Slow Politics
I am working on a book of civic essays — Slow Politics: On Civic Hope in Troubled Times. It aims to share a mindset, strategy and vision for hopeful citizenship in our often disappointing era. Topics discussed include: the need for longer-term civic projects, the flexible nature of our social structure, the power of civic creativity, a vision of political community beyond tribalism, the practice of working groups, how to scale through ‘networked localism,’ the difference between a deeper democracy and a more humane meritocracy, and the meaning of “the democratic faith.”
Below are some links and excerpts to past writing that speaks to similar themes as this upcoming book:
Decade of Disappointment, Decade of Hope (Current Affairs, January 6, 2020)
But this is not the only story of the decade. This level of civic despair is felt mostly by those still invested in the hopes of 10 years ago. The people most deflated right now are those who held on the longest to the old saviors—those who thought progress was inevitable, because that is what they were told. Fortunately, there was a countercurrent present in the 2010s—it was present right from the beginning and it grew each year. It was a countercurrent of Americans who peeled off from the faithful, who started looking skeptically at the would-be saviors, and who lived by a different King quote: “Progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.” It was a countercurrent of citizens who gave up on the old hope—and in doing so, freed themselves to take up new kinds of action.
Deep Democracy & Civic Creativity (The Unfinished conference, 2018)
How to Heal the Left-Liberal Divide (Current Affairs and The Guardian, October 2017)
In sum, an ideal Democratic Party would arbitrate internal divides through a flurry of vigorous issue campaigns and primary challenges during ordinary time and then, during general election time and critical Congressional votes, rapidly unify to win. This would move our conflicts — over which candidates are worthy of trust, over what voters actually want, and over the reality of certain larger forces — away from the never-ending shadow-boxing ring and toward resolution in the court of public opinion. Primaries, for example, will help resolve the strategy divide, surfacing whether “pragmatism” or “idealism” wins in general elections, as candidates of different persuasions win primaries and test their pragmatist/idealist orientation in general elections. Issue campaigns, meanwhile, will surface the extent to which the party has been corrupted by nefarious structural forces. One need not endlessly discuss whether this or that politician is a “neoliberal shill” if you can resolve the question by launching issue campaigns that dramatize these larger forces at play and see whether said politician supports the campaign. If they do, they may be worthy of more trust. If they do not, they may be worthy of a primary challenge.
Commitment in the Age of Trump: Two Practical Steps Forward (November 9, 2016)
My favorite high school teacher has this poster in his classroom: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a wise message for the first week after the crisis: I worry if we jump into “The Response Plan” too early, we will repeat the same mistakes that brought us here. You can already see it happening in our newsfeeds, as everyone’s plan for the Age of Trump seems to be: “Everybody just needs to double down on my worldview.” Carving out time for reflection in spaces outside of campaign politics—reading spiritual books rather than pundits’ hot takes, watching a play rather than a cable news show, reaching out to real people rather than ranting about the latest stranger’s horrible comment thread—is crucial if we hope to shine a path out of here. I also, however, believe in Roberto Unger’s insight about hope and action: “It is a common mistake to suppose that hope is the cause of action. Hope is the consequence of action. You act, and as a result, you begin to hope.” So, this week, what then should we do? My proposal: alongside carving out time for reflection and offering immediate care to our neighbors, we should spend this week making a commitment. Concretely, we should make a commitment to a certain amount of time and a certain amount of money that we are ready to consistently give to our country in the coming years. Very specifically, we should each commit to a number of hours we are ready to give each week and a percentage of our paycheck we are ready to give each month.
From despair, work (November 9, 2016)
What America needed more than anything from this election was solidarity: the feeling that we are all in this together, that we have a shared direction, that we have found common ground. Instead, the greatest threat in our lifetime to our national solidarity—to our neighborliness, to our decency, to our commitment to shared endeavors—has arrived. We thought we were better than this. But we have been blindsided. And we are confused and afraid. When we are confused and afraid, we are tempted by twin evils. First, we are tempted to quit. We are tempted to run away to Canada, or run away to irony, or run away to fantasy. We are tempted to hide away and build our bunkers. Second, we are tempted to blame. We are tempted to search for our scapegoats and fall guys. We are tempted to tie some people and groups to the whipping posts and place our hurt onto them. Our first task on this dark week is to resist these immediate temptations.
