PART 1 OF 2
PART TWO: HOW MAY THE PEOPLE SPEAK TO POWER?
7. THE POLITICS OF "RUDE AND CRUDE"
The nature of democracy's breakdown is visible not only in the corridors of Washington, but among the people too. Citizens have been distanced from the formal structure of governing power and they know it. Many are demoralized and resigned to their inferior status. Powerlessness also corrupts.
Others who still care about public questions have invented their own irregular methods for speaking to power. People will play the hand they are dealt and do the best they can with it. But, in the modern scheme of American politics, even active citizens are holding a very weak hand. Many have decided that if anything is going to be accomplished, it has to be done outside regular politics and in spite of government. Some assume the role of perennial guerrillas, staging daring raids on the established political order. The assaults occasionally rattle the centers of power but never manage to topple the fortress.
These citizens' attitudes and .actions powerfully confirm this book's argument that the political system we call democracy has lost substantive meaning. They can testify from experience to all the many elements of decay that have been identified as the "realities of power."
They see the major political parties in comfortable alliance with one another, not in principled competition. They know, from tangible experience, how the mystique of information-driven politics is used against them, disparaging their claims and pricing them out of the debate. They perceive the client-representative relationships of Washington as partnerships between government and the powerful economic interests that are arrayed against them. These citizens do not perhaps know the precise ways laws are manipulated, but they certainly perceive the murky barrier of symbolic law and false promises that makes it so difficult for ordinary people to penetrate the reality of governance.
All these factors and some others have incapacitated the citizens of this democracy, rendered them ineffectual as citizens. They are cut off from the real decision making in government and unable to speak to it coherently or find reliable representatives who will speak for them. People do the best they can in these debilitating circumstances, but inevitably many have absorbed their own distorted assumptions about what it means to he a citizen in a working democracy.
A generation of frustrated aspirations has led many citizens to separate themselves from the formal system of power and dwell in righteous isolation, contemptuous of all traditional ways of connecting with government. They no longer believe in elections as an effective lever of power for citizens. They distrust the elaborate machinery of governing. Many no longer believe that federal legislation itself makes much difference; they have seen too many reform laws eviscerated by the powerful economic interests.
Indeed, in many realms, the authority of federal law has become the enemy of active citizens -- taking issues away from them and concealing the action deep inside the Washington labyrinth. Cut off from the real decisions, lacking the resources to compete with the insiders, citizens at the community level lose contact with the content of public issues they care about and, as a consequence, their political activism sometimes loses coherence and energy. To overcome this, many have developed their own bluntly practical strategies for how to do politics-rough and direct confrontations with power.
Rehabilitating American democracy thus requires much more than reforming the government. It means that citizens at large must also reinvent themselves. The political culture that fractured governing authority and allowed political institutions to become irresponsible has done the same to the citizenry. The modern methodologies of government have taught people to think of themselves as one more "interest group" -- focused narrowly on this or that particular concern, but unable to imagine a larger role for themselves in the power relationships. These deformities, like the government's, are deeply embedded in the society and will also not be susceptible to quick, easy remedies. Some Americans are already working on it, however, trying to restore themselves as citizens in order to repair the democracy.
It is this lively but neglected territory of politics, the weaknesses and strengths of active citizens struggling for democratic meaning, that is explored in this next section. Their stories reveal, above all, the disconnectedness that prevents them from entering into any kind of enduring, responsible relationship with those in power.
This chapter concentrates on their strengths -- the varied ways in which citizens do sometimes manage to acquire a limited measure of power, despite the barriers thrown up in their path. Their victories are real, but often amount to a negative form of power -- popular vetoes over what the governing elites have decided in their behalf.
Not all Americans suffer equally from the deterioration of politics, and Chapter Eight, "Political Orphans," explains how the imbalances of power penalize one sector of citizens more harshly than all others. They are the working-class people who used to be protected and represented by powerful secondary mediating institutions -- organized labor and big- city political organizations. The story of how labor unions were stripped of their representative powers is an essential strand in the story of how citizens were incapacitated in politics.
