Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, 1908. Photo by Frank H. Nowell, Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition Collection.
Two things…properly speaking [constitute the soul of a nation] …One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received.
—Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? (1882)
There has to be something concrete that makes those of us living in the United States more than just co-residents who share little other than proximity. There has to be something that makes 300 million people into we and us. That something is civic nationalism.
—Ian Reifowitz, “Liberal Nationalism Is Not Only Possible, It’s Essential” Huffington Post, Dec. 06, 2017
After Liberal Post-Politics
Under the sustained hammer blows of hyper-reactionary neoliberalism, whatever was left of the postwar American liberal democratic consensus (with all its various assumptions and expectations) is now entering a state of extreme liquefaction. It has also become increasingly clear that our basic constitutional arrangement, our institutional checks and balances, and long-accepted norms of democratic governance will not protect us from a further slide into authoritarianism.
Once the initial shock of this begins to recede, we hear from a variety of sources the hue and cry, “only a return to politics can save us!” We are then duly encouraged to become active and engaged citizens, to get involved in our communities in order to try to reinvigorate American democracy.
Beyond this initial point, however, things start to get rather complicated, because the “end of liberal post-politics” is ambiguous—the meaning of a possibly durable, American center-left solidarity turns out to be a highly contested political terrain.
What shared understanding of political action after liberal post-politics—might lead to a viable center-left counter-hegemonic social and political project?
In my first installment of this post, I suggested that there are actually two distinct paradigms for this in active circulation today. There is the version implicitly held by centrists who think some sort of liberal détente among middle class, working class, and social movement constituents is still presently viable, and that this bloc can regain and hold political power; and there are more radical leftists who ardently believe (and not without good reasons) that given the drift of the American political Right into reactionary politics, the time is now ripe to organize a leftist coalition for mass struggle against the dominant class hegemony.
I am interested in entertaining the idea that they may very well both be right–since understanding how this can be so is actually the condition of an effective center-left coalition. It may be the case that there used to be something uniquely promising about American civic and political life (while recognizing the depth and profundity of our historic failures) that is in danger of withering away, with increasingly tragic results. It may also be the case that the unique experience of class in America was only the successful anesthesia of class consciousness in what was essentially an unsustainable liberal class compromise.
The Post-Political Liberal Condition
To see these two different sets of impulses more clearly it helps to recall some of the elements of the prior condition of liberal post-politics that is now coming to an end:
The condition of liberal post-politics had its roots in the Western world’s assumption that the post-WWII liberal democratic order was both progressive and irreversible, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. The almost universal recognition of the superiority of democratic socio-political legitimation mechanisms and institutions over and against any and all possible alternatives, under conditions of value pluralism, led to the widespread assumption of an “ethics first” model of politics. Here theorists have been concerned with the workings of a deliberative democracy where it was assumed that all parties were interested in reaching a rational consensus, and committed to the required minima moralia.
So I want to understand the imperative “only a return to politics can save us!” in the way that Husserl does when he says, “back to the things themselves!”
In the sphere of international relations, the subsequent ubiquity of some sort of constitutional patriotism among most liberals of this stripe also meant the simple assertion of cosmopolitan, transnational values over the thick solidarity of tribalistic, ethnic nationalisms.
On the home front, rank-and-file liberal-progressives generally went about promoting these same sorts of values domestically by supporting issue-oriented advocacy organizations, and assuming that the mythological white ethno-nationalism (völkische Bewegung) actively stoked by the donor class of reactionary neoliberalism could never attract more than a fringe following in this country.
With all this in the background, it makes sense that at the end of this sort of post-politics there would naturally be a large number of people who would want to work toward a reinvigorated American civic nationalism as the way to challenge a surging white ethno-nationalism. For these people, the challenge is to re-establish the density and vitality of our shared civic life, with a sense of community solidarity across class divides.
On the other side of this contested terrain, one finds groups of people for whom the return to politics has more to do with an apotheosis of the various new social movements of the last 40 years—a project involving various forms of civil disobedience and other forms of street level activism and community organizing that takes tactics and insights from each—a grand coalition of anti-war, civil rights, women’s movement, gay liberation, environmental movement, ACT-UP, LGBT equality, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, etc. On this side of the divide, one also finds intonations of the theory of agonistic democracy, where even under conditions of liberalism, politics must be properly understood first and foremost as an arena of perpetual social conflict and struggle for hegemonic dominance among competing groups.
