” on the other, Ryan’s characterization of Dewey’s populism in these terms also hints at a key limit of Dewey’s theory.

Dewey and civic development. Dewey saw Americans as a people forged from democratic diversity, and America’s democratic traditions as experimental, open, practical, and based in values of universal importance. One of the least plausible charges against him is that his philosophy was aboutmeans with no concern forends . “I make no apology for linking what is said in this chapter with the name of Thomas Jefferson,” Dewey began “Democracy and America,” the conclusion ofFreedom and Culture, defending active democracy against both Marxist and conservative alternatives.

Dewey championed the country’s founding ideals. “[Jefferson] wrote ‘these truths are self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” Dewey said, “His fundamental beliefs remain unchanged in substance if we forget all special associations with the wordNature and speak instead of ideal aims and values to be realized - aims which, although ideal…are backed by something deep and indestructible in the needs and demands of humankind.”[49]

Populism is based on faith in the intelligence and talents of common men and women everywhere. Respect for the unrealized democratic potentialities in human beings is a powerful, admirable theme that runs through the core of Dewey’s philosophy.  Human development was at the center of his first serious statement on democracy, his essay “The Ethics of Democracy,” written in 1888. Democracy, according to Dewey, involves an ethical ideal, not simply a government. Its aim should be the development of the potentials of each individual. “Democracy means thepersonality is the first and final reality,” Dewey wrote. “It admits that the chief stimuli and encouragement to the realization of personality come from society; but it holds, nonetheless, to the fact that personality cannot be procured for any one, however degraded and feeble, by anyone else, however wise and strong.”[50]

Dewey here introduced a focus on the importance ofwork as a source of development and democracy, extremely unusual among political theorists, along with a sharp criticism of most people’s degraded experiences of work. “Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political…”[51]

Dewey was proudly, though far from uncritically, “American,” but he extended his emphasis on human democratic development across the world. Indeed, he had strong appreciation for the insights and contributions of many other societies and cultures. For instance, his descriptions of the integration of esthetic experiences with life in earlier societies are replete with praise. “We do not have to travel to the ends of the earth nor return many millennia in time to find peoples for whom everything that intensifies the sense of immediate living is an object of intense admiration,” Dewey wrote inArt as Experience. “Bodily scarification, waving feathers, gaudy robes, shining ornaments of gold and silver, of emerald and jade, formed the contents of esthetic arts and, presumably, without the vulgarity of class exhibitionism that attends their analogues today.” Thus, “domestic utensils, furnishings of tent and house, rugs, mats, jars, pots, bows, spears were wrought with such delighted care that today we hunt them out and give them places of honor in our art museums.”  Dewey developed a critique of the detached “museum art” of modern life and the accompanying penchant for artists to “exaggerate their separateness to the point of eccentricity.” In his view capitalism produced both an international market that detached art from context and also anouveaux riches who sought to evidence his “good standing in the realm of higher culture…as his stocks and bonds certify to his standing in the economic world.”[52]  

Real understanding required attention to context. “It is a commonplace that we cannot direct, save accidentally, the growth and flowering of plants, however lovely and enjoyed, without understanding their causal conditions,” Dewey wrote. “It should be just a commonplace that esthetic understanding - as distinct from sheer personal enjoyment - must start with the soil, air, and light out of which things esthetically admirable arise.”[53]

Dewey envisioned a variety of ways to reintegrate art into contexts and, more broadly, a democratic way of life, from the buildings and spaces of the modern world and the educational experiences of young people to the productive activities of workers.  Thus, his ideal of democratic development was tied the work of the craftsman as much as the efforts of the self-conscious artist. Indeed, Dewey saw artists, as he saw professionals in other disciplines, as essentially practicing crafts, with problem-oriented and relational patterns of learning, deeply attentive to context.

Forty years after he had introduced the idea of human development through work in the “Ethics of Democracy,” he argued inArt as Experience that “the intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged.” He decried the rarity of such experiences in the modern worksite. “The labor and employment problem of which we are so acutely aware cannot be solved by mere changes in wages, hours of work, and sanitary conditions. No permanent solution is possible

save in a radical social alteration, which affects the degree and kind of participation the worker has in the production and social distribution of the wares he produces…this modification of the nature of experience is the finally determining element in the esthetic quality of the experience of things produced.”[54] Though he would have resisted the comparison, in such passages Dewey sounded like the late Pope John Paul II, whose 1981 Encyclical “On Human Labor” was an eloquent call to make the “subjective experience” of work the touchstone of modern economies.

John Dewey’s philosophy led him into fierce debates about the role of citizens.  