What Motivates Millennials? (Falls Church News-Press, February 2, 2017)
When confronted with this challenge, party strategists tend to employ two misguided strategies. Their first strategy is to deploy what I call “civic engagement finger-wagging”: criticizing young people’s disengagement by appealing to platitudes about the almost-religious importance of voting (like “people died so that you could vote” or “It doesn’t matter who you vote for: just vote!”). This strategy is ineffective, because people do not vote because they care about voting: They vote because they care about the deeper projects for which their votes stand. To be invested in voting, you have to be invested in a direction in which you want the country to move. To be invested in a direction in which your country could move, you have to be invested in your country. If we do not connect young people to their country — by engaging them in the public life of their own neighborhoods and towns — and if we do not empower young people to imagine themselves as being able to lead their country in a fresh direction — by respecting their ideas and fostering their initiatives — then young people will never become invested in voting. A second misguided strategy that politicians use to motivate Millennials is to highlight political issues in which Millennials, they perceive, have a self-interest. They think they will win over Millennials by, say, talking about the national debt (“you know, you’re going to have to pay for this one day!”) or narrowly focusing on, say, student loans or legalizing pot. This is also ineffective, because it appeals to young people as self-centered consumers rather than as moral-centered citizens. Our consumer preferences might motivate us to buy one toothbrush over another, but they will not motivate us to participate in something as beautifully irrational as casting our lone ballot in with millions of others. To vote, we need to first become part of something bigger than ourselves, a process which requires politicians to appeal, in Lincoln’s words, to “the better angels of our nature.”
Beyond hashtag bitterness: campaign season vs. a politics of public projects (June 11, 2016)
Politics, to me, is the word we use to describe the interplay of our public projects. These projects range from the specific (“We want to regulate this product”) to the conceptual (“We want to achieve equal justice under law”); from the bounded (“We want policies that protect our family”) to the grand (“We want an international climate plan”); from the self-interested (“We want this tax break for our income bracket”) to the civic-minded (“We want to ameliorate this social ill”); from the state-centered (“We want to end this war”) to the culture-centered (“We want to change this practice”) to the market-centered (“We want to modernize this industry”). These projects advance through struggle: against inertia, against friction in the institutions that can help realize them, and against each other. We identify with some of these projects and their respective struggles, while disdaining and fighting other ones. We treat most as practical steps to address complicated challenges, but experience a special few as simple religious crusades. These public projects -- and the struggles for them, the fights between them, and the processes that grant them power -- are the meat and potatoes of politics. We care about elections because we care about our public projects. I like to think of elections as contests to determine the legislative terrain on which our various public projects will interact in the coming years. Seen this way, voting in elections is like picking the arena where the real match will eventually take place: though the possible arenas may vary widely -- with each possible arena advantaging some projects and disadvantaging others -- they are not the matches themselves. The matches themselves are between the actual public projects that we continually struggle for every year regardless of which terrain was selected in the last election year. No matter how lopsided an elected arena’s terrain is -- no matter how much this year’s batch of elected officials will advantage certain public projects over others -- Election Day is not the closing bell but the opening one; and the true players are not the various candidates, but us.
The Virtue of Not Being a Genius (October 9, 2015)
I just read this great quote by Lionel Trilling, writing about George Orwell: "If we ask what it is that he stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do." Though Orwell was a Brit, of course, I feel that the "virtue of not being a genius" is one of America's great virtues. Our nation's best accomplishments have been achieved by extraordinary ordinary folks remembered much more for their open-hearted devotion and practical creativity than their mental majesty. The Ida B. Wellses and Benjamin Franklins; the Eleanor Roosevelts and Gifford Pinchots in our history weren't once-in-a-century minds-- they were just citizens who had a high estimation of their own significance and an open ear to the challenges calling them. "He is not a genius," Trilling wrote of Orwell. "What an encouragement!" I hope the same for millennial America: that we can be ever better built of, by and for extraordinary ordinary citizens, so that our descendants may say "our ancestors accomplished so much and they were not geniuses... what an encouragement!"