Civic Nationalism or Agonistic Democracy?
As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, examples of these two tendencies were evident at the recent Bard College, Hannah Arendt Center conference on Civil Disobedience, where I was able to watch some of the proceedings via webcast. The distinction is apparent, for example, when one compares contrasting remarks made there by the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol and the London-based political theorist Chantal Mouffe.
Where Skocpol talked about “two opposing politics in America,” presumably referring to the red/blue experience of the white working class/lower middle class vs. progressives and the loose coalition of social change interest groups, Mouffe instead focused specifically on a broad-based left populism opposed to “the establishment” rather than “something oriented around proletarians vs. bourgeoisie.”
Steve Heikkila dares us to remember that because America is founded in freedom, Americans are not Americans because of historically determined factors out of their control.
My purpose in drawing out this (semi-latent) opposition between Skocpol and Mouffe is not to set the stage for a facile reductionism, in which these two nuanced political commentators are shown to be simply engaging in an academic species of the ideological finger-pointing that is presently going on in Democratic party politics between centrists and left-progressives via social media. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
By pointing to the nature of the impasse here as actually relating to a common referent (the nature of the civil society and the prospects for left-progressive politics) I’m trying to suggest that we treat the imperative “only a return to politics can save us!” as the occasion for a kind of bracketing of opposing assumptions, as an opportunity for reflecting upon their common grounds or conditions. So I want to understand the imperative “only a return to politics can save us!” in the way that Husserl does when he says, “back to the things themselves!”
But where Husserl is concerned with an intentional bracketing of judgments about the natural world in order to grasp things as phenomena, I want to focus instead on something like civil society and class consciousness in light of Gramsci. If we see these orientations toward a counter-hegemonic project as turning on two different interpretations of Gramsci’s account of hegemony and civil society (what in my last post I identified as thick hegemony, and liberation hegemony), I think it makes sense to see them, initially at least, as more or less equally compelling variations (and thus potentially non-exclusionary with respect to one another).
To put it another way, after liberal post-politics, whether one wishes to find ways to de-polarize the electorate, or else to radicalize masses of people for political struggle, the question concerning the basis of inter-group solidarity on the terrain of civil society still presents itself, and still needs to be addressed.
There are good reasons to see the civil society primarily as the political terrain on which the dominant class organizes its hegemony, the realm of Michel Foucault’s “relations of power” in which the state and the dominant class hegemonically maintain a culture of putative consent. Under this conception, even in a democratic society, hegemonic change and the forging of counter-hegemony in the multiplicity of antagonisms within civil society happen by way of nothing more than a pacta sunt servanda (good faith commercial contract agreement). There are also reasons to see the civil society, with its bottom-up natural complexity, as having a liberation potential, and thus to regard it as an arena for transformational political action and as such a bulwark against authoritarianism, one party rule, and the deployment of state coercion to enforce class dominance.
Gramsci’s emphasis on cultural hegemony per se, and thus upon political struggle as a “war of position” on the terrain of civil society with its complex network of trenches, is meant to be a rejection of orthodox Marxist economism, the idea that capitalist economies and dominant class hegemony will simply collapse because of the unfolding of a necessary historical dialectic. So unless one still thinks that the proletariat alone is the “subject of history” or unless one actually believes in the “utopia of the classless society” then there is really no good reason why liberal-progressive ideas about “thin solidarity” in a democratic society should be excluded from our active consideration.
If we recognize that we are actually having a debate about the prospects for counter-hegemonic practice in relation to a set of ideas about the nature of American civil society, it’s my view that it may be possible to find a way to give both sides their due. Some things start to suggest themselves to me about how “centrist depolarizers” and “left-progressive radicalizers” can come to recognize a common sense of project, and a shared experience of solidarity.
Once More with Feeling: American Civic Nationalism vs. Neo-Nationalism
In his excellent article from 2016, “America is not a Nation,” In Dark Times’ own Steve Heikkila forcefully challenged the claim of the new American white ethno-nationalist nativism that it somehow intersects with the tradition of American patriotism.
In his article, Heikkila reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s 1973 interview where she says that the USA is united “neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language,” but rather by common citizenship, and this “through their consent to the constitution.” Americans are Americans, she argues, “because they have chosen to be so.”