According to progressive intellectuals, changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century - technological developments, urbanization, the growth of scientific knowledge and the like - meant that theories of citizen involvement needed radical revision. The modern world, wrote Walter Lippmann, “had upset the old life on the prairies, made new demands upon democracy, introduced specialization and science…and created the impersonal relationships of the modern world.”[55] Lippmann and other progressives in theNew Republic - Dewey’s political home from its founding until 1937 - argued that new forms of participation must replace face to face ties. Editor Herbert Croly said that “the responsibility and loyalty which the citizens of a democratic nation must feel one towards another is comprehensive and unmitigable,” but the connections of small town communities needed to be replaced by “the loyal realization of a comprehensive democratic social idea.” New technologies created opportunities to replace face to face communications. Citizens, in Croly’s view, no longer need “assemble after the manner of a New England town-meeting” since there existed “abundant opportunities of communication and consultation without any meeting…the active citizenship of the country meets every morning and evening and discusses the affairs of the nation with the newspaper as an impersonal interlocutor.”[56]

The detachment of democratic participation from place evolved into an attack on the ideal of active democracy. By the late 1920s, a growing consensus among social scientists advanced the “democratic realist” position that held most people to be in the grip of blind instincts and in need of guidance. Thus in 1934, Walter Shepherd, in his presidential address to the American Political Science Association, declared “the dogma of universal suffrage must give way to a system of educational and other tests which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed, and the anti-social elements.” Shepherd argued that “government demands the best thought, the highest character, the most unselfish service that is available” and called for “an aristocracy of intellect and character.” To make certain his audience understood whom he had in mind, he concluded by calling for academics to lead the nation, for “men of brains” to “seize the torch.”[57]

Dewey’s colleague at theNew Republic, Walter Lippmann, a formative voice in public debate, developed a more sophisticated argument but one that was even more challenging to Dewey’s belief in democracy as a way of life. The problem with active democracy in the modern world was that most people possessed very limited information, according to Lippmann. Thei

vision of the “real world” was distorted by “artificial censorship, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine…” People’s minds processed information through stereotypes - what social psychologists have more recently called “frames” - that they have learned. The consequence is that people are passive and manipulated.[58]   Though his logic was different, Lippmann’s solution was like other social scientists: There must be “some form of expertness between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled.” Citizens’ role was minimal: “To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly.” The premise of active self-governing democracy was mistaken, he said. The test of government was not citizen involvement, but rather whether it delivered the goods.[59]

Dewey addressed these technocratic critics of participatory democracy in several ways, with varying success. In response to the pretensions of credentialed intellectuals and academics, Dewey made action, not detached thought, the foundational experience of human beings who make meaning in the world. As Ryan put it, “One reason why Dewey was never able to accept the orthodox argument of stimulus-response was the fact that it made the organism whose behavior was supposed to be built up out of endless stimulus-response circuits too passive, too spectatorial, and too much a creature of the environment.” Rather, the person “makes senseof the world for the sake of acting productivelyon the world.” This focus led Dewey to a critique of detached intellectuals who imagine the primacy of their own thought. “The depreciation of action, of doing and making, has been cultivated by philosophers,” Dewey wrote inThe Quest for Certainty , his attack on the idea that inquiry can be separated from social contexts. Dewey observed the aura of infallibility which those armed with “expertise” could assume. “The dogma worked out practically so as to strengthen dependence upon authority,” he wrote. “Just as belief that a magical ceremony will regulate the growth of seeds to full harvest stifles the tendency to investigate…so acceptance of dogmatic rules as bases of conduct in education, morals, and social matters lessens the impetus to find out about the conditions which are involved in forming intelligent plans.”[60]

In response to social scientists’ arguments that most people are in the grip of raw instincts, Dewey’s book,Human Nature and Conduct, proposed that “habits,” not “instincts,” shape most of human behavior. Here he anticipated by decades the work of social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu. Habit, for Dewey, was “human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously dominating activity.”[61]

Habits are not blind repetitions but are learned patterns that create predispositions for action in unexpected circumstances. Habits can be

changed and developed through “intelligent action.” This has proven a fertile theory for educational innovation. Thus, Deborah Meier, the great democratic educator, founder of the Central Park East schools in East Harlem and Mission Hill School in Boston, has demonstrated the fruitfulness of the concept of habits to education for democracy. “The real crisis we face is not a threat to America’s economic or military dominance but the ebbing strength of our democratic and egalitarian culture.” Meier recalls the “traditional public function of schools: to pass on the skills, aptitudes, and habits needed for a democratic way of life,” observing that these “are hard to come by; they are not natural to the species. They are as hard to teach as relativity. Democratic culture needs citizens with very strong habits.”[62]

Dewey’s direct responses to the arguments about the practical impossibility of active democracy showed his populist inclinations. But they were much less successful.

