In some countries the inhabitants seem unwilling to
avail themselves of the political privileges which the law gives them; it
would seem that they set too high a value on their time to spend it on the
interests of the community....
But if an American were condemned to confine his
activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his
existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is
accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable.
---Alexis Tocqueville, Democracy in America
My talk is something of a mystery story--a murder.
The question is, as Robert Putnam put it:
What Killed Civic Engagement? How
and why in the U.S. did a nation of joiners and activists suddenly become a
nation of passive spectators of the political scene?
To be sure there is some disagreement on how and why
civic engagement has declined, but there is ample evidence that U.S.
citizens no longer participate in public affairs as they once did.
Some of the best evidence comes from Harvard’s Civic Engagement
Project and the publications that have come out of it, notably Putnam’s Bowling
Alone and Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy.
Voting, communal participation, participation in political campaigns,
attendance at club meetings, union membership and membership in
chapter-based associations have all declined, and most have declined
dramatically. (see tables)
There have been numerous explanations for the
decline, such as suburban sprawl, television, and the fast-paced,
time-starved lives lived by Americans.
Since the average citizen now spends 73 minutes a day driving, 86
minutes on the computer, 52 minutes on the telephone, and 180 minutes
watching television, it’s difficult to find a place for associational
activities.
But in this talk I
want to examine some broader issues related to the decline of civic
participation, specifically the impact of the need in the culture of
capitalism to maintain perpetual economic growth and the relationship of
that prime directive to our political freedoms and the power of elites.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, economic growth must come from somewhere;
that is, monetary capital can only be created by converting it from
something else such as environmental, political, or social capital. Economic growth is very much an alchemical process; it
is, quite literally, a Faustian bargain.
Tonight I’d like to examine more closely how and why we have traded
democratic prerogatives for economic growth, and how this affects the extent
to which we have a say in the kind of society that we live in, and try to
export around the world. More
specifically I want to illustrate how elites through various technologies of
control have delegitimated and commodified dissent.
Economics and The Fear of Democracy
There has always been, particularly among the elite, a
distrust of democracy. Most
recently, Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
international editor and former editor of the journal, Foreign
Affairs, in his recent book The
Future of Freedom. Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
warns that too much democracy threatens liberties, and that
public-spirited elites should act as "social stabilizers” and not be
accountable to public whim. Central
banks, the European Union and the World Trade Organization are examples of
some of the elites organizations that he suggests we need in order to temper
what he calls “illiberal democracy.”
Zakaria’s argument is interesting, but is little different from
political writings from Aristotle to Edmund Burke and Francis Fukuyama, all
warning about the dangers inherent in giving people the right to have too
much of a say in their lives and in their government.
The roots of this distrust in democracy are deep and
complex, but I suspect that one factor is that democracy does not make for
good economics. The research on
this is mixed, but strongly suggestive.
Most recently Robert J. Barro in a cross-cultural
empirical study of determinants of economic growth concluded that
At low levels of political rights, an expansion of
[democratic] rights stimulates economic growth. However, once a moderate
amount of democracy has been attained, a further expansion reduces growth.
The key question is why should increased
democratization inhibit economic growth?
Barro suggests that democratization retards growth because, as growth
increases, citizens become more concerned with economic inequality and
social justice and demand social programs and income redistribution, neither
of which are conducive to the uninhibited accumulation of monetary capital. Thus democracy poses an economic conundrum; how is it
possible to maintain perpetual economic growth in the face of democratic
demands for economic equality? Or,
to phrase it another way, how is it possible to maintain democracy, but not
allow the government to be captive to the public will?
To begin to answer this question I want to go back to
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a period when civic
participation and social activism was thriving.
It was a time, also, when corporate prerogatives were being called
into question and when social movements were driven by popular appeals to
equality and social justice. At
the same time, elites were warning again about the dangers of democracy.
One of the most influential came from a French sociologist, Gustave
Le Bon, and his book, first published in 1895, The Crowd: A Study of the
Popular Mind. Le Bon warned
of the power of the masses, which had been set loose and was overtaking the
historical stage. At this point, the public began to be redefined as “the
mob.” The question given "scientific” legitimacy by Le Bon, was how
to assert control of the mob?
Le Bon’s question is credited by some,
including media scholar Stuart Ewen, with leading to the creation of the
whole field of public relations and the emergence of “spin,” attempts to
“engineer consent,” and mold public opinion to the interests of nations,
elites, corporations and fee-paying clients.