To seek to transform the children of immigrants into American nativists, Heikkila continues, runs counter to the spirit of 1776, and is thus an attempt to fabricate something that simply doesn’t exist. Instead, he argues, the “patrie” of American patriotism was founded by an act of political choice, so that the shared identity of Americans is premised upon a shared oath (actual on the part of immigrants, implied for those born here) to honor a set of political ideals deriving from the American creed of liberal democracy.
In this article, I am seeking to explore what can be seen to lie behind this constitutional patriotism with its foundation in political voluntarism, and what also can be seen to flow from it — namely a “desire to live together” as Ernest Renan famously wrote, but in a (politically and socially) particular way. Steve Heikkila dares us to remember that because America is founded in freedom, Americans are not Americans because of historically determined factors out of their control. Americans as such are “a collection of individuals united by little more than their mutual consent to a social contract.”
What does it mean to ground a national identity in a shared voluntary political commitment to live according to a certain set of principles? In recent years, this sort of constitutional patriotism has been largely scoffed at as being simply too thin to bear the weight of something like a national identity. My jumping off point, however, is where Heikkila writes that this sort of patriotism is “closer to Rousseau’s civil religion in The Social Contract.”
By looking at Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy, I am interested to explore the experience of civic nationalism that gives both dimension and an element of solidarity to this constitutional patriotic form of allegiance. It is my conviction that while it’s true to say that Americans are united by “little more than their mutual consent” this little more points to a backdrop of a distinctive history and experience of civic nationalism that anchors our political voluntarism in social solidarity. It is my view that when seen in this way, the little more turns out to be just enough.
It is important to note that the last time the question of civic nationalism was debated with great urgency in the early 1990s, international legal and political theorists were especially worried about managing the expectations of nationalist succession movements by various ethnic minorities after the breakup of the Soviet Union (along with other long-festering claims to national self-determination by minority citizens in mature states).
As Michael Walzer explained in his introduction to Thick and Thin: Moral Argument & Home and Abroad (1994), the name of the game was to try to find some resolution to the problem posed by the idea of the nation-state itself, to find a balanced way to insist on and otherwise promote democratic principles of government while also being committed to cultural autonomy and national independence, or to quote him directly, “…to endorse a certain politics of difference while defending a certain sort of universalism.”
Beneath the laudable aspiration announced here, namely to be both enlightened and caring, (and thus to “have the cake, but to eat it too”) there was always some sense that ethnic nationalism existed, like a brain fever, mostly in places where a democratic, civic nationalism had not yet firmly established itself (as long as one forgot about places like Northern Ireland, Quebec, and India, of course). Put another way, the search for some sort of middle passage (if not for an outright “cure”) for ethnic nationalism generally rested, as Bernard Yack has written, on the assumption that “in western democracies, freely chosen principles have replaced cultural heritage as the basis of cultural solidarity.”
Why should it be so difficult to describe the solidarity of constitutionally patriotic citizens for whom the nation is a shared democratic civic life? The “post-nationalist nation” is a community with shared thin notions of the good.
Writing a year earlier than Walzer, in Blood and Belonging, Michael Ignatieff, for example, remarks that “while the psychology of [ethnic] belonging may have greater depth than civic nationalism’s…the sociology that accompanies it is a good deal less realistic.” Ignatieff here concurs with others proponents of civic nationalism from this period who (again, per Bernard Yack) would debunk “the national myths that exaggerate the virtues of nations and otherwise distort the historical record, inflaming passions that ignite ethnic conflicts…and remind us that nations are imagined communities or constructed or invented rather than simply handed down.”
In the later 90s and early 2000s, however, civic nationalism and its proponents, including those making the case for a so-called “constitutional patriotism” took quite a beating. For example, in her 1999 paper “The False Promise of Civic Nationalism” Chimène Keitner argued that civic nationalism, as a purported form of nationalism, must be evaluated (along with ethnic nationalism) by the extent to which it “provides something more than just a state-based account of identity and allegiance.” With this in mind, Keitner interrogates civic nationalism in order to find the “account of pre-political identity that it offers for establishing the viability of political arrangements,” but all she is able to find are accounts of state patriotism that try unsuccessfully, she writes, to “harness the pre-political bonds of solidarity characteristic of nations while associating them with the institutions of the state.”
In urging identification with republican, state-based values, Keitner says, civic nationalists effectively collapse the distinction between nation and state, and the arguments that deliberative democracy theorists like Habermas make for their constitutional patriotism (based on formal procedural agreement and principles of mutual respect) amount to a cosmopolitanism that is “not robust enough to nourish and sustain states as distinct political and territorial entities.”
