 |
Essays
on Civic Renewal
National
Commission on Civic Renewal First Plenary Session, continued
Panel
Four: National Community & Civic Society
Contents
Panel
One: Americans' Civic and Moral Beliefs
Panel
Two: Social Trust and Civic Engagement
Panel Three: Race, Ethnicity, and Civic
Cohesion
Panel Four: National Community and Civil Society
Comments from Senior Advisory Council
Panel
Four: National Community & Civic Society
Witnesses:
William
A. Schambra
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Theda Skocpol
Harvard University
GALSTON:
We have now reached the fourth panel of the day, the fourth and
final panel of the day, and it addresses one of the questions
that is most contested politically and also most complex analytically:
namely, the relationship between the growth of the power of public
institutions, particularly at the national level, in the United
States over the past century or so, on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, the health, the vitality, of the classic intermediate
and voluntary institutions celebrated since the famous Tocquevillean
analysis, which has been referred to already many times today.
We have
with us two of the leading students of this question in America
today, to talk about it with a slightly different kind of evidence—not
so much public opinion surveys, or even interviews with families,
but with a different kind of important evidence, namely, historical
evidence. William Schambra, who is Director for General Programs
at the Bradley Foundation and a well-known author, and Professor
Theda Skocpol, who I believe is in both the government and the
sociology departments at Harvard. The same ground rules apply
as before.
William
Schambra: Thanks very much,
and it's an honor to be here with you all today.
In a leaky,
drafty former VFW hall on Milwaukee's northwest side, Pastor Gerald
Saffold is busy rebuilding civil society. Of course, that's not
how he would describe what he's doing. He would say that he's
bringing souls to Christ—using his immense gift for music
to draw inner-city teens into his "Unity in the Community" Choir,
where former gang leaders and drug dealers help him write the
songs and choreograph the dances that they then perform all over
the city.
Nonetheless,
this is an unmistakable act of civic renewal, and under the least
hospitable circumstances imaginable. Where before there were inner-city
gangs of angry teens, there is emerging today a cohesive community,
united in common endeavor, mutually developing skills of cooperation,
leadership, and citizenship.
Yet sadly,
we as a society do not seem inclined to celebrate this simple
gospel choir as a significant civic event. (And this, ironically,
in the very face of Professor Putnam's now famous discovery of
the link between active choral societies and civic health.) Instead,
we seem to be scanning the horizon for larger, more sweeping countrywide
movements, for a sweetening of our collective national mood, a
restoration of national cohesiveness. If the Commission sitting
here today can make one contribution to this nation's understanding
of civil society, it would be to insure that Pastor Saffold's
achievement is no longer overlooked, while we pine for some grand,
national gesture of civic revival.
How did
we arrive at this preoccupation with national cohesiveness? That
is the story of the idea of national community—the central
concept and overriding goal of 2Oth century American progressive
liberalism. Early in the 20th century, our leading political intellectuals—foremost
among them Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—concluded
that the forces of modernity were rapidly eroding the traditional
institutions of civil society. Within those institutions—small
towns, churches, neighborhoods, ethnic and religious groups—Americans
had traditionally governed themselves, established and preserved
their own vigorous moral and religious culture, cared for their
most vulnerable, and met the human yearning for community.
But now,
the progressives warned, the boundaries of these "island communities"
had been hopelessly ruptured by modern technologies—the railroad,
telegraph, telephone, the high-speed press, the corporation. These
same technologies, however, made possible a new, and dramatically
improved form of community in their view—the great, national
community. Elaborate communications and transportation networks
could pull the nation together even as they pulled the village
apart. And the emerging social sciences would tame the disintegrative
effect of modernity, once enough experts in government, business,
and the nonprofit sector were trained in them and organized into
the imposing bureaucracies that would now "scientifically manage"
all human affairs.
In order
to bring comprehensive order to these forces, Theodore Roosevelt
famously proclaimed in 1912, we now needed a far more powerful
central government. At the apex of this new federal apparatus,
a dynamic, articulate president would mount the "bully pulpit"
and summon the American people out of modernity's fragmented individualism
into unified, high-minded national endeavor. The stirring rhetoric
of national crisis and war would provide the metaphors needed
to make the American people sense, as the late Robert Nisbet put
it, "their mystic national oneness."
This century's
political life has been utterly dominated by this project of building
a great national community or family or village, peaking in Lyndon
Johnson's effort to "turn unity of interest into unity of purpose,
and unity of goals into unity in the Great Society." We have been
exhorted by Franklin Roosevelt to unite in the face of the Great
Depression "as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for
the good of a common discipline;" by John F. Kennedy to "ask not
what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country"
by Lyndon Johnson to wage a "war on poverty;" by Jimmy Carter
to engage in a "war on the energy problem." Through these galvanizing
metaphors of war and crisis, the presidency sought to fulfill
its primary purpose, which is, as Walter Mondale put it in 1984,
to "make us a community and keep us a community." We would not
soon be allowed to forget what Mario Cuomo describes as the "one
big idea" that is "the heart of the matter"—that "this nation
is at its best only when we see ourselves, all of us, as one family."
As noble
as this ideal may seem—as necessary as national unity may
occasionally be, in the face of genuine emergencies or war—progressivism's
national community has nonetheless proven in political practice
to be this century's greatest disappointment. For, while it does
in fact manage to drain the strength and moral authority from
local community institutions, it has at the same time utterly
failed to build the promised national substitute.
The national
community's contempt for and campaign of eradication against local
civic institutions is a bedrock of 20th century elite discourse.
In this view, local institutions are notoriously and hopelessly
backward, partial, parochial, reactionary, and riddled with irrational
myths and prejudices. They stubbornly cling to obscure and retrograde
notions of traditional morality and religious faith, rather than
bowing sensibly to the authority of scientifically credentialed
professionals and experts, who alone can exploit the potential
of modernity.
How many
campus-bred intellectual doctrines, how many short stories and
novels, how many Hollywood movies and television shows, have reveled
in this contrast between shabby, small minded, local prejudices,
and a sophisticated, expansive attachment to national ideals?
Given the unremitting hostility of America's elites toward local
civic institutions throughout this century, is it any wonder that
today they find themselves in an uphill struggle for survival?
Even as
it has managed to sap the moral authority of local community,
however, the idea of national community has failed to deliver
on its central promise—that is, to reestablish the idea of
the nation as a whole the sense of belonging, purpose, and self-governance
that local institutions once provided. Although now commonly considered
a conservative argument, this insight by no means originated on
the right. Indeed, as Nisbet pointed out, conservatism wasted
much of this century futilely extolling the virtues of rugged
individualism and the untrammeled marketplace, in the face of
America's manifest yearning for some form of community.
Rather,
the bankruptcy of the idea of national community was the central
insight of the New Left of the 1960s, and of Saul Alinsky's community
organizers, before and since. They initially and correctly observed
that the Great Society had not in fact delivered the great community,
but rather only the cold, distant, alienating, inhumane bureaucracies
of what they called "corporate liberalism." The vast, impersonal
institutions of business and government, they argued, simply could
not provide the self-governance and community of "participatory
democracy," for which the human spirit yearned.