Edward Bernays, often called “the father of
“spin,” was born in 1891 to a powerful and wealthy Austrian family (Bernays
was a nephew of Sigmund Freud). Bernays
was a public relations genius: he got his start working for the U.S.
Committee on Public Information (CPI) during WW I, the vast propaganda
apparatus mobilized by the government to sell the “War to End All Wars.”
He originated the orchestration of public events to advertise
products, as when he convinced women’s rights marchers in New York City to
hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.”
He was the advisor and confidant of presidents, world leaders, and
corporate heads for over 80 years. Interviewed
when he was almost 100 years old by Stewart Ewen, Bernays expressed a
clearly hierarchical view of society in which an "intelligent few"
have been charged with influencing the tide of history.
Public relations, he said, is a response
to a transhistoric concern: the requirement, for those
people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.
Bernays even suggested that an eleventh article by
added to the Bill of Rights; in addition to the freedom of speech, freedom
of assembly, and freedom of the press we should add, he said, “the freedom
to persuade.”
Bernays, of course, was not alone in his sentiments.
Guided by public relations pioneers such as Ivy Lee and Walter
Lippmann popular opinion and culture began to be seen as something that must
be controlled for the good of society. Particularly concerned in the early
twentieth century were corporations whose practices were coming under
increased scrutiny and attack by journalists, government agencies, and the
public at large.
Corporations hired public relations consultants,
governments used them to sell policy decisions, and soon a social science
emerged that specialized in mass psychology and manipulation. These PR people saw themselves as "news engineers."
They proposed to get out “facts” to enable the public to
understand the soundness of corporate policy.
Ivy Lee's most famous work was trying to do "damage
control" after the massacre of workers at a Rockefeller-owned Colorado
Iron and Fuel Company. Taking only "facts" favorable to the operators
position (and taking them unchecked from the operators themselves) Lee
sought to get these facts and present the operator's view of things.
During World War I, the U.S. government orchestrated a
campaign to build and maintain support for the war. William Creel who headed the CPI, called it the "House of Truth," and it was
remarkably sophisticated in its operation.
It sent out a steady stream of press releases and made special
efforts to funnel information to the some 100 foreign language newspapers,
published in 19 languages, in order to win over the large immigrant
population. To "guide the
mind of the masses," the CPI even published its own newspaper targeted
at public officials and other newspapers.
Creel reasoned that if advertising techniques could sell toothpaste
and soap, why not war?
Some of the results of their work can be seen in the
poster that adorned public places and government offices (see figure ?)
Government and corporate campaigns to influence public
opinion led to the doctrine of what historian Robert B. Westbrook called
"democratic realism," the idea it was best to strictly limit
government by the people and to redefine democracy as, by and large,
government for the people by enlightened and responsible elites.
The masters of spin had a low opinion of public
intelligence. Journalist Walter Lippmann, for example, thought the public
incapable of seeing the world clearly, much less understanding it.
But, he said, the scientifically-trained person could engineer
"pseudo-environments" to persuade people to see the larger
political environment and that management of information, particularly
through the mass media was critical.
Particularly frightening to elites at that time were
the economic and social policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal,
policies that to elites most threaten capital accumulation-- economic
redistribution and social justice.
Furthermore, Roosevelt was particularly effective in presenting the
reasons for his policies by trying to educate the public, rather than simply
control it. For example, in his
first of 31 “Fireside Chats” he outlined the intricacies of the banking
system, why so many had failed in the preceding months, and what must be
done to make them secure again. Roosevelt,
Ewen writes,
struck a bargain with popular activism.
Exhibiting trust and affection for the public, not fear, he
encouraged ordinary people to examine even his own New Deal programs and
provide suggestions--if required--for more suitable actions to be taken.
Alarmed conservatives and business people countered the
New Deal with spin. They
created the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and launched a
campaign to convince the public that what was good for business was good for
them. They produced pamphlets such as the one, What is Your American
System All About telling people that they had a choice of what kind of
country they lived in, one in which "the citizen is supreme and the
government obeys his will," or one in which "the state is supreme
and controls the citizen."