Chapter Nine, "Class Conflict," turns directly to the citizens' own debilities -- the attitudes and approaches that condemn them to a weak position in politics. Just as governing circles are ruled by outmoded and self-defeating mythologies, so are many of the citizens who engage in irregular politics.
The final chapter of this section, Chapter Ten, "Democratic Promise," reveals a hopeful alternative vision-a portrait of citizens who are trying to reinvent democracy from the ground up. In a number of unexpected places, citizens are acquiring real power by coming together and patiently developing their collective political voice. These citizens are a living model of democratic meaning -- people speaking to power in a coherent manner. They provide an optimistic example for others, but also a rebuke to the atrophied political institutions that have failed.
Above all, these stories of politics have a redeeming message that is more important than all the subsidiary complications: Behind the empty shell of formal politics, the nation is alive with democratic energies. People are still pursuing the universal impulse for political self-expression. Disconnected from power, they are still searching to find it.
***
At the Highlander school in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, where black citizens trained for the civil rights movement a generation ago, students of a different sort assemble each month for instruction in political organizing and agitating. Most are white and not poor, though they generally come from the less prosperous comers of America, rural counties and urban working-class neighborhoods. Most are already engaged in the irregular politics of their communities and anxious to learn more about how it's done. The weekend training sessions are called STP, a title that is left open to playful interpretations. Save the Planet. Stop the Poisoners. Shoot the Politicians.
At dusk on a Friday evening in late August 1990, a group of nineteen citizens gathered in a wide circle of rocking chairs in Highlander's rustic conference room and began to educate one another with personal stories of victory and frustration. They had traveled from nine states, points as distant as Brooklyn, New York, and Jonesboro, Arkansas. A young folk singer from Pineville, Kentucky, provided a mournful version of "I am just a weary pilgrim going through this world of sin."
Highlander was founded in the 1930s by radical Christian social activists whose training workshops for labor and black organizers were frequently denounced (and persecuted) as "Communist-inspired" by southern segregationists. The mountain training center endures, a staff member explained to the circle, as "a school for people to learn how to act to exercise their rights, which is what we think democracy is all about." The civic battleground is no longer racial equality, but the injustices of life-threatening pollution.
Larry Wilson, a community leader from Yellow Creek, Kentucky, opened one discussion by reporting some of the insights gleaned from previous STP sessions. "Last group decided, since we're doing what EPA should be doing, we ought to bill the government for our work," Wilson said. "So we all sent EPA a bill. As screwed up as EPA is, they may pay us."
From Greenup County, Kentucky, an elderly war veteran named Daniel Thompson reported on GROWL, a citizens group trying to block a huge nine-hundred-acre landfill believed to be designed for the garbage of New York and New Jersey. "Those hearings they have are just a laugh," Thompson said. "The one we had, people said the hearing officer fell asleep two or three times. . . .
"I think the people in New York's got in mind to make eastern Kentucky and the southern states their dumping ground. If they win, we ain't going to have no water fit to drink because even EPA says there's no landfill that doesn't leak. They may get it -- I don't know -- but they'll surely know they've been in a fight."
Deborah Bouton, from Murphysboro, Illinois, reported gloomily on the hazards of a local Superfund site created by a military installation and EPA's plan to install a mobile incinerator for the cleanup. "I'm here because I desperately need some encouragement," she said. "I need to hear some success stories. I approach friends and try to get them to come to meetings, but their apathy is so profound. It's like there's nobody home."
Bob Greenbaum, a home-repair contractor from Cleveland, Ohio, described a fight against a new incinerator planned for a poor neighborhood "where the people have about as much political influence as my dog." A wealthy suburb, he said, was persuaded to join the fight because its citizens might 'be at risk too if the wind is blowing the wrong way. ''I' in for environmental fundamentalism," Greenbaum declared. "Start a lot of big brushfires everywhere you can and let the regulators try to put them out."