Conservatism
has indeed more recently taken up this general theme, but with
an adaptation not at all in the spirit of the 60s. To be sure,
participatory democracy is essential for human happiness, conservatism
maintains, but the peculiarly American way of achieving it has
always been through dutiful citizenship within traditional, local
institutions like the church and synagogue, neighborhood, and
voluntary association. That Republican presidents were swept into
office throughout the past three decades on this theme proved
its power; that a Democratic president recently won reelection
on this very same theme marks its moment of supreme triumph.
But the
subtle allure of the national community idea is still very much
evident among us today, and tends to undermine even the most sincere
efforts to restore civic institutions. Our national ambivalence
is nicely reflected in Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent volume,
It Takes a Village.
Ms. Clinton
readily concedes what progressivism had denied for much of this
century—that strong families, neighborhoods, and churches,
far from being merely nurseries of reaction and bigotry, are in
fact essential to the physical, psychological, and moral well-being
of children. That stated, however, she quickly reverts to themes
more congenial to the project of national community: that such
traditional local institutions have been hopelessly undercut by
technological developments; that we therefore must now rely heavily
on the advice and assistance of trained professionals and experts
in lieu of traditional wisdom and institutions; and that we should
consider a variety of new government programs to insure that all
families are able to secure such advice and assistance. The small,
real-life village quickly yields to the metaphorical national
village.
Likewise,
as we discuss the revitalization of civil institutions, especially
in the Putnam sections, we tend to focus our concern on a limited
range of major national non-profits like the PTA or the Red Cross,
which are by no means incompatible with the idea of national community.
Though these organizations may have local chapters, they often
look to the Washington office for marching orders, receive federal
funding, press policy agendas upon the federal government, and
have gradually displaced the leadership of local amateurs and
volunteers with centralized bureaucracies of scientifically trained
experts and professionals. Such "acceptable" civic institutions
can even be counted upon to go before Congressional committees
and testify that they would languish, rather than prosper, were
government's benevolent presence to be diminished any further.
It is now
permissible—indeed, fashionable—to fret about the health
of such organizations, because of course they don't at all undermine,
but rather tend to reinforce, the upward political tug of the
national community idea. It is seldom noted that perhaps their
health is imperilled precisely because they have exchanged their
historic roots in the neighborhoods for invitations to cocktails
in the salons of our political and cultural elites. Perhaps their
predicament is not a proper gauge of the well-being of American
civil society, after all.
These examples
suggest that, while the moral authority of the idea of national
community has been seriously eroded over the past several decades,
it has nonetheless left in its wake towering bureaucracies of
elites and experts—not only within government, but also in
the nonprofit sector—who have powerful vested interests in
the renationalization of this idea of community. They will argue
eloquently and forcefully before this Commission that "civic renewal"
must mean restoring the deference and respect owed by a mystifyingly
ungrateful public to the major institutions working on behalf
of the noble idea of national community.
I would
suggest, on the contrary, that it's time to look in the opposite
direction, away from the exhausted ideal of national community,
and toward the small but vigorous civic community that Pastor
Saffold is building on Milwaukee's northwest side. As Bob Woodson
has argued so forcefully over the years, there are in fact hundreds
and hundreds of Pastor Saffolds in America's inner city, working
quietly, successfully, and without public acclaim to battle drug
abuse, educate children, reclaim teens from gangs, and rebuild
neighborhood economies—in other words, to accomplish as small,
local civic institutions what government bureaucracies never could.
Here, in
our nation's bleakest neighborhoods—long after the bureaucracies
of business and government and the mainstream non-profits have
thrown up their hands and fled—faith-based grassroots leaders
are managing to resurrect the institutions and principles of civil
society. If the Commission is looking for the true experts on
civic renewal, talk to them. They are civil society's trauma specialists.
Yet to our
elites, these grassroots initiatives are invisible, or if visible,
then contemptuously dismissed as charismatic exceptions or inspiring
but isolated anecdotes. After all, they're not docile subsidiaries
of the larger, "acceptable" non-profits, but rather scrappy, scruffy,
fiercely independent local initiatives, too busy working with
the poor to join coalitions against poverty. They're not staffed
by credentialed bureaucrats, but rather by volunteers whose chief
credentials may be that they themselves have only recently overcome
the daunting circumstances of the inner city. They place little
faith in the rehabilitative powers of the social sciences, but
witness every day the fruits of their abiding faith in the transformative
power of God.
I urge you
to defy the sophisticated scorn of our elites, and seek the wisdom
of these grassroots leaders who have accomplished under the least
hospitable of circumstances that civic revival that we wish for
all our communities. Then, help us appreciate them as they deserve.
Name them, honor them, celebrate them. Highlight the ways we can
redirect both private and public resources to those who have already
accomplished so much, with virtually no outside help at all. And
when you suggest a role for the federal government—for it,
too, surely has a role to play—insist that it leave behind
its grandiose ambitions for building a national community, and
that it assume instead a posture of humble service to the genuine
community-builders within our neighborhoods.
When the
VFW made the decision a while back to close its hall on Milwaukee's
northwest side, no doubt this retreat of a major national nonprofit
was carefully toted up as one more loss on Professor Putnam's
gloomy balance sheet of civil society. When Gerald Saffold once
again filled the old hall with joyous music and vigorous civic
life, no doubt this magnificent incident of civic renewal went
utterly unrecorded. That is an oversight the National Commission
on Civic Renewal should seek to correct, as it directs our focus
away from the failed project of national community, and back to
the churches, voluntary associations, and grassroots groups that
are rebuilding America's civil society one family, one block,
one neighborhood at a time. Thank you.
SKOCPOL:
Thank you for inviting me to contribute to this timely and important
commission. My presentation draws on research that's in progress
by a group I lead at Harvard called the Civic Engagement Project,
and I'm also drawing on the research of other scholars. After
hearing my co-panelist I can't resist saying, please keep in mind
that I'm a lower middle-class kid from Michigan, and my parents
were farmers. I'm not just from Harvard University.
I'd like
to develop three major points. Voluntary groups and democratic
national government are not opposites in American history. They
have risen and fallen in many ways together throughout U.S. history.
Secondly,
for much of American history, there has been no zero-sum tradeoff
between local and extralocal voluntary activity, because many
of the groups that we think of as purely local have been parts
of translocal federations, which I will argue are better thought
of as networks than as bureaucracies.
And finally,
I'll talk a little bit about how I see a possible dimension of
our civic problem today. I think it may not be the absence of
group activity, but a weakening of encompassing associations and
a breakdown of two-way relationships between leaders and actual
groups of citizens.
Let me begin
with voluntary groups and democratic government, very quickly.
Many people believe that there was once a time in the United States
when voluntary groups flourished within island local communities
that were cut off from one another, and this view is often attributed
to Alexis de Tocqueville. I do not think it adequately represents
the complexity of de Tocqueville's vision of early America, where
he stressed that vigorous electoral democracy was one of the schools
(along with America's religious culture) in which even local activity
as well as extralocal voluntary activity flourished. Recent research
by social historians has established that the American Revolution,
the rise of a competitive democracy encompassing white men by
the 1830s, and of course the spread of religious movements, all
were very important in stimulating the emergence of local voluntary
associations far beyond what you would have expected given the
size of communities in our early national history.
