Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Populism Versus Technocracy in the 2008 election season

A new triumphalism in technocracy is evident in many settings, recalling today Walter Shepherd’s call from 1934 for “men to brains [to] seize the torch.” For instance, it is expressed in the zeal of many scientists to roll back the purported delusions afflicting people of faith. Thus the Fiftieth Anniversary issue of the leading British science journal,The New Scientist, in 2006 began with description of a large California conference of scientists that had all the flavor of an old fashioned camp meeting - in this case going on the offensive against religious belief. In 2006, the evolutionary biologist Robert Dawkins’ book,The God Delusion, a best seller on theNew York Times list, launched a ferocious attack on religious conviction of all varieties and also on the “Neville Chamberlain School” of scientists lacking what he thought was requisite zeal for the anti-religious crusade. As H. Allen Orr observed in theNew York Review of Books, Dawkins demonstrated a “mission to convert,” that was intolerant, refused ambiguity or doubt, lacked engagement with any of the sophisticated views of adversaries, showed a cavalier attitude toward historical evidence, and demonstrated a strikingly Manichean bent of mind. Dawkins embodies the rectitude of ideological zealots of any variety.[103]

In high level politics, the technocratic bent is also pervasive. As one policy leader in Washington told me during our New Citizenship effort with the White House Domestic Policy Council from 1993-95, “the contempt in the Washington beltway toward the American people is often breathtaking,” a pattern Joan Didion detailed in her campaign coverage from 1988 through 2000 for theNew York Review of Books.   Technocratic trends culminate in high level presidential campaigns, now based on treating citizens as customers and candidates as rock stars and superheroes.[104]

Yet under the surface of degrading and elitist trends, a manipulative culture “littered by disposable remains,” there are also signs of a new movement. Here, I conclude by looking at how a populist perspective can reframe the coming election.

Many descendants of John Dewey’s emphasis on communication and “socialized intelligence” describe it as an emerging world wide movement for “deliberative democracy.” Others, such as Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett in their book,Dewey’s Dream, see it as a movement for democratic education reform. They propose that a movement for “university-assisted community schools constitute[s] the best practical means to help realize Dewey’s general theory of participatory democracy.”[105]

I have much respect for these practices, sites, and those who make these arguments. Deliberation at its inclusive best, in ways urged by authors such as David Mathews, Daniel Yankelovitch, Hal Saunders, Nöelle McAfee, Alison Kadlec, Matt Leiningher and others, challenges the stranglehold that technocrats have gained over policy making. Kadlec, following Dewey, observes insightfully that deliberation can disclose public problems, injustices and power inequalities.[106] Deliberative democrats help bring back a respect for the intelligence of ordinary citizens. And, like Dewey, they

emphasize democratic “habits,” such as the capacities to engage people of other views and interests. Because deliberative democracy is so clearly related to Dewey’s focus on communication while it also provides part of the missing answer to the “democratic realists,” it is not surprising that he has become a foundational theorist in this movement. But the democratic movement needs to put deliberation in a larger context of practices. Public work that solves public problems and creates public wealth involves a continuing conversation about the meaning of its products. It also points toward a thicker conception of civic agency than the deliberative citizen.  A populist conception of agency highlights not only citizen judgments about problems and what government might do about them. This was Dewey’s view, reflected inThe Public and Its Problems , in which citizens, when they recognize public problems, become a public as they form a state to act on them. Dewey’s perspective is the common approach taken in most deliberative efforts - people deliberate mainly about government’s proper course of action. In a populist perspective, by contrast, the question is not “what can government do?” but “what can we all do?,” posing “problems” or “issues” as parts of larger cultural dynamics. Publics form as they do public work. They are not formed, as Dewey proposed, through government. Government is a resource of the people, but not the only one. Public work illuminates a broader range of citizen talents, whether teens who told Jennifer O’Donoghue how important it was to create things of lasting value or IDASA’s approach that teaches local officials to shift focus from whatgovernment and health workers should do about HIV/AIDS to whatthe citizenry in communities do.