The “Dewey Problem.” The gap between Dewey’s vision of participatory democracy and the means to realize it is often noted by biographers. “Dewey never actually developed, let alone implemented, a comprehensive strategy capable of realizing his general theory in real world practice,” write Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett in their lively “Deweyan” manifesto,Dewey’s Dream . “What we mean by the Dewey Problem is, whatspecifically is to be done beyond theoretical advocacy to transform American society and developed societies into participatory democracies…? [italics in original]”[63]

This “Dewey problem” is illustrated by the weaknesses of his reply to critics of citizen democracy,The Public and Its Problems, published in 1927. He agreed with the “realists” that citizens were bewildered by modern conditions. Public transactions are those which have significant indirect consequences for those not directly involved. But this creates an enormous challenge. “The machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified, and complicated the scope of indirect consequences, has formed such immense and consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis, that the resultant public cannot distinguish itself.” Yet such a discovery is the foundation of action. Thus, publics are inchoate and disorganized and “The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself…”[64]

Dewey affirmed that society needs organized intelligence and that social scientists play a key role (though he had in mind public intellectuals like Henry George, not detached academics). But he said newspapers were potentially better sources of knowledge than critics acknowledged, when combined with good social science, effective reporting, and engaging presentation. Democracy, he argued, “will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.”[65]

He held that in order to organize themselves and deal with indirect consequences, publics formed “states” to serve their common interests. He acknowledged that inherited forms of government were inadequate to the tasks. “The ‘new age of human relationships’ has no political agencies

worthy of it.” Americans had inherited “local town-meeting practices and ideas. But we live and act and have our being in a continental nation-state.”[66] Thus, democracy needed to take an open-ended approach to state-making. “By its very nature, a state is ever something to be scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be re-made.”

Finally, Dewey called for recovery of local community. “Evils which are uncritically and indiscriminately laid at the door of industrialism and democracy might, with greater intelligence, be referred to the dislocation and unsettlement of local communities,” he wrote. He argued that “Vital and thorough attachments are bred only in the intimacy of an intercourse which is of necessity restricted in range…Democracy must begin at home and its home is the neighborly community.”[67]

Even his enthusiastic biographer Robert Westbrook, who sees Dewey as the key theorist for modern participatory democracy, levels a devastating critique at the weaknesses of this book. Westbrook observes that Dewey gave no clue as to how an increasingly distanced group of social scientists might become re-engaged. He neglected to mention ideas on how the state might become more participatory. “Dewey’s political theory and ethics pointed to a government that would include, indeed maximize, agencies of direct democracy…yet despite the implications of his own argument, he appeared to have given little thought to the problems and possibilities of participatory government.” Nor did he develop any strategic idea for the rebirth of local democracy. “It was unclear how a public that was the product of a social transformation showing no respect for place could remain strongly attached to local settings,” Westbrook observes.  Westbrook concludes by using Dewey’s own arguments. “He was himself constantly railing against those who were guilty of wishful thinking because of an inattentiveness to means…Dewey’s failure to constitute participatory democracy as a compelling ‘working end’ as well as the demanding conditions he set for its realization, madeThe Public and Its Problems a less than effective counter to democratic realism.”[68]

Alan Ryan explains the fact that Dewey’s philosophy often had a “magical” quality, “never…fully seized of the nastiness of political dilemmas,” by factors external to his philosophy: during his formative years, before moving to Chicago, Dewey lived in small communities and had small audiences.[69]   I believe that there was a deeper problem.

Dewey and Power: Dewey, who emphasized the importance of conscious attention for full understanding of anything, gave little explicit attention to the concept of power.  As a result, his political arguments and prescriptions often have an idealized, almost wistful tone.  Just as he relocated politics in the state, in the dynamic I described in my first Dewey lecture, he also thought about power in the conventional terms of force. “Not only have we separated the church from the state, but we have separated language, cultural traditions, all that is called race, from the state - that is, from problems of political organization and power,” he argued in his essay, “America in the World,” an idealized defense of World War I whose enthusiasm he came to regret but which is suggestive for its underlying

definitions. “To us language, literature, creed, group ways, national culture, are social rather than political, human rather than national interests. Let this idea fly abroad.”[70]   Even in sober moments, Ryan argues, Dewey equated “power” with “force.” Force meant getting people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.[71]

Dewey’s treatment of power tended to assume that power is a one-directional operation, powerover others, not powerto act in relationship with others. “Power” understood differently, as the relational capacity to act, entails closer attention to power and public agency, the dynamics of communal solidarity, and social movements that are crucial for change. To use Deweyan language it makes “problems” out of what he took for granted.