Furthermore,
there's some fascinating work on the great importance of the US
Postal Service—yes, the US Postal Service. It's hard to think
of that as an efficient and encompassing institution. But early
in American history, the United States had a remarkably effective
and broad postal service that ensured communication and transportation
into the remotest hamlets of the country—far more effective
than the postal services of the bureaucratic monarchies of Europe
at that time. And there is excellent research showing that that
postal service was vital not just to the spread of American commerce,
but to the growth of democratic politics and voluntary associations.
For example, the General Union for Promoting the Observance of
the Christian Sabbath, one of the earliest American reform movements,
actually used the postal service to spread agitation, create local
chapters, and create a national petition to get the postal service
to close down on Sundays to respect the Christian Sabbath. That
is an indication—there are many others —that a strong
and effective national state and a democratic civil society grew
up together, not as opposites, in early America.
The waves
of voluntary group formation that scholars have documented occurred
in the nineteenth century just before the Civil War, after the
Civil War up into the twentieth century. And those waves coincided
with the height of democratic electoral competition for office
at local, state, and national levels. They weren't opposites.
They also coincided with pressing national debates about the morality
of social life—about slavery, and then, after the Civil War,
about the coming of industrialization and what that meant for
citizens in local communities. The national debates themselves
helped to stimulate participation and local group activity.
I passed
out to all of you a copy of a list that has been developed in
my research project at Harvard, which I think you might find fascinating
just to look at, that shows large voluntary associations throughout
US history, from 1790 to the present, associations that enrolled
1 percent or more of American adults (or 1 percent of men or 1
percent of women if the associations were restricted to men or
women, as many of them were). If you look at the pattern of emergence
of these associations, you will see that in many cases, their
dates of founding coincided with periods of intense electoral
democracy in American history and with important periods of national
debate or crisis—the Civil War, World War I, World War II,
the Great Depression. My group is in the process of trying to
develop a biography for each of these groups throughout American
history, and our work is just getting going, but one of the things
we're doing is looking at the patterns of the rise and fall of
membership. And I appended a couple of these graphs to the copy
of my testimony that I handed out today, to give you some feel
for some of the patterns we're seeing.
I just want
to stress, because I don't have much time, that what we do see
is that four-fifths of all the groups ever founded in American
history are still in existence, and that after spreading out as
national networks, many of them added members and activities,
and new local and state units, throughout the twentieth century,
during the same period when the national government in the United
States was becoming much more involved in economic and social
life.
My own research
on American social policy, furthermore, suggests that there has
been a profoundly complementary relationship between the development
of major American social policies, from Civil War benefits to
programs for mothers and children, through the GI Bill of 1944
and such programs as Social Security and Medicare—a complementary
relationship between the growth of those programs and the involvement
of voluntary associations at state, local, and national levels,
both in shaping those programs and in administering them in ways
that met the express needs of a diverse national population.
Our research
shows that local efforts, local voluntary groups, have often been
part of something bigger. And here I think that this point speaks
directly to a point that my co-panelist raised. For example, a
list of local voluntary associations that Bob Putnam and his cohorts
have developed for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—my
research group at Harvard took that list and discovered that 74
percent of the locally present fraternal and sororal groups that
Putnam was able to record for 21 cities and towns between 1850
and 1920 were actually part of federations that encompassed regions,
states, or the nation as a whole. And I believe that the latest
results in a lot of social history show that a vital proliferation
of local groups is often empowered by, stimulated by, and of course
in turn complements the growth of what I would call encompassing
networks or federations that reach across localities, across states,
and even across the nation as a whole.
And my favorite
example of this, which I carefully selected because Senator Nunn
is here, is the American Legion. The American Legion is a wonderful
example of a three-tiered federation that has embodied the genius
of US voluntary federations, their ability to make local, state,
and national commitments and activities complement rather than
oppose one another. The Legion has been involved in supervising
youth activities, running parades, helping veterans, running civic
education in communities throughout America, at the same time
as it has been involved in shaping activities of state and national
government. And the Legion was responsible for creating one of
the most effective social programs in US history, the GI Bill
of 1944. It wrote the legislation, and if the Legion had not been
active, I would argue that that bill would not have made it possible
for hundreds of thousands of less privileged men to go to college
and enter post-high school job training in the United States for
the first time.
Let me close
by talking about what I think this research suggests about what
may have gone wrong lately. Much of today's call for the revitalization
of civil society comes from people who are crusading to dismantle
an allegedly huge and overweening US federal government, or even
arguing that the very idea of national community is inimical to
vital local involvement. I don't believe that the evidence supports
this. My research does suggest another diagnosis of America's
contemporary civic malaise. Maybe the problem is that many Americans
feel that they can no longer effectively band together to get
things done either through or in relationship to government, especially
above the local level. Recent shifts in society and styles of
politics may have made it less inviting for ordinary citizens
to work with one another and less possible for them to engage
in genuine two-way conversations—not one-way conversations,
but two-way conversations—with their state and national leaders.
The master
list of large associations that I handed out today is only part
of the voluntary association universe, and I'm not trying to suggest
otherwise. But that list suggests that a real break occurred about
30 years ago in the patterns. We now have fewer foundings in this
country of three-tiered voluntary associations that have a presence
at the national, state, and local level. We have a dwindling of
membership and activity in many of the three-tiered federations
that we inherited from our past. And what we have developed instead,
in the 70s and 80s, is a proliferation of two kinds of groups:
national advocacy groups with headquarters in places like New
York City and Washington, DC, and, I would argue (and I think
Andy Kohut's research is supporting this), lots more local groups
of new kinds. What may be missing are the connections between
them. And if more and more Americans report that they feel they
are subject to staff-led national associations and politicians
and other institutional leaders who are engaging in media manipulations,
taking polls, and handing out rhetoric rather than directly communicating
with them and hearing from them in face-to-face meetings, I think
the research suggests that perhaps they are right about that.
Of course,
these changes also mirror what is going on the political system.
Our political parties were once networks of leaders at national,
state, and local levels, where there was a certain amount of two-way
bargaining and communication. They were also mechanisms for contacting
voters, for inviting them into the political process. Now our
political parties, and I would argue especially the Democratic
party, have become holding companies for the raising of money
and the hiring of media consultants, although this has happened
in both parties. That's happened at the same time that there's
been a proliferation of professional associations, business associations,
and liberal and conservative advocacy groups that are headless
bodies.
Why has
all this happened? I've suggested in part that it mirrors things
that have happened in the political party system. Let me briefly
mention two other factors that I think may have been involved.
Class and
gender transformations have also been a part of the story here.
Most large US voluntary associations were once cross-class but
single-gender groups—things like the American Legion, the
fraternals, the PTA, brought together people ranging from business
people and professionals through farmers and artisans in communities.
