Huston, “What We Talk About When Talk About Democracy”
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Democracy
Reengaging the American democratic traditionOutside the ranks of political theorists and activists, it’s been a while since Americans have had a substantive, public discussion about democracy. It’s perfectly common to celebrate our country’s democratic political system. Among my students, it’s even more ordinary to take it as a given. There’s still plenty to cheer about in American political practices and institutions, especially if one has been following the elections in Zimbabwe, Russia, or Italy (to name a few places). The problem with the cheering is that it isn’t at all clear what we’re cheering about. Politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens point with pride to a “democracy” that strangely lacks specifics. Their assumption is that we all agree about what democracy is, so we don’t need to specify.
[This is just a snippet. Read the whole article at Common-Place, then come back here to comment below.]
Reeve Huston writes:
One has to consider the very interesting bifurcated, it seems to me, legacy of the Jackson presidency. First is its rather inchoate reassertion of the populist corrective strain in the active (and, as you correctly observe, ever evolving) American polity, to which I am somewhat sympathetic — and the other one, to caricature slightly, of the reductionist-tending figure in Jackson’s somewhat primitivistically framed matters of person and policy. But I do not think that is what is primarily under discussion in your provocative article.
That not inconsiderable aspect aside, you have correctly identified the recently campaign of President-elect Obama (one can say it this morning, with some sense of amazement) as an example of a movement with true grass-roots aspects and powerful influence. There is no doubt in my mind that the proof is in both the everyday activities I saw and heard about, and more materially, the evident massive success of Obama’s fundraising through a huge ground-up inpouring of hundreds of thousands of contributors, most of whom I understand gave an average of under $100. This is truly quite extraordinary. Although I am a firm believer in the concept of public-financing, I cannot wring my hands too much about the Democrat’s declining to participate in it this year. Pragmatically, the reason was simply that he could raise a lot more money this way. And not incidentally, it is also rather democratic. (Nonetheless, I think the public financing system should be tweaked to guide future candidates back to that option. The concept is good, and this Obama phenomenon may be a historical one-off.) Also, the elitist-informed media savvy, advertising polish, hyper-organized central (looping, it is mostly true I think, back down constantly to those grass-roots to some extent, perhaps not totally symbolic, such as through a non-stop and eventually daily barrage of constant e-mails to its huge list) functions of the Obama campaign are salient crucial factors to be noted.
By the way, to delve into popular culture since that is somewhat the subject here, choosing the date of 1968 as the advent of the certain sort of modern campaign handlers and media operators at the presidential level of political participation is suggestive of trends in the popular literature in the late 20th century. I suppose one could accept that date as well as any other. Outside of academia, that year indeed was very well popularly captured in book “The Selling of the President 1968″ by journalist Joe McGuinness, but had also been invoked in the precedent-setting “Making of the President [1960]” by T. H. White. And Vance Packard had noticed the totalizing machinations in best-sellers as early as the 1950s.
I am sure there are others, too, as well as those more aligned with media-resisting traditional Saul Alinsky-type views and preferences about the continuing community-organizing point of view persisting past the early 1970s. But I would say that the Obama success was not fully in that tradition due to its integration of the media smarts and highly effective financial management that bespeak the era of this very moment much more than that previous more idealistic view did.
Comment by Democritus — November 5, 2008 @ 8:54 am
POST SCRIPT: I will note that many in the Alinsky school (and later) invoked the vaunted slogan “Think Locally, Act Globally,” but in effect I would hazard to generalize that in fact most adherents tended toward localist activism, and that this persists today for many. (I would even go so far as to say the youthful anti-globalism which surged a few years ago may remain mostly anomalous–now curiously dormant–although I may yet eat those words.) In any event, Obama himself may have been the unusual one with community-organizing foundations who in practice truly wished to embrace both aspects of the slogan, and it is quite possible in a few ways to recognize in his campaign a new synthesis.
Comment by Democritus — November 6, 2008 @ 6:29 pm
I very much appreciate “Democritus’s” provocative comments. I agree that Jackson’s campaign (and administration) combined a genuine populist element, both in its rhetoric and in its methods of mass mobilization, and a “primitivistic” way of framing both Jackson’s persona and his policies. If you look at it from one angle, I’m not sure that the two were bifurcated, though. Part of Jackson’s populism was his embrace of white frontier farmers’ hatred of Indians and belief that they had a higher claim to Indian land than Indians did. So his clearly “primitivistic” Indian policy (and his ideological claims on the matter) was part and parcel of a genuine appeal to popular aspirations and beliefs. Similarly, Jackson’s crude image as the (genteel, honor-bound) defender of the People’s rights was also a good way to appeal to his electorate.
I also think that Democritus’s comments on the Obama campaign are right on the money. It seems to me that it has the potential to change the rules of electoral politics, much in the way that Jackson’s 1828 campaign did. Now, Obama has not foresworn his dependence on wealthy donors and fancy fund-raisers. He spent a lot of the general campaign courting them. And given what happened to Kerry in 2004, who can blame him? But if this method of internet-based, low-amount fund-raising proves transferrable to other, less charismatic candidates (admittedly, a big if), we might well see future candidates and officials in a position to spend less time fundraising, which is in itself a major change, given that members of Congress spend far more time raising money than in committee or on the House floor. More importantly, it has a big potential to lessen the power of big donors.
The Obama campaign’s emphasis on grass-roots organizing has the same sort of potential. If other candidates follow suit, grass-roots activists will be essential to electoral victory, and they will have to court those activists—possibly as the influence of big donors is diminishing. Both developments could have big implications for elected officials’ policy choices. If this happens, it will not always move politics to the left. The Republicans’ politics of culture war (including the nomination of Sarah Palin) has been in part an effort to keep their grass-roots organizers happy.
This all may not happen. As I say in an upcoming post, whether or not 2008 is the beginning of a new political era or a one-shot deal depends on what Obama does in office, most importantly on his ability to forge policies that address the aspirations of his present and potential supporters.
We can certainly count on the Obama administration (that has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?) to try to change the rules of politics. The candidate has put that sort of change—mobilizing the grass roots, rejecting wedge politics—at the center of his message. And David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, has stated that they plan to keep the organization that won the election active during an Obama administration. This holds the possibility of a permanent change in the way politics is conducted, not only during elections but between them. What would have happened to Clinton’s health care plan if there had been hundreds of thousands of volunteers going door to door, working to persuade voters of the merits of the plan? A ground game is no guarantee of victory on any given policy, but it could serve as a powerful counterweight to the armies of lobbyists that routinely weigh in on policy and the ad campaigns that appear when the stakes are particularly high.
Hold on—it’ll be an interesting four years.
Comment by Reeve Huston — November 7, 2008 @ 12:09 pm