"It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of [others]." Samuel Adams
Ideological Democracy is not the only way to organize collective action for political change. There are alternative ways to organize powerful movements of ordinary people to change governmental policy. There are many alternatives, I will highlight one of them. It is a philosophy already being practiced by activists and organizers. The philosophy is this: my role in politics is to build relationship with people who do not share my beliefs in order to collectively influence how elected officials use their power. I will call this philosophy Community Democracy, it a practical political philosophy that serves as a corrective to our democracy’s excesses. This is a practical philosophy, not a theoretical one. There are many organizations doing this work right now, many people making a difference in public life using the tools and practices of Community Democracy. The political victories that have been won are major and encompass a host of issue areas: criminal justice reform, police oversight, expanding health care access, improving public parks, protecting immigrant communities, and many many more. This argument owes its essence to the training I have received from the Industrial Areas Foundation, a nationwide organizing network. They are not the only organizing network doing the work of Community Democracy, but they are certainly doing this work well. Community Democracy is defined by many practices that make it a corrective to Ideological Democracy. Community Democracy focuses on building relationships with elected officials, rather than trying to influence the results of an election. Community Democracy works to address people’s concrete everyday interests, rather than pursue ideological goals. Community Democracy builds power by forging coalitions among people who do not agree, rather than trying to politically defeat opponents. Replacing the endless election cycle with relationships with public officials First, Community Democracy seeks to influence the behavior of elected officials regardless of ideology by forming relationships with those people. This practice is a powerful alternative to the endless election cycle because it introduces a fundamentally different means of evaluating a candidate as compared to an elected official. Community Democracy groups are motivated by the following question: will this elected official listen to our stories and (this is crucial) will they tell us their own story in return? That’s what relationship is, mutual knowing. Story is the basis of relationship and relationship is the basis of political agreement. But how would that work in practice? Elected officials mostly ignore individuals by having low level staffers or interns listen to them in order to mollify them. How does an ordinary person enter into relationship with an elected official? By becoming part of an organized political base built on relationships among diverse people. Entering into a relationship with an elected official requires gathering a base of people large enough to make it worth that elected official’s time to meet. That means acting locally, by which I mean acting as an organized constituent group. You can go into action with your US Representative, or with a state senator, or a mayor. Any level of government is fine as long as the group of people being organized are represented by the same people in government. Remember, in Community Democracy we still vote, we just vote based upon our relationships with elected officials rather than agreeing with their beliefs. Where we are in ever lengthening election cycle is not particularly important. Say that you are part of a group of 250 people concerned about a statewide law and want to meet with your state senator. Be creative in getting a meeting, powerful people are people too and respond to humor and creativity and drama. Send your state senator 250 homemade birthday cakes for their birthday. Or frame photos of all 250 of you and mail them to their office. Do something unforgettable, show your numbers, ask for a meeting. If you don’t get it immediately, persevere. It is more time consuming and draining than you might imagine to try to ignore motivated people. Once your group secures a meeting, tell your stories and make it clear that the political issue you’re there to discuss matters personally. What someone believes is secondary to revealing why they hold that belief. This requires training people to tell their own stories powerfully, and training them also to listen to and care about other people’s stories. You have to practice telling your stories among one another, you have to know who from your group has a powerful story. Once you’ve told your stories to the elected official, be sure to ask them about themselves, why they believe the things they do and what is most important to them. All this story telling and relationship building is for a purpose, however, which is pushing elected officials to address your group’s concerns about public life. Replacing partisan gridlock with concrete solutions to community needs Community Democracy organizes ordinary people in order to enter into a working, productive, public relationship with elected officials. If a person lives in a community where nearby industry is polluting the air, Community Democracy will fight to clean up the air. If a person is from a community where the cost of daycare is prohibitive, Community Democracy will fight to provide alternatives that are affordable. How do you know what those interests are in your community? From all that story telling and relationship building. That step cannot be skipped. When a broad array of people who are in real relationship are all impacted by a problem, then getting elected officials to do something about it becomes a real possibility. When you’ve told the elected official you’re meeting with about the problem you are facing, make a proposal to them about what you would like to have done about it. This obviously requires research, and an understanding of who specifically in government has the authority to grant or deny your request. Ask the official you’re meeting with what they think about the proposal, who they think is most important in moving the idea forward, ask them if they would be willing to help set up a meeting with those key parties. Don’t just ask them to deliver something on a silver platter. Ask them what it will take to address your concerns and ask them to be a partner in making it happen. If they help you, find a way to creatively and publicly thank them for having done the right thing. This is a powerful alternative to partisan gridlock because officials who offer real solutions to real problems addressing ordinary people will stand to benefit politically. No longer will their strategy be dictated by what electoral gains they hope their party will achieve in the next election. Instead, their political future can be strengthened by delivering real solutions to the real problems of their constituents. Action, rather than inaction, is rewarded. This helps break political gridlock. Replacing bitter partisanship with intentional diversity It may be quite possible for you to pull together a few hundred people who care about a single important issue. But what if you are trying to change something that requires an act of the Governor of your state? Or a US senator? 