Hearts, Laws, and Our 1L Orientation (The Harvard Law Record, September 7, 2015)
First, we must bring the language of changing Hearts, writ large — moral prophecy — into our conversation. It is the language of the Martin Luther Kings, Thomas Jeffersons and Pope Francises of the world: setting a direction for where we should go, articulating visions of parts of the Good life, deliberating what a more perfect union means, and bearing moral witness to the dark corners of today’s system. Second, we must bring the language of changing Laws, writ large — structural vision — into our conversation. It is the language of the Jane Addamses, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelts, and Lawrence Lessigs of the world: identifying first steps in the direction of our ideals, analyzing the institutions that mold public life, launching creative interventions, and supporting existing constructive deviations from the dominant system. Some of us will end up more in Jones’ camp, taking up the work of changing Hearts. As members of the legal vocation, most of us, like Clinton, will be better suited to the work of changing Laws. Either way, what we cannot do is ignore the need to change Hearts and Laws while lost among the shiny distractions and misplaced anxieties of the pre-professional rat race. Not at this time. Not with this power.
Civic Idea of the Day: 3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Giving Up Civic Hope (May 18, 2015)
To be serious about solving a public problem means that you actually care about solving the problem. When helping to solve public problems, we are tempted to care more about personal things: mimicking the style and affect of an activist subculture, affirming our own innocence in opposition to social ills, or scoring points in the eyes of our peers. To be serious is to not give into these temptations. To be serious is to be strategic: thinking, experimenting, and analyzing about what needs to be done to solve the problem. Many times, being serious means being willing to do something uncomfortable, like thinking about what the "other side" values and speaking to them in their own language.
The Soul of Facebook Venting: Empowered Alternatives to Ranting Online (Front Porch Republic, May 18, 2015)
I know I am not alone in experiencing the Facebook venting cycle: 1. First, a glowing screen that you are reading or watching projects some news that upsets you. Perhaps it was news from a cable channel that is engineered to ceaselessly produce anecdotes designed to upset you. Perhaps it was news from a comedy show whose most popular bit is to aggregate upsetting quotes from those cable channels. Perhaps it was news from a viral media website who curates clips from those comedy shows about that cable channel’s quotes about those upsetting anecdotes. Whatever the source, the process begins with a glowing screen making you upset (with, of course, the source raking in the advertising revenue). 2. Next, a tension builds inside of you. You cannot stand the thought of living in the same world where that news occurred or being part of the same human community as the person who committed the upsetting act. You feel like you need to do something about it all. You sometimes even feel as if you cannot continue your daily work or see your friends or care for your family until this tension is resolved. 3. Finally, you release the tension by posting a link and rant to the ever-present release valve that is your Facebook status update box. Some rants are long-winded, but even short bursts – like “This is horrible!” “I can’t believe this is happening in 2015!” or “Kids these days!” – do the trick: you have “raised awareness,” you have declared your opposition to the upsetting news, your conscience is cleared, the cycle is over and you may continue with your day. ... Perhaps Bottum’s interpretation of our spiritually “anxious age” explains that deep tension that builds up when the news upsets us. Perhaps we see in those upsetting anecdotes a post-Protestant demon — social sin peeking out from behind the social order. Perhaps the tension that must be vented is our uncertainty in the presence of such sin: Am I going to be tricked by this evil or am I going to be aware enough to see it at work? Am I going to become part of it or am I going to reject it? Am I on its side of the great divide or am I on the side of the redeemed? Facebook venting resolves this uncertainty. By pasting a link to a news story and properly identifying the social evil at work – “This is racism!” “This is bigotry!” “This is evil!” – you stand at the digital altar and testify to your awareness of social sin. By ranting against the news story, you validate that you have rejected this sin, broadcasting that you belong among the redeemed. When you click submit, your uncertainty about your moral goodness is temporarily washed away: you can proceed with confidence that you are one of the elect.
Jeanne Manford and Lightswitch vs. Gardening Politics (January 29, 2015)
This quote, from Jane Addams' 20 Years at Hull House struck me this week: "The decade between 1890-1900 was, in Chicago, a period of propaganda as over against constructive social effort; the moment for marching and carrying banners, for stating general principles and making a demonstration, rather than the time for uncovering the situation and for providing the legal measures and the civic organization through which new social hopes might make themselves felt." Too often, we view political causes like a lightswitch: we all believe one thing, we make some noise to flip the switch, and then we all believe another thing. *Flip the switch*... problem solved. This process usually involves drawing a line between the light and the dark, constantly reminding ourselves that we are 'in the light', and demonizing and punishing those 'in the dark'. It's an easy model for practicing politics, because it requires very little work: just declare yourself clean and start feeling good about yourself. This way of looking at politics -- as a series of switches to flip; a series of lines of which to be on the right side; a series of the right words to say to remain clean -- is tremendously ineffective at achieving structural change. Causes like rolling back global warming, reforming the criminal justice system, or getting money out of politics are not going to happen like the flip of a switch. Rather, it's going to be much more like a gardening project: how are we doing at planting the seeds (changing people's minds)?; how are we doing at tilling the soil (creating the right environment for change)?; how are we doing at watering the plants (creating the routines and putting in the work that allow change to grow)?; how are we doing at getting the legal right to till the land (legal/structural changes)?; how are we doing at getting the money to buy the materials (funding)?; and how are we doing at inspiring more gardeners (recruiting)? The process looks less like "[No Garden] vs. [Full Garden]" and more like a gradual process of fits and starts and sprouts and weeds and duds and blooms... that hopefully -- a long while later -- makes this plot of land we call home much more beautiful than it was before. (Notice how declaring yourself "Pro-Garden" and belittling some neighbors as "Anti-Garden" is, at best, a tiny part of the project and, at worst, dangerous to the project.)