Some of the strategies included giving newspapers
articles addressing depression concerns such as the uneven distribution of
wealth, class antagonisms, etc. and putting a pro-business spin of the
issues. They also distributed
cartoon features modeled after Ripley's Believe it or Not features in which
amazing facts were presented about private enterprise and the American Way
of Life. They had six
professedly independent scholars from Princeton, NYU, Stanford and USC, take
turns writing newspaper columns attacking economic aspects of the New Deal,
and published a You and Industry series of booklets for schools,
colleges and public libraries. And
Young America, distributed weekly to schools, contained articles
offering a user-friendly portrayal of capitalism.
They also produced documentaries for theaters such as the ten-minute
series America Marches On narrated by Lowell Thomas detailing America
as the greatest industrial system the world has ever seen.
They also moved to drama, producing a fifteen-minute weekly radio
show, The American Family Robinson chronicling the lives of ordinary
Americans and portraying business people as heroes and labor organizers as
villains. They also spent millions on billboards upholding "The
American Way” and describing the glories of life in America and the evils
of communist “collectivism.” For
example, The AMA launched a campaign in 1949 to scuttle what looked like a
promising plan for federally insured health coverage by linking the plan to
communism. The spotlight was
shifted from health care needs to the evils of government intervention.
In all, they spent $1.4 million dollars to defeat the proposal [the
equivalent of over $10 million today].
These early attempts to engineer consent, pale of
course, with what is now possible with a corporate controlled mass
media—newspapers, radio, television, and so forth.
Spin is such a ubiquitous part of our life, we are hardly aware of it
at a conscious level. The virtues of elites and the dangers of Le Bon’s
mob are inscribed on toys, embedded in educational institutions, and
engraved on virtually every facet of our everyday life.
Its effectiveness is beyond question, witness the fact that 7 in 10
people believed that Sadaam Hussein was directly implicated in the attacks
of 9/11, that the Patriot Act will protect us from being overwhelmed by
brown-skinned people from other lands, and that tax cuts for the wealthy are
of benefit to everyone.
In sum, our democratic prerogatives have been
systematically undermined by corporate, professional, and government elites
ostensibly to protect us from the mob, but also, I would argue, to prevent
any threat to economic growth. Technologies
of control, the technology of spin, de-legitimate dissent that would slow
the conversion of natural resources or social relations into money.
Activism that threatens economic growth—programs for environmental
preservation, for social justice, for the fair distribution of wealth—are,
I would suggest, relatively helpless against such technologies.
The
Commodification of Dissent
But there is another way that genuine activism and
civic participation is threatened by the need to maintain economic growth--
the commodification of dissent itself.
As I mentioned earlier, perpetual economic growth requires the
conversion of non-monetary capital into money.
We convert natural resources into money by utilizing water, forests,
and minerals. We convert social
capital into money by commodifying social functions such as child care, food
preparation, and entertainment. And
we convert political capital into money by commodifying democratic
prerogatives, such as dissent. How
have we done this?
In her
most recent book, Diminished Democracy, political scientist Theda
Skocpol traces the dramatic decline over the past 50 years of large scale
(at least 1% of the total population), national membership organizations
such as Fraternal Order of Eagles, Elks, Grange, Farmers Alliance, and so
on. These were, she says, vital “schools of democracy,”
where, as de Tocqueville put it, “citizens come to be taught the general
theory of association.” With
the loss of these national membership organizations and their replacement by
largely professional advocacy groups, Skocpol says, we have gone from
membership to management.
It might seem strange that we would consider democracy
diminished by the passing of membership organizations in which members
(largely men) wore funny hats, engaged in exotic membership rituals, or
adhered to one absolutist theology or another.
But we may have underestimated the importance of these groups for our
power to dissent.
First, they were membership-based, dues-paying
organizations modeled after larger government structures.
People not only participated, held office, discussed issues of
interest in face-to-face situations, but they learned the process of
democracy. There are few such
opportunities, let alone the time, for such face-to-face interaction today.
Second, they were cross-class organizations, in which
every level of society was represented.
In one study in New haven, Connecticut, researchers found that
slightly more than one-third of the heads of voluntary groups were working
class, another third were white-collar workers, who were not people of great
authority. In other words, "a majority of all civic organizations were headed by
regular folks for whom high office was not the routine expectation in life.
Third, these organizations had political influence and
their membership included people in power.
From 1920 to 1965 more than 75% of Massachusetts state senators
claimed membership in fraternal groups, but by 2000 fewer than 30% claimed
such membership. Now they are
members of professionally managed groups, cultural or social service
institutions or advocacy organizations.
Politicians, not only joined fraternal groups, but
regularly solicited the support of members.