James Ramer, a hospital administrator from Jonesboro, Arkansas, recounted how he became politically activated. "We had one landfill that hit us before we knew how things worked," Ramer said. "We thought EPA was supposed to protect people." The others interrupted with cynical laughter. "Seriously, we did, " he said. "So we lost that one. Then they came in with the second landfill and we nailed that one. . . .
"The governor brushed us off so we got mad and we organized an environmental task force statewide with twenty-one hundred members. We're becoming a political force. The governor can't wall us off in one comer of the state. We're popping up all over the place."
The lengthy discussions at the STP school are about politics, but not in the esoteric euphemisms that cloud Washington debates. These people do not say "pollutants." They talk about the "poisons" in their communities. They do not analyze the statistics of risk assessment. They talk about people they know who died or children afflicted with cancer in their hometowns. The official language of environmental regulation -- terms like "interim permits" or "sanitary landfill" or "state-of-the-art technology" -- sounds to them like purposeful double-talk.
"These people are already radical," Larry Wilson said, "but they're saying things here for the first time to real folks like themselves -- things they've never had the nerve to say to their conservative folks back home. It's kind of like Alcoholics Anonymous. Saying something out loud that you've been thinking has a cleansing effect and hearing someone else say it has a strengthening effect. It makes it easier to say it over and over again when you get back home."
The rough-hewn political sophistication of these "witnesses" is obvious. Collectively, these people already know quite a lot about how government really works and, if policymakers ever listened to them in earnest, they would hear a brutally explicit diagnosis of why politics and government have failed. From practical experience, these citizens have mastered many of the procedural formalities and dense technical details, but they have also glimpsed the real power relationships underneath. That is why they are so alienated.
Public-spirited reforms enacted in the last generation (including public hearings and formal access to decision making for ordinary people) have only deepened their skepticism. They can see for themselves that the democratic form is not the reality. "At public hearings," one of them observed, "most public officials act like they're protecting hidden interests, like the decisions have already been made somewhere else."
James Ramer went further. "The politicians have pretty well quietly insulated themselves from all the critical issues," he explained. "By turning the decisions over to boards and commissions who are beholden to the industrial interests, the politicians protect themselves from the blame."
"We're playing by their rules," Wilson said. "The system was invented by the people who are poisoning us. The rules say they get to argue over how much cyanide they can put in our coffee, how much poison they can put out before they have to take responsibility for it. That's not a system we can ever win in."
The STP schools, perhaps by design, produce predictable tides of conflicting emotions among the students, some of whom are meeting other community activists for the first time. First, there is elation, listening to the others tell stories of their inventive tactics and occasional victories. This is displaced by despondency as they turn to analyzing the political forces arrayed against them: the federal government, local politicians, the corporations and their hired cadres, the scientific community, sometimes the media, sometimes even their own communities.
In a role-playing exercise, the STP students assumed the parts of the industry spokesmen and government officials attempting to convince a community that the new landfill or incinerator poses no health hazards and promises lots of new jobs. With disturbing ease, the activists found they could expertly mimic the condescending language and scientific bromides that have been used against them. The exercise provoked nervous laughter, then subdued reflections on their own weakness.
After many hours of talk, a renewed sense of anger surfaced -- anger that swiftly hardened into audacious political statements. "The law is not on our side, it just isn't," Bob Greenbaum said. "It's our government even though it isn't serving us. We need to seize the moral high ground and ask moral questions. Who made this choice that put us at risk?"
"There are already enough laws on the books right now, if they were enforced," James Ramer said. "I think the only way we're going to do it is to get hold of the power, which is the political power. Even though rich people have the most power, if we seize the political system out from under them, that's when it's going to happen. We have to develop enough clout so the governmental machinery can't be bought off."