In “The Myth of Civic Nationalism” (2000) Bernard Yack argued something similar, writing that “civic nationalism is really just wishful thinking” because it “turns national belonging into a form of rational attachment, a choice rather than a legacy.” Even if it’s true that national communities are largely imagined, Yack says, “they are imagined by groups trying to work things out in the present, not by individuals making voluntarist rationalist commitments.”
It is my view that these critics, concerned with the pesky problem of the nation-state for emerging democracies in far flung corners of the world, and serenely confident that nationalism represented no significant threat to mature democracies, have actually missed something quite important by not trying harder to characterize the “pre-political aspect” of post-nationalist constitutionally patriotic solidarity. The current unprecedented rise of neo-nationalism in mature, Western democracies like the USA places the question of civil society once again at the heart of both theoretical and practical concern–but this time with an unexpected twist. The twist is that this time, a compelling account of our own tradition of civic nationalism is urgently needed in order to combat the rise of a mythic white ethno-nationalism.
Why should it be so difficult to describe the solidarity of constitutionally patriotic citizens for whom the nation is a shared democratic civic life? The “post-nationalist nation” is a community with shared thin notions of the good. While it is certainly possible to theorize these ethical and political commitments in ideal terms, I have a sense that it is also possible to locate this commitment in the real experience of American civic life.
It is also my view that Theda Skocpol provides such an account of American civic nationalism, showing in Diminished Democracy how the term civic nationalism can be meaningfully applied to the kind of solidarity generated by the social and political voluntarism that gets expressed among citizens under conditions of liberal democracy.
Theda Skocpol’s Civic Nationalism
As with any sort of magnum opus, Theda Skocpol’s book Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in Civic Life has a certain irreducible complexity about it—there are layers of intention and regional arguments within the book that support the overall arc of her argument concerning the loss of something important about the American experience of class (what used to be called American exceptionalism before it got confused with the supposed indispensability of American global imperialism).
In the most basic sense, the book is a study of the role, function, and meaning of civic voluntarism (voluntary federated associations) in American life from just after the Civil War until the Viet Nam War, which is then contrasted with an account of a set of abrupt changes that unfolded from the 1970s to the present time.
At one level Skocpol seeks to offer a riposte to conservatives and communitarians who have insisted for almost half a century that “national government is inimical to healthy civil society” and that “voluntary groups flourish best apart from active national government, and disconnected from politics.” Based on an array of sources of data, she argues instead that “civil society and government worked hand in hand,” and that the “true story of voluntarism is thus different from the myth of apolitical localism.”
To grasp the extent of this breakdown one need only consider the running joke connecting the antics of Ralph and Norton in the “Raccoon Lodge” on The Honeymooners program with “The Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes” on The Flintstones.
At another level, however, as will be described below, Skocpol uses the phenomenon of mass voluntary association membership to paint an unexpected picture of American civil society, a heretofore undiscovered country, one in which acts of voluntary association created numerous ties that bound people together across ethnic, class, and regional lines (race and gender play a different role in this story).
In yet another section of the book, Skocpol’s focus moves to the causes of decline in federated voluntary associations (and with it the network of these “Gramscian trenches” in the civil society) and to the diminished democracy created by the condition that I have been calling “liberal post politics.”
It’s worth pointing out that at no time does Theda Skocpol use the term “civic nationalism” in Diminished Democracy. Nor does she situate her account of American civil society in relation to Gramsci’s account of cultural hegemony. However, I am interested in each of these major moments of Skocpol’s book because together I think they go some distance toward recovering (and thus explaining) the civic nationalism that has traditionally been the substantialist backing for our (now often discounted) American tradition of constitutional patriotism. Once again, it locates it not in the theoretical grounding of transnational values on the part of highly reflective intellectuals, but instead, firmly in the history and experience of American civic life.
The American Tradition of Civic Voluntarism
Diminished Democracy begins with a sense of wonder. Theda Skocpol is looking at early 20th century tombstones, and trying to understand why so many people apparently felt that their participation in voluntary groups like “The Grand Army of the Republic” or “The Grange” or “The Oddfellows” was important enough to have it carved into their marble along with “beloved son,” or whatever else the small patch of eternal real estate could reasonably support. It turns out that understanding this is not just a matter of peering back into the sepia tinted photos of the nineteenth century, to understand the period of American industrialization, the Civil War and Reconstruction, etc. It’s also a matter of understanding a much more recent period of American civic life, roughly from WWI until the early 1960s as well.