One of the initiatives of the CPI in World War I included some
thousands of citizens called “Four-Minute Men.”
These were local citizens who were asked to talk to local groups at
meetings, public gatherings, and even after movie shows on the need to
support the war and avoid any talk that might “give support to the
enemy.” Contrast that type of
face-to-face interaction with the mass media-dominated measures taken by the
Bush administration to solicit support for the war and occupation in Iraq.
As these large-scale, chapter-based organizations
declined in importance, their place has been taken by a different sort of
groups—activist groups built around specific issues such as women’s
rights, environmental preservation, and welfare reform, along with think
tanks and foundations directed to specific issues.
This growth is reflected in the listings of the Encyclopedia of
Associations whose listings grew fourfold from 1959 to 1999--5,843 in
1959, 10,308 by 1970, 14, 726 by 1980, and 22,259 by 1990.
The growth began with women's and civil rights groups, but then
branched out to policy-based advocacy groups.
Activists who got their start in the social movements of the 1960s
organized many of these. Their
strategies were to deploy financial resources to lobby politicians on
specific issues, or litigate in court, or orchestrate public elations
campaigns to stir up constituencies.
These changes represented the professionalization of activism, or, as
I prefer to call it, the "commodification of dissent."
Dissent has become a major economic activity.
There are 1.6 million non-profit organizations in the U.S., employing
11 million people. Their
economic output comprises some 7 percent of the nation's GDP.
I would suggest that in commodifying and
professionalizing largely voluntary, membership-based, dues-paying
organizations, we have sacrificed a significant portion of our democracy. Here are some of the reasons.
First, most activist groups have no members, but
consist largely of professionals who work to galvanize specific
constituencies for limited goals. Summary
statistics about 3000 "social welfare" and "public
affairs" organizations founded in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s show that
close to half indicate no "members" at all, and another quarter
claim few than 1000 "members." The vast majority of recently
founded civic associations are what Marshall Ganz calls "bodyless
heads." This reconfigured
civic universe is much more focused on specialized, instrumental activities
than on broad expressions of community or fellow citizenship.
As Skocpol puts it,
The universe of very large American membership
organizations today is much less concerned with brotherhood, sisterhood,
fellow citizenship, and community service than ever before in the nation's
long civic history.
Second, These advocacy groups are significantly
different that the large-member-based organizations of before. Unlike the membership groups, that consisted of a
cross-section of the population, and often contained a cross-section of
ideas, they tend to be made up of like-mined individuals.
Common Cause is a good example; 43.6 percent had graduate or
professional degrees, another 14.5 % had some graduate or professional
training, and another 18.7% had college degrees. Contrast that with the 18% of the general population with
college degrees. And all had an income 85% above the national average.
Our civic organizations now mirror our gated communities and Potemkin
villages.
Third, because of the need to raise funds through
donations rather than through dues, these organizations utilized a technique
adopted by marketers of consumer goods; they segmented the market.
By aiming for their massive, dues-paying members for national
influence, the classic membership organizations had to espouse broad values
and speak to broad constituencies; by contrast, professional association
leaders must engage in “niche marketing,” and identify what Skocpol
calls “hot button” issues to appeal to sophisticated constituencies
already involved in public life.
As producers of goods learned to do by appealing to market segments (men,
women, children, the elderly, Blacks, and so forth), activists have also
learned to focus their efforts on the interests of narrow constituencies.
The consequence for civic engagement is a dilution of both effort and
power.
Fourth, as dissent is commodified, as with any
commodity, it is largely available only to those who can pay for it.
Thus recently founded organizations tend to address issues that are
of concern to the relatively well-to-do.
As politicians need to appeal to corporations to finance their
livelihood, activists must appeal to segments of the population with money.
One consequence is the neglect of broad-based issues such as
inequality, and social injustice.
Finally, the decline of face-to-face organizations, the
focus on local or narrow concerns, has resulted in the same distrust of
democracy that has characterized the elite for centuries.
When people associate only with others like themselves, and as
opportunities from cross-class interaction decline, distrust of the Other is
bound to increase, and activists seem to adopt the same perspective of the
elites that their constituencies need to be manipulated and controlled,
rather than empowered.
The larger question, of course, is given the need to
maintain and protect economic growth by engineering and commodifying
dissent, is there anything that can be done to initiate a progressive
revival? To begin to answer
this question, I’d like to turn the discussion over to my colleagues, Wade
S Norwood, Sarah Brownell, and Ann Howard.