In that sense at least, their self-conscious identification with the civil rights movement is accurate enough: These citizens are also utterly distant from power. They are scattered voices expressing hopes and fears for their families and communities, but utterly beneath the notice of the larger structure of formal politics. In their hopeful moments, these citizens also imagine that they are quietly building a political movement -- a movement for environmental justice -- while political elites dismiss their fears as irrational and disparage their demands as "misplaced priorities."
***
Firsthand experience with how government responds to ordinary citizens can serve as a powerful organizing tool. A vast network of indigenous environmental organizations has "popped up" from the grassroots during the last decade -- as many as seven thousand, some estimate -- fighting everything from industrial smokestacks to groundwater pollution. These citizens were not drawn to environmental activism by abstract ideology or aesthetics, but by their own experiences. They did not come from the well-educated managerial classes that produce so many members for the larger environmental organizations. On the whole, these citizens come from the most alienated and passive ranks of society, middle America, where politics seems remote and pointless. [1]
Typically, these people saw their homes or communities threatened in tangible ways. They turned to the government for help and were confronted by bureaucratic indifference or political sleight-of-hand. The disillusionment eventually led them to ask larger questions about power and the nature of democracy, but also to entertain more ambitious conceptions of their own citizenship.
Lois Marie Gibbs, executive director of the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, a national organization that supports and advises thousands of grassroots groups, explains:
"Generally, people at first have a blind faith in government. So when they go to EPA or the state agency and show them that there is a problem, they think the government will side with them. It takes them about a year before they realize the government is not going to help them. They see the agencies studying them to death. That's when they become really angry -- radicalized."
Gibbs went through the same learning process herself back in 1978 when, as a young housewife and mother, she organized the neighborhood families who were living on top of a chemical swamp known as Love Canal in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. "When I started, I believed democracy worked," she said. "I believed everything I had learned in civics class. What I saw is that decisions are made on the basis of politics and costs. Money."
Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal activists became the model for thousands of other communities because they figured out how to play politics "very rude and very crude," as she put it. The governor of New York came to address their complaints and delivered what Gibbs described as a "kiss-the-baby" speech. When it was their turn to ask questions, the mothers flooded the stage with their three-year-olds and four-year-olds. Then they turned to the governor and asked if he intended to protect these children from the deadly chemicals. Surrounded by toddlers, the governor capitulated on the spot.
"Although we won, that was really scary to me," Gibbs said. "My God, do they make all their decisions this way? All you need to do is make it politically advantageous for these guys to do what you want, regardless of whether it's right or moral? So much for civics class."
As thousands of other citizen activists have discovered, rude and crude politics works more reliably than the system's formal processes. Instead of obeying the rules, they stage dramatic confrontations with the people who have power. Citizens chain themselves to the gates of landfills. Or they block incoming dump trucks with caravans of their own cars and pickup trucks. They "blow up" public hearings with noisy disruptions and walkouts. In Braintree, Massachusetts, fifteen hundred people formed a hand-to-hand protest across a river bridge to protest a hazardous-waste incinerator. In Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a school bus filled with women and children blocked a Browning-Ferris landfill entrance for three hours. In Sumter, South Carolina, the local American Legion commander was arrested in community civil disobedience. These flamboyant tactics all won their objectives -- after reason and politeness had failed. [2]
"The movement is outside the system," Gibbs explained, "because that's the way to win. If you work within the established system, doing the right thing, more often than not you will lose. The system is put together by the powers that be so they will win. To be outside means not to accept that we will lose.
Many of these activists are convinced they are risking personal retaliation by challenging powerful corporate interests, a fear that is not entirely groundless. Some of them have been hit with multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuits filed by waste-disposal companies, a counterattack designed to silence them with huge legal bills (the activists call them SLAPPs -- "strategic lawsuits against public participation"). In an internal memo, a Union Carbide executive invoked the Red scare by warning his fellow managers that Lois Gibbs's organization has "ties into labor, the communist party and all manner of folk with private/single agenda." [3]
Nevertheless, William Ruckelshaus, the CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries and former EPA administrator, has a politician's grudging respect for the grassroots activists -- perhaps because his own company, second largest in the waste-disposal industry, has gone up against them on many local fronts and often lost.