But it was all men or all women. Throughout much of American history,
higher-educated women who taught school in communities throughout
the land and then got married and had to step down from their
job were leaders in the female side of this. Men who had passed
through the military were often leaders in veterans associations
or fraternal associations. What I think has happened increasingly
in the last 25 years is that higher-educated women have withdrawn
from participation in certain kinds of cross-class, locally rooted
associations, certainly from active leadership in those, and shifted
their participation to workplaces and professional associations.
And my analysis of the General Social Survey data suggest that
more-educated men have also withdrawn to a considerable degree
from veterans and fraternal associations that were once very important
sites of linkage between the national, the state, and the local,
and across classes.
If you take
my analysis seriously, it suggests that this Commission should
not simply look to what's going on in local society, and should
not easily conclude that government in some general sense is to
blame for all of our ills, but should look at the incentives and
the moral models that elites in American society are using to
shape not the number of groups that they participate in, but the
kinds of groups that they are participating in. I think you'll
find that the withdrawal of many people like those of us in this
room from the kinds of groups that used to knit the society together
is one important factor in the rise of our civic malaise.
GALSTON:
One of the co-chairs has made a procedural recommendation which
I think is very sound, given what we've just heard—namely,
that unlike the other three panels, since there really is a thesis
and an antithesis here, that it would be useful to give each of
the panelists now two minutes—and I mean two minutes—to
respond to the other. This is not a command performance, but the
opportunity is there. Why don't we start with Bill Schambra.
SCHAMBRA:
In a sense, Professor Skocpol sort of sets up a straw man for
Tocqueville. She says Tocqueville believed that civic life was
utterly local, was completely local, and any contamination by
an outside influence whatsoever automatically refutes the Tocqueville
thesis. I don't think that's an accurate way to describe Tocqueville.
Clearly, to take an example, as villages were being built on the
frontier, they established a village church, and typically the
village church was one of several fairly well-known congregations
that spread across the United States. I don't think that diminished
its locality significantly. Incidentally, I think the churches
that did better on the frontiers did tend to be the churches with
a flatter management structure and that did in fact permit more
congregational self-government. The ones that did less well were
the ones like my own Episcopal church, that insisted on a kind
of hierarchical ordering, which explains why most of the West
is free of Episcopalians today.
But that
illustrates this larger point. And that is, I think, that whether
or not an organization is linked to a network or a larger national
organization is an interesting item; it's something that a social
scientist—you can examine an organizational chart and you
make a note, and it's something that you can actually record,
and therefore it's something that social scientists would gravitate
to. I think the larger and more subtler question, though, is this:
How much is an institution in this village responding most immediately
to the needs of this village, the people in this village? Is that
not, in fact, what it was responding to most directly? If indeed
this village-rooted organization begins to neglect the needs of
the village and begins to respond more and more to some state
or national bureaucracy, chances are it will languish. That, incidentally,
is an interesting empirical question. But that would require some
more subtle investigation. Not being a social scientist, I don't
have to worry about that; I can just throw that suggestion out.
But I think
that Professor Skocpol's point about the parties today is interesting
in that regard. Because of course at one point our political parties
were very much rooted in locality. They responded first and foremost
to the needs of the cities and the states in which they were located,
and they gathered once every four years to nominate a president,
and that was really the only national function that they had.
I think that as the parties have gotten away from that, and have
indeed gravitated more toward the holding company status that
Professor Skocpol describes, that they have languished and they
have done less well as civic institutions. If there were some
way of reversing that within the political party system, that
would certainly be an interesting proposal.
I'm not
so concerned about whether an organization purchases a US postage
stamp and thereby relinquishes its local status. That's not a
terribly interesting point to me. I guess the larger question
is this: How much damage has been done this century by the Progressive
ideal of national community? I'm not talking about organizational
structure. I'm talking about a very deliberate, coherent project,
launched at the beginning of this century, and prosecuted through
much of this century by our intellectual and cultural elites,
a project that involved heaping contempt upon local civic values—they
were bigoted, they were partial, they were prejudiced—and
extolling the sophisticated cosmopolitan values. It is no wonder
that Professor Hunter describes what he describes. That's exactly
the result of what we've seen of this project—namely, an
elite that is distrusted, massively distrusted, by the people.
And the part that he didn't report, but that is in the written
part, is that the elite does indeed hold in contempt the values
of the American people.
SKOCPOL:
Let me be brief. I really agree with a couple of things
that Bill Schambra has said. I think the Commission should look
to what has happened to political parties as bridging institutions,
institutions that involve face-to-face meetings and pull people
together for bargaining, conflict, and deliberation.
And I want
to stress that I do not think there is thesis and antithesis on
this panel, because I simply do not associate myself with the
caricature of the Progressive project that has been outlined here.
I have no doubt, since I have studied American history in great
depth, that there are people who intended to do the kinds of things
that Mr. Schambra suggests. But they did not succeed, and they
could never have succeeded, given the nature of American society
and the way our institutions work. The genius of both American
government and politics, and American voluntary associations through
much of our history—which may have broken down somewhat recently,
but the genius of it through much of our history—has been
to make the local and the extralocal work together, energize each
other, not operate in zero-sum trade-off to one another. And I
know it's easy to think in terms of more one, less of the other,
but I do not believe that that is true in any way to the fact
or the spirit of American history. And as a Methodist, I have
to say that in the Methodist tradition, there is a strong understanding
of how the individual in the local community can be part of a
larger project in ways that are mutually complementary.
NUNN:
Well, I find myself torn on this kind of philosophical argument.
Because I have concluded long ago that the federal government
is far too big to be able to be run efficiently, and I concluded
in my first couple of years in the Senate that we were not only
senators; we were looked on as city council, county commissioners,
state legislators. I mean, we were dealing with everything from
potholes to national security. And still are.
So I come
from a point of view of thinking that from a pragmatic point of
view, rather than a philosophical, the federal government is far
too big. I also come from a point of view of believing—and
that's one of the things I hope this Commission can do that the
federal government does poorly—the federal government is
dominated by budgeting. Congress is a budgeting organization,
and we make everybody else in town budget. We're terrible at evaluation.
We don't evaluate programs well. We don't have time to do that;
we're too busy budgeting. And it sends everybody all over the
country into a budgeting mode, including the bureaucracy, so that's
my starting point.
But I really
would like to ask our witnesses: when you look at what's happened
with the federal government, I found "elite" in both conservative
and liberal camps. I've never been able to figure out that the
elite were in one camp or the other. I mean, there are elite folks
all over town, all over the talk shows, all over everywhere, that
come from every part of the philosophical spectrum. And I have
as hard a time with putting "elite" in one camp as Bob has in
putting African-Americans in one camp. They're all over the place.
But my question
is, in the sweep of history, and looking at where the federal
government is today and the areas of dominance—too much,
in my view—how do you fit in things like slavery and the
Civil War, and the federal occupation of the South in Reconstruction,
where we actually and basically had the federal troops running
large parts of the country for literally years and years and years,
after the war was over? And then you fit in the civil rights movement.
Does anybody believe that we would now have civil rights if that
was all done at a local level? I came from the South, and I don't
think so. So how do you fit in World War I and World War II and
the GI Bill? How do you fit in the interstate highway system and
the ports and infrastructure? Are we really talking about philosophy,
or are we talking about trying to find pragmatic ways where the
federal government ought to get out of the equation and let local
people and state people be involved?
