This Moment in Time

Reclaiming Local Structures for Democracy

We live in an increasingly troubling world. There is a growing attraction to certainty, authority, and a short leash. Regardless of our stance on any particular issue, many of us long to find an alternative to the isolating and controlling culture that surrounds us.

We have been living in this condition for some time, only now the veil of how centralized and authoritarian we have become is lifted. This is not only a national concern, which the news and social media fully attend to, but one in our organizations and in the civic functioning of our communities. It all takes on even more importance as we witness how vulnerable our democracy is becoming. This is not just in one country but sprinkled throughout the world.

One way to understand this moment is to see that what is being enacted is an exaggerated expression of our immersion in the market economy. At the center of current events is an ideology that believes more control, more scale, more efficiency, and more dominance of others, played out in a context of scarcity, are the operating principles that are in the best interest of society and democracy.

Within Our Span of Influence

There is only so much we can do about large, national developments. We seem to be left with writing emails, raising funds, and waiting for the next election.

What we can act on now is to accept that the values and worship of the market economy also exist in our own community. This has infected our local structures initially designed to engage citizens’ voices and representation in serving our communal interests and the common good. Some examples:

• For local governance we have city councils, neighborhood councils, planning commissions, departments of economic development, and departments of civic engagement.

• Each state has a legislature that was designed to serve the interests of its constituents.

• Political parties claim they are responsive to citizens, mostly in election time.

• The real estate industry, held as a major measure of prosperity, seemingly operates within instituted restraints originally intended to give communities control over their own land and cultural memory.

The point: Every institution, private or public, declares that it acts in the public interest and is committed to engaging people to serve their collective interests. Schools, health care, social service, developers, private industry, governments, all make the claim. Each has full-time employees dedicated to community relations. Their primary interpretation of this mission is to manage the messaging and go through the motions with surveys, feedback questionnaires, booths at public events, advertisements of their generosity. However, when we have a public meeting, as in a neighborhood council or board of education meeting, we leave only a few minutes at the end for public comment. We spend most of the time following Robert’s Rules of Order, the market economy’s tool of choice to bring control, speed, and efficiency into every moment of our time together.

These public and private representative structures were created with good intent. Despite their intentions, however, their promises are not being fulfilled. Most of our structures say they engage people, while most are just offering lip service. The author Larry Inchausti calls this kind of engagement “bogus participation,” meaning that it moves slowly if at all. The claim of engagement is not delivered.

One simple example is with real estate development. Developers are required to get community input, so they will hold a community meeting but it is so late in the process that the conversation is ceremonial.

In this moment in time, the structures supposedly designed for equality, compassion, and raising the voice of regular citizens are a masquerade of engagement.

Elected Officials and People in Charge Are Not the Problem

The instinct is to look at the people running things. They are not innocent, but they are not the problem. It is that our structures designed to deliver equality have been captured by the market mentality. Any promise of citizen engagement––including journalism, the fourth estate, with its promise to create an accountable and equitable society––is empty. Our call is to do something about the disfunction of the structures for engagement. To re-create them as a national approach is harder and more complicated to do.

It is important to acknowledge that lip service engagement and bogus participation are not a benign drift from purpose but happen by design. As noted earlier, designs for central control grow out of a belief system very aligned with the market economy’s core values of control, efficiency, scarcity, and scale. Not that complicated. Participation and equity make holders of these values very nervous. No wonder we keep working to privatize much of what the government used to do. Prisons, security, parking lots, student loans, health care, schools, affordable housing, protection of resources in national parks.

The Creative Economy, Stupid

What is in our hands is the conscious choice to collectively depart the values of the market economy. Many are already doing this; they are simply waiting for us to make them central to our conversation. We can come together to put our attention and energy into restoring authentic engagement in our structures. This is our most accessible and powerful action step. It calls for us to bring our voice to the structures designed for representation and our well-being. One umbrella we can stand beneath to shift our attention and action to an alternative economy is what is called the creative economy.

The creative economy is all around us. It is how we care for the neighbor, the land, notice a child, welcome the stranger, see art as a communal undertaking, embrace local food, and support area enterprise. It is a neighborhood that keeps itself clean, safe, and relational. These all are attending to the affairs of the city.

This economy is a world that is not measured by money. This is a world where citizens, working with each other, create their own well-being. Where control, scale, scarcity, and efficiency are not the point. They are incidental concerns at best. Useful as one consideration among many. The creative economy treats trust as more important than control, taking time as more important than speed, investing nearby as more important than scale. It believes gifts in each person are abundant and more important than a scarcity mentality would have us believe. The creative economy is the production engine of democracy and the common good.

Noting the importance of social capital as a form of a political act is useful here. The concept was best established by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, which offers proof that the outcomes our institutions were designed to deliver––health, educational achievement, local economic strength, public safety––are dependent on the level of peer, neighbor, employee, and citizen trust of one another.

This means we can no longer explain the present situation by history, leadership behavior, research studies, family patterns, or college degrees. These are the factors that we traditionally use to explain this moment. Putnam’s research showed these factors made little difference in the health, safety, growth, or economic strength of a community. A community’s well-being simply has to do with the quality of the trust that exists among its citizens.

Traditionally politics is a subject to avoid because of its purported polarizing effects. There is a conversation about politics that takes us somewhere. This gives us something to talk about.

