"This is a powerful and important book. By looking at different grassroots organizations first hand, Hart gets to the center of debates over American politics that ask what kind of languages are available when trying to persuade others, and what kinds of references to morality work in secular politics."—James M. Jasper, author of The Art of Moral Protest
"This is a timely and important book—an intelligent call to reorient progressive politics in a more pragmatic and effective direction. Hart examines actual grassroots organizations on the ground to make a substantive contribution to debates over social movements and their effectiveness in public arenas."—Christian Smith, author of American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving
An excerpt from
Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics:
Styles of Engagement among Grassroots Activists
by Stephen Hart
Part I: How We Engage in Politics and Why It Matters
Chapter 1: Varying Styles of Political Activity
When we become involved in politics, we often disagree on the issues of the day or adopt differing political philosophies. But in addition to these substantive differences, there are differences in how we do politics. Some of these have to do with how we talk. Political talk can be full of moral commitment and passion or it can be cool in tone and tightly focused on specific tasks to achieve immediate objectives. Sometimes we relate varied issues to an overall social vision, but at other times issues remain discrete. Within a group with common political objectives, the moral basis of politics can be shared and explicit or private and invisible. Sometimes we link civil- societal cultural traditions--religions and other sources of ethical values and commitment--to the social and political world, while at other times we disconnect them. In addition to these differences in modes of public discourse, there are differences in the cultural dimension of political conduct. Some groups and movements develop a strong expressive life-- ceremonies, stories, and practices that are valued for themselves, provide sustenance to participants, and communicate their values to outsiders--while others do not.
Political talk and action, in short, can attend carefully to cultural traditions and the expressive dimension of politics or deal with cultural factors more superficially. This difference crosscuts the divide between progressives and conservatives. In each political camp, one can find groups that pay a great deal of attention to the cultural dimension of their work and others that do not.
Furthermore, styles of discourse and the expressive dimension of political work are not accidental; nor are they merely subjects of aesthetics, public relations, or manipulation. On the contrary, the way we do politics manifests our identity and moral convictions as much as our assessment of what strategy is most likely to result in concrete political victories. Within political and social movements, choices about modes of discourse become deeply ingrained, respected customs.
My purpose in this book is to examine such differences in the cultural
dimension of politics--and especially progressive politics. The reason for
doing so is that these differences are fateful. A key question about
contemporary American political life is why the right has fared so much
better in Washington than the left since the 1960s and what potential there
is for this to change. Some of the problems of progressive politics, I believe,
lie in its cultural work. To diagnose or address these problems one needs to
examine the modes of discourse progressives use, the cultural bases they
implicitly or explicitly draw upon, and how these can be claimed more
effectively. I intend to show how progressive politics often uses modes of
discourse that are cautious and constrained to the point of being anemic,
and argue that recovering the capacity to express moral outrage, universal
claims of justice, and visions of a better society is essential if progressive
political initiatives are to prosper--or deserve to prosper.
(1)
In addition, a focus on the cultural dimension of politics can clarify topics
that frequently arise in social criticism, such as the nature and extent of
individualism in America, the state of civil society, and the impact of
religion, morality, and cultural movements on American politics. Social
critics such as Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Robert Bellah, and Robert
Putnam reflect on how American politics has gone wrong and what might
be done, particularly by progressives, to remedy the situation. While I share
many of the concerns of these authors, my diagnosis and suggestions
diverge from theirs. Compared with Rorty and Gitlin, I am less persuaded
of the dangers, and more of the advantages, of robustly cultural forms of
politics, of moralism and even religious language within public discourse.
With regard to individualism, as discussed by Bellah and a slew of critics,
in my view the problem is not so much individualism in itself as weakness
in the connections between public discourse and the strongly
nonindividualistic ways of thinking, speaking, and acting that are still very
much alive in America. Therefore, by contrast with thinkers such as Robert
Putnam who see our basic problems in terms of weakness in civil society, I
believe that what hurts our country the most is the decoupling of a
reasonably healthy civil-societal sector from politics. In this book, I ground
these arguments in an assessment of the actual state of grassroots public
discourse.
Although it has a formal ring to it, the term public discourse does not refer
only to what politicians, professors, and journalists do. Rather, it is found
wherever people talk about our society and the problems and issues we
face. Family dinners, office water coolers, churches, and taverns can all be
sites for public discourse. The major focus of this book is on the discourse
and cultural practices that are found in grassroots social and political action
groups. These are where ordinary Americans become personally involved in
efforts to improve our society, and they provide an important means by
which nonelite Americans can have an impact on public life. Unlike
national advocacy groups to which people relate only as contributors, local
groups bring participants into interaction with others and provide
opportunities to become public actors by organizing other people, speaking
in front of the media, writing public statements, and so forth. They have the
potential to connect the life of American civil society with politics.
Compared with public opinion polls, the political discussions found in
grassroots groups provide a more interesting, if less systematic and
representative, sense of what is going on outside the Beltway. When
responding to a poll, one is talking to a passive listener, what one says
makes little practical difference, and the issues under discussion typically
have only an indirect impact on one's life; it is rare that one has taken action
personally on these issues. By contrast, in local action groups the issues
often concern one directly and the group faces practical decisions about
what to do. Furthermore, the people one is speaking to are far from passive:
they respond to what one says and express their own views. Thus a forum
for democratic deliberation takes shape. Furthermore, local groups have
been a source of political creativity and change throughout American
history--as in civil rights struggles during the 1950s--and may perform the
same service again in the future. For all these reasons, the discourse and
cultural practices of grassroots activist groups--even though many of them
are small--deserve serious study. In examining these groups, the focus in
this book is not on their often exciting actions and confrontations, but on
their cultural work and their contributions to American political culture.