And also,
the whole sweep of the national corporation, now international
corporation. The last thing local businesses want when I talk
to them, even after they complain about all the onerous environmental,
safety and health standards, is having fifty states with fifty
different environmental standards, fifty differ health standards,
and fifty different safety. And if you think business community
won't go crazy if you start doing that, just talk to them. You've
got anomalies like, most of my business constituents for years
came to see me about getting the federal government off their
backs. But then you had the fishing industry every year, seafood
industry, would come up and say, We want to regulated at the federal
level, because we're deathly afraid there's going to be a seafood
scare, poisoning somebody, and there's going to be no federal
standards, and we're going to lose all of our business to poultry
and beef, which are federally regulated.
So I have
a very hard time putting a philosophical prism on this, the way
Bill has it today. I think it's a pragmatic question. And I really
do think a whole debate on federalism is far overdue, but I don't
think we've had one that's meaningful. Alice Rivlin, who is probably
classified as liberal, she had a whole plan to get the federal
government out of everything, but the debate was never joined.
Now my Republican friends want to abolish the Commerce Department
and Education Department, but I heard on the radio the Republican
sponsor, and I don't remember the name from the house, abolishing
the Commerce Department. And the person that was asking the questions
on the radio said, "Now what about this function?" "Oh, we're
going to keep that, we're going to move it here." "And what about
this function?" "Oh, no, we're not going to do away with that
one, we're going to move it here." When you got through a list
of ten functions, there wasn't a single thing that wasn't still
going to be done at the federal level.
So I suggest,
and this is my question mark (which is a long time coming), I
suggest that our witnesses address the practical questions. What
is it the federal government is doing today that it shouldn't
be doing, and how do we go about getting that done in terms of
devolution?
SCHAMBRA:
Let me just make a stab at it. I don't think—as I was fairly
careful to try to say, the federal government will always have
a role to play. No question about it. I think the question is
this: Does it remain in the hands of a project which is relentlessly
centralizing and which is bitterly opposed to what it perceives
to be partial and parochial local civic communities, or does it
put itself in the service of another kind of project, which is
to begin to work with the sorts of groups that Bob Woodson represents
in his organization, to work with the Pastor Saffolds, to do what
they do so well. There is a federal role in that, to be sure.
It's a considerably more modest role, though, and the Progressive
Policy Institute has done a lot of good thinking about how one
might in fact harness the federal apparatus to this effort to
regrow local communities, and they've done a very good job at
that. That's the kind of thinking that I think we need to do more
of.
But when
I'm talking about the federal government—and this is an important
distinction—there is a distinction between the federal government
as a governing apparatus, which of course was set up by the US
Constitution; I have no quarrel with it—and this national
community idea, which is a product of twentieth-century intellectual
elites, and as I say, was prosecuted with some vigor throughout
this century, and led to the situation that is described so accurately,
I think, and so well in Professor Hunter's University of Virginia
survey, which underlines this dramatic gulf between elites and
the rest of Americans when it comes to the values that they hold
dear, and leads the average American to despair about their future,
because they are beginning to think that they are somehow unable
to reach the levers of power and unable to have any influence
in the society.
SKOCPOL:
Let me be brief. I don't believe there's any evidence for the
proposition that the idea of American nationhood is a Progressive
project of the nineteenth century. I think a more careful reading
of our social and cultural history would suggest that that's simply
not true.
On your
question, Senator Nunn, I think it's helpful to think not just
about the federal government, but about ways in which government
interacts with our economy, and our society, and our democracy.
And it may be that in the last thirty years, we have had the growth
of a combination of very detailed attempts to direct funds in
a diminishing fiscal environment and extremely nettlesome and
picky regulation. I think there are reasons why that has happened,
and they don't have to do with the fact that America has a more
centralized and bureaucratic state than other places. It in fact
doesn't.
But that
style of government, in terms of its impact on democracy and civil
society rather than the economy—which I think we're talking
here about democracy and civil society—that style of government
may very well have fed a process in which there is a proliferation
of professional, trade, and advocacy organizations that feel that
they need to be in Washington, D,C., watching in great detail
what happens in the courts, the Congress, relating to the staff
people on both sides of the aisle. I mean, any notion that this
was all just Democrats, I think we can now lay to rest after two
years of a Republican-led Congress. It's happening on both sides.
And it's happened because that's where the action seems to be
on a series of things whose impact on states and localities, groups
of citizens and businesses, may be interfering with their ability
to pull themselves together and to relate to one another, not
just within places but across places. And it may be part of this
process of interfering with the two-way communication that would
leave citizens more satisfied about the degree to which they are
part of the decision making and not simply objects of manipulation
from above. It would take me a lot longer to spell it out. But
I think that we should think about the how—not just the size,
or government versus nongovernment.
BENNETT:
I thought I had this, but then maybe I lost it. Let's get specific.
Yesterday, the President was there with President Bush and Mrs.
Clinton and others. Was that a good thing?
SKOCPOL:
I missed this yesterday.
BENNETT:
This volunteerism, coming out in favor of volunteerism, Colin
Powell. All right, you missed it.
SKOCPOL:
If you're asking me, is the President's national service—it's
as American as apple pie, you know, to have national leaders talking
about the need to have participation in national community. This
isn't something Bill Clinton started. And to be trying to find
ways to both encourage and subsidize local efforts. We could have
an argument about whether this particular variant of it is good
or not. And I'm the head of the Committee on Public Service at
Harvard, so I get to think about the impact of this on actual
groups of student volunteers. But it is not new, and it's not
something created by liberals in the twentieth century.
BENNETT:
I just wanted to know what you thought of it. What did you think
of it, Bill?
SCHAMBRA:
I haven't seen the details. But let me just say, I have been disappointed
by presidents in the past who have made the intention of decentralizing
government, and making an effort to restore civil society—having
declared that their foremost intention of their administration,
then they set up an apparatus, A One Thousand Points of Light
bureau or something of that nature, and the next thing you know
it's just another sort of feel-good program that has really no
bearing on the way the American people govern themselves.
BENNETT:
Would you agree with that?
SKOCPOL:
I do agree with that. And the question you pose—that it's
important to see what happens to many of these groups over time,
and whether they are drawn into spending more time on paperwork
and applying for grants. I just want to stress that you can also
spend a lot of time applying for grants from private foundations,
or writing memos to the Heritage Foundation, as well as spending
a lot of time applying to federal bureaucracies. And I think we
need research on that. In fact, my group is researching that very
question for each of these associations.
SCHAMBRA:
This gives me an opportunity to plug the National Commission on
Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, chaired by Lamar Alexander, and
supported by the Bradley Foundation, which is among other things
taking up precisely this issue, this question. Is it not, in fact,
the case that the foundations are very much a part of the centralizing
project? And very deliberately so, incidentally. The major foundations—the
Rockefeller Foundation and several others, as they were being
set up after the turn of the century, very deliberately wanted
to get out of the business of immediate melioration of problems
and into the business of scientific research, of getting to the
roots of things, of mobilizing public programs to address these
problems, and as a result they, the foundations themselves, to
say nothing of the federal government, are now very much detached
from the sorts of groups that Bob Woodson works for. And indeed,
they find it easier to carry on with whatever they can scrape
and pinch from congregations and the neighborhood than to deal
with the foundations. And that is a travesty, and that, I think,
is something that has to be changed.
