Education for action.

Education for action.
For awhile I worked for a consumer group, then at a community education center. Later I taught GED classes for adults, and now I teach in the public schools. Here's what I think now about political education.
• Democracy takes talk.
It was bizarre. One day in the fall of '08I was standing in line at the P.O.; as usual, I’d squeezed in just before closing. I noticed the woman ahead of me, who was carrying a bunch of envelopes stamped with logo of a big local union. I struck up a conversation, asking about the union, describing my small experience with it, and the people we knew in common. She responded chattily. Then I asked about how folks were viewing the upcoming electoral campaign. She told me who the union was supporting, no news there, and didn’t say much when I asked how the members were talking about the candidates. Then a couple other guys in line chimed in, talking favorably about Obama while sneering at politicians in general. At this point the union staffer said, Well, you can get in trouble talking about politics, and clammed up. The 2 guys, several feet away, continued to talk in whispers.

If paid staffers won’t talk politics, no wonder the rest of us hold back. O, we have our reasons. By definition, there’s a lot at stake when we discuss things we care about. It takes patience and skill to listen closely and explain ourselves clearly, to explore disagreements while affirming what we share. And where are we going to learn such skills? Not in places where hierarchies rule, and the most useful verbal skills are flattery and evasion. Women have traditionally been assigned the maintenance work of listening, accepting, soothing and nurturing, but that doesn’t necessarily engender learning.

The union woman did tell me where the nearest polling place was, and when it would be open. No doubt she votes in every election. But how does she make up her mind? What does she consider? What are the most important issues for her, and how does she think about the rest of the community? What does she think about people like me? She wouldn't say.

John Dewey wrote about “deliberative democracy,” the idea that it’s not enough for people just to vote their druthers, and majority wins. Before we decide we need to be talking with each other, to share and develop our ideas together. The best decisions come from gathering the information and sorting it out together.

I think that’s right. When something big comes up, we don’t just jump into it without thinking. When the issue involves the whole community, naturally we want to find out what other people are thinking and see what kind of agreement we can reach that makes sense to everybody. We know from research that that’s probably how some small-town governments operated, and very small bands of people even before there were any towns. We try to recreate that kind of deliberative environment with local grassroots groups, or when we hold conferences on particular issues.

For the most part, though, we live in such huge communities nowadays, our relationships with others can be so shallow, and our unscheduled time is so limited, that it’s hard to talk about the things we don’t already agree on. If talk is the requirement for deep democracy, we’ll have to learn to talk even in hostile circumstances.

I used to hope that some bold candidate would use electoral campaigns to push the national dialog and change the terms of debate. Now I see that will happen only at the margins, even with gifted wordmongers like Obama. The system we have practically forces politicians to play it safe, assembling a winning plurality by pushing as many of the favorable buttons as they can, and avoiding the dangerous ones. Changing paradigms is work that has to happen between or in spite of electoral campaigns.

There are some great cultural and political education programs going on in communities and unions all across the country. But these generally require a long-term commitment on the part of staff and participants, and are always pushing against constraints of their own (see Democratic education efforts, below). I’d like to see a way we can talk politics in less structured circumstances, in the course of our daily dealings with friends, family and neighbors.


• The truth is not enough.
We have an advantage over the death-dealers: we don’t have to lie. We’re not selling nuclear waste or war or fear of women. We’ve got generations of (mostly) excellent research and analysis to inform our understanding and our ambitions. But some of our neighbors can’t understand what we say, and it’s not just a matter of high-falutin’ language. The facts we can marshal depend so much on context to be understood.

In April, 2004 a bunch of Iraqis lynched four American contractors and hung two from a bridge. My local paper showed the photo: a mangled body suspended above a gleeful crowd. The picture provoked quite a furious debate in the letters page. Most people were outraged to have to see something so upsetting over their morning coffee. But several writers defended the decision to publish. Some took the picture as proof that war is savage and pointless, and called on Halliburton to bring the troops home. Others, however, simply saw further evidence of heathen barbarism, that can only be contained by staying the course.