Public Agency: [72]  John Dewey translated his conception of the human person asproblem-solver into the view that the ideal human agent is the citizen scientist.  For instance, this is a strong emphasis throughoutCulture and Freedom . He argued “the future of democracy is allied with the spread of the scientific attitude. It is the sole guarantee against wholesale misleading by propaganda. More important still, it is the only assurance of the possibility of a public opinion intelligent enough to meet present social problems.”[73]   The habits Dewey cites as part of the scientific attitude -- willingness to suspend belief, to look at evidence and go where it leads, to hold ideas as provisional hypotheses, to enjoy new problems - are important attributes of the democratic citizen. But they are also strikinglycognitive habits, continuing his life long penchant to place the emphasis on ideas in direct contravention of his deeper theory of action. This tendency was present early on. At Michigan, for instance, he enthusiastically signed up to be editor of the hair-brained scheme of Franklin Ford in 1892 to launch a newspaper,Thought News, dedicated to thought, until public derision caused him to pull out.

There was a contradiction throughout Dewey’s career between his deepest concept of the person - that the organism “makes senseof the world for the sake of acting productivelyon the world” - and his tendency to prioritize thought over action. This is evident, for instance, in his approach to micro-cultures such as schools, communities, and workplaces. Dewey was eloquent about normative civic dimensions of such settings. For a brief period, in the Chicago Lab School, he developed a practical site for working through his ideas. But as Benson, Harkavy and Puckett detail inDewey’s Dream, his inattention to the institutional politics of the school’s relationship to the University of Chicago soon caused the severance of his relationship. An adequate theory of agency poses places like the Lab School and their relationshipsthemselves as a focus for action --how to organize for democratic change.  There are a number of habits and traits that are not on Dewey’s list but that are crucial for organizing and sustaining a democratic site like the Lab School. An organizing citizen needs to be relational, appreciative of the resources of settings and also able to imagine alternatives (possessing the “capacity to aspire”), astute in reading power and interests, skilled in listening and communication, strategic, and able to see connections between particular problems, the contexts in which they operate, and larger systems.

Our own experiences in the partnerships of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship have repeatedly brought home how easy it is for professionals to lose any sense of context when they focus on “the problem.” Dewey at his best conveys a richer concept of the human person than “problem solver.”[74] Though Dewey sought to resist uprooted thought by regularly invoking context, in fact a concept of agency that puts the emphasis on problem solving tends to detach activity from context, especially in the hands of culturally uprooted professionals. “Problem-solvers” lose the awareness that discrete “problems” have different meanings in different settings. They forget the ties of particular problems to webs of other problems. They neglect the holistic qualities of environments in which a person acts. And they assume long range ends as “givens,” focusing on efficiency of means. Decontextualized problem solving is the trait of technocracy. Given Dewey’s championing of common people, it is unfair to charge him with being a technocrat, as Christopher Lasch among others, has done. But it is easy to see the reason for the charge: “problem solving” suggests a technocratic frame of mind.[75]

The concept of the person as a “co-creator” of her environments, a maker of contexts and communities, is more adequate to the democratic task. It suggests a shift from person “in herself” to a democratic citizen “for herself,” the transformations needed for  democracy to become a “way of life.” Such conceptual language is intimated by experimental psychology that emphasizes humans as unique, relational agents of their development even in early childhood. Infants create ideas drawing from diverse sources, as they learn to negotiate and shape their environments. This science points toward a political, open, and dynamic concept of contexts and of the humans who make them.

T he late Esther Thelen pioneered in this science, moving toward a “grand unifying theory” of the field of early childhood development. Thelen’s science was based on a relational, interactive, emergent understanding of complex systems and how to theorize them. She acknowledged a debt to Dewey but a stronger debt to William James, who emphasized more than Dewey the idiosyncratic qualities of each person and the gritty, turbulent, ironic and heterogeneous qualities of experiences (Ryan also observes this contrast between James and Dewey).[76] Thelen’s theory challenged views of infants as passing through pre-determined “stages” of development. She argued instead that infants are experimental, self-realizing agents, profoundly relational and interactive with their contexts. A group of former students and co-researchers described the embodied quality of thought in the 2005 Presidential Session of the Society for Research on Child Development. Drawing on many of her experiments, they concluded that infants are constantly assembling holistic patterns, such as reaching or walking, out of many elements, including testing, perceiving, feedback, and experimenting with ideas. “[An] integration of body and mind is a fundamental characteristic of all goal-directed activities…Thought is always grounded in perception and action.” [77]

Thelen not only challenged stage theories of development and disembodied thinking. She also differed from conventional views about

scientists and science. She saw the scientist as part of the equation; she certainly would have added the capacity to build relationships to Dewey’s list. In Esther Thelen’s view, theory grows not only from use of the scientific method but also from a rich and interactive set of plural relationships, with “amateurs,” parents and families, as well as with other scientists. In democratic terms, Thelen’s science suggests a conception of the person not simply as a problem solver, but more broadly as a co-creator of the contexts in which problem-solving takes place.