BARBARA
ROBERTS:
Several things briefly. One, I think it would be an error for
any of us to take political speeches or other speeches out of
context and assume that the term of a national village, a national
community or a national family was anything other than a way to
verbalize the commonality we feel as Americans. I don't think
it's some kind of an evil plot to become elitist at the federal
level.
I might
comment I don't know where the Bradley Foundation is located,
but if it's like a lot of other foundations in this country, lots
of them are located right here in Washington, D.C., and if it's
not, many of them are, though, at the same time we're discussing
what the connection is.
It seems
to me that it is so common in America for communities, for neighborhoods,
for groups of citizens to start organizations. Having belonged
to lots and lots of those organizations in my lifetime, and having
been active in a lot of them and being a Westerner, where quite
frankly it doesn't make any difference what the hell's going on
in Washington, DC because they can't even say "Oregon" correctly,
we have learned to function and solve problems without that interconnection.
But that doesn't mean that the interconnection is evil. And I
think that to see us as a family or a village or a community—as
a country, in a sense—is a way to verbalize our sense of
being Americans. It's way to describe the sense we have of the
foundation from which we come.
When a previous
speaker said one of the recommendations he would make was that
we encourage people to become citizens who lived in this country
and who are not now citizens, I think we should encourage high
school students to take the same exam you have to take to become
a citizen, because they don't understand their own country or
its foundations.
There are
lot of reasons to look for how we lost our way, if indeed we did,
other than assume it was because we used terminology that spoke
to us as a family in this country. So I would ask, as research
is done by those who have spoken to us today, and as this Commission
looks at the roles it has, it be very careful not to generalize
about, for instance, political parties. Political parties in the
West are considerably different than political parties in the
East. They always have been, they always will be. They have not
filled the function described here today for political parties
in the East, nearly in that way in the West. So I think we need
to be very careful, to say the further you get from Washington
DC . . .
Someone
was describing the polling differences as you went further West.
Well, part of it is just the literally geographical removal from
the West Coast to the East Coast or the East Coast to the West
Coast, depending on what your views are. And so I think it's very
important as we look at these issues that we see there really
is a distinction in many of those views for people who have had
to do without easy connection to the federal government, and have
had to function in different ways from people who have been an
hour away, or two hours away, or a half-hour flight away, or a
two-hour drive away.
I feel comfortable
being part of a national family. I don't feel any discomfort about
that at all, and I know that I am not an elitist about people
who work at the community barn-raising. Other things of that nature
were very common in the West, and they remain very common today.
MICHAEL
JOYCE:
I mentioned last night that the Bradley Foundation is located
in a suburb of Green Bay.
ROBERTS:
You did mention that, that's right.
JOYCE:
As someone associated with my colleague in his critique of Progressive
ideology and the national community, I don't want to be misunderstood
on this point, that it automatically means that I'm opposed to
federal programs. And I wondered if we could ask our witnesses
if they could distinguish between certain kinds of federal programs.
For example, the GI Bill. Now here's one that seems to be friendly
to local associations, friendly to citizenship in that it empowered
people to make decisions with respect to their education, and
also respectful of true community, including faith-centered communities,
making possible, for example, persons to attend religious institutions,
even religious seminaries. There were many men ordained to the
ministry and priesthood whose tuition was covered by the taxpayers
under the GI Bill. That would seem to me to be one kind of federal
activity which is very friendly to civic renewal. And I wonder
if that can be distinguished from other kinds which are less friendly,
and which, for example, today do not treat faith-centered institutions,
with respect to social spending and elementary and secondary education,
with the same reverence that was offered there.
So, for
example, it would seem to me that the GI Bill is much more consistent
with the kinds of traditions that Professor Skocpol has articulated,
whereas much of what we have today when the national government
encounters local community associations, it is more in the nature
of regulating or creating barriers to those kinds of activities
that were supported under the GI Bill. I guess what I'd like to
ask is, could each of you sort this out a little bit as I'm poking
around in my own mind about this?
SKOCPOL:
I think the GI Bill is a wonderful example of the way that things
can work well together, for reasons that you articulated. But
let's remember how it came about. If it had just been up to conservatives
in Congress, on the one hand, or the liberal planners of the Roosevelt
administration and the elite universities, one of which I come
from, on the other hand, the GI Bill would not have taken the
shape that it did. It ended up taking the shape that it did because
of the role of the American Legion, which insisted that it be
open to four years of training or college for all of the returning
veterans, and that there be an ability to choose any institution
that would accept the person who was applying. The American Legion,
in turn, is a voluntary association that was founded by the returning
officers of the World War I military who stimulated active groups
throughout the nation. It's a perfect example that state and society
can work very well together and in a populist, inclusive way that
respects community and individual diversity.
There are
a lot of other examples. You mentioned the West. The West was
not completely detached from government; it has been, along with
the South, a recipient of enormous subsidies from the federal
government, but let's set that aside. The West was the place where
women's groups that knit together national federations were active
earliest and most extensively. Those women's groups led the way
in demanding public schooling, in asking all levels of government
to engage in civic education, and improving conditions for communities,
families, and children, and campaigning for the origins of the
policies that we now call welfare.
Now a lot
of the things went wrong along the way and didn't achieve what
they intended. But once again, I think that I would answer your
question by saying that when government is a facilitating framework
and, frankly, a taxer and spender—I knew it was going to
come to this, that I had to admit this—when it taxes and
spends, it can often facilitate individual choice, community diversity.
When it turns into a micro-regulator, which it has increasingly
in recent years for a variety of intended and unintended reasons,
then it can become destructive of the efforts of a whole range
of citizens and communities.
NUNN:
It's gone way too far in those areas. If I could add just one
other comment that is pretty interesting. I haven't done empirical
research on this, as we were discussing last evening, but I would
at least venture a guess that the most rapidly growing part of
the federal jurisdiction in the last decade, under both parties,
has been in the law enforcement area. The federal government has
taken over one law enforcement function after another, and usually
it has been against the advice and sometimes the testimony of
the federal bureaucracy. It's come in the drug area. I voted for
it, in fact, led the charge with Bill Bennett to try to get the
federal military more involved in protecting the borders, but
we tried to delineate blinds and leave most of it up to local
government. But you can name the federal area—any time there
is a crime, somebody stands up on the floor of the House or Senate
and proposes the federal government make it a federal crime. We
have federalized the criminal code in a sweeping way in the last
ten years, and that's come from both political parties. Now it's
gone too far. I don't think there's any doubt about it, but that
has not come from any elite that I know of. Most of it has come
from basically people demanding help in law enforcement, from
the local level.
