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ROUNDTABLE on 'DEMOCRACY’S CHALLENGE'

A panel of educators, policymakers, government officials, scholars, and association leaders from around the country came together to discuss democracy and its challenges during a roundtable at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on November 13, 2006.

The roundtable centered on the findings of Public Thinking about Democracy’s Challenge: Reclaiming the Public’s Role, a report commissioned by Kettering. The report, by Doble Research Associates, highlighted the public’s thinking on community life and civic participation, the role of religion and moral values in a democratic society, and barriers and opportunities for fuller citizen engagement in the political system. The report was drawn from forums that took place in 45 states and the District of Columbia between December 2005 and the early fall of 2006. (A summary of the report is available here.)

The discussion focused on what the moderator, the late Cole Campbell, who at the time was dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, described as the “tensions or dilemmas in the democratic experience” and how Americans can respond to them.

“There’s an exquisite tension in America between democratic hope and democratic frustration,” Campbell said as he introduced the themes that the roundtable discussion would feature. “When people are called upon to talk about democracy and what’s challenging to it they actually . . . start off with the little frustrations and then they get to some of the bigger frustrations, and they talk about things that they feel push them away from public life. But in the end, they are reminded of the potential of democratic participation and how, if they were more fully engaged in helping communities make choices, they believe they could make a positive contribution to positive change.”

To set up the panel discussion, John Doble, founder of Doble Research Associates and now senior research fellow at Public Agenda, gave an overview of the Democracy’s Challenge report, explaining how responses by participants in the forums are “totally at odds” with the conventional wisdom in the country in two ways. “In one way, the conventional wisdom goes something like this: Last Tuesday [the November 7, 2006, midterm elections], people wanted change. They voted for change, and they got the change they wanted. That change will now occur.” He continued:

“What we heard in these forums is the discontent is much deeper. It’s much more pervasive than that. It’s far more threatening to the long-term health of our democracy. People said again and again, “Something’s terribly wrong.” They feel alienated, they feel cynical, they feel like spectators and not participants—except in their communities. In some cases they feel like participants in their communities but not in the nation as a whole. They feel like we’ve become a nation of consumers.”

The second piece of conventional wisdom, Doble said, is that the country is “hopelessly polarized. We’re divided on values. We’re split into the red states and the blue states and never the twain shall meet. That’s not what we heard in the forums. What we heard in the forums is that there’s broad agreement on an array of core values.”

However, just because there’s general agreement on values, Doble said, doesn’t mean that citizens don’t struggle to define those values. “For example, there are tensions around democratic values. People agree on an array of moral values, on an array of religious values,” he said.

“But they have tensions as they try to weigh or balance the separation of church and state or what role values should play—values education should play in the public schools. They have tension regarding democratic practices—community involvement that they think is important and fulfilling and important to their communities versus the realities that people feel that they’re under. The idea of public service, which they see as important, versus mandatory service. . . . They have tensions regarding democratic government, specifically around accountability—how to make government more accountable, how to make it more responsive to the general public interest as opposed to the special interests.”

As people deliberated in the forums, Doble said, they “made connections between values and community life and politics,” and how all three “add up to something more.” And many left the forums “with a sense that, ‘this is our problem. This is not their problem.’” They also started to “see themselves more as citizens,” he said.

Role of Faith in Democracy

The panel discussion focused on the tensions that Doble outlined, beginning with the role of faith in democracy. Richard Harwood, president of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, said that political debates are framed “in ways that divide people,” and that issues, including those related to faith, are framed in ways that “push people’s hot buttons.”

“When I hear . . . citizens use the word faith, yes, they mean it in a particular religious way,” he said. “But they [also] mean it in ways that transcend particular faiths. They mean it in terms of faith in ourselves and in one another. They mean it in terms of our faith in our ability to make a difference. They mean it in . . . our faith in our ability to step forward. . . . They mean it by joining hands with others, not by dividing or building walls between and among ourselves.”

“I thin,” he continued, “there are ways in which we can use language that has been co-opted by some to divide us to reclaim that language in ways that enable us to come together, not so that we can sit in a circle and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ but [so] we can find a public space where we can have honest-to-God debates about what we value and determine what is valuable to us and figure out what our priorities are as we move forward.”

Brenda Girton-Mitchell, associate general secretary for justice and advocacy and director of the Washington office of the National Council of Churches of Christ, discussed how polarizing issues, or what she called “litmus tests,” affect how people approach issues of faith. She noted that tensions exist not only in “the public square, but within the walls of our sanctuaries.”

“We have pastors who could be teaching and informing and equipping people of how to engage and participate in the democracy, who are now afraid to speak because . . . their congregations are angry because they think they’re taking a position,” she said.