Another of Dewey’s contributions was his sustained focus on schools and educative processes in general. Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett add practicality to his concerns, with an inspiring track record of “making real” Dewey’s idea of schools as centers of community life, connected to community problems. Yet many settings, not simply schools, need to be conceived as civic learning environments - families, cultural groups, libraries, congregations and small businesses, neighborhood organizations and art projects, to mention a few. Moreover, while academics have much to contribute, they have more to learn from groups outside of higher education.  Finally, to transform the cultural dynamics and concentrations of wealth and power that threaten communal and democratic values will require civic learning and populist organizing in a myriad of locations, beyond schools - religious denominations and unions, professional associations and shop floors, courtrooms and jailhouses, dot com companies and farming communities, environmental groups and government agencies, legislatures and Congress. Higher education has interactive ties to all of these and more.

A populist movement integrates democratic practices and sites with a conception of public agency that sees the citizen as co-creator, “We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for.” This is the “citizen at the center” stance, the title of Ström’s and Gibson’s pieces.

Higher education takes on many roles in a populist movement. Our institutions are potentially key “agents and architects” of democracy, as Elizabeth Hollander and I put it inThe Wingspread Declaration on the civic

mission of research universities. They are not simply its researchers, critics, service providers, or the educators of its future leaders.  Scholars’ work is not only to analyze and critique but also to stimulate conversations, to expand the sense of the possible, and to help activate civic and political energies.  Redefining higher education’s role in these terms is crucial in the early 21st century. Higher education is the premier knowledge institution in an era of exploding knowledge and knowledge technologies. It generates and diffuses conceptual frameworks that structure practices of all sorts, from global finance to parent education. It trains and socializes professionals. Higher education is thus a theater for significant strategic action if it takes up a robust democracy-building mission and identity.

But a populist movement challenges us to place ourselves as a strand of a larger movement, not see ourselves as tutoring the larger society in the skills and values and habits of democracy.  All this requires a shift from critic, service provider, and outsider to what I would call a relational intellectual, embodying the craft nature of the professions. Craft is relational, contextual, and unique in its products, a far different view of professional and academic work than decontextualized expertise. Thus, looking at the experiences and practices of those such as Bill Doherty, or the scholars doing public work profiled by Scott Peters highlight the deeply contextual, relational and craft nature of “scholarship.” But these roles are different than the roles of “service” or “critique” that define the main paradigm of higher education public engagement today. In all these cases of interactive, collaborative public work, scholars help peopleidentify and sometimesorganize on communal values,authorize these values, andamplify their stories and experiences, connecting these to other contexts.[107]  

We need to “return to the source,” in the phrase of the great African activist intellectual Amical Cabral, the people themselves.  In this process, not only communities struggling for survival in the United States but also areas of the world such as Africa, viewed with condescension in the West, hold potential for global leadership.[108] We have a challenge to reconnect with the living networks, histories, cultures and stories of communities, with the democratic currents of American culture, and with populist democracy movements around the world. At a deep level, we need to recover awareness that we  are not outsiders, prime movers or Archimedean points. We are fellow citizens.

This view has direct relevance for the 2008 election. We need to join with others to challenge the focus on which candidate will rescue us. The better question is, Which candidate do we want to work with the day after the election to create a flourishing democratic society? We need to build a November 5 Alliance to answer it.

The Kettering Foundation helped support the research for this lecture. Again, I am deeply appreciative of their material support and also of the intellectual community they create for engaging, debating, and exploring these ideas. I thank Marie Ström for our many conversations throughout, Xolela Mangcu for his column inBusiness Day, February 15, 2007, developing these themes, Omano Edigheji for helpful conversations about populism in Africa, and Lawrence Goodwyn, Alison Kadlec, Cherrie Strachan, and Nikki Kohly for extensive commentary. I also thank Rom Coles, James Farr, Deborah Meier, Lary May, Nöelle McAfee, Benjamin Barber, Michael Edwards, Helen Ström, Anu Idicula, Ira Harkavy, Matt Leighninger, and Christopher Beem. I also thank Eric Fretz for arranging a first public conversation about these themes, at Denver University on January 18, and Susan Sterett for her insightful reflections.

Notes