SCHAMBRA:
Well, just to pick up, absolutely, the GI bill is a marvelous
example, and if the logic of it were extended to K-12 education,
you would see that in even more pronounced ways. The ability of,
let's say, a federal voucher to strengthen local families and
local communities, a family empowered, a parent empowered to make
that kind of critical educational choice for his or her child
and able to select a school for the child—almost always it
will be a successful school, and that means a school constructed
as a community of one sort or another in its own right. That's
the kind of civically renewing activity that is indeed possible
through any level of government, federal, state, whatever. There's
no question about that. As I say, the Progressive Policy Institute
has done some interesting thinking about how you might take some
job training programs and reduce them to vouchers as well, so
that we can eliminate the scores and scores of job training programs
scattered throughout the federal bureaucracy and actually again
empower the person to select the kind of job training they find
most appropriate to themselves.
Those are
the kinds of things that can be done within this framework. So
I think the GI Bill is indeed a very productive and fruitful example
for other things that we might be able to do.
SKOCPOL:
I just want to suggest, though, that when we are talking about
government in relation to families, parents and children, the
issues about how to structure empowering programs may be slightly
different than when we're talking about government's role in relation
to adults who are choosing institutions across the nation. Which
is not to say that I don't believe that there are much more effective
ways that all levels of government could empower parents to improve
the schooling of their children. But we're not going to be handing
vouchers to K-12-year-olds and asking them to choose any school.
JOYCE:
Their parents are adults.
SKOCPOL:
Most are. And they need to think about—the only point I'm
making here is that geography enters into a family's security
in a very different way than geography entered in for the young
men returning from World War II. It means that when young men
came back from World War II they often went to college far from
the place that they grew up, and took their wife and children
with them. That is not exactly analogous to the situation that
we face in devising appropriate policies to empower necessarily
locally grouped sets of parents to improve schooling for their
children. I don't want to be put in a box here of saying anything
definite about policies, but to suggest that family integrity
is a very important consideration in the design of government
programs.
WOODSON:
Just a footnote to the GI Bill. You're right, in 1943 the opposition
did come from University of Chicago [President Robert Maynard]
Hutchins, who said, If you give the money directly to the GIs,
it would create an education hobo jungle of higher education.
And the Congress ignored the experts and implemented the program.
Senator
Nunn asked a question I'm not so sure was answered, and that is,
the appropriate role for the government intervening in . . . when
do you go to civil rights and the other. I would venture to say
that, as a person in the civil rights movement, since we did not
have voting rights, we had to go to the central courts to achieve
political rights. And once we did that, then we were able to vote
and exercise the franchise. But again, we asked the government
to intervene as the government would in the case of a natural
disaster, a tornado. It was very temporary, for relief of a given
circumstance, so that the situation could return to normal.
The problem
with social policy in the Sixties is that the government intervened
—I remember in the first years of the poverty program—the
government intervened, for the first six months, they permitted
an array of groups to participate, so neighborhood leaders came
in and were doing a fine job. And then OEO came up with one policy
that plagues low-income people today. It required all community
outreach workers to have a bachelor's degree, and a professional
requirement was associated with the delivery of services to the
poor. That became a pervasive policy that foundations followed;
third-party payments were contingent upon having certified people
to serve, and as a consequence government requirements dominated.
And that's why you have the resistance of this whole idea of national
government—because many of us who labor in the vineyards
today, our people are prohibited from participating in the delivery
of services to our own people because we cannot meet the credentialing
requirement. There is no relationship between certification to
serve and qualification to serve.
ELSHTAIN:
I'll be very brief. I'm wondering if each of our expert witnesses
would just engage in this exercise. I'm wondering if, as you think
about everything the federal government is now doing, if there's
one program or function or policy that you, if you could just
wave a wand, that you think it should not be doing—you would
just stop it, right now—if you're concerned with the flourishing
of civil society, as you both are. And, what at present the federal
government is not doing that it might do that would conceivably
conduce to the desired end of civic renewal?
SCHAMBRA:
Rather than name a specific program, I'd like to point or just
really reinforce what Bob Woodson just said, about a policy that
is pervasive throughout most federal domestic programs, and that
is this privileging of the credentialed elites. There are all
sorts of requirements for people to be engaged in federal social
programs of one sort or another that concern education and training
and various institutions, all of which of course lobby Washington
to be sure that this training requirement is installed and preserved.
Listening to Bob now for what, 25 years, I am persuaded that the
most effective people are often those who are perhaps six months
or one year removed from the problem. And that is their primary
credential—the fact that they are survivors, that they have
managed to overcome this situation. And the fact that they don't
have an M.A. in social work is really not terribly important to
this young man or young woman who is struggling with drug addiction
or some other kind of problem.
And that
of course then leads to the recommendation I would make, similarly
diffuse, and that is that we begin to remove the barriers to faith-based
groups and begin to permit funding to flow to faith-based groups.
And that of course, both of those recommendations could apply
to all levels of state and local government as well. And we're
working with that indeed right now in Wisconsin, trying to somehow
or another overcome that critical problem.
The reluctance
of even foundations to engage themselves with strong spiritual
organizations is really amazing, even though they have proven
track records of success. That is amazing to me. And as I say,
the government can point to a church-state requirement, albeit
much distorted over time by misinterpretations and Supreme Court
rulings. But for the private sector, for foundations in particular,
there is no excuse. We should be prepared to support people like
Pastor Saffold, even though it is a Pentecostal denomination and
therefore a form of worship very different from what Episcopalians
are accustomed to.
SKOCPOL:
I believe that we need to look to all levels of government, and
to private institutions that control massive resources, at the
same time, and not just direct our critical attention to the federal
government, and I too believe that we should move off of micro-regulations.
I think that there's a long tradition actually of empowering faith-based
groups, and I would endorse going further with that as a general
principle, although we always need to look at the details of any
given proposal.
I think
that the federal government does best when it concentrates on
providing dignified security to large numbers of citizens who
contribute to the community. That's how our greatest federal programs
have always worked. They have provided a little bit of security
or opportunity in return for contributions to the community. I
detailed that in my testimony. And it should provide frameworks
within which other levels of governments and other actors in the
society are encouraged to pull themselves together and address
tasks in a variety of ways. I can't really identify one program.
I can't
resist saying to Bob Woodson, that he needs to remember that as
well as President Hutchins, there was also Congressman Rankin
who opposed a generous GI Bill, a conservative congressman, who
said he didn't really want a lot of federal spending to send young
men to study with red sociology professors. And the Legion needed
to overcome both sides of the spectrum in order to come up with
something sensible for Americans.
GLENDON:
Another observation and question. I understand this word "elites"
raises a lot of hackles. But I can't resist saying as a person
from a small town, in fact from Shays Rebellion territory, it
is true that a sociologist could find enormous diversity among
the people who preside in our universities and governments and
large institutions. But I think that if you did the survey, you'd
also find that they are relatively homogeneous on this point of
hostility to local institutions and contempt for a stereotype
of what a small town is all about. And especially if religion
is involved. There you've got the knowledge-class elites and the
money-class elites are as one. So I would urge you not to give
up on that.
My question
is this. You urged the Commission to recognize the role of grass-roots
initiatives at the local level, and to support those that are
working and indeed to devote resources to those that are working.
