Keep Your Eye on the Ball
The New Year 2025 promises to be eventful, full of uncertainty and replete with crises and, one hopes, also welcome surprises. Given the polarized political situation along with the anger and resentment that infuse politics across the world today, it is easy to be consumed with day-to-day political intrigue. Was he really nominated? What terrible law is being passed? What did he say today?
My resolution for the year is to avoid such distractions and to keep my eye on the ball. By that, I mean, I will seek to remember that source of our political despair is the failure of our institutions and the need to focus our efforts on remaking and reinvigorating those institutions. From Congress to the FBI to the academy, our liberal institutions have failed to provide trustworthy, responsible, and competent leadership. As people lose faith in corrupt institutions they can easily be swayed to think that the best approach is to burn the system down. Celebrating the murder of CEOs or cheering for a nominee to run the FBI whose main credentials are selling MAGA-ware and his unwavering loyalty to the incoming President both are examples of justified hatred for the establishment unleashing dangerous and disastrous impulses to destroy the entirety of the system. We must recall both the justified despair and the wrongheadedness of the impulse to destroy.
Arendt saw that the rise of Nazism in Germany and Bolshevism in the USSR were both driven by political movements motivated by a hatred of the state and corrupt political systems. Antisemitism and the hatred of the bourgeoisie were important, but Arendt understood that they were secular ideologies deployed by anti-establishment movements for propagandistic purposes, tools to motivate the masses to join in the fury of destruction.
If we are to learn from Arendt, the best way to respond to the totalitarian elements driving our politics today is to reinvigorate our institutions. This does not mean defending the institutions against all criticism. Our institutions are failing and many of them are corrupt. What is needed is an honest reckoning and a commitment to reimagine and re-enliven the basic institutions of our self-governing democracy.
In Arendtian terms, we need to do the hard work of rebuilding power, the experience of acting together with our fellow citizens to build a common world. Following Tocqueville, Arendt saw the uniqueness of what she called the new American experience of power to lie in the resolve of American citizens to engage in public life whether through civic organizations or through politics itself. To have the courage to speak and act in public, to risk ridicule or loss by collectively participating in public life with others is how to build a small ‘r’ republican democracy.
With that in mind, one of the most hopeful developments in contemporary politics is the rise of citizens’ assemblies. You may have seen me write about them before, and you can read more about them here, here, and here. In brief, Citizens’ Assemblies bring randomly selected citizens together to work together to come up with solutions to difficult political problems. Very much like juries where citizens put aside their personal beliefs to make judgments about law and justice, Citizens’ Assemblies encourage citizens to embrace the experience of making collective political judgments that require moving beyond their partisan and personal interests.
The Hannah Arendt Center’s Democracy Innovation Hub is working to build coalitions to hold Citizens’ Assemblies in New York City and throughout the Hudson Valley region where Bard College is located.
Nick Romeo recently wrote about one of the more ambitious and interesting Citizens’ Assembly projects in the United States, an effort in Deschutes County, Oregon to bring together citizens to deliberate on youth homelessness. Romeo writes:
The assembly lasted five full days, spread across two weekends a few weeks apart. The members of the cohort, who ranged in age from their teens to their eighties, included a retired pipe fitter, an I.T. specialist, a restaurant manager, a worker at a local bullet manufacturer, and several small-business owners. Some of the delegates were struggling to pay rent in cramped apartments; others owned spacious homes with many spare rooms. About fifty per cent were politically unaffiliated, with the other half split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
They met in the airy wood-panelled atrium of a new building on the Oregon State University-Cascades campus, in the county seat of Bend, and spent the first weekend learning about youth homelessness and about one another, with icebreakers, small-group discussions, and presentations from experts. “It had an awkward vibe in the room to me, in a really good way, sort of that first-class-of-college kind of feel,” a member of a regional government council who observed the first weekend told me.
Awkward but civil conversation was an improvement over recent political discourse about homelessness in Deschutes County. One Bend city-council member recalled a public meeting at which someone compared homeless people to raccoons, saying that if they’re fed, they will stay in the area and make more raccoons. Advocates for homeless people could be extreme, too; another local elected official described being likened to a Nazi for suggesting a need to regulate encampments.
During the first weekend, the assembly members generated questions that they wanted answered in the second session. The organizers then convened panels made up of nonprofit service providers, government employees, and community advocates to address the delegates. Some questions were very broad, such as “How can we disrupt the cycle of generational poverty?” Others were highly targeted: “How much money is spent sweeping the homeless encampments?” and “Is there more funding or resources to build more tiny homes?”
In an age of high political polarization and dysfunction, a diverse group of citizens calmly studying and discussing a nuanced issue presents a surprisingly functional image of politics. “It was like Congress without the showboating,” Elizabeth Marino, an associate professor of anthropology at O.S.U.-Cascades whose research explores divisive conversations, said of the first weekend. Marino, alongside a group of researchers from M.I.T., was interested in observing the assembly to understand how people navigate charged conversations. Marino’s research team has found that when they shift the moral frames used to discuss polarizing topics, greater consensus becomes possible. In one study, the researchers discovered that when climate change was framed in terms of patriotism, personal responsibility, and the purity of America’s environment, conservatives were more likely to say that it was caused by humans than when the topic was discussed with an emphasis on values like justice or fairness, which typically appeal more to liberals. The team found a similar result when a suicide-prevention message aimed at firearm owners invoked tradition and responsibility. These were controlled studies; whether anything similar would happen spontaneously in Bend was an open question."