Bliss Browne, founder and president of Imagine Chicago, said that civic life should return to “helping people look at the matter of integrity in their lives. . . . What are those core values and what are the actions that express it?” She said that citizens should start thinking about such questions as, “what do we believe and how do we show what we believe in the way we do public life?”

“It’s not so much having particular values as having an alignment of values and making values explicit so we can then look at what difference . . . we make . . . as human beings,” she said.

Role of Public Education in Democracy

Issues related to values being taught in the classroom were also addressed during the panel’s discussion about education and democracy. Betty Knighton, director of the West Virginia Center for Civic Life, said that National Issues Forums have been asking people around the country, and in West Virginia, where she works, about how public schools should teach values. “We are hearing very clearly from a number of people that they do expect the school to tackle issues in the classroom related to morals and ethics and values. But they are very squeamish about the intersection between that and personal religious beliefs,” she said, adding, “I have definitely heard a widespread concern and a belief that the public schools need to do a more focused and perhaps better job of coming to terms with what their role is and with promoting strong character values among students.”

Beverly Hogan, president of Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi, said that every day educators talk to students about values, but those values are not necessarily religious or moral values. Instead educators tell students things like it’s wrong to cheat on tests. When she was a student, she recalled, teachers always talked about values “whether you were in math class, whether you were in English, whether you were in science. Whether you were talking about honesty, whether you were talking about cooperation, whether you were talking about the integrity of self-discipline, the responsibility of getting your homework.”

But Hogan said that today there’s confusion among parents and educators about teaching values in schools. “I think there is mistrust based on some of that philosophical thinking about whose values and which values are going to be taught,” she said. “But I do think that many people across this country are in agreement that there is a set of values that should be conveyed. Because when we look at public schools and education in general and we talk about building a strong and vibrant democracy, education is at the heart of that.”

Building democracy begins “in our classrooms across America,” she said. She said she believes that the purpose of education is to educate people so they can effect change and they can become citizens.

Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that the Democracy’s Challenge report highlights the need for citizens to discuss the issue of values when they discuss the challenges facing democracy. He also stressed the importance of having space to discuss values and controversial issues like balancing national security and individual civil rights. “We need to have a space where these issues can be debated and acknowledge that they’re going to be controversial sometimes,” he said. “And you can have a debate where people have different points of view that does not kind of devolve into rancor, but is serious discussion about hotly contested issues.”

Tensions in Democratic Practices

Another tension panelists discussed was the obstacles that keep citizens from fully participating in their communities and how to overcome those obstacles.

Kettering President David Mathews said that the modern political system has three serious problems: “One, it had difficulty dealing with moral disagreements. Its approach to problems was very rational and systematic—if you can’t agree, we’ll just have a majority vote. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll sit down and negotiate it out.” The trouble is, he said, people don’t negotiate away their moral convictions. The second problem found in the modern political system is that its “problems are deeply embedded in the social fabric,” Mathews said. “They’re in the culture, they’re in the way of going about things. . . . They are the problems, somebody said, that grow out of a lack of a sense of community and then further exacerbate that lack of community. . . . And third, modern political systems have problems with legitimacy and even more with authenticity.”

Delli Carpini described as mixed the picture of citizen involvement today. While there is a decline in democratic practices, including citizen participation in “certain aspects of public life,” he said. “We should neither romanticize the past nor so demonize the present to realize that there are real opportunities. Young people are a great example of this. Oftentimes when these arguments are made, they’re made most explicitly by talking about generational differences—that young people are not as involved as younger people were a generation or two ago. If you look at the evidence, it’s not as clear as that.

In fact, he said, involvement in charity work is “as much or greater among the current generation of 18- to 24-year-olds as prior generations.” He called this a “volunteerism type of approach to public life.”

“Where there does seem to be a decline that’s more real and more serious is in what we might consider more traditional politics, everything from voting to believing in the efficacy in the political system,” Delli Carpini said.

Harwood argued that Americans have become “highly mechanistic in our responses to engage people.” “We latch onto online services, we latch onto technology, we latch onto revving up the number of forums that we do. And we believe that if we just have enough numbers and the right technology and the right resources—we have the right mechanisms in a sense—that somehow or another we have fulfilled . . . our desire to connect to one another . . . to create meaning together . . . to create faith together. And those mechanistic responses actually squeeze out the room that we need for ambivalence, for understanding, for hearing, for listening.

He said that America’s consumer-based society has “overridden the public square,” creating impediments for citizen engagement. This consumer society “permeates virtually everything we do,” he said. “There are now school superintendents, as you know, who have embraced customer service to such an extent that when they see people they see them as customers and say, ‘How can I fix the schools for young Johnny or young Sue?’—as opposed to [asking] ‘What kinds of schools do we need for our community here in this community that we all live in and own?’”