In a different context, research over the last generation has shown that organizing which develops people’s co-creative agency generates profound changes in the sense of self, skills, behaviors and values, what the organizer and public intellectual Ernesto Cortes calls “metanoia, a theological concept meaning transformation in being. These changes are visible in what are called “broad based citizen organizations” affiliated with networks like the Gamaliel Foundation, Industrial Areas Foundation, and PICO. Such groups often use the concept of citizens as co-creators. In a splendid treatment of these themes, Rom Coles described how such organizing, drawing on diverse traditions, “inflects these traditions in light of a radical democratic ethos that accents inclusion, dialogue, receptivity, equality, difference, a taste for ambiguity, patient discernment, and an affirmation that political relationships centrally involve ongoing tension, some compromise, and humility in the face of disagreement.”[78]

Our work at the Humphrey Institute’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship began in 1987 with a populist, everyday politics in which citizens are co-creators.[79] Drawing from experiences of broad based organizing, as well as the citizenship schools of the civil rights movement, our goal has been to develop concepts and practical methods that can feed broader movement building. With partners, we translated citizen-centered politics to varying settings, from a nursing home and the College of St. Catherine, to the Metropolitan Council and Minnesota Extension Service. Our sustained work has included partnerships with new immigrants and the West Side of St. Paul in the Jane Addams School for Democracy and the Neighborhood Learning Community,[80] and also the youth civic learning initiative of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship called Public Achievement.[81] Key colleagues have included Bill Doherty, whose Families and Democracy partnerships use a public work approach. These have pioneered models of the “citizen professional” and organizing to change the cultural forces undermining family life. 

Across all the CDC collaborations, the idea of the citizen as co-creator has been at the center. In the Jane Addams School, for instance, everyone is a “learner” and a “teacher”; students learn they are not doing “service,” but are participants and colleagues in public work. In the Families and Democracy partnerships, citizens and families possess the primary knowledge, responsibility, and capacity to address challenges - professionals are citizen professionals.  In Public Achievement, the conception of the citizen as a co-creator of communities and democracy through public work means that young people are citizens now, not citizen in preparation. Public work involves a diverse mix of people creating public

wealth, things of lasting civic benefit, whose value is determined through continuing conversation, and in Public Achievement young people choose issues they want to address and are coached by older people.  Such concepts and practices pose every setting as open to change and re-creation. They teach methods like “power mapping,” one on one interviews, and strategic thinking, that illuminate the politicality of every setting.  The CDC web site is full of stories of transformations that take place in identity and outlook as people learn the everyday politics needed to make changes.[82]

In another context, Jennifer O’Donoghue’s pioneering research illuminates micro-processes of transformations in identity and sense of agency among poor and working class young people, mostly of minority backgrounds, active in inner city community organizations in northern California. The groups’ focus on young people’s power and learning. Their commitments and practices have much the same effects as Public Achievement at its best. Drawing on research that shows low income and minority young people to be less civically engaged and more marginalized in community life, posing community groups as potentially alternatives to those who look simply to schools for remedy, O’Donoghue undertook a qualitative research project that explored public learning opportunities in community based youth organizations (CBYOs). These, she hypothesized, were likely to have more “free spaces” for youth than schools. 

O’Donoghue found dramatic and positive changes in identity, behavior, attitudes and hopes among these young people, most of whom had struggled or failed in school and felt marginalized by the larger culture, and who sometimes came from families of abuse, violence, and neglect.  “Participating here and doing things here helps me feel like I’ve accomplished something. My experience here has given me a little piece of pride I never had,” said one young woman.  In contrast to prior experience, many reported learning more openness, trust, and connection. “My mom used to say, you can’t trust anybody,” said another. “But I feel I can really trust these people.”  Another element was “coming out” to be seen. As one put it, “I’m starting to open myself up more and show who I really am and where I’m coming from.” Said another, “I was one of those youth who was always in the background… When I started speaking my mind, it was a hard to explain feeling because I’ve never actually spoken my mind...”

Young people learned to see others in different ways. “I used to have the same attitude as some adults, that some youth just mess it up,” said one. “But now I look at them like, what have they gone through in their life for them to be like this?” Another reflected, “I used to look at people and make judgments right away. I don’t do that anymore, or not nearly as much as I used to. I’m friends with all sorts of different people now.” Finally, many reported a new sense of civic identity. This meant being involved in the community “to affect it in a drastic change toward positivity,” as one put it.[83] O’Donoghue summarized features of the micro-cultures that generate such changes:

“In explaining what they valued about their CBYO experience, young people emphasized an organizational culture characterized by a commitment to youth power and learning. They conveyed their organization,

at its best, as ‘just like all about youth empowerment.’ Supporting youth power, for these young people involved believing that all young people were capable of making change, opening space for young people to create or build things in the world, and challenging them to do it. The idea of creating something real and lasting was extremely powerful for these youth. Being committed to youth meant also being flexible and responsible to the people who make up the organization and to the broader community around them…” [84]

Like the conception of the person as an active agent and the micro-cultures in which they develop a new sense of self, the larger communities in which young people and others develop civic skills and identities can also be understood not simply as things to be espoused but as contexts to be consciously repaired, sustained and re-created.