250 people will not rise very high in a governor or senator’s priorities. You would need to pull together thousands of people, from a variety of communities, willing to stand together on an agreed upon platform. It’s not easy to get even like minded people to agree on a single course of action. This is why Community Democracy builds truly diverse coalitions of people, because they are powerful. Community Democracy creates multi-issue bodies, organizations composed of a diversity of people with many (sometimes competing) interests. Being part of an organization like that will require you to do hard work to advance causes that don’t impact you personally. You do this not out of charity, but because others in the organization will in turn work to advance causes that do impact you personally. This is an alliance in the most straightforward sense of the word. Two or more groups decide that they will fight alongside one another. Each will further the interests of the other, precisely because they expect reciprocal support in the future. How does that actually work, though? How can this go beyond mercenary and temporary relationships? Through relationships built upon stories. Again, that step cannot be skipped. How this might Work Sharing stories brings people together who are different. A mother sharing a vulnerable story about losing a child to a drug overdose can create real relationship with someone different from her. That story may prompt a man whose son was shot in an encounter with police to tell his story of grief and loss. The stories are related, but not because they’re about the same issue, they are related because they both come from the depths of a person’s motivation. Deep calls to deep, as the scriptures say. These two people do not share the same interest—drug overdoses and police brutality are not the same thing—but because they have a relationship they can work together in furtherance of one another’s interests. A grieving mother will help a grieving father because of a relationship forged by sharing private pain. Our human compassion for one another's pain is crucial for building the political power needed to address that pain. Political power in Community Democracy is built on relationships in which people honestly share about the public causes of their private pain, and then fight to change things. This is how it works on an individual level, the same is true of communities. Communities that do not share the same interests can unite with one another in common action. Private pain is not so private, after all, and the tragedies of individual life add up to public problems on a large scale. A father grieving his son’s death at the hands of police may live in a predominantly black community where people all-too-often experience deadly violence from police. Such a community likely has many people fighting for greater community oversight of police. A mother grieving the overdose death of her daughter may live in a predominantly white neighborhood where drug overdose deaths occur all-too-often. Such a community likely has many people fighting for good Samaritan laws and for police to be trained in using Narcan. Were these two communities, filled with people motivated by heartbreak, to agree to stand with one another, they could much more powerfully address their concerns. By expanding their base, they are capable of influencing elected officials at higher levels of authority than they could independently. If one community can get a meeting with the chief of police, two can get a meeting with the mayor to whom the chief of police reports. If one community can meet with their state representative, two can meet with the state senator chairing the committee overseeing law enforcement. It is in each community’s interest to be in relationship with the other because being in relationship increases their power. There is a deep relationality and mutuality to the arrangement. The white community shows up to police accountability actions. The black community shows up to overdose reversal actions. But how could such agreements be reached? How could trust be built between two communities that are unfamiliar with or even suspicious about the other? Story telling and relationship building is absolutely indispensable. The white community needs to meet the individuals whose hearts are broken because of young lives cut short by overzealous police. The black community needs to meet the individuals whose hearts are broken because of young lives cut short by drug overdoses. By hearing one another's stories, face to face, each community can come to count the other as an ally. It is fortunate in one sense that government policy takes so long to change—it gives community activists ample time to learn to trust one another. When someone shows up to a community meeting at 7pm on a Tuesday month after month, it’s possible to trust them when they say they will show up next month on a Tuesday at 7pm. Communities can come to trust one another when, issue after issue, fight after fight, they show up for one another. People show up for one another first because they have come to know one another's stories and care about each other as people. They show up for one another, second, because it allows them to more effectively further their own interests. I show up for you because I want you to show up for me. The more diverse that a coalition is, the more powerful it becomes. The more people engaged, the more interests represents, the more issues at stake, the more powerful the coalition can be. The only limit to their power is the degree to which they can maintain real relationship among the groups represented and maintain real progress on the issues that are important. This relies upon the value of negotiation and the dignity that comes by people making agreements with one another and being held accountable to those agreements. Negotiation is built upon the power of compromise, the idea that people with competing interests are able to value their own interests without demonizing or seeking to politically neutralize those whose interests are different. This is a powerful alternative to bitter partisan anger, because it allows people to experience the political power that comes from being in real relationship with people with whom they don’t agree or who they don’t know.
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AuthorI'm a Christian, a progressive, a pastor, and a community organizer. Archives
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