To provide a first glimpse of how styles of discourse vary, in the section
that follows I recount my observations of three groups concerned,
respectively, with the Gulf War, pornography, and local economic justice
issues. These sketches are not intended to portray what is typical of political
work in these three issue areas. In each area there are other groups that
operate quite differently from the one reported here. Rather, these groups
serve as examples of variation in modes of discourse. The first two,
observed at the same time and in the same city, are examples of two
dramatically different discursive styles that I term constrained and
expansive. The group with constrained discourse, the one that was working
against the Gulf War, was politically progressive, while the
antipornography group, which had a more expansive style, was
conservative. I observed the third group, which works on economic justice
issues, one year later in a similar city. It was progressive but manifested
relatively expansive discourse. Thus this set of examples allows us to see
how styles of discourse vary independently of the political content of the
discourse.
After these examples, I examine the nature of variations in modes of
discourse and argue briefly that such variations are important for
understanding American politics and the problems of progressive politics.
After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and continuing after the start of active
U.S. military operations in January 1991, a peace movement around the
country worked to oppose U.S. policy. In Cincinnati, a loosely structured
group with a few dozen active members but no staff met during that period
and fielded a few antiwar actions. (It was affiliated with one of the two
national anti-Gulf War groups, but was on its own locally. It was not really
a coalition but a membership organization.)
At coalition meetings, discussion was entirely on nuts-and-bolts subjects.
At a meeting in February 1991, when the ground phase of the war was
already underway and it was clear that the war would end within a few
days, this became manifest as an explicit choice. Early in the meeting, a
draft political statement was brought up but immediately put aside without
discussion. In making this choice, the group decided not to try to take a
public position beyond the demand that the war end. In addition, it
eschewed discussion of the topics that would have arisen while considering
the draft statement.
A little later in the meeting, a college student who was a regular participant
tried to raise broader questions: What are we as an organization
fundamentally about? How do we want to change the United States so that
the country will make fewer wars? He argued that the goal of stopping the
war made little sense at that time because it was going to be over soon
anyway and evidently we weren't going to stop it. So maybe, he said, we
should think more about our broader purposes. He was, in a friendly way,
immediately ruled out of order. The chair of the meeting told him, without
giving any reason, that the group couldn't get into that. And indeed, no such
discussion as he proposed took place at that or any other meeting of the
organization I observed.
What explains what happened at this meeting? Certainly not lack of time.
The remainder of the evening was spent talking about every detail of two
elaborate proposals for the group's organizational structure--exactly how
many at-large steering committee members to have, for instance. (All this
for a structure destined to be obsolete within 72 hours!) This discussion
went on well past 10:00 pm and many people left before it ended. The
reason for turning down invitations to broader discussions appeared,
instead, to be a sentiment that it was dangerous or inappropriate to discuss
any larger social visions or grounds for opposition to the Gulf War. The
group should stick to an affirmation that the war was wrong.
Another possible explanation for the group's nuts-and-bolts orientation is
that diverse opinions among its members meant that the only thing they had
in common was opposition to the war and that even talking about anything
beyond that would be at best useless, since no agreement would be reached,
and at worst divisive and destructive. But this line of argument is not very
persuasive in view of the fact that the group was relatively homogeneous
politically. Some of the participants were students, but the rest were long-
term peace activists (some leftists, others pacifists or people whose political
identity focused on peace issues) who had been demonstrating together for
years against American policy in Central America and, for the older ones,
Indochina. There were certainly differences: the pacifists and the socialists
disagreed on some points. But I very much doubt if there was a single
participant who opposed the Gulf War alone without feeling that there were
underlying reasons why the United States continually got involved in
problematic wars.
A third potential explanation is that the group was concerned to make its
case effectively among the general public. It is possible that the older
participants remembered the flamboyant and perhaps ill-advised rhetoric
used by some leftists during the 1960s. This may have been part of the
reason not to try to adopt a political statement. The usual argument for
issuing a narrowly focused statement on a particular public issue--even if
people within a movement have common views on a wider range of
questions--is that the movement has a good chance for an important
political victory in the near future and that the chance will be reduced if
people outside the movement are alienated by broader statements with
which they may not agree. Perhaps some people in the antiwar group were
thinking in these terms, although it was a somewhat implausible position
given that by the time of this meeting the movement had no chance of
practical political victory no matter what it did. But in any case, the group
elected to constrain not only its external but also its internal discourse.
Externally, it declined to adopt a political position statement contextualizing
its opposition to the war. But in addition, by not even discussing the draft
statement and by ruling the college student out of order, the group failed to
take advantage of two opportunities for internal discourse about the broader
political or ethical values behind its opposition to the Gulf War. And as we
have seen, efficient time use or the likelihood of destructive conflict do not
seem plausible explanations. Something deeper and more implicit, some set
of customs or rules--learned in the group or brought in from other political
experiences--appears to have been in play.
In this group, there seemed to be an implicit rule that people's reasons for
belonging and their ethical--let alone religious--sentiments were an entirely
private matter. Any discussion of topics beyond nuts and bolts, any effort to
talk about values or religion, was effectively embargoed. Connections
between the immediate political issues at hand and general social or
political visions were not made. Nor were links forged between people's
politics and the more general cultural traditions, such as religions, to which
they were attached. Furthermore, these activists expressed little passion and
transcendence, even though in fact most of them were highly committed to
their cause.
Let us now turn to a group with a much less constrained style of discourse,
also active in Cincinnati in 1991. While this organization was more
conservative than the one just described, I will focus here not on its goals
but on its way of talking about politics and on how it attended to the
cultural dimension of public life.