In this more recent period, the names have changed, so that we have The American Legion along with Masonic lodges, Knights of Columbus more than Hibernians, Elks Clubs instead of the Loyal Order of the Moose. But for all the sense that the Baby Boomer generation and their offspring have been able to make of these organizations, they might have just as well belonged to the previous century. To grasp the extent of this breakdown one need only consider the running joke connecting the antics of Ralph and Norton in the “Raccoon Lodge” on The Honeymooners program with “The Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes” on The Flintstones. It’s certainly possible that audiences watching Ralph and Norton’s pratfalls in racoon caps were “laughing with” as well as “laughing at.” But by the time only middle-class kids were watching Fred and Barney in the 70s and 80s, the memory of what these associations meant was pretty much gone.
During their heyday, however, these federated voluntary organizations were large, trans local networks, reflecting an extensively organized and deeply participatory civil society, where civic voluntarism was thoroughly entwined with government activities and popular politics. Skocpol identifies as many as 58 such groups with membership levels reflecting one percent or more of the total US adult population cutting across class lines (and reflecting segregation according to gender and race).
Needless to say, Skocpol rejects the familiar set of conservative proposals, and refuses to give them the high ground on civic renewal: shrinking the size of government, localism, religious-based social services, etc.
In their operation, Skocpol says that the voluntary associations were what Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. called, “the greatest school of self-government” in that by “mastering the associative way,” he said, “they have mastered the democratic way.” While the associations were about strengthening community ties beyond immediate family and friends and neighbors, as federations, they also connected people in organizational solidarity across regions and the nation as a whole, and did so in a way that was all about broader social and political movements. Before electronic mass media and the consumer society that came with it, federated voluntary associations were in some sense the analog Internet of their day. Even more importantly, however, they schooled millions of people in parliamentary procedure, collective debate, and operating according to by-laws that mirrored the US Constitution. As organizations of community engagement, they also provided a mechanism for social integration for industrializing and urban America.
In terms of their political activity, the voluntary associations had a distinctively social agenda. They flourished because of a kind of reciprocity—the various systems of political patronage needed to be able to get to masses of voters; but reciprocally, they created bridges between local citizenry and elected officials in ways that influenced state legislatures and Congress. As largely pan-Protestant lay organizations in the time during and after the 2nd Great Awakening, they provided various forms of mutual aid for members, and they lobbied for veterans’ benefits after war mobilizations, temperance, women’s suffrage, greater access to educational opportunities, and social insurance.
The story that Theda Skocpol tells us about the “rise and fall” of these national and regionally federated membership organizations is thus also the story of how civil society and government worked hand-in-hand to fashion the welfare state intended to extend opportunity and guarantee a modicum of security to the working class and middle class in American society from the Civil War through the post-WWII era. It’s a different story of American greatness than the one we are most often hearing these days.
The Demise of Liberal Cultural Hegemony
Skocpol’s intervention in the conservative “myth of apolitical localism,” where civil society and national government are seen as thoroughly inimical, is on its own a great service. By the time she’s done beating their bucolic Jeffersonianism over the head with Alexis de Tocqueville and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., a much more nuanced and textured picture of American civic life has come into focus through the prism of voluntary membership associations. But the story she goes on to tell about the precipitous decline of these groups may be even more important, because it sets the stage for discussions about what we need to do today (it’s certainly not to reform local chapters of the Order of the Moose).
Skocpol’s account of the demise of the voluntary membership associations corresponds closely with the rise of liberal post-politics beginning in the 60s. Civil rights and Viet Nam opened a yawning generation gap that fractured civil society and sent the traditional membership headed off into very different directions. For all their contributions to civic life and cross-class solidarity, the voluntary membership associations, with deep roots in the 19th century, were for the most part racially segregated, sexist, religious, and militarist, and not casually so—they were these things in their specific traditions, in their DNA so to speak.
A Rip van Winkle who went to sleep in 1960 would not recognize our civic life, she writes.
So the burgeoning middle class after the 60s became cosmopolitans—first they went away to colleges and universities, and then they settled in “college towns” or affluent suburbs with other members of the professional class, or they gentrified urban neighborhoods, and they jetted around the world on vacation, or just nationally if they were less affluent. What they didn’t do, is stay put in their original home towns.
