Civic Power

Civic Power

K. Sabeel Rahman & Hollie Russon Gilman

290 pages, Cambridge University Press, 2019

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Democracies around the globe are in crisis. Yet while there is a growing consensus across the policy and political landscape about the urgency of this moment, there remains a large gap in our understanding of the kinds of solutions and strategies needed to actually address the root causes of democracy’s failures—and to build towards a more inclusive and equitable democracy for the future. In the fall of 2013, we had the good fortune of working with a group of remarkable scholars and organizers concerned about the state of American democracy. The Gettysburg Project, out of Harvard’s Kennedy School, as we came to call it (in reference to Abraham Lincoln’s defense of democracy in his Gettysburg Address), brought together leading organizers, democracy reformers, foundations, and academics to think deeply about how the crisis of American democracy could be addressed in the long term. Since then, we have continued working with an ever-growing network of inspiring and incredible leaders, across community organizations, policymakers, and foundations, including in our current roles at Demos and New America, and in the political science and legal academies. What we have learned is that, in order to build an inclusive and responsive democracy out of this moment of crisis, we must take a holistic view that centers not just on the idea of “good governance” and civic engagement, but rather the deep values of democratic power and inclusion. Realizing democracy also requires deep collaboration across the landscape, linking together the work of organizers, policymakers, funders, and researchers, overcoming conventional silos that prevent genuine relationships, deep collaborations, and truly transformative change. In our book, we provide an analysis of why the crisis of democracy is fundamentally a problem of power and how moving forward requires building on the lessons learned by on-the-ground innovators building new civil society and policymaking organizations. We have chosen an excerpt from the book that highlights the primary themes, some examples, and in particular, lessons for the philanthropic community, which we think will be of interest to the SSIR audience.—K. Sabeel Rahman & Hollie Russon Gilman

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Introduction

On a frigid January evening in 2008, Barack Obama, then merely a junior senator from Illinois, shocked the political establishment by winning the Iowa Caucus. At the boisterous celebration rally, Obama delivered what would become one of the signature speeches of his political career, defining many of the central themes of his campaign and his presidency. “[T]he time has come,” Obama declared, “to tell the lobbyists who think their money and their influence speak louder than our voices that they don’t own this government—we do. And we are here to take it back!"¹ If there was a central message in Obama’s 2008 campaign for the White House, it was this faith in a revival of American democracy—the belief “that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”²

Obama would go on to win the presidency, but within the next eight years, the aspirational hope of the early Obama era faded away, supplanted by something much darker. While the Obama administration achieved several significant policy changes, his term was also marked by the fallout from the Great Recession as well as increasingly vociferous opposition from conservatives in Congress. At its close, Donald Trump, a real estate mogul, shocked the country by winning the next presidential election, after rising to political prominence as the leader of the “birther” movement that questioned the very legitimacy of the nation’s first African-American President.

In some ways, the Trump candidacy channeled a sharper frustration with the corrupt and rigged political and economic system than even that evoked by Obama in 2008. But Trump garnered his “populist” grassroots base so by fusing this anti-establishment ire with virulent appeals to racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. As President, Trump has provoked widespread concerns about the threat he and his politics pose to democratic institutions.³ His public rhetoric has helped foster and encourage the resurgence of openly white supremacist and anti-feminist movements in American politics. The lack of transparency around his and his family’s business interests—as well as proliferating conflicts of interest and opportunities for self-dealing connected to them—raise concerns about kleptocracy and corruption. His attacks on the free press, independent judges, independent law enforcement, and his calls for criminalization of his political opponents all raise the specter of democratic decline in the United States.