Beyond Josh Lyman Politics: How the West Wing Miseducated My Political Generation (Front Porch Republic, January 15, 2015)
What would a better political education look like? First, it would de-emphasize the role that political wheeling and dealing, snarky debate, encyclopedic literacy of formal political processes, and even inspirational speeches – skills which our political establishment has in excess – play in political change and emphasize the role that community-mindedness and visionary reform – scarce resources inside the Beltway – play in it. Second, it would draw focus away from the internal dramas of Washington insiders and towards the politics that occurs outside of the halls of national power: the state initiatives, the small-town ideas, the business innovations, the community projects, and the local protests happening in neighborhoods across America. If you insist on focusing on Washington, why not feature the public interest groups who work tirelessly everyday not to maintain their administration’s power but rather to push for actual game-changing reforms? Finally, it would see democracy as more than national elections and the choices of the national administrations they produce. Consequently, it would see citizens as more than dollars and votes, pushing the dial back towards a membership democracy from our management democracy. It would equip community innovators to create institutions that discourage the practice of centrally-minded, furious, spectatorial politics and encourage the practice of community-minded, routine, empowered politics. Two shows point in this new direction. From the progressive tradition, David Simon’s The Wire is the anti-West Wing: there’s no eloquent speeches, there’s hardly any moment resembling debate, and any temporary insularity is immediately broken by the chaotic and sprawling reality of the modern city. Viewers learn about the other end of the policy digestion system: the practical institutions that administer public laws and programs. Nobody ‘wins,’ because ‘the game’ of inner-city Baltimore isn’t winnable. Yet, we have a lot to learn from some of players’ temporary civic victories, such as Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin’s progressive experiment to test the effects of drug legalization in one area of his Western District. Such tiny, progressive community innovations, by people working where the rubber hits the road in urban life, have snowballed into some of our greatest national achievements but are hardly mentioned on shows like The West Wing. From the conservative tradition, Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights is also a stark contrast to The West Wing, but for different reasons. Whereas The West Wing’s characters endlessly one-up each other to prove their superior intelligence, the neighbors of FNL’s Dillon, Texas have little respect for Gilbert and Sullivan references and Ivy League degrees. Rather, characters proved their worth by how much they could give back to their community: by how big a fundraiser they could throw, by how many boys they could shepherd into manhood, by how many athletic booster meetings they could attend, by how long they could consistently preserve local values and traditions. Despite being a show about literally winning football games, its deeper message betrayed its surface-level competitive spirit: when a character valued being right and winning interpersonal skirmishes – as every West Wing character does almost every episode – they often faltered, whereas characters who valued being good and preserving interpersonal ties found success. Friday Night Lights taught what is perhaps the most important – and the most overlooked by West Wing-style politics – principle of making political change: before we are activists, we are neighbors; before we can change a community, we must be a member of it.
A Political Vocabulary Reset (December 11, 2014)
Our political thoughts and conversations are too often confused by our ambiguous political vocabulary. Saying you're "Liberal" can mean you want more health and safety regulations or that you want less health and safety regulations. Saying you're "Conservative" can mean you want a muscular foreign policy, an isolationist foreign policy, or a hard-nosed prudent foreign policy. These words aren't useful anymore. Attempts to clarify this ambiguity -- such as the famous square of "liberal vs. conservative" on one side and "cultural issues vs. economic issues" on the other (creating the ever-popular and often-misapplied label of "I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative") -- give us a much-too-narrow set of concepts than are needed to (1) paint an accurate picture of what's going on underneath the surface in American politics and (2) begin a much-needed reimagining of American politics. So, for the sake of just that -- (1) clarifying our understanding of the present fault lines of American political belief and (2) providing tools for political re-imagination -- here is my first stab at a POLITICAL VOCABULARY RESET. I aim to reset 12 words, each representing the two poles of six political spectrums. These spectrums are, of course, not comprehensive of all of American politics, but they are my attempt at identifying the range of opinion on a few major foundational questions that are not only present in politics today, but will probably still be present in the coming decades after the specific 'issues' debated today -- gun control, gay marriage, ISIS, etc. -- are past.