Cincinnati acquired notoriety when the Queen City's contemporary art
museum hosted a traveling exhibition of photographs by Robert
Mapplethorpe. The show upset every cultural traditionalist in town. It
included erotic representations, same-sex relationship themes, and images
that some found to violate religious sensibilities. Elsewhere the show
aroused some opposition, but in Cincinnati opponents managed to close it
down and put the museum officials responsible for organizing it on trial for
obscenity. (A jury later acquitted them, however.) A particularly
conservative sheriff spearheaded these steps, but his actions were strongly
influenced by the presence of a militant and effective grassroots
antipornography organization, the Citizens for Community Values (CCV).
In Hamilton County--comprising the city of Cincinnati and the inner
suburbs--CCV had managed by 1991 to wipe out all adult bookstores, get
all X-rated videos removed from video outlets, and ban the showing of X-
rated movies in theaters. In the six surrounding counties, adult video stores
survived but were close to extinction.
CCV was a local group operating only in the Cincinnati area, although it
provided advice to other groups and was part of national coalitions. It was
structured as a membership organization. In 1991 CCV had approximately
five thousand people on its mailing list, but perhaps more importantly it had
a contact network reaching nearly five hundred congregations and a number
of local chapters (one based in a congregation, the rest geographic). The
contact network meant that there was a person in each church who could
quickly disseminate information and requests for action throughout the
congregation. For instance, if a crucial legislative issue was coming up, the
contact could go to church the next Sunday and organize many fellow
congregants to write letters to their representatives. Several dozen
volunteers were also involved in committee work. In short, CCV was not a
staff-driven organization with a passive constituency dealt with by mail.
There was significant personal contact and political activity involved in its
work.
CCV defined itself as a nonsectarian organization promoting the observance
of Judaeo-Christian morality. In fact, its constituency was largely
evangelical Protestant, but there was some Catholic and mainline Protestant
involvement. The staff pointed to the presence of nonevangelical faiths as
evidence of the group's nonsectarian character and would have been very
happy to have Jewish involvement so as to make that case stronger. The
reality, however, was that all CCV participants were religious traditionalists
and the vast majority were Protestants.
The religious traditionalism of CCV members was linked to their
conservative views on pornography politics. However, to understand the
ways in which civil-societal cultural traditions can help or hinder
progressive politics, we need to be aware that this combination represents
an important but hardly representative link between religion and politics. A
large body of evidence shows that traditionalist religion supports
conservative politics in relation to sexuality but not in other domains of
political debate. (2) We will see later that religious traditionalists can easily be
progressive on economic justice issues. And in fact, it occasioned no
tension in CCV that one of its leaders, an evangelical minister who wrote a
column in a local newspaper, took liberal positions when he addressed
economic questions.
The organization devoted a large amount of time to the education and
formation of members. It was serious about having a practical impact, yet it
did not confine its meetings to practical matters. Group activities, in
addition to their instrumental purposes, provided a context in which rank-and-
file participants were encouraged to become public actors and given
training in how to articulate the connections between their politics and their
faith and other basic values.
One chapter meeting that I observed started with prayer and song. Then the
leader presented information about an adult video store that was renting
videos combining sex with violence against women. This led into a lengthy
discussion of why this was abhorrent; many of the participants expressed
their views. Next, everyone in the room wrote a personal letter to the owner
of the store. The leader did not provide any pattern that the letters were to
follow--everyone was on their own. Then several members read their letters
aloud, precipitating further discussion. The meeting closed with prayer.
Other meetings had strong educational components. At one local chapter
meeting, with about twenty people in attendance, a video was shown that
presented a revisionist history of the constitutional principles in the First
Amendment, arguing that they did not mandate as strict a separation of
church and state as contemporary civil libertarians usually thought, and
certainly did not bar religious people and organizations from explicitly
bringing their values into public life. As at the other meeting, a discussion
followed.
A different local chapter had smaller, more informal meetings that were
held over lunch in a restaurant. At these meetings members shared their
current activities and concerns. At one, a member told of how she was
trying to have her mother-in-law's adult video store in the suburbs put out of
business. While her husband was supportive, she was evidently in some
anguish about the situation. The other members listened with sympathy,
talked over what was happening, and offered support.
CCV's case against pornography was linked to broader social issues. It was
in part a critique of unbridled markets and individualism. CCV members
also bemoaned the loss of traditional moral certainties. Furthermore, like
many other Americans, including social critics who focus on deficits in
"social capital" or civil society, they were worried about what they saw as a
tendency toward social disorganization in our society. I heard little mention
of sexuality in the meetings but a lot of worry about divorces and children
using drugs. These were problems that members believed to be significantly
exacerbated by pornography.
In short, CCV's political proposals were grounded in more basic or general
values, that is, values that participants applied to life as a whole, not just
politics. These values were mainly religious in CCV, but in other
organizations, as we will see, secular values can play the same role. The
transcendent quality of CCV's values, plus the universal applicability that
people in CCV claimed for them, made a basis for asking people outside the
group to support its aims. To be sure, many Americans are not so sure that
CCV's moral standards should be applied in full rigor to every situation, and
this limits what CCV can accomplish politically by such appeals. But
certainly members felt themselves to be urged into action by transcendent
claims.
The connection between the particular political issues CCV was addressing
and wider social visions was articulated. Even more important, CCV
participants became better able to connect their personal commitments and
their religious traditions to public policy issues. Through their involvement,
they were empowered to operate as actors in public life. They were
encouraged to speak in their own words, expressing their own concerns.
This was particularly impressive given that most members were people
from modest backgrounds who had not previously been engaged with
public affairs. In short, CCV members acquired new cultural capacities.
One does not have to agree with the organization's political proposals to see
the strengths in its cultural practices and the kind of public discourse carried
on within the group.