"They are the most radicalized group I've seen since Vietnam," Ruckelshaus said. "They've been empowered by their own demands. They can block things. That's a negative power. But it's real power. Right or wrong, you can't bull your way through that kind of opposition."
Across many issues beyond environmental protection, Ruckelshaus observed, the dissolution of governing authority is underway -- driven mainly by public distrust. "I think what's happening," he said, "is that people are taking back the power to govern. It's not just symbolic power, it's real power."
Among political elites, including some of the respectable environmental organizations, the community environmentalists are regarded as irresponsible and dismissed with the tired cliche "not in my backyard." In fact, the movement for environmental justice has embraced a public-spirited goal that is more positive and ambitious than the government's -- to stop the corporations from dumping their stuff in anyone's backyard. [4]
Gibbs describes a plausible strategy for accomplishing this -- "plugging the toilet" of the industrial system -- a strategy that is based on an analysis of corporate economics, not good intentions. What policy elites mistake for random irrationality in the grassroots agitators is actually their different way of understanding the power relationships. The activists recognize that political outcomes are not determined by the rationalistic policy processes that elites promote. Do federal regulatory laws have the promise of solving the environmental problem, given their compromised condition in the web of corporate political influence? At the grassroots level, based on their own observations of how the system works, the answer many citizens give is no.
The relevant power, the citizens would say, does not reside in the political system, but in the private corporations that finance and manipulate the politicians. So these citizens have worked out their own strategy for achieving environmental progress -- a strategy that, realistically enough, targets corporate power. Given all that has occurred, their approach seems at least as "rational" as trying to enact new regulatory laws. Lois Gibbs explained:
"When companies have proposed new hazardous-waste landfills, our folks have come out and said, no, you can't put it there. As a result, there has not been a single new hazardous- waste site opened in the last ten years. Without passing any new laws or regulations, without getting into the debate, we have stopped the expansion of hazardous-waste sites in this country. In Colorado, BPI has the last landfill that's been approved, but the reason people lost in Colorado is because they turned to the scientists and did their objections within the system. You can't win within the system.
"Our aim is to change the discussion within the boardrooms of major corporations. That's where we will win ultimately, not in the government agencies or Congress. Our strategy is basically like plugging up the toilet -- by stopping them from opening new landfills, incinerators, deep-well injection systems and hazardous-waste sites. What happens? Industry is still generating the same amount of chemical waste and, because disposal facilities are limited, the cost of storage and disposal climbs many, many times. That's the American way -- scarcity raises the price.
"In the boardrooms at some point, there's going to be this discussion: 'Hey, ten years ago, our disposal costs were X and now they are multiplying and so is our liability and so is the public-relations damage.' That's when real change will come. All they understand is profit and loss. When the cost is high enough, corporations will decide to recycle wastes and reclaim materials, to substitute nontoxics in their products, to change their processes of production."
It is entirely plausible that these scattered groups of citizens, employing their practical strategy of cost pressures, may succeed where government has failed. As if to substantiate Gibbs's power analysis, William Ruckelshaus announced in the spring of 1990 that Browning-Ferris was going to get out of the hazardous-waste business. BPI would concentrate on the other, less dangerous forms of waste disposal and try to sell its new site in Colorado to some other operator. Hazardous waste, Ruckelshaus explained, was losing money. [5]
Active citizens of any sort are always, of course, a small minority of the population, since they are committed to public affairs at a level of intensity most Americans would probably never reach, even if democracy were functioning. A 1986 study measured the political sophistication of American adults and found an activist core of 5 percent, including the regular cadres within political parties. A fifth of the citizenry, 20 percent, was described as "totally apolitical." The rest were said to be "marginally attentive to politics."