Of course, there isn’t anything especially wrong about all of this. There also isn’t anything wrong with walking away from voluntary organizations because one finds them sexist or racist. But the implications of what happened at the level of mass demographics is significant. Skocpol points to a major divergence that occurs during this time in terms of styles of politics.
While people without college degrees maintain their participation in these groups at about the same level during this time, overall membership drops precipitously. And while the white working class in their evangelical churches become increasingly the captive of right-wing advocacy groups like the National Right to Life Committee and the Christian Coalition, middle class liberals are joining recreational and self-help/spiritual organizations, or participating in ad hoc local school groups and the like.
The Professional Advocacy Explosion
What Skocpol calls the “advocacy explosion” comes to largely displace chapter-based member organizations, and what follows sorts liberals and conservatives into strikingly different buckets. For the middle class, the upheavals of the 60s reconfigured the civic world, so that by the 80s social movement activism was transmuted into the work of chapter-less professionally run advocacy organizations with the aim of affecting public policy. A Rip van Winkle who went to sleep in 1960 would not recognize our civic life, she writes. Add to the mix the rise of PACs after the mid-70s, and the role of business associations formed to blunt social advocacy and philanthropy, and the new landscape is more or less complete.
During the heyday of federated, voluntary membership organizations, Skocpol says, professionals and business elites were generally rooted in their local communities, and playing a kind of trustee role in civic engagement by working closely with community members from other strata of society. But after the advocacy explosion, the condition of liberal post-politics emerges, and the work of establishing and maintaining cross-class solidarity in the civil society also effectively ceases—post politics is thus here exposed as an apparent loss of incentive to reach out, to reach across, and to defend a kind of civic contract that was the hallmark of liberal hegemony understood as a form of cross-class cultural rapprochement.
As a social historian, Skocpol is writing about the decline of the sort of democratic civil society solidarity that formed the basis of civic nationalism and American constitutional patriotism for more than a century. Since the work is focused on civil society and liberal cultural hegemony, she does not trace out the effects of economic transformations (especially capital mobility and deindustrialization) upon organic communities beginning in the 70s, although she does have some things to say about the weakening of the union movement to the point of near irrelevance by the early 2000s when she was writing Diminished Democracy. She also has little to say about advanced technological capitalism, the Internet and mass media, the effects of which, to be fair, were perhaps somewhat less clear in 2003.
Reinventing American Civic Democracy
Skocpol’s final two chapters concern why we should care about the loss of these prior ties, reflected through the prism of voluntary association membership, that bound people together into a civic nation.
Obviously, Skocpol does not recommend some sort of return to the days of voluntary associations that excluded African-Americans, marginalized women, and vilified gays. But her constant concern over the loss of what she likes to call “democratic capacity” through the erosion of cross-class fellowship are highly relevant to thinking through how to go about reinvigorating our previous democratic civic culture. Likewise, her account of what I have been calling liberal post-politics, or what she describes as “a deleterious interlock of professionally-managed activities, associational and electoral decline, a proliferation of organized interests, and new communication and campaign technologies” is equally important, because she shows that together these things skew our politics and public policy toward the value and interests of the privileged, thus polarizing the electorate.
In the concluding section of the book, Skocpol makes some directional suggestions about how “classic civic America” might be reinvented. Needless to say, Skocpol rejects the familiar set of conservative proposals, and refuses to give them the high ground on civic renewal: shrinking the size of government, localism, religious-based social services, etc. But the Right’s potent admixture of federated, church-based membership organizations and media savvy advocacy organizations actually points the way toward the sort of blended organizing that she has in mind.
For examples, she mentions the AFL-CIO’s “new unionism” in Los Angeles, combining grassroots community organizing with labor organizing moving into new kinds of workplaces, and in so doing, welcoming women and minorities historically marginalized in union bureaucracies, as well as college students, religious organizations, and social movement activists. A similar example she cites is the case of the Industrial Area Foundation (IAF) a non-partisan, multi-ethnic and interfaith organization that works in poor and moderate-income communities to build the competence and confidence of ordinary citizens to affect change.
Skocpol’s examples, in which a blended model of membership organizations and professional advocacy groups work together in ways that also cut across the traditional divide of labor and community organizing, prefigures the approach taken by Ira Katznelson in City Trenches that I will describe in the final post in this series after discussing the agonistic democracy/radical democracy of Chantal Mouffe in the third installment, and James C. Scott’s Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts in the fourth part.