The antiwar coalition described above illustrates constrained discourse on
the left while CCV exemplifies expansive discourse on the right. But
progressive politics is not inherently or necessarily more constrained than
conservative politics. To see this clearly, let us preview the movement to be
examined in depth in part 2 of this book: congregation- or faith-based
community organizing. This movement is similar to CCV in the
expansiveness of its discourse even though its politics are progressive. The
local organizing project in Milwaukee, which I observed from 1991 to
1993, is Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH).
Faith-based community organizing is a movement that works for economic
justice and radical democracy but at the same time has some of the
characteristics of CCV with regard to its political style. This kind of
organizing combines a variety of religious social action traditions and the
philosophy of community organizing developed by Saul Alinsky--who was
a secular Jew--into a distinctive religio-political language.
At MICAH meetings, people are present not as individuals but as
representatives of their congregations. In front of me at the table around
which the MICAH housing task force met was a manila folder bent into a
simple name plate reading, "Steve Hart, St. Andrew's." Faith in such an
environment is not a private source of motivation, as it was for the people
from the churches that I found in the antiwar organization and other
progressive groups in Cincinnati, but a communal identity. (It is for the
most part not a limiting identity, however, in that MICAH incorporates
varying faith commitments and translates its statements into secular
languages as well.)
All meetings begin and end with prayer--frequently lengthy and referring to
the group and its members--and some include a reflection period organized
by one of the participants, often based on a passage from scripture. From
time to time people make references to religious or ethical values
underlying the practical work. For instance, at one meeting the housing task
force discussed a city initiative to boost inner-city home ownership. Several
people argued that MICAH's priority, contrary to the city's, should be on
publicly subsidized rental housing, because people with very low incomes
could not plausibly benefit from owning homes and the first concern of
religious people should be with the poorest of their neighbors. At another
meeting, representatives from a Baptist congregation expressed their
concern about whether a planned march to the mayor's house would have
sufficient dignity to satisfy their sense of decorum and show enough respect
for the city's highest official.
But the connection between faith and politics goes deeper than this. In
interviews and meetings, MICAH participants continually tell stories about
how their lives have been transformed by their involvement in community
organizing. Over and over again I heard how they had learned to connect
their faith to public life and become effective, engaged actors in the public
arena. Far from competing with their spiritual life, this involvement often
deepened it. They also reported that their congregations had been affected,
becoming at once more connected with the surrounding society and more
effective organizations internally.
In addition to business meetings and other task-oriented activities, MICAH
devotes an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources to training.
Most people who become more than superficially involved attend training,
often a lot of it. It plays a major role in how participants are transformed
and is a key site for learning and articulating the movement's religio-
political language. Training in MICAH is not primarily a matter of learning
particular skills (how to run a meeting, for instance) but of developing a
systematic perspective on religion and politics. In training, one is
challenged to rethink one's connection to public life, the way one's
congregation operates, and even the goals for one's personal life. The
perspective involves a distinctive set of terms or categories--self-interest,
power, relationships, and so on--providing what is explicitly called a
"language." Training is a key part of how a richer, more robust discourse,
more like CCV's than that of the progressive groups I observed in
Cincinnati, has been created within faith-based community organizing.
To draw on the life-affirming values found in religious communities is
understood by almost everyone involved in contemporary organizing as the
heart of the process. These values are not uniform. There are some very
diverse views found within MICAH, given that it includes denominations as
different as the Quakers and the Church of God in Christ. But practically
everyone agrees that faith has political implications and is comfortable with
the kind of things MICAH seeks, such as more resources for inner-city
neighborhoods and power for inner-city residents, as part of those
implications. To be sure, some members of MICAH congregations do not
agree. But most do, and the divisions on these questions do not set whole
congregations against each other. Issues that might, such as abortion, are
not discussed. This is the most obvious constraining discursive rule that
MICAH adopts. Nonetheless, overall the style of political discourse
exhibited by MICAH is quite expansive. MICAH persistently and carefully
links faith and values--frameworks and commitments found in civil society--
to political issues and public policy.
The contrasts among these groups are striking. With regard to political
"content"--the kind of political and social change the groups are seeking--
CCV is conservative while the other two groups are progressive. But when
we consider political discourse from the standpoint of its mode or "style," it
is apparent that CCV and MICAH share some important features that
distinguish them both from the antiwar coalition. And while I have given
only one example of constrained discourse, I observed this style in several
other groups, both progressive and conservative, during the research for this
book; I have also seen it in dozens of groups I have watched or read about
over the years. Neither of these styles of discourse is unique.
Differences in the style of discourse crosscut differences in political
agendas. A secular radical, disagreeing fervently with CCV's political
stance and its religious basis, could nevertheless admire the care taken in
member education and formation, the way the organization empowers
ordinary people to enter public life, the attempt it makes to connect specific
issues to broader visions, and the encouragement given to members to
construct and articulate moral arguments. When I told participants in
Amnesty International--an organization in which letter writing is a central
activity--how at a CCV meeting people wrote individual letters and then
read them aloud to each other, they were amazed and said that they ought to
imitate this model but might not be able to do so. On the other side, I have
observed conservative groups that operated in much the same way as the
Cincinnati antiwar coalition.
As a shorthand for describing these differences in style, I use the terms
constrained and expansive. The former term refers to discourse like that in
the antiwar coalition, while the latter applies to CCV and MICAH. (3) What
kind of difference does this contrast represent? That is, what kind of choices
are people making when they adopt discursive styles?
To begin, note that the constraints adopted by action groups are not ad hoc.
It isn't as if a group were to do an opinion poll in January and decide to be
very constrained, then find in October that public opinion had shifted and a
more expansive style would do the job better. In the antiwar coalition and
many other groups with constrained discourse I have observed, the degree
and kind of constraint have been essentially constant during the period that I
observed them. The same is true for groups with more expansive discourse.