Karen Paget, a political scientist at the University of California, estimated that fifteen million people are engaged in as many as two million citizen organizations, ranging from neighborhood drug patrols to national groups like ACORN, which has seventy thousand members organized in poor and low-income communities in twenty-six states. "Though there is no precise definition of a citizen organization," Paget wrote, "even a narrow conception would disclose phenomenal growth in the last two decades." [6]
In some crude fashion, however, these activists speak for a broader public too, serving as self-selected representatives without the benefit of elections. For them, developing political influence depends crucially on sustaining credibility among the passive citizens who merely sit and listen. Ralph Nader is disparaged by the elected apparatus of politics, but he has continuing influence because he accurately voices the complaints of a much broader audience.
On some matters, the unelected representatives are more trusted than the elected ones. A Washington Post poll, for instance, asked citizens to rate the different political voices they hear on environmental issues. The environmental groups came in first: 63 percent favorable; 20 percent unfavorable. Local governments finished second, EPA was third. Business leaders finished last: 33 percent favorable; 45 percent unfavorable. [7]
Ronald Reagan made an ironic contribution to the dramatic growth of irregular politics, not because he preached antigovernment volunteerism, but because his administration's hard- headed assault on federal programs and laws clarified the power relations for people. The fix is in in Washington, they concluded. Nothing will be done there. Why pass laws when the other side has no intention of observing them? Let's try something else. So people turned in other directions, lobbying state and local governments for reform or inventing disruptive new ways to apply "rude and crude" politics to a wide variety of issues, from housing to taxation.
The very structure of federal laws, however, including environmental laws, has had the long-term effect of weakening citizen politics by making issues more remote. Leon Billings, an environmental consultant, served as staff director of the Senate Public Works Committee during the reform years of the 1970s when all the landmark environmental laws were enacted. He has regretfully concluded that federal legislation like the Clean Air Act of 1970 had the unintended consequence of smothering political energies at the grassroots level. Might the nation have made more actual progress on clean air, Billings wonders, if the federal law had not intervened?
"Adopting national air ambience standards in the Clean Air Act was the biggest mistake we ever made," he confessed. "Citizens-for-clean-air groups were beginning to get local governments to adopt tougher standards around the country, much tougher than anticipated, and industry wanted to get out from under these local and regional activists who were coming after them everywhere. The Clean Air Act brought the fight to Washington where industry could manipulate thing much more cleverly.
"The federal law short-circuited the activism. It took away the forum for local activists and they had to become involved in much more technical arguments, an arena where industry is strong and citizens are weak. Once policy issues become engulfed in the federal bureaucracy, the public loses the ability to influence these decisions because local electronic and print media simply lose interest in the issues. The story is suddenly distant and difficult to cover in a local newspaper. There's no local agitation because it's now a 'national issue.'"
If citizens at large seem "dumb" to political elites, including their own elected representatives, it is partly because they have been cut off from knowing and understanding the real arguments. But the citizens' new tactics also condemn them to a more or less permanent state of isolation. They may succeed at delivering potent messages to those in power, but this does not get them any closer to developing a relationship with the formal structure that decides things.
Karen Paget, formerly an official for federal domestic-social programs in the Carter administration, offered this sympathetic critique of nonelectoral citizen politics: "To be sure, community organizations can playa crucial role in fostering participation, strengthening a democratic ethos, and in making government work. But claims that suggest such organizations can replace the state or the polity are as misleading as the notion that they could eradicate poverty."
The isolation from power leads to strategies that are oppositional and often narrow or essentially negative. Community organizations can target an offending corporation or veto a government project. But they cannot enter into the ongoing political debate on larger matters like the federal tax code or the national economic policies that fundamentally influence the future of their communities. They can stop a chemical waste dump or postpone the closing of a local plant or perhaps even ban a harmful product from the marketplace. But they cannot reach the government decisions that allow these things to happen in the first place. Citizens may block things, but it is much harder for them to build anything.
***