Civic republicanism and the West The Big Strategy

A couple months back Michael Tomasky published an essay suggesting an overall theme for Democrats in the next election. His suggestion of "civic republicanims," a sort of new citizenship urging the common good, "balancing self interest with the common interest."

While this message is apt nationwide, it is particullary interesting in that it would work especially well in the West.

This is the only justification leaders can make to citizens for liberal governance, really: That all are being asked to contribute to a project larger than themselves.

In terms of political philosophy, this idea of citizens sacrificing for and participating in the creation of a common good has a name: civic republicanism. It’s the idea, which comes to us from sources such as Rousseau’s social contract and some of James Madison’s contributions to the Federalist Papers, that for a republic to thrive, leaders must create and nourish a civic sphere in which citizens are encouraged to think broadly about what will sustain that republic and to work together to achieve common goals. This is what Dad asked me to understand that day in our Granada.

This is what Democrats used to ask of people. ...it was a period when citizens (a majority of them, at least) reciprocally understood themselves to have a stake in this larger project.

While this argument for civic republicanism, urging the great good, has been attacked as meaningless and not forming the basis of a clear political philosophy, it isn't meaningless in the West because it is already being acted out.

In the West, this civic republicanism is taking shape in the colaborative works of local governments and groups that are doing the hard work of civic life. So much more than any other region, Westerners are creating a new culture of civic problem solving:

In the West civic republicanism is a dedication to local collaboration over an absense of government involvement, the empowerment of citizens and strong, responsible government. These are things that Democrats can attach themselves to. Daniel Kemmis, referring to the West as the "Home of Hope" talks about the development of democracy in the West:

So it is that places may play a role in the revival of citizenship. Places have a way of claiming people. When they claim very diverse kinds of people, then those people must eventually learn to live with each other; they must learn to inhabit their place together, which they can only do through the development of certain practices of inhabitation which both rely upon and nurture the old-fashioned civic virtues of trust, honesty, justice, toleration, cooperation, hope, and remembrance. It is through the nurturing of such virtues (and in no other way) that we might begin to reclaim that competency upon which democratic citizenship depends.

...

A politics of citizens working out the problems and the possibilities of their place directly among themselves implies a revival of the old republican notion of citizenship based upon civic virtue; it rejects the federalist use of procedures to "supply the defect of better motives." But a politics which rests upon a mutual recognition by diverse interests that they are bound to each other by their common attachment to a place also rejects the notion of a politics of "keeping citizens apart." Escaping from each other into frontiers of any kind is explicitly rejected.

But as rural life is threatened more and more severely by inter-national markets, by technological dislocations and corporate domi­ nation, it may be time for a reassessment of the relationship between cities and their rural environs. It may well be that neither towns nor farms can thrive in the way they would prefer until they turn their attention more directly to each other, realizing that they are mutually complementary parts of the enterprise of inhabiting a particular place-whether that place be called a bioregion, a city-state, or a polis. As a rule, we come closer to this way of thinking in the economic than in the political sphere. Cities and towns, in their economic development policies, recognize at least dimly that it is to their advantage to add value locally to the produce and raw materials of their hinterlands

...

At this point we have to speak of politics and economics in the same breath. If localities in the West had more control over their resources, and if the various interests within those localities could agree on some common directions for utilizing those resources, then local economies could be substantially strengthened and stabilized. But the political "ifs" which precede this economic "then" are significant indeed. This is plainly illustrated by the history of the Sagebrush Rebellion

...

The movement was led by conservatives, with particular support from grazing, timbering, and mining interests. Environmentalists and recreationists saw the rebellion (with considerable justification) as an effort to place public land in private hands, with one major objective: to increase the profit margins of various enterprises. In the end, an unusual opportunity for the West to gain some much-needed control over its own territory and resources was stalled by the distrust which so thoroughly characterizes western politics. It is on this level, finally, that the West must finally confront the challenge of cooperation which Stegner so tersely poses. The region cannot transcend its colonial heritage until it gains a much more substantial measure of indigenous control over its own land and resources. But it can neither gain nor exercise that control until the left and the right gain enough trust in each other, and establish a productive enough working relationship, to enable them to agree, at least roughly, on what they would seek to accomplish if they had such control.

...

The lesson can hardly be overstated: proponents of the public interest must find ways to break out of the politics of stalemate, even if it means (as it does) that they have to begin opening up arenas of cooperation with "the enemy."

Emmett O'Connell | June 13, 2006 | Comment on This Post (2 so far) Permalink: Civic republicanism and the West The Big Strategy

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