There, the variation one finds is contextual. MICAH, for instance, uses very
expansive discourse in training but a more constrained style in business
meetings. Some socialist groups I have observed use expansive discourse
internally but constrain themselves significantly when addressing the
outside world.
Furthermore, the kinds of constraints on discourse one finds in a particular
local group are seldom unique. The groups I have observed that use
relatively constrained discourse operate according to rules that, while not
identical, are similar enough to suggest that they represent a kind of
blueprint for political organizations and public discourse. This blueprint
originates outside any particular group and is used as a guide for the
construction of discourse in many groups. Groups with relatively expansive
discourse, similarly, operate by rules that go beyond the particular group.
The style of discourse in any group develops through its unique history and
is in part an unconscious, perhaps even accidental, pattern. But the
discourse styles we have been discussing are more than that. They are a set
of customary rules--sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit--governing
discourse. It was by intention, not accident, in the antiwar coalition, that
certain topics did not come up. Nor were these topics absent simply by
default; that is, because nobody thought of them. Rather, they were
embargoed. The discourse I observed in the antiwar coalition and have seen
in many other progressive groups operates as if the following rules were in
effect: Don't talk about anything other than the practical steps of achieving
the immediate goals the organization is trying for! Don't bring up any basic
values (religious or political) that underlie your commitment to the
organization! Don't ask anyone to articulate their reasons for participating
in the group! Don't talk in terms that engage people's passion! Discuss
issues in purely instrumental terms whenever possible! By contrast, CCV
and to a large extent MICAH operate under implicit rules like these: Have a
single overarching set of values that rules your whole life, personal and
political! Talk about these and develop them (through discussions with
sympathetic others)! Relate the specific issues of the day to this value
system! Engage yourself whole-heartedly in the struggle!
Note that each of these sets of rules is religiously and politically
contentless. These ideas are not inherently liberal or conservative, religious
or secular. They represent a distinct dimension along which political ideas
and practices differ, independent of left-right or religious-secular debates.
But what kind of rules are these? Are they simply instrumental in intent--
that is, advice for how to achieve one's purposes more effectively, like the
rules for mixing a great martini? To some extent this is surely the case. And
to an even greater extent, people in groups with relatively constrained
discourse believe this to be the case. Numerous leaders in activist groups
have told me, at one point or another, something like "If you waste
participants' time by endless discussions of first principles, they're liable to
desert you." Very frequently, the accounts that group members give for why
their groups operate under constraining rules follow this pattern. With
regard to the rules governing internal discussions, participants say there is
not enough time to loosen the constraints or that destructive conflict would
erupt if they were to do so. With regard to external discourse, they say that
only with a narrowly focused message can the organization achieve its
goals.
These accounts, however, are not always plausible analyses of the group's
situation. After all, groups like CCV and MICAH achieve concrete victories
and are frequently very task-oriented but also find time for education and
values talk. In the antiwar coalition, the relative political homogeneity of
the group internally meant that severe conflict was unlikely. Time was not
really a problem and achieving the group's immediate objective was
impossible, so it is not clear what would have been lost by dealing with
broader issues. In this and many groups with highly constrained discourse
topics are absent, not just for practical reasons but because they violate
norms to which many participants are deeply attached. Observing the
antiwar coalition, other progressive Cincinnati groups, plus a conservative
one (a group supporting the Gulf War) that used a similar discursive style, I
felt myself in the presence of a taboo or prohibition. Certain kinds of
discussion were out of bounds for reasons that transcended practical
concerns. The fact that constraining rules frequently apply not only to the
public statements a group makes, but also to its internal discussions, is
another indication that they are more than instrumental advice. Rather, they
have the quality of an ethos--an ethically charged way of political life.
In many groups, the accounts for constraint just mentioned are firmly
believed and sometimes stated. This attachment to the accounts makes a
difference, regardless of how plausible the accounts really are. And there
are other accounts we will encounter later, such as the idea that respect for
privacy requires group members not to ask each other about the sources of
their political views. There are accounts used to explain and justify
expansive discourse as well--for instance, the ideal of a life self-consciously
unified by a coherent set of values. Such accounts, in short, are themselves
part of the cultural life of activist groups.
Thus grassroots social action groups operate according to a set of customary
rules governing their style of discourse, and they often articulate
justifications for these rules. This combination is parallel to how a political
platform might propose new public policies and argue why these would be
best for the nation. Choices about how to conduct politics that follow a
consistent pattern, implicit or explicit rules manifest in that pattern, and
justifying accounts, taken together, constitute what might be called a
"cultural structure." This structure is a guide to how one should engage in
political talk, without regard to whatever views one holds on particular
issues. Ideas about what modes of discourse one should adopt, especially
when they become explicit, are a second layer of discourse placed on top of
garden-variety political debates. (4) Discursive rules and the grounds for them,
in sum, represent a political ethic. They are about the right way to be a
citizen activist. And as we have seen, Americans have varied
understandings of what that way might be.
As with most contrasts, the difference between constrained and expansive
discourse is not a simple dichotomy. In practice there are compromises and
syntheses of the two as often as pure instances of either. Furthermore, there
are different respects in which discourse can be constrained or expansive.
Some of these are shown in the table provided for reference at the end of
this chapter.
The two cases of relatively expansive discourse discussed earlier were
groups with a religious identity, and a person might think that for all
practical purposes discursive expansiveness and religiosity are the same.