Yet fears about rising exclusionary populism, lack of accountability, and erosion of existing democratic checks and balances all speak to deeper, more chronic problems of American democracy. Although Trump poses some unique threats to American democracy, in many ways Trump is as much symptom as he is a cause of the weakness of American democratic structures. In a polity where trust in and responsiveness of political institutions is already low, where racial and gender disparities lurk just beneath the surface, and where many constituencies struggle to make themselves heard even in settings of “politics as usual,” conventional political structures—even those of the pre-Trump era—already fall short of democratic aspirations and ideals. The Trump era has exacerbated chronic failures into a more virulent and urgent form of democratic crisis. Thus, the democratic threats posed by the rise of far-right populism raise a subsidiary danger: that efforts to reform American democracy will focus too narrowly on restoring an imagined pre-Trump era of civility and the accompanying “norms” of ordinary political behavior in a status quo ante.⁴ Even if such reform were possible, it would be unwise. Trumpism is reflective of the deeper and more chronic crisis of American democracy.

Economic inequality, for example, skews democratic politics—not just through the influence of wealthy donors in our campaign finance system, but through a variety of mechanisms as wealthier constituencies and business are systematically more likely to have their policy preferences met by policymakers;⁵ organized business advocacy groups outweigh labor organizations, public interest groups, and marginalized constituencies in their lobbying presence;⁶ while working class leaders and people of color in particular are systematically less likely to run for and win elected office, leading to demonstrable skewing of policy outcomes in favor of wealthier groups.⁷ Similarly, structural racial and gender inequities magnify in the policy domain, as a predominantly white and male policymaking and political class produce policies that fail to respond to the needs and challenges faced by the wider democratic public.

Science fiction novelist William Gibson is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as having stated that, “The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.”⁸ The aphorism is a useful articulation of the reality that places with high technological sophistication can coexist with others that are left behind by technological advances. The same observation applies to current concerns about democracy. Despite recent fears about a potential slide into authoritarianism, or at least, diminished democracy in the United States, the reality is that both democracy and authoritarianism are already present in America, they are just unevenly distributed.

In order to tackle these deeper failures of democracy, we argue that our approach to democracy reform itself must shift to focus on the central question of power, and on its day-to-day disparities: in how constituencies struggle to organize and exercise a share of political power; in the perpetual fracturing of communities along racial, gender, and class lines; and in how institutions of ordinary, daily governance—from cities to regulatory bodies—fail to operate inclusively and responsively. Democracy at its core is about empowering a variety of constituencies to share in the project of self-governance, to exercise political agency, and to address shared problems in an inclusive and equitable manner. Democracy reform must be about more than simply defending democratic institutions; it must be about radically reinventing them to better balance political power.

Yet conventional democracy reform discourses themselves often overlook—and therefore reify and further entrench—these deeper structural disparities of power. For example, “good governance” reforms often rely on the idea of civility—that if only we could restore good-faith dialogue and overcome partisanship, we could restore democratic functioning. Other reforms rest on a presumption of transparency—that by bringing government into the open, we make government more responsive—or rationality—that by improving the information, data, and decision-making of policymakers we make government more rational and therefore more responsive and effective. These approaches to reform have value, but by themselves, they imply what we call the good governance ethos. The good governance ethos focuses on trying to sterilize or insulate policymaking from undue influences of special interests and from the messiness of political conflict. Instead, governance, in this view, ought to be structured to maximize expertise, knowledge, rationality, and good faith deliberation—all of which would obtain if only “politics” did not contaminate governance. But the problem of our democracy is not one of civility, transparency, or rationality; it is rather, that for too many individuals and communities, our democratic institutions are not reflective, responsive, or representative; they are instead alien, arbitrary, and unaccountable.

For democracy reform to be meaningful, it has to address these deeper, structural crises of exclusion and inequality. We call this the “civic power” approach to democracy reform. Building such civic power requires two complementary and mutually reinforcing changes to our democratic ecosystem.