Communities: John Dewey invoked community as the ground for democratic values, anticipating critics of technocracy like James Scott. “Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions,” he wrote inThe Public and Its Problems. “Their separate assertion leads to mushy sentimentalism or else to extravagant and fanatical violence which in the end defeats its own aims.”[85] But Dewey’s community, like his concept of agency, was abstract. He neglected the gritty, power-laden, and culturally rooted work needed to retrieve, sustain, and generate democratic values in a world that assaults them. The most insightful leaders of people’s organizing have a profound sense of this work. “We are not a grassroots organization,” said the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, a leader in East Brooklyn Churches, a model for organizing over a generation. “Grassroots are shallow roots.Our roots are deep roots. Our roots have fought for existence in the shattered glass of East New York.”[86]

When he turned to strategies and concrete examples, Dewey had aliberal idea of community in mind, with little sense of potentials of more conservative traditions, with their often fierce defense of roots. During World War I, he sought to get the federal government to intervene in the politics of the Polish community on the side of liberal groups against conservative and Catholic ones. He championed public schools, and opposed parochial ones. He became embroiled in a polemic with the Catholic Church. As Ryan says, “The Catholic church still struck Dewey as a threat to human intelligence and social reform, and he still complained that its emphasis on supernaturalism was a threat to science, and its emphasis on authority a threat to individual liberty. The church’s leaders and rank-and-file Catholic intellectuals returned his distaste.”[87]

In recent years, broad based citizen organizing has sought to ground organizing in multi-dimensional connections with community institutions and diverse traditions. This meant taking seriously the real religious beliefs of participants, first in local churches of Catholic and Protestant orientation, later in synagogues and mosques as well. It also meant changing the very definition of “leadership.” Leaders in low income and minority community organizing were traditionally the visible public actors and activists, typically male. In the new organizing, key figures became the more invisible “relational leaders,” most frequently women, who worked behind the scenes

to keep school PTAs going, ran day to day activities in churches, and were the people neighbors turned to for support and advice. Sister Christine Stephens, a key figure in this shift, described the innovations of the Mexican American group Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio.  “COPS built on the basis of PTA leaders, parish council members, stalwarts of the church guilds,” she described. “Not the politicos, the people who have wheeled and dealed.” Stephens described this as a key shift in the social bases of organizing. “The approach builds around the people who have sustained the community,” against enormous pressures. “For example, these are women whose lives by and large have been wrapped up in their parishes and their children. What COPS has been able to do is to give them a public life and a public visibility, to educate, to provide the tools whereby they can participate.” Politics also became redefined to put citizens back at the center and to reintegrate politics into the horizontal relations of daily life.[88]

In another example, sustained alliance-building in the geographic area of the West Side in St. Paul, a historically rich immigrant neighborhood, led leaders in the Jane Addams School to help create a neighborhood-wide coalition, the Neighborhood Learning Community, NLC. The NCL aims to develop a “culture of learning” across the area. Traditional professional strategies do not work to create such culture change. The informational approaches common in professional settings, where parents and educators are given research findings, have little potential to engage families’ interests, develop families’ power, or to create substantial relationships between schools and their surrounding communities. Traditional social service approaches deliver educational enrichment experiences to students conceived as customers, not as creative agents who have potentially rich cultural and other resources to bring. As democratic educational theorist Nick Longo points out, “Developing a neighborhood culture of learning counters prevailing trends and invites non-experts to participate in education reform.” It is a “citizen centered model…that asks experts to…be on tap not on top.” The challenge is that “this constitutes several paradigm shifts: seeing ordinary people as producers, not consumers; actors, not spectators; and teachers, not students.” Jerry Stein, an educational scholar and activist, says it amounts to a “Copernican Revolution,” understanding that schools need to orbit communities and families.[89]

Dewey believed that living, active communities and publics would someday be created through richly diverse communicative action. As he put it, “Communication alone can create the Great Community.”[90] But communities, like Copernican Revolutions, are built on a large scale in the modern world through popular movements. In such movements, communication is one dimension of a larger process of building collective power.

Dewey and the people’s movement of the Great Depression: The populist movements of the 1930s and Dewey’s relationship to them are helpful to look at in this regard. His efforts to articulate a populist conception of democracy as a way of life differed from left wing conceptions of agency and Marxist visions of the future, in ways that have continuing relevance to

movement building. Yet left wing organizing has at times also had a populist character that is full of important lessons. This was dramatically true after the Seventh Congress of the Communist International shifted in 1935 from a rhetoric of class struggle to a populist rhetoric of “the people.” This shift unleashed an amazing array of creative democratic efforts and generated a vital social movement in the US and elsewhere. At the heart of the movement was a profound irony - the turn in the communist movement toward populist organizing came at the same time Stalin undertook a ferocious assault on populism as a distinctive intellectual and political project. Dewey could see sharply the flaws in Stalinist ideas. But he seemed at best only dimly aware of the teeming populist practices underneath them, and all around him.  