But this would be an error. It is quite possible to engage in expansive talk
on a secular basis. In The Search for Political Community, Paul Lichterman
provides a good example of this possibility. He describes in rich detail the
life of several activist groups with a broadly environmental focus. One of
these is a Green Party chapter in California. The "Seaview Greens," as he
calls them, have strong shared commitments. Most obviously, they hold to
"Green values" and a "Green perspective"--an ideology mixing ecological
and social justice concerns. But in addition, they adopt a mode of political
commitment that Lichterman terms "personalism." (5) Theirs is not a life-style
enclave or the kind of politics of self-expression and self-development that
communitarians love to criticize. It is strongly public spirited and involves
willingness to compromise and work collectively. The Seaview Greens seek
to win concrete victories in the real political world. Nonetheless, they are
deeply committed to the high value and development of the individual
activist. As Lichterman puts it, "each individual activist is a locus of
personal responsibility and efficacy, outside as well as inside activist
organizations." (6) Given this understanding, cutting off discussion or
narrowing its scope in order to get something concrete accomplished is
almost never done. Also, specific political projects are always discussed in
the context of the overarching framework of Green values. These values
constitute a whole way of life, an ethical as well as a political framework. In
essence, Green values do some of the same things religious commitments
do within MICAH or CCV. They provide transcendent commitments and
ground particular political choices on the issues of the day. At Green
meetings, the moral grounds for politics are manifest. Varied specific issues
are bound together into a broader social vision. Issues are addressed with
passion and transcendence. And the capacities of participants to relate their
most basic commitments to public life are systematically nurtured.
The Greens, and the expansive discourse sometimes found in the human
rights movement, to be discussed in part 3, show that it is quite possible to
carry on expansive talk on a secular basis. Of course, one could define
religion as any framework that asserts transcendent values, and then argue
that all expansive discourse is "religious." But if we are talking about
religion in the ordinary sense, the connection between religion and
discursive styles is contingent.
One key hallmark of expansive discourse is the presence of transcendent
talk. By transcendent, I mean using standards of value that are grounded in
things outside of normal life in the currently existing world, and giving
these standards a morally binding quality such that they trump not just one's
personal interests but also the rules and values found in one's social and
cultural environment. Thus the biblical injunction that "we must obey God
rather than any human authority" (Acts 5:29) (7) manifests transcendence, as
does the stance of a journalist who follows strongly held ethical standards
and publicly defies the law, going to jail rather than revealing sources. The
Seaview Greens clearly believe in transcendent standards, and other
examples of transcendence without religion abound.
For instance, I have observed for many years a loose group of ex-communists
who are in their seventies and still politically active in various
left-of-center groups. They are secular, but they feel that the social world is
morally skewed at a basic level. Especially since they stopped appealing to
any "actually existing socialism" as a model, they use external,
nonempirical bases--hopes and visions for a better society--to assert their
stance. They take it that these represent superior principles worthy of being
followed. That is, these values have a transcendent, morally binding quality,
parallel to the way CCV members conceive of traditional sexual morality.
These ex-communists manifest their commitment personally by organizing
their lives around a vision of justice and involvement in struggles to achieve
it. This commitment has exacted serious risks and costs. One, for instance,
was a school teacher who was fired in a procedure ruled illegal only over a
decade later, and even then with vastly too little compensation to make up
for his economic losses. Nevertheless, they have been able to maintain their
worldview over the entire span of their adult lives, and their point of view
has sustained them. Having a transcendent worldview does not make these
people "religious"--if anything, they tend to be antireligious, although they
have mellowed in this regard over the years--but it does give them
capacities for expansive discourse.
In fact, transcendent values can lead to an antireligious stance. This was
traditionally the case for Marxists. In addition, some human rights activists,
while asserting transcendent values about the liberty and dignity of the
human individual, see religious faith as one of the great sources of human
rights violations.
Conversely, religious groups--especially new or unconventional ones--
sometimes deal with public issues in a "cool" way, defining themselves, at
least in their external discourse, as just one more cultural grouping. In
essence, they want to be treated as interest groups and put forward entirely
prudential arguments--we are taxpayers, we are law-abiding, we vote, we
are customers--for accepting them and giving them the same rights as any
other group. They take an implicitly relativistic stance in their discourse on
public issues, even though on religious ones they may be far from
relativistic.
To be sure, religious faith offers many possibilities for engaging in
expansive discourse. The assertion of transcendent standards against the
existing world was something humans first learned how to do within
religious frameworks, long before secular worldviews developed this
capacity. In the West, as Robert Bellah among others has argued, it was the
radical monotheism of ancient Judaism that first decisively relativized
worldly standards and authority. (8) Elsewhere, other religious traditions did
similar things: witness the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves
during the war in Indochina. But this capacity, like other hallmarks of
expansive discourse, can now exist independently of religion, or even in
opposition to it. It exists among the Greens as analyzed by Lichterman and
the ex-communists just described. People who are secular have every right
to insist that making a passionate and transcendent commitment to social
ideals does not make them less secular or more religious.
There is a paradox about recent trends in American politics. It is
indisputable that public policy and the political discourse found in
Washington and many state capitals have shifted dramatically rightward
over the last twenty-five years. At a practical level, the shift is evident in
national and state legislation, such as the gradual loss of progressivity in
income taxes and the offensive against welfare capped by the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. With regard to the tone
of debate, there has been a vigorous reassertion of individualistic themes
such as self-reliance, and a growth in skepticism about government.
If this rightward trend expressed a sea change in public sentiment, we could
explain it straightforwardly. But, in fact, there is no such change.
Republicans have done better in elections. But when Americans are asked
about issues, no trend to the right is revealed. On the contrary: reliable
evidence shows that public opinion in the United States has been largely
stable since the 1970s. Leading academic survey researchers have done
comprehensive and careful analyses of opinion poll trends, finding little
change in grassroots views on most issues. (9) Only on criminal justice is there
a clear conservative trend. Opinions on economic equality are essentially
unaltered compared with twenty years ago, as are views on abortion and a
host of other issues. On a few issues, especially ones about women, the
trend is liberal.