“We engage people more around notions of your own good as opposed to the public good,” Harwood said. “And as we do that, we tap people’s impulse to say, ‘Here I am and this is what I want, and I am a claimant, and I get to claim those resources.’” Harwood then offered a solution to this problem: “If you want to fight the good fight and reengage people, we will have to focus more on change, we will need to rid ourselves of these mechanistic tendencies, and also we will need to start to engage people around notions of the public good, not just their own good.”

Charleta B. Tavares, member of the Columbus, Ohio, City Council, said that citizens are “crying out for a way to participate and a way to give meaning to their participation.” The best opportunities to engage citizens exist at the local level, she said, “because there are issues that directly impact communities, whether it’s a neighborhood or whether it’s a geographic area of your community. And people can see what that change is going to look like. And so they’re going to be more likely to engage themselves in the discussion and in the action.”

For instance, Tavares described how the city of Columbus provides opportunities for citizens to get involved in local politics. “We have a city council in Columbus, Ohio, that’s all at-large. We don’t have districts and wards, but we do have a geographic representation called ‘area commissions,’ and the citizenry themselves decide whether they want to develop an area commission,” she said. “If they do choose to develop an area commission, that is a legal body that represents that geographic area and gives recommendations to the city of Columbus. That’s a way for the residents of our communities to say, ‘We choose to be a part of this local government entity, and we’re going to organize ourselves to speak for this area of our community and then give those recommendations to the city council members.’”

But Tavares said she also has found that “unless people feel strongly about something, either for something or against something . . . they’re not going to engage—unless it’s something that they feel very strongly about, unless it’s something that impacts them in a more direct way.”

Tavares said, however, that new technology presents new opportunities through which citizens can be engaged. “It used be meetings, town hall meetings, civic meetings that people would come out to discuss the issues. Now it’s more so the chat rooms and the discussions online,” she said. “And we just have to use those in a more effective way, I think, as public officials to engage our residents, to hear what they are saying needs to be done in the communities.”

Browne said that public language is “still so overwhelmingly negative and deficit-based that that itself is a huge enervating fact of our public life.”

“If there’s a single practice that would significantly shift our public life, it would be effective strategies for eradicating cynicism, which now passes for sophistication and is simply a very cheap and damaging and corrosive effect on our public life,” she said. “Because it shuts down the opportunity to have discussions around what’s possible and what’s important. . . . I think it’s a very substantial thing to begin to refocus public conversation on what we do want and to really help tune communities to the frequency of hope so that we can move past a deficit-based public conversation,” Browne said.

In asking the two panelists who have held elected office—William Winter, former Mississippi governor and chairman emeritus of the National Issues Forums Institute, and Tavares—to discuss the effect money has on America’s political system, Campbell said, “What the Doble research tells us is now when people think about the democratic challenges and they think about government, they tend to think about problems, reining in special interests, and controlling the role of money in politics.”

The Democracy’s Challenge report indicates that there’s “a lot of skepticism and even cynicism about the political process today,” Winter said. “I have three reasons why this is true. The first reason is that there is too much money in the political process. The second reason is that there is too much money in the political process. And the third reason is there is too much money in the political process.”

“I think this obscene amount of money that is now involved in American politics is the greatest threat we have to our democratic system,” He continued. “Its corrupting influence is, I think, the basis of . . . that other great danger to our democratic system, and that is the increase of cynicism and skepticism of the American people. . . . If we cannot limit the amount of money . . . maybe somehow we can find a way to substitute for that money in increased participation on the part of average citizens coming together to insist that they have honest government and that they have candidates who can be elected and be supported without spending these increasingly large sums of money.”

Tavares agreed. “There is much too much money involved in our public life. And for those of us who are elected to office, we have to find a way of being more accountable to the people so that we don’t need as much money to get elected,” she said.

She recalled how in her 2003 reelection campaign to the Columbus city council she chose to do little fundraising. She took this approach, she said, “to prove that if you do good public service, if you participate with the residents of your community, with the civic associations, with the area commissions, with the churches, the synagogues, the civic and social organizations—you go out to the people that you say you want to represent, you listen to the people you say you want to represent—that you can win an election without spending a lot of money.”

Despite being outspent $125,000 to $1,000 in the primary and $175,000 to $30,000 in the general election, according to Tavares, she was reelected to one of four available seats on the city council.

“We’re going to have to remove the dollars out of these elections or people will feel as though [politicians] only listen to those that are contributing,” she said. Those who are poor, “those who feel voiceless and helpless and hopeless,” think “they don’t have a place at the table,” she said. “That’s what we’re allowing . . . our government to become—a system where only those with influence are at the table.”

