The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference
By Harry C. Boyte
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008
207 pages, $15.95
... everyday civic politics is about breaking down stereotypes, rigid boundaries, and people's tendency to avoid understanding the views of those that they disagree with.
Analyze power. Who has power over this issue? Who makes the decisions? What kinds of other power do people have, such as position, knowledge, resources like money, moral authority, or relationships? What kinds of power do you have? Think not only about formal power, but informal power as well.
The Citizen Solution should be on every activist's book shelf -- consider it the practical progressive's Bible for making things happen. Really happen. As author Harry Boyte, senior fellow ast the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, says at one point, this is the kind of guidebook for people who work in the "world as it is" instead of "the world as it should be."
Based on a couple of decades' worth of organizing experience in the real-life experimental laboratory of Minnesota, a state long known as the incubator and trendsetter for innovative progressive policy, author Boyte draws both on his education learning at the feet of the inimitable Saul Alinsky, and the day-to-day lessons he's learned ... often about about learning from the constituencies he came to organize.
Running throughout the book is a basic trust in the local solution and a constant push for an expansion of just who should be involved in the mechanics of every-day democracy. This folk trust shows what modern populism can look like, stripped down and rebuilt differently in every community, according to regional issues and needs. Bursting with case histories and detailed interviews with organizers who've learned how to tread the line between idealism and pragmatism, incrementalism and impulsive change, this book outlines everything from how to run a neighborhood meeting on your street to how to find people in the overlooked "free spaces" that abound in any community ... if you know where to look for them.
Free or public spaces are places of, for, and by the public. Look for "Humphrey drugstores," civic meeting grounds like the store that educated Hubert Humphrey. They are important because the natural tendency is to stick with people who are like us. People who are different can make us uncomfortable, but they are necessary for building civic muscle.
Free spaces are places to socialize, discuss, have fun, learn and do public works. There are free public spaces in every community. They are settings where people meet as equals with others who are outside their immediate family and friendship circles, where people have a sense of comfort and ownership, and where people learn values and habits of public life, such as regard for the common good.
As a blogger reading Boyte's description of free spaces, it's hard not to think he's talking about online communities, but the author, coming from his background of on-the-ground experience, is describing the importance of the public spaces we often take for granted in real life.
There are many shared commonalities between Boyte's meat world and the online world, and those reading this book from familiarity with only one sphere will have many "Aha!" moments along the way, like the rebellion against the hegemony of so-called expertise:
Citizen professionalism points toward a fundamentally different civic philosophy than the outside-expert philosophy that now dominates in Minnesota and other places. It suggests a philosophy of shared abundance, of common wealth, not scarcity. This has implications for many professional systems and practices today, across different fields. It also has implications for the renewal of government of the people and by the people, not only for the people.
Taking back our government, recognizing the "experts" in each other and in our own life experiences, listening to the folklore of communities, trusting in the ability of each of us to contribute our own unique talents ... this is the stuff of participatory, responsible democracy. Boyte details how groups manage day-to-day reach-out to new members, organize effective action, set goals and select leaders. Example organizations range from a Cultural Wellness Center that focuses on neighborhood health issues and solutions, to a Community Engaged Parent Education program that views community through the lens of what is best for children, to agencies like the Minnesota Department of Transportation's efforts to incorporate genuine citizen input into decisions about what bridges should be renovated.
And the health of our democracy depends, Hoyte believes, in forming just such alliances between all citizens, those with special knowledge and those with the desire to serve in areas new to them, creating a mutual respect and fostering a responsibility for the condition of democratic processes and ideals.
Condescension toward volunteers derives from what can be called technocracy, a mode of domination that has spread throughout our society like a silent civic disease. Technocracy means control by experts who see themselves outside a common civic life, whose authority comes from book learning and formal credentials and whose superiority is based on supposedly objective and scientific knowledge. Technocracy turns groups of people into abstract categories.
This respectful view of the non-credentialed citizen is a vision that is certain to be embraced by every blogger who's been told he or she should sit down and listen to the experts--in the media, in the party, in the advocacy groups--and who has learned to trust and rely on fellow citizens in the new progressive movement.
Update: Boyte's blog, on the University of Minnesota site, can be found here.