Furthermore, Americans today, as in previous generations, regularly
manifest in local activities remarkably strong concern for community and
the public sphere. Although some commentators worry about Americans
bowling alone, nobody denies that civil society is still exceptionally strong
in this country compared with other nations. (10) (By "civil society," I mean
arenas that are not part of either government or the for-profit business
world. An alternate term with nearly the same meaning is "voluntary
sector.") People work in soup kitchens, enlist in civic improvement
organizations, try to protect the environment, get involved in religious
congregations, sing in community choruses, and find solidarity with other
parents in soccer leagues. In these and many other contexts, ethical
languages are spoken or expressed in action. In grassroots associational life,
Americans give practical witness to values that are much less individualistic
than those dominant in Washington.
How is that so much has changed in national and state politics while so little
has changed in public opinion or civil society? An important part of the
answer, documented by Dan Clawson and others, is that the right has
organized itself systematically, much more than previously, to use the
economic resources of corporate America to advance a conservative
agenda. (11)
In addition, however, there is a cultural part of the answer. Progressives,
especially in recent decades, have not paid as careful attention to the
cultural dimension of politics--and especially to values and religious
traditions--as has the right. Progressives often fail to articulate, and
sometimes even try to hide, the ethical values that ground their proposals.
The right, meanwhile, engaging in discourse that is generally more
passionate and transcendent, has seized the discursive high ground. There is
sometimes more critique of how capitalism operates in conservative
thinking than in what one hears from socialists. Progressives are often
appalled by the florid links between faith and politics articulated by the
religious right, but have failed to take in the fact that progressive politics
has equal need of rooting in cultural traditions to which people are deeply
committed. To be sure, progressives want to maintain values of tolerance
and diversity sometimes threatened by groups on the religious right, but to
do so, as I will argue in part 4, it is not necessary to abjure all connections
between religion, morality, or transcendent values and political discourse.
Furthermore, progressives have often pursued politics in ways that
disconnect their work from the cultural traditions generated in civil society.
This has hurt their chances, since these traditions, at least on economic
issues, have more progressive implications, giving a higher value to
community and lower one to the market, than the kind of discourse
currently dominant in Washington.
In sum, to understand the problems and possibilities of progressive politics,
and the role of cultural factors in American politics, we need to examine
modes of discourse as well as the content of what people say. To examine
political work in this way clearly involves in part a normative analysis in
which one makes explicit value judgments. I will go into normative
questions in detail in part 4 of this book. For now, I will confine myself to
two observations.
First, sound value judgments on social and political issues are based in part
on accurate descriptions of what is actually happening. The first task of this
book is to describe the modes of discourse that Americans currently use.
Only if this is done in a fair and thorough way can we make intelligent
judgments. Given the complexity of the judgments to be made, it is crucial
to understand in some detail the kind of discursive choices activist groups
make and the implicit or explicit moral basis for citizen activism.
Accordingly, the major part of this book is devoted to describing and
understanding what is happening in grassroots groups. Such understanding
can serve as an impetus to improving the cultural work of progressive
politics and may help citizens of any political stripe decide how the kind of
politics they favor might best be strengthened.
Second, judgments about discursive modes do not follow directly from
categorizing them as constrained or expansive. While I do believe that
progressive political discourse in America is on average more constrained
than ideally it should be, the best mode of discourse in any particular
situation depends on the context and the kind of group involved, and there
are usually considerations on both sides that need to be weighed. And any
group, as we saw with MICAH's implicit rule against discussing abortion,
adopts some constraints. The real question is not whether to have
constraints but what particular constraints one might adopt and what will be
lost or gained by adopting them.
The book contains four parts. The first, comprising the current chapter, lays
out the issues to be addressed and the approach to be used in the remainder
of the book. The next two parts constitute a descriptive account of
important cases of cultural work in contemporary progressive politics. Part
2 presents the most extensive case study of the book. It concerns faith-based
community organizing--the broader movement that MICAH exemplifies.
This movement illustrates ways of constructing a culturally robust politics
focused on one of the main agendas of progressive politics, the pursuit of
economic equality and democracy. Part 3 deals with a secular case: the
human rights movement. This movement is an important expression of a
second core progressive agenda, the liberty and dignity of the individual.
The language of human rights is also important because its claims to
universality--to be valid for people of any religious or cultural tradition--are
more widely accepted than those of most other political frameworks. Here,
Amnesty International will be the main example. The discourse found in the
local Amnesty groups I observed has expansive characteristics but also
strong constraints. Amnesty pays unusually close attention to its discursive
rules, thus providing insight into discursive constraints that are operative in
many other social movements, only less explicitly.
In part 4 the analysis becomes primarily normative. Chapter 7 takes up
issues about individualism and civil society that occur frequently in the
writings of such American social critics as Robert Bellah, Robert Putnam,
and Richard Rorty. In addition, it proposes a way of understanding
individualism that integrates concerns about justice and liberty. Chapter 8
deals with the opportunities and perils of integrating culture and politics,
taking on social critics such as Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin and arguing
that the need for a richly cultural politics outweighs the dangers. In both
chapters, I attempt to clarify the issues conceptually and to bring data about
the actual cultural life of activist organizations to bear on them.
1.
Throughout this book I use the terms progressive and conservative. I
recognize that there are grave problems about such terms. "Progressive" can
be confused with progressivism as a specific political movement, and has
connotations of faith in progress. Also, some social critics, such as Anthony
Giddens, argue that the conservative/progressive dichotomy is outmoded.