A full treatment of Dewey’s populist concepts, the left’s populist organizing, and the relationship between them in the 1930s and 1940s is beyond the limits of this lecture, but I can sketch the bare outlines. Throughout, Dewey remained a critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He believed that capitalism had failed and needed replacement by a different economic system. He saw the New Deal as a half way measure. The National Recovery Administration, for instance, a key element of Roosevelt’s response, “loaded the dice in favor of the existing system of control of industry, with a few sops thrown to labor.” In his view, “there is no way out for America except to recognize that labor has prior claims upon production, which take precedence of current return upon property.”[91]

Dewey’s emphasis on “labor’s priority” was more in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln than Karl Marx. Dewey was sympathetic to working people and to trade unions. Indeed, he was a zealous advocate of school teachers’ organizing. But he resisted class struggle language. He argued that the failure of public education was due to elite control. Thus in strikingly populist accents, he said that a teachers union allied with other trade unions was necessary to combat “the state of servility…” that characterized education.[92]

His populism was also evident in the way he thought about efforts through the 1930s to create a third party (if not in his actual quixotic efforts themselves). His concept envisioned an alliance of farmers, blue and white collar workers, small business and professionals. He saw labor support as critical. But winning the middle class was the key. To achieve this, the party’s approach must be non-statist and respectful of small property. “The first appeal of a new party must be to what is called the ‘middle class’: to professional people, including, of course, teachers, the average retail merchant, the fairly well-to-do householder, the struggling white collar worker including his feminine counterpart, and the farmer.”[93]   Socialist theory dismisses such populist programs as at best temporary expedients on the way to class politics. But Dewey’s view articulated a democratic alternative both to privatized culture and statism: people need small property to be self-governing, independent, productive citizens of the commonwealth.[94]

Finally, Dewey also played an extremely important role in criticizing the duplicity and self-delusion affecting many intellectuals in the 1930s who

turned a blind eye to the totalitarian tendencies of the Soviet Union. In 1937, he served as chairman of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, generally referred to as the Dewey Commission, because he believed in his “right to a public trial.” He also served as honorary chair of the Committee for Cultural Freedom, formed in 1939, which warned of “the tide of totalitarianism…rising throughout the world…washing away cultural and creative freedom” in Russia and fascist regimes.[95]

In all these cases, Dewey’s advanced democraticpopulist ideas, not a vision of “classless society” or socialized production or the modern “mass” man and woman (populism is the antithesis of the whole constellation of terms associated with “mass”).  Dewey saw democracy as a work in progress; the core problem was bringing concentrated power and wealth under control. But he had much weakerpopulist practice . Thus he had little feeling for how the Roosevelt administration, precisely because of its pragmatic responsiveness to changing conditions and popular moods, helped to catalyze democratic organizing. He also did not perceive that below the surface of formal leftwing politics, its organizing was generating democratic energies.

Thus he saw Popular Fronters as simply communist dupes defined entirely by their ideas about Russia. In fact, as a wealth of scholarship suggests, the tone of the nation’s collective response to the Great Depression was set by a populist-style movement called the Popular Front. It mobilized civic and democratic energies well beyond formal politics as well as through elections. It addressed domestic challenges of poverty, racism, hunger, workers’ powerlessness in the face of large employers and many other questions. The historian Eric Foner notes the ironies: the Communist Party, its leaders slavishly loyal to the Soviet Union, helped to greatly “expand freedom” in America.[96]

All over the world the shift from class struggle to popular fronts generated democratic energies as left wingers shifted focus from an abstract internationalism and the language of socialism to mining of democratic resources within specific societies and cultures. In colonies of the Global South, this shift helped to launch “national liberation struggles” that fueled independence. It also generated creative social changes of many kinds.  Thus, in the Indian state of Kerala, communist organizing of landless peasants, continuing for decades, producing enormous transformations. As Peter Evans observed, “Decades of social battles [around land reform] changed people’s cultural images of themselves and their society. Humiliated lower-case peons were given scripts in which they were heroic rather than despised, in which they were supposed to exercise agency rather than hoping for charity, and in which their neighbors were comrades in collective endeavors rather than competitors for scarce resources.”[97] Amartya Sen draws intensively on the movements of Kerala in his theory of “development as freedom.”