Civic Creativity: Democracy as a Platform for Our Public Projects (March 2012)
My senior thesis in college was entitled Civic Creativity: Democracy as a Platform for Our Public Projects. You can download the work here.
Here’s a summary of the two arguments in the thesis:
The first big idea is that, for the individual citizen, there is a new mode of civic action – independent of voting, deliberating, and protest – which I call: civic creativity. It is defined as “the imagining and implementing of public projects over multiple platforms.” In Part 1, I will describe the history of the three commonplace modes of civic action (voting, deliberating and protest), define civic creativity as new mode of civic action, and compare civic creativity to the other three modes. The second big idea is that the individual act of civic creativity, being a social and collective practice, has ramifications for our understanding of democratic society as a whole— that there is a new way to understand democratic governance that goes hand-in-hand with this new mode of civic action: democracy as a platform for our public projects. In Part 2, I will describe this new way of thinking. In this understanding, governance is not just Government— the institution commonly referred to as the government is not the only force that governs our lives. Rather, the model acknowledge that a network of various institutions – the media, corporations, religion, web platform architecture, culture, language, neighbors, foundations, universities, civic groups, and more – also govern our lives. Each of these governing forces are themselves governed by rules. To turn a civic creation idea into a reality, you must navigate the various “platforms of governance,” convincing various people and entities that your creations and purposes are worthy of their support.
Here’s the table of contents:
Introduction: A New Paradigm Shift in Democratic Theory 1. Strange civic actions 2. A disconnect between such actions and common civic concepts 3. Paradigm shifts in democratic theory 4. Outline of the argument for a new democratic model Part 1: A New Mode of Civic Action 15 1. Beyond civic engagement finger-wagging 2. The three dominant modes of civic action: a history of voting, deliberation and protest 3. Another turn in democratic thought 4. Gaps in the three dominant modes of civic action 5. How the three dominant modes capture and fail to capture the new civic actions 6. Civic Creativity: A New Mode of Civic Action 6a. Spearheading instead of just participating 6b. Problem solving rather than law 6c. Decentralized work instead of a focus on the state 7. A broader understanding of civic creativity Part 2: A New Understanding of Democratic Governance 1. The restricted spectrum of democratic models 2. The restrictive assumption of the two models 3. Democracy as a network of platforms of governance 3a. Governance is more than government 3b. Platforms of governance have their own specific rules and procedures 3c. Multi-platform governance and civic creators 3d. The ramifications of multi-platform governance 4. Democracy as a platform for our public projects Conclusion: On Generativity
MLK Jr. Day Celebration Speech @ St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, MA (January 17, 2012)
And there lies the problem with Option 2. History — and especially American Civil Rights history — teaches that we should not be surprised at all. Of course it is not the leaders we elect who bring major change to government policy. It is social movements and citizen projects from outside of government that force those leaders to act. Lincoln penned the Emancipation Proclamation, but abolitionists provided the ink. FDR signed off on the New Deal, but for the workers’ movement, it was old news. Maybe Nixon proposed the Environmental Protection Agency ‘cuz he was tree hugger at heart… or maybe he faced the biggest environmental movement in history! Indeed, as historian Howard Zinn put it, “government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action.” Indeed, it was that 2008 Presidential candidate that we all fell in love with himself who put it best: “You are the ones you have been waiting for…you are the change that we seek.” The Freedom Riders of 1961 understood that extraordinary ordinary citizens had to hold leaders’ feet to the fire if they wanted to spur those leaders to action. When the Kennedy Administration was asking for a ‘cooling off period’ from direct action by civil rights advocates, activists kept the Rides going, understanding that it was exactly direct citizen action in times of administration uneasiness that could lead to major societal change. Their success in convincing the Kennedy Administration to support bus de-segregation proved their belief true.