Politics That Binds

The word “politics” is from the Greek meaning the “affairs of the city.” These affairs were communally managed in indigenous cultures, rural cultures, intentional cultures. Not as the ancient Greeks and Romans managed them, which was embedded in elitism. Closer to the present, politics shows up more communally in the associational life that Tocqueville wrote about in the nineteenth century.

Our historical and traditional commitment to relational ways of being was co-opted by modernism and the ideology of the market economy. It began in the seventeenth century. The common land as the source of livelihood and well-being was privatized in a process called enclosure. This is the origin story of how the market beliefs, based on self-interest and the pursuit of the dollar or pound as the measure of success, claimed dominance over the “affairs of the city.”

An important part of political debate gets centered on attention to social issues. Sexual orientation, minority and women’s rights, abortion, the danger of the stranger, and the like. Important as these are, perhaps there is something larger at stake. What is equally powerful for our well-being is the question of who decides on the “affairs of the city.” How engaged and powerful are citizens and neighbors in producing the common good: raising a child, maintaining our health, being safe, how and where the dollar circulates, where we shop and make a living? These concerns are driven upstream by issues about controlling land, protecting our natural resources, and the economic distribution of wealth and capital.

No matter where we stand on left, right, red, blue, conservative, liberal, Republican or Democrat, socialism or democracy, all of these stances have one thing in common: they are pursued within the dominant values of the market economy. When we vote or protest, aside from the episodic focus on gender, the embryo, and the stranger, we are choosing who suits us better in their approach to maintaining control, scale, and efficiency as the key to well-being. All parties support globalizing the economy and give priority to the GDP, inflation, and Dow Jones as the measures of well-being. At election time, and in the headlines in between, it is all about “the economy, stupid,” the central slogan of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.

The tragedy is that whatever part of the commons we are committed to, it is most likely governed with bogus participation in the decision-making process. Politics, expressed by the campaign of the moment, vibrates on who is in control of our pursuit of more economic growth, building more big-box stores, believing higher buildings are the best use of land and that public money to support private investment is in the public interest.

To address the underlying problem means we act to reconstruct “politics” as we practice it. Depart the market economy. Live into engaging citizens in support of the creative economy. Support schools as a place for learning, not as an accelerated vehicle to achievement in the market or the military service. The alternative creative economy is built on focusing on the gifts, generosity, patience, and trust that produce local control over the common good. It is not based on competition and success measured by how high we rise. It is based on connecting people with each other, which becomes a positive political act. This is the politics that serves people and planet on a regular basis, without waiting for a vote or for “those people” to do the right thing.

Innovating Forms of Engagement in Our Operating Structures

The path of action is to build social capital through our existing structures for governance and the affairs of the city. Council meetings, board meetings, committee meetings, budgeting meetings, zoning meetings. Places where engagement is promised but not realized. We can be an advocate for authentic participation and there are connectors in every place who have the methodology. Jeff Stec has written a guide to this pathway titled “Humanizing Public Conversation.” Contact me for a copy. It gets very specific about how a creative economy operates in the public realm.

We can also focus on creating engagement in other forums that can open a window to give more accountability to citizens. These are activities that are both within reach and are another form of politics. This is where the creative economy operates and can innovate in putting citizens in control of their own well-being. Two examples:

The Arts. Our usual structure of entertainment, like a music performance, is for citizens to be consumers, called the audience. Ed Gutfreund writes songs and occasionally performs what he has written. We decided to try a way to engage the audience as co-creators of a performance. In one event, with an audience of about fifty people, he and his group played five songs. Then he invited us to break into groups of three to take ten minutes to answer the question “What is this experience meaning to you and why was it important for you to come here today?”

After bringing us back together, Ed asked a few to share what their conversation had been about. Then Ed continued the performance. The shift in the experience of listening to the last five songs was felt by all, especially the performers. We, the audience, became co-creators of this experience of music and the moment.

Election Campaigns. A candidate for mayor in Colorado read my book Community and called me about how to build community through his campaign gatherings. Radical idea, since most campaigns are marketing events. Big money spent on advertising. Candidates spell out the weaknesses of the competition and promise magic to educate our children, make the streets safe, create jobs, and lower costs. Typical citizen-as-consumer, candidate-as-product approach.

This mayoral candidate used campaign stops to briefly talk about why he was running and what he cared most about, then he put people into small groups with strangers and asked them what they cared most about and what part they as citizens play in making things better. The candidate and his staff joined the groups as listeners. The groups then reported out what they care about and their role in achieving the outcomes they wanted. This campaign stop became an example of how he would govern. At the end of the meeting, the staff asked people to sign up to be engaged after election day. Luckily, he won and even invited me to virtually join in the celebration.

Only the Beginning

There is endless potential in occasions where we can gather in new ways in service of the creative economy. Each time we gather, we can have citizens connect with each other in small groups with a question as a central feature of spreading support for a community good.

Some examples waiting to be redesigned: Back to school night. Protest events. Author talks at the library. Women’s Club and League of Women Voters events. Community land trusts. Church Sunday school, festivals in the park, garden clubs, art openings.

Add to these what we do to join with our neighbors, like picking up trash together, knowing the names of the children on the block or in the building, providing help to neighbors who need transportation or dog care.

The goal in all these opportunities is to counteract the raggedness of what leads in the news, which is constantly disturbing. We can pay primary attention to what can be reshaped locally. It is hard to do. The belief in the market economy is very much in play. We have the means to affirm in our own way of engaging, to find ways to place in our collective hands the capacity to reclaim some control over the democratic way of being that we believe in even though it now seems so fragile

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