We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For This page intentionally left blank We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For The Promise of Civic Renewal in America z PETER LEVINE 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levine, Peter, 1967– We are the ones we have been waiting for : the promise of civic renewal in America / Peter Levine. pages cm ISBN 978-0-19-993942-8 (hardback) 1. Political participation—United States. 2. Civil society—United States. 3. Local government—United States. I. Title. JK1764.L48 2013 307.1′4—dc23 2013005193 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents 1 . Overview: Th e Public and Our Problems 3 2 . How to Th ink About Politics: Values, Facts, and Strategies 23 3 . Values: Collaboration, Deliberation, and Civic Relationships 35 4 . Values: Th e Limits of Expertise, Ideology, and Markets 64 5 . Facts: Th e State of American Democracy 91 6 . Facts: A Civic Renewal Movement Emerges 120 7 . Strategies: How to Accomplish Civic Renewal 162 A Note on the Title of Th is Book 191 Notes 1 93 Index 2 25 This page intentionally left blank We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For This page intentionally left blank 1 Overview The Public and Our Problems Good citizens deliberate. By talking and listening to people who are diff erent from themselves, they enlarge their understanding, make them- selves accountable to their fellow citizens, and build a degree of consensus. But deliberation is not enough. People who merely listen and talk usually lack suffi cient knowledge and experience to add much insight to their conver- sations, and talk alone rarely improves the world. Deliberation is most valu- able when it is connected to work—when citizens bring their experience of making things into their discussions, and when they take ideas and values from deliberation back into their work. Work is especially valuable when it is collaborative: when people make things of public value together. Th ey are typically motivated to do so because they seek civic relationships with their fellow citizens, relationships marked by a degree of loyalty, trust, and hope. In turn, working and talking with fellow citizens builds and strengthens civic relationships, which are scarce but renewable sources of energy and power. A combination of deliberation, collaboration, and civic relationships is the core of citizenship. If we had much more of this kind of civic engagement, we could address our nation’s most serious problems. Indeed, more and better civic engagement is a necessary condition of success; none of the available ideologies or bodies of expertise off ers satisfactory solutions, which must emerge instead from a continuous cycle of talking, working, and building re- lationships. Unfortunately, genuine civic engagement is in decline, neglected or deliberately suppressed by major institutions and ideologies and by the prevailing culture. Our motivation to engage has not weakened, but we have lost institutionalized structures that recruit, educate, and permit us to engage eff ectively. Nevertheless, we live in a period of civic innovation, when at least one million Americans, against the odds, are working on sophisticated, de- manding, and locally eff ective forms of civic engagement. Th ese Americans