I think I would interpolate in there, At least do no harm. That's
the least you can do, that's the easy part. Don't do things that
hurt them, for crying out loud. But it's a very difficult matter,
as I'm sure you know as well as anybody else, for either government
or a private foundation to resist the temptation, that if you're
going to help, you're going to set down conditions that are going
to actually cause some of these institutions to lose the specific
characteristics that make them so effective at what they do. This
is a real practical puzzle. And it's not just government that
does that. I can tell you as part of a university that occasionally
gets grants from private foundations, sometimes they're worse
than government. They want what they want, and they'll send their
program officers to check up on you.
SKOCPOL:
Absolutely. And I want to say that I think "elite" as I use the
term is broader than simply an epithet for liberals in the twentieth
century. But I think that we need to be realistic, that stratification
has increased in this society, and it's not just a matter of wealth.
It's the way that people structure their careers, and their associations
with one another. The associations that I studied used to depend
on membership dues and membership participation to build ladders
from the local up and to facilitate two-way communication. I think
now we have professional and moneyed elites who are talking mainly
to one another, and when they think of a national problem, they
found an advocacy organization, a new think tank, or a commission,
to address the problem, rather than approaching it the way our
counterparts would have done in the nineteenth or the early twentieth
century, which is to try to participate in and stimulate a nationwide
network, perhaps one that's is already there, but one where the
local and the regional parts have their own agendas at the same
time that they're participating in communication with one another.
It's a very different style of solving national problems.
SCHAMBRA:
It is absolutely true that if we are going to involve the federal
government, or indeed even the Bradley Foundation, in the support
of any of these grassroots groups, we do have to be extraordinarily
careful not to divert them from their mission and, as you say,
impose—and it's so easy to do—to impose our particular
view of what should be accomplished, and more to the point, the
framework. "A three-year project shall begin on this day and it
shall be successfully completed on this day"—and that's sort
of the way foundation program officers think. And of course, that's
not the way these grassroots groups deal with problems. They were
there before, they will be there afterwards. And as you say—I
often, for myself, say it will be great if we can walk away from
this association and not have done harm. And this is a foundation
officer. At a minimum I set for myself that I can walk away and
say, "It's still doing what it did when I found it." Maybe you
can hope to actually help it do better what it was doing before,
and provide some resources. But that's the kind of struggle, I
think, that we do need to engage in, rather than take the easy
sort of libertarian approach, which is to say, "To hell with government,
to hell with any level of government assistance for these private-sector
programs, all government is always suspect, it's always corrupting,
and we just simply can't have any association with that." I think
that's fundamentally wrong.
ANNA
FAITH JONES:
I don't know that I have anything to add. As I listen to this,
I would make a plea for our doing both/and. I believe deeply in
the efficacy of what this pastor in Milwaukee is doing. As a community
foundation we support all kinds of grassroots efforts like this
in Boston, increasingly with the support of large private foundations
like Rockefeller, like Pew, and others who also understand the
efficacy of this. But I would make a plea for us not leaving the
task alone to these people. They cannot do it alone. Our society
is too complex. If you look at the profiles of some of these communities,
we have left single-class, severely disadvantaged communities
where there is no understanding of where the opportunities are.
If they were given vouchers, they wouldn't know where to go tomorrow,
so that there needs to be some infrastructure there.
When you
have communities, as William Julius Wilson tells us, where work
has disappeared, there are no models for people going to work,
there is not the kind of network that we all rely on, of friends
and families to tell you where they think a job is. There's work
that's been done that says, you know, most of us do not sit down
and pull out the newspaper and find a job. We talk to friends
and relatives and networks of people who tell us where jobs might
be. It's a much more daunting task, and I think we do need to
completely rethink what the role of government is and leave a
lot of the decisions and initiatives to local people who know
what the problems are and how to work at them, and they are really
terrific. But I think if we say, government needs to withdraw
entirely from this and that these people can do this alone, we
would be making a terrible mistake.
FERNANDEZ:
I'm going to agree in large part with my colleague Anna Faith
Jones and say I worry about the potential for washing our hands
of responsibility for each other by making the local non-elite
the ultimate solution. And certainly, using that, we would have
lost valuable input from both of you if we were to have used that
model.
And I would
also suspect that my friend to the right [Lloyd Hackley] in charge
of the North Carolina college system would agree that going to
college is a goal for our young people, and part of that is creating
real-life incentive for young people to go to college. So I'm
very leery, as somebody who works very close to the grass roots,
that we set up some wonderful ideal of everything being right
if we would just get out of the way and stop bothering people.
I know that's not what's being said, but it's a few steps away.
And I suggest, instead, that maybe what you're talking about,
so maybe I missed it a little bit, was the role of the mediator.
Both of you actually work for historic mediators. The foundation,
which I would say you've pointed out, has an obligation not just
to local support but I would think you would also say to longer-term
local support. And the university, which has an obligation, too,
as a mediator, to begin to take some of the people who are coming,
as all people do, from local communities into the university and
begin to understand broader national trends so they can take that
knowledge base back to the local community. So you're both in
mediation roles. You can certainly comment on that.
And I'd
like to have you both comment on a new mediator—the mediator
of electronic communications technology, which seems to be providing
almost for the first time an opportunity to kind of break apart
what you talk about, Professor Skocpol, the local, the regional,
and the national, to communities of shared interest across a much
broader spectrum. How does that play a role? Because we're going
to be the National Commission, I suppose, on Civic Renewal for
the future, and this seems to be a clear part of the future.
SKOCPOL:
I think that the way technologies play out depends a lot on the
kind of group and political structure that they go into at the
time. But I think there's a real possibility that some of this
could play into the fragmentation of special cause and special
identity subgroups, which is definitely not what I'm talking about.
I'm saying that we have a little bit of a withering of the kind
of groups or connections that encourage people to pull together
across various divisions.
I just wanted
to quickly comment that your point about the university as mediator
may or may not apply very well to Harvard University, but it applies
very well to Michigan State University, where I was an undergraduate.
And Michigan State grew up as part of the agricultural extension
system in this country—a federal program that encouraged
the proliferation of state universities which were very directly
involved in serving organized groups of homemakers and farmers
throughout the community. And that's a very good model, by the
way, for the kind of things that can serve some of these bridging
and stimulating functions while empowering people and yet encouraging
and respecting their ability to pull together and get things done.
SCHAMBRA:
I would agree that it could do that if it can shed itself of this
notion that somehow people are "clients," and they are the professionals
there to somehow or another minister to passive, helpless clients,
which has been the way American citizens have come to be viewed
in a social sciences/social welfare-driven world. And again, this
is not just the federal government. You see this throughout the
private sector as well, throughout all sorts of nonprofits as
well. It's a crippling understanding of what the American citizen
is, and yet it is a view of the American citizen very much rooted
in this understanding of what social sciences can deliver. They
are the client. The very word should curdle our blood. Incidentally,
as I understand it, speaking of extension, I gather that Harry
Boyte and others are working to overcome this problem, which is
very much a problem that has gripped the extension services, and
to begin to perhaps return it to an earlier understanding of true
empowerment and true public work.
Back to Panel Three
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