The Communist Party in the US experienced the tensions of such a change in practice. As Gary Gerstle found in a study of the textile town of Woonsocket, Rhode Island,

Many party members and sympathizers, especially those long committed to Leninist doctrine, found this change [from class struggle to Popular Front] wrenching. Some, however, genuinely embraced the Popular Front precisely because it seemed…an opportunity to overcome their isolation from American workers and their marginality in American politics. They enthusiastically set about constructing a new radical language, one that was respectful of American political traditions and consonant with cherished American notions of freedom, independence, justice, and equality. [98]

The “struggle for socialism” of the early 1930s had created ferocious fights between radicals and moderates. After 1935, the callto defend democracy meant broad alliances replaced demands to choose “which side are you on?” America’s democratic heritage came to be understood as a treasure trove of resources. The struggle to defend democracy became not simply defensive; at its best, it became a movement to deepen democracy. Even the Communist Party claimed “Jefferson, Paine, and Lincoln.”

Dewey’s abstract bent produced its own ironies. Thus Dewey envisioned vital communities that would someday combine face to face relations with intellectual life. If community “be re-established, it will manifest a fullness, variety, and freedom of possession and enjoyment of meanings and goods unknown to the contiguous associations of the past,” he wrote. “It will be alive and flexible as well as stable, responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in which it is enmeshed.”[99] Yet as part of the populist movement, such community cultures were appearing right next door.

Thus, Harlem was the scene of a remarkable public culture, vividly rendered by Barbara Ransby in her biography of the civil rights leader Ella Baker.  From the 1920s through the 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance nourished wider democratic changes, the combination of life and flexibility and stability Dewey longed for.  Activists of every stripe - from anarchists to communists, mingled with day laborers and a range of professionals -- artists and poets, labor organizers, teachers, ministers and musicians, in an explosion of political, literary, artistic, and intellectual creativity. As Ransby described, “The streets of Harlem provided a cultural and political immersion like no other…infused as it was with the exciting intellectual rhythms of the black diaspora. The serious exchange of ideas, cultural performances and political debates flowed out of classrooms, private homes, meeting halls, and bars onto the neighborhood thoroughfare of Lenox Ave.”[100] In Harlem, free spaces ranged from jazz spots like the Cotton Club to churches, labor study groups, local businesses, unions, the Harlem library, schools, labor education groups, and theater projects. These settings mingled to create a vibrant public culture. People learned skills of dealing with others who are different. They knew that what happened in Harlem mattered to “American civilization.” A whole generation of intellectual and cultural and activist leaders - Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Adam Clayton Power, and many others - were schooled in this milieu. Key architects of SCLC’s approach were also formed in Harlem.

The thirties and forties’ movement also had strong trans-local dimensions.  Historians such as Lary May inThe Big Tomorrow, a treatment of the transformations of “the American dream” presented in movies,

Lisbeth Cohen, inMaking a New Deal, showing the agency of blue collar workers in using mass cultural forms like radio to forge a larger sense of collective identity, and Michael Denning inCultural Front, an analysis of the cultural politics of the Popular Front, have richly detailed the populist organizing among “cultural workers” of many kinds - from journalists, screenwriters and artists to scholars and educators and union organizers. Denning effectively disputes the idea that intellectuals in the Popular Front were dupes of the communists. He uses the idea of an “historic bloc” of variegated forces of diverse interests and motivations united around certain overarching goals (defeat of fascism, defense of democracy, and pursuit of economic and racial justice). The overall result was that the content of the American dream in the popular culture shifted from the individualist, WASP-oriented, consumerist ideal of the 1920s to a far more cooperative, racially pluralist and egalitarian vision of democracy in the New Deal. In the process, cultural workers developed a consciousness of their own potential roles in the battle of ideas and conceptions of the good society, as allies of industrial workers, blacks, farmers, small businesses and other groups, and also fighting for themselves and their own interests.   Theorists of this cultural politics like Lewis Corey saw the struggle as about professionals’ own interests for socially relevant work. As Denning puts it, a “craft vision of professionals, intellectuals, and artists was a crucial element of the depression left.”[101]   Public meanings of work also gave a strong civic cast to New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps.[102]

The Popular Front generated a democratic aesthetic illustrated by Martha Graham’s 1938 dance masterpiece,American Document . It emphasized American folk traditions, multi-ethnic heritages, and ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. “What is an American?” she asked. She answered, not only Anglo-Saxons but also blacks, immigrants, and workers. All were needed for democracy. The appeal of Earl Robinson’s great song on the same theme and with the same message, “Ballad for Americans,” showed the reach of this democratic aesthetic. Made famous by Paul Robeson, it was sung at both Republican and Communist Party 1940 conventions.

Today’s broad-based organizing is rooted in this tradition. The contribution of Saul Alinsky, its founder, was not “inventing community organizing,” as is imagined. Rather Alinsky codified organizing lessons of the Popular Front. His 1946 book,Reveille for Radicals, was in fact a call to revive the movement without socialist baggage - Alinsky identified himself as a populist. The populist movement for the 21st century needs to draw on this heritage. Finally, populism challenges technocracy.