Nonetheless, I think "progressive" is a less unfortunate term than the
alternatives. "Liberal" has such a variety of frequently invoked meanings,
ranging from a philosophical preference for the individual--the meaning on
which critics such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas focus--to
the journalistic meaning of favoring economic equality and civil liberties,
that the term is deeply confusing. "Left" also has severe problems. In using
the term progressive, let me be clear that I imply nothing about progress or
any other teleology. Nor do I mean to imply that the political views
Americans hold exist in neat packages all easily arranged on a single
progressive-conservative dimension. On the contrary, it is clear that the
patterning of political views takes diverse forms. Nonetheless, the kind of
progressive politics embodied in support for human rights and that
manifested by struggles for economic justice have things in common, and
are empirically associated to some degree.
(return to text)
2.
Opinion poll data conclusively show that there is no connection between
religious traditionalism and conservatism on economic issues, or indeed on
most issues outside the areas of sexuality, reproduction, gender roles, and
schooling. See Stephen Hart, What Does the Lord Require? How American
Christians Think about Economic Justice (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992; expanded edition: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1996) for survey data on this point and references to other authors reaching the
same conclusion.
(return to text)
3.
In past writings I have spoken of "thick" and "thin" discourse. There is no
essential difference in that to which the old and new terms are meant to refer.
But the new terminology, I hope, has a smaller overload of evaluative
connotations and will therefore be less confusing and off-putting. Another
reason for changing terminology is to avoid confusion with the terminology
found in Michael Walzer's Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and
Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), which has
appeared since I started using these terms. Walzer's distinction is related to
mine but is not by any means the same. Confusion has also come from
people's familiarity with Clifford Geertz's concept of "thick description."
(Geertz, of course, was speaking of thick qualities in the social scientific
narrative about culture, whereas Walzer and I are concerned with the cultural
forms themselves.)
(return to text)
4.
One could distinguish between "primary" discourse, dealing with the world,
and "secondary" discourse that tries to govern primary discourse. This
distinction is analogous to the way legal theorist H. L. A. Hart defines primary
and secondary rules in The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
(return to text)
5.
This is not to be confused with the philosophical perspective of the same
name, associated with French thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Emmanuel
Mounier. In the United States, the most obvious political manifestation of
personalism in this more traditional sense is the Catholic Worker movement.
(return to text)
6.
Paul Lichterman, The Search for Political Community: American Activists
Reinventing Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
34.
(return to text)
7.
Here Peter and the apostles are speaking to a Jewish priestly council. This
and all other scriptural quotations and citations are taken from the New
Revised Standard Bible.
(return to text)
8.
The basic argument for the social and political significance of transcendent
religious frameworks was first made, within social-scientific analysis, by the
sociologist Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(New York: Scribner, 1958 [German original, 1904]), Weber showed how
world-rejecting stances could transform the world (paradoxically, more than
stances backing the pursuit of self-interest). He made the argument even more
pointedly, and in a way that applies more directly to politics, in the conclusion
to The Religion of China (New York: Free Press, 1951 [not published in
Weber's lifetime]). Michael Walzer's The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1965) carries forward this intellectual perspective,
applying it explicitly and in detail to the religious genesis of modern
revolutions. Robert Bellah's seminal article "Religious Evolution" (American
Sociological Review, 29 [June 1964]: 358-74) puts the argument in an
ambitiously comparative context. My own What Does the Lord Require? How
American Christians Think About Economic Justice (expanded edition), an
empirical analysis of grassroots viewpoints based mostly on in-depth
interviews, shows how the capacity of Christians of many theological stripes
to assert transcendent values and images of reality against what they see
around them persists today, often with progressive political implications. The
line of argument of all of these scholars applies fully to the Greens and ex-
communists described here. In other words, they meet the analytical
requirements of this model even though concretely their worldviews are very
far from the ones Weber, Walzer, and Bellah discuss.
(return to text)
9.
On this subject, see Tom Smith, "Liberal and Conservative Trends in the
United States since World War II," Public Opinion Quarterly 54 (1990): 479-507;
James Davis, "Changeable Weather in a Cooling Climate Atop the
Liberal Plateau: Conversion and Replacement in Forty-Two General Social
Survey Items, 1972-89," Public Opinion Quarterly 56 (1992): 261-306; and
the preface to the 1996 edition of Hart, What Does the Lord Require: How
American Christians Think About Economic Justice. A more journalistic
treatment is found in Thomas Ferguson's Golden Rule: The Investment Theory
of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). The reason for my
focus on issue positions in this argument is that voting and party preference do
not really measure where people stand on issues. Also, some of the shift in
party allegiance is in the South and may be a move from being conservative
Democrats to being Republicans, without any shift in political philosophy.
(return to text)
10.
A not very empirical but nonetheless insightful argument about the
enduring strength of American moral discourses is found in Jeffrey Stout's
Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1988); see especially chapter 9. The debate about whether
American civil society is declining has been spirited in recent years,
particularly in response to Robert Putnam's widely influential essay "Bowling
Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 (1995):
65-78. One important critique of Putnam is Theda Skocpol's "Unraveling
From Above," American Prospect 7, no. 25 (March-April 1996): 20-25. For a
study of how American voluntary associational involvement stacks up against
other countries (way above average, including religion; a little above average
not including religion), see James Curtis, Edward Grabb, and Douglas Baer,
"Voluntary Association Membership in Fifteen Countries: A Comparative
Analysis," American Sociological Review 57, no. 2 (April 1992): 139-52.
(return to text)
11.
Dan Clawson, Alan Neustadtl, and Mark Weller, Dollars and Votes: How
Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998). See also Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The
Investment Theory of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
(return to text)
Thumbnails: Styles of Discourse in Three
Grassroots Activist Organizations
The Cincinnati Area Coalition against U.S. Intervention
Citizens for Community Values
Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope
Styles of Discourse: Constrained and Expansive
Religion and Modes of Discourse
Why Styles of Discourse Matter:
Culture and Political Trends
The Organization of This Book
NOTES
