reviewed by Kent Chadwick
Ross Perot has made it his avocation in the last year to prescribe simple and acerbic solutions for the problems our country faces. The prescription that has drawn the most attention has been his call for nationwide, electronic town meetings. After reading Daniel Kemmis' profound book, Community and the Politics of Place, it is clear, however, that such electronic national meetings would eliminate the very thing that makes town meetings effective: the town itself.
"No real public life is possible," Kemmis writes, "except among people who are engaged in the project of inhabiting a place."
The allure of electronic meetings reflects a desperate hope that if only we would all get together and talk, we could reach a consensus on national direction and public policy. But such meetings, broadcast everywhere, take place nowhere. They exacerbate what Kemmis, the mayor of Missoula, Mont., describes as "the prevailing placelessness of our political culture." They offer talk but no meeting, no finding of common ground.
Perot's prescription blithely ignores the fact that there are real, governmental town meetings held daily across America, meetings that, in a perverse way, tend to obscure the common good more often than illuminate it. We call them "public hearings." Kemmis knows their dynamics well, both as a practicing politician and a political philosopher. He served as a Democrat member of the Montana House of Representatives and rose to the position of speaker of the house. But he left his state office and chose to run for mayor of a college town in order to pursue the politics of inhabitation.
In Kemmis' analysis, public hearings miss what is truly public and include little hearing. What transpires is courtroom-like argumentation directed at the presiding governmental authority, the only player in the process required to compromise or make a decision. This implementation of the constitutional right to due process allows citizens to speak out, but without any sense of obligation to listen to each other. "My own experience in public life," confesses Kemmis, "has left me convinced that our way of being public is a deepening failure."
In clear, detailed language, Kemmis traces how American political culture historically has "severed the public from its republican context." Kemmis' analysis is part of a widespread re-evaluation of the assumptions believed to be held by the founders of the United States. It's a re-evaluation being made by a spectrum of modern thinkers, even conservative George Will.
|
'My own experience in public life has left me convinced that our way of being public is a deepening failure.' -Daniel Kemmis in Community and the Politics of Place
|
What happened to the republic, the common good? Kemmis looks back to the Constitutional Congress' decision in 1787 to create a government of checks and balances in the Federalist tradition, with the primary responsibility for solving public problems assigned to the government, not the citizenry.
This position, championed by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in the Federalist Papers, was based on a pessimistic view of human nature and a fear of popular uprisings. Shays' Rebellion of debtor farmers had broken out in New York state just months before the Congress convened. The U.S. Constitution reflects Madison's philosophy of encouraging individuals to pursue private ends, keeping them apart so that they cannot form a tyrannical majority and letting governmental structures arbitrate and balance the conflicts between those individual interests.
The Federalist tradition is second nature to us, since it won the day. But what the Congress rejected - the republican tradition upheld by Thomas Jefferson - is not well-known. Community and the Politics of Place is an invigorating call for the United States to return to that republican tradition, which rested upon a "face-to-face, hands-on approach to problem-solving, with its implicit belief that people could rise above their particular interests to pursue a common good."
Republicans such as Jefferson believed in a "politics of engagement," a high level of interaction among citizens - in contrast to Madison's "politics of radical disengagement." Kemmis argues that Madison's introduction into the political realm of Adam Smith's invisible hand of balanced self-interest removed the common good from discussion in American political culture and made the republic invisible as well.
Two hundred years later, Kemmis sees American liberals and conservatives both fundamentally agreeing upon a rights-based Federalism, but fervently arguing over the correct balance between unencumbered individualism and bureaucratic regulation. The debate is caught in a narrow channel with no room for cooperation, Kemmis says, where both sides agree that all values are private and that there are no values shared by the entire community.
"The result is that I may block your initiative this time, but the odds are that you will block mine tomorrow." Here Kemmis defines the exact nature of the political gridlock we face at all levels, where, in the words of former South Dakota Gov. William Janklow, "Anybody can wreck anything in America."
Is it possible, two centuries later, to revive an untried republican tradition? As a Jeffersonian, Kemmis is an inveterate optimist on principle. In the second half of his book, Kemmis casts a wide net over various contemporary intellectual and social movements and draws them into his vision of a re-inhabited American political culture based on republican values.
He finds hope in the research that Robert Bellah and others reported in their 1985 book, Habits of the Heart. The Americans they interviewed described their public lives in a language of individualism that was unable to convey their actual lived commitments to their community and their neighbors. But these Americans also generally knew a second language, one that conveyed tradition, history, memory and stories.
Kemmis believes the contemporary republican task is to strengthen and teach that second American language of the common good. To accomplish this, he advocates concrete community practice, like the barn-raisings of his childhood on the Montana plains. In that place and that time, "Avoiding people you did not like was not an option. Everyone was needed by everyone else in one capacity or another."
Kemmis' most important contribution is his adamant recognition that the practice of community and civic virtue must happen in a specific place. "What holds people together long enough to discover their power as citizens is their common inhabiting of a single place." He shares poet and agriculturist Wendell Berry's understanding that we are not surrounded by our environment - we and the land create one another. Thus, ecosystems and economics have more in common than we have imagined.
Kemmis argues that we can put the place back in marketplace by accepting Jane Jacobs' revisionist position that cities and their hinterlands - not nation-states - are the main economic units. Furthermore, he says, we can transform and enhance Americans' sense of citizenship by limiting governmental intervention as the third-party arbiter in public conflicts. If we expect citizens to take on more responsibility, Kemmis writes, they have to be allowed to come up with their own compromise solutions.
Community and the Politics of Place is a rich book to be studied, pondered and taught. It may even turn out to be a guide to our common future.
Kent Chadwick's NORTHWEST BOOKS is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest.
Kent, his wife Cathy and their son Luke live in Florence, Ore. Kent and his brother Gregg's fiction painting installation, "I Am A Man," opens July 1 at the Rm 608 Gallery, 608 19th Ave. E., Seattle.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Contents on this page were published in the June, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1993 WFP Collective, Inc.