Doble responded by discussing what citizens say about the role special interests play in politics. “People feel that there are so many special interests, that they have so much access because of their money, they have so much expertise—and people in the forums recognized that special interests have a role, that special interests represent constituencies that have a place at the table,” he said. “But they feel like they’re shut out, they feel like they have no place. In one forum people said, ‘I can’t get a meeting with my representative, with my congressman because . . . I don’t have a place at that table. Our representative doesn’t hold meetings with us in our community, doesn’t hold forums with people in our community. We’re not the ones who are listened to.’ ”

Going Forward: Possibilities for Public Action

In addition to discussing tensions in democracy, roundtable panelists talked about how citizens can get engaged in public activities. Knighton said public work, like efforts by the NIF network, tries to ask people to reexamine their perceptions of one another. “So that policymakers, for example, can look at the public not only as consumers or as advocates of a particular position, she said, “but as a source of judgment and a source of wisdom and a source of insight that helps them do their work better. And so that the media can look at the public as a source of that same kind of information as opposed to some of the traditional more cut-and-dried sources that they may look at. But mainly so that people in the public look at each other differently. I think that the greatest potential out of the kind of public dialogue work that we’re doing is the capacity for people to build relationships with one another and to understand that if they can disagree with someone and still work together, that there really is an avenue of hope that people can explore as citizens.”

Girton-Mitchell said that her organization, the National Council of Churches, often hears from citizens who don’t think they know enough about politics to get involved. “They don’t really understand what the fight is about. They just know there’s a fight in Congress,” she said, giving an example of what citizens often tell her organization. In such a situation, she said, the National Council of Churches reminds citizens that “all politics is local, and you do have a voice. And if you’re quiet, if you sit back and don’t say anything based on your desire to be a peacemaker, that you’re adding to the confusion.” So we try to empower them to help in this tension by speaking up, recognizing that they, members of our congregations, are the leaders that we’ve been waiting for. Giving them the information and the resources so that they can go forth and be active in the public square as opposed to reacting to what’s happening in the public square.”

Noting that the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C., was being dedicated the same day of the roundtable, Delli Carpini said that the civil rights movement was effective in bringing about democratic change because “it had all the elements of what we think about as civic and political participation.”

“It had grassroots involvement, it had local involvement, it had national involvement,” he said. “It required action that was both at the community level and petitioning government. The courts were involved, the executive branch was involved, Congress was involved. And it was all being driven by the actions of self-interested people at one level, but people who were able to make their self-interested argument as part of the public good and who could convince people . . . who might not have been as directly affected by it that in fact their interests were involved as well and the public interest was involved.”

“When we think about citizen-driven change that involved elites but also required citizens to be involved and think about what we mean by civic and political engagement, [the civil rights movement] captures all the pieces of it,” he continued. “And I think that what we lack today—because the issues are equally as important as they were at that point—is the mechanisms and the leadership to be able to kind of put something like that together again.”

Hogan noted that Tougaloo College, where she is president, operates the Center for Civic Engagement and Social Responsibility to provide “public spaces on our campus so citizens can have conversations about issues that are relevant to them.” The center tries to create awareness among citizens that “they have a voice in the everyday issues that affect their lives and that they can make a difference and they can really influence policy if they let their voices be heard,” she said.

“I think that each of us in our own spaces, whether it’s work or play in community, can work toward creating spaces where people can have meaningful conversations about issues that can lead to them having a better connection and understanding that they’re not just people without voices but we are indeed citizens,” she said. “And the government is the people. It’s not better or no worse than we make it.”

Betty Sue Flowers, former director, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, cited efforts by Texas libraries to open themselves up as places where people can gather to discussion public issues. One such discussion involved a bipartisan attempt to devise a strategic plan to solve what Flowers described as a crisis in the state’s health-care system. “We listened and came up something that both sides could agree on,” she said. “And now we’re rolling out that plan for health care in Texas.”

Noting that a block in a system will eventually be bypassed, Mathews said that people are returning to “a politics that they absolutely refuse to call ‘politics.’ They’ll call it ‘local,’ they’ll call it ‘community,’ they’ll call it ‘civic.’ They will call it anything” but “politics.” Furthermore, Mathews said, people have been taking the ideas that they discuss in NIF forums to “places we would not call political. They took it into their clubs, they took it into the workplace, they took it into their churches, and those far more than they took it into some political forum.”

“So politics, I’m beginning to think, is moving outside of capital P politics into this lowercase politics,” he said. “That’s, for example, why libraries, which have not been thought of as political space, are becoming more in-the-sense-that-I-mean-it “political.’”

Campbell summarized the day’s discussion by noting that “we need to reimagine citizens not as consumers but as active shapers of the public agenda. We need to reimagine problems not as deficits but as aspirations and as assets in the community to tap. We need to reimagine libraries not simply as repositories of documents but as public spaces and places to engage policymakers.”

He said panelists were talking about a new way of viewing public involvement, what he called “tri-partisan” efforts that bring together the two major political parties and the public. “We’re talking about reimagining . . . what were once thought of as private problems as public issues,” Campbell said, “reimagining students as citizens and full-time activists and . . . reimagining the capacity of citizens to take effective action.”

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