First, it requires transforming the way we approach organizing constituencies. Thus, building a truly inclusive democracy will require deep investments in building bottom-up, membership-driven civil society organizations, and radically more participatory and democratic policymaking institutions which these organizations can engage and influence. New models of organizing pioneered by grassroots groups increasingly shift focus from transient campaigns to the challenge of developing the kind of underlying infrastructure that builds long-term grassroots power and enables a more sustained, ongoing, and long-term capacity to exercise political influence. These new approaches to organizing address a deep structural problem in our democracy: the lack of opportunity for individual people to participate as active members in civic organizations that have actual political capacity.⁹ These movements must focus not only on mobilizing, but also on building long-term power for workers and grassroots communities themselves. As scholars of social movements have suggested, this means building mass-member, federated, civil society organizations driven by organic leaders developed from within the movement. It means converting people from newly mobilized supporters into long-term, committed members of the movement who deepen their knowledge, skills, and commitment over time.¹⁰ Part of what makes membership-based advocacy groups organizing so effective is that they build durable organizations that can exercise influence in a variety of ways and that persist beyond momentary flashpoints of controversy. Building long-term democratic inclusion, then, requires deep investments in building this kind of infrastructure for durable, grassroots organizing.

Second, it requires radical changes to how we structure governing institutions and the process of policymaking. Indeed, where inclusive economic and political arrangements have proven effective, transformative, and durable, they have depended not just on a durable coalition of organized civil society supporters;¹¹ they have also depended on the creation of powerful state institutions in which these policies are embedded, and through which they are enforced.¹² Institutions and processes can be designed in ways that pro-actively catalyze and facilitate the ability of groups—particularly diffuse, under-resourced, marginalized, or traditionally overlooked groups—to be better able to exercise power and influence. From innovative urban reformers in city government to new approaches to federal bureaucracy, government actors on the ground are experimenting with systems that could provide real authority for affected stakeholders. This in turn requires a different approach to institutional design, focusing on bureaucracies that have sufficient authority and capacity to be able to actually respond to the claims and needs raised by organized constituencies—and have processes and hooks and levers through which affected communities can hold those policymakers accountable.

The analysis and case studies we offer in our book expand on these themes, and point to several key lessons for funders and policymakers in particular.

• Provide more general operating support and no-strings-attached resources, investing in talent, leadership development, pipeline projects, and organizational infrastructure rather than focusing on specific campaigns or policy outcomes, as a way of supporting innovative leaders in both civil society and government trying to more effectively encourage civic power. This includes developing alternative funding models such as collaborative funding structures across philanthropy, to encourage more cooperation and less competition between organizations, and to ensure that different funders collaborate to support different aspects of governance reform.
• Make learning and research a key grant deliverable. Given people’s busy schedules, collaboration with external stakeholders, especially researchers, could be integrated more directly into grant proposals. If working with external researchers or learning and evaluation efforts are baked into grant proposals at their onset, this could help to engender overall support for collaboration and additional time afforded to external researchers and evaluators. This can help, in turn, to generate broader lessons and findings for the field.
• Look beyond the glamour of easy-fix tech solutions to instead look at how data and technology interact with organizing and institutions to shift (or concentrate) power. While data, human-centered design thinking, and evidence-based policy making are critical components for governance innovation, they do not replace the need for on-the-ground organizing and place-based knowledge. Incorporating new tools and technologies into government, runs the risk of making policy invisible, without feedback loops to engage citizens. Similarly, open data and consumer- or user-experience reforms aimed at making government more transparent, more technologically advanced, or more streamlined from a service delivery perspective all may be useful. But they do not by themselves produce genuine shifts in power and long-term support for or ability to engage in equitable policymaking. Effective and inclusive civic engagement will require a mix of in-person and online tools. Institutions that genuinely shift power will require support of both policymakers and organizers on the ground.
• Invest in creating a more reflective and inclusive leadership in our civil society organizations and our bureaucracies. Civic engagement requires its own form of expertise: interfacing with communities requires a wide range of linguistic, interpersonal, and locally rooted expertise. This means that government will have to change its view about how to recruit, train, and deploy staff. A governmental bureaucracy committed to democratic participation and to sustaining and implementing these kinds of power-shifting policies and processes will have to train and invest in existing staff, creating incentives and supports for learning new approaches. Such a governmental body must also develop new creative ways to bring in a more locally rooted and diverse workforce particularly through concerted outreach to marginalized communities. This means modifying the talent pipeline to be more diverse and more inclusive, so that more individuals from nontraditional backgrounds enter public service. Rotational training programs, fellowships, and other models can be adapted to increase the pipeline of grassroots voices and leaders into leadership and policymaking positions.