Here’s another: the income tax. My state, Tennessee, still doesn’t have an income tax; instead we have a lottery very high sales taxes, including a tax on food. There’s no dispute about the facts: these taxes hurt low and middle income people a lot more than a progressive income tax. There’s plenty of information available and the concept is not that complicated. But to get at the popular resistance we have to understand the bases for their suspicion of the government, the context of the state budget crisis, and probably also something about decoupling payment from services, the way a yearly tax does.

The courts and contract negotiations and public hearings demand that we develop very detailed knowledge of the issues, but it’s not a mountain of data that changes public opinion and ultimately, the balance of power.

. . . we had to find out why this has happened to us in our communities. Why? So I’m trying to study and figure out and look at different movements for justice and I’m getting pretty lost. I can’t study the issue any more, the environmental issues. I’m a victim of exposure, I know everything there is to know about perchlorethylene and tetra, I know everything there is to know about benzene, but honest to god I feel just so, I’m so I can’t take it any more. The issues are circular, there’s no answers to these issues. I’m scared to death of the greenhouse stuff. I mean I just can’t even read about the ozone hole, I just feel so, I’m so I can’t take it any more. So, understanding that, I am not trying to work on environmental issues as much as I am trying to work on people and building leadership. Because that’s the only thing that is giving me strength is in other human beings (HREC, STP #5).

We’ve seen a very interesting conflict of perspectives with the market meltdown starting in 2007. It seems indisputable to me that Halliburton let the pirates run wild, yet as the crisis deepened there was a growing chorus of rightist media blaming, you guessed it, Big Government on the one hand, and homebuyers on the other. You can see how the privateers would be a mite concerned that this too-close-to-home failure could take the luster off unregulated capitalism, now that so many U.S. residents are getting a bigger dose of what folks in other countries have suffered decade after decade. The talking heads that rushed to cover up the crime are no more than jail trustees, so it’s hard to tell how much the rest of the inmate population have bought their excuses. Judging by the talk shows, we’ve finally sussed out the real culprits behind the sub-prime mortgage mess: immigrants.

Finally, let me give you some examples from the ‘04 election. A friend of mine was canvassing for unions in West Virginia. The responses included elaborate defenses of Halliburton (paraphrased below) by people who had plenty of contrary information (10-15-04):

• gay white guy: I’m concerned with equality, including equality for gay people. But we shouldn’t change horses in midstream. Kerry’s a northerner.

• white guy, railroad worker: Bush has been a nightmare for jobs, health care, Social Security . . . but I have to vote to defend unborn babies.
--canvasser: You’re concerned about more than yourself.
--guy: Exactly. I’ve been born again. I know Bush is just using Christianity for political gain, but I have to choose between old people and young people [by which he meant fetuses].

• African American woman cashier, union member: The biggest issue is jobs. I know Bush represents the rich and the corporations, and my sisters are strong Kerry backers. But Kerry flip flops too much. We shouldn’t change horses in midstream.
--canvasser: Why is changing scary? Do you feel safer with Bush?
--woman: Yes. There have been no more terrorist attacks.
--canvasser: What about rising anti-U.S. sentiment around the world?
--woman: I don’t believe it. After all, there were WMD in Iraq.

Most canvass operators warn their volunteers not to get into discussions. All we’re looking for is turnout, they say; we’re not going to change any minds at the doorstep. Reassure people when they have doubts, or change the subject. Avoid controversy. Sensible tactics for the moment, maybe, my friend thought-- so when do we try to change minds?

As Beverly Brown put it about the same time (10-24-04): conservatives would have to inhabit a different universe with different rules (e.g. about gender) to be able to vote for Kerry.

I’m sure you can come up with plenty of your own examples. Facts make a difference when people share some underlying perspective on the world (the inherent moral superiority of U.S. policy, or not; I earned that SUV and vacation home; people are inherently wicked; and so forth). By itself new information can’t move people from one big idea to another.

This would be true even if the major media weren’t run by a very small number of rich people, if the schools and churches were democratic, if our employers weren’t scanning our email. As it is, we have to compete with legions of Karl Roves and James Dobsons. If our only banner is Just the Facts, Ma’am and our primary vehicle sound bytes on the 6 o’clock news, we are playing on their turf and by their rules. In the last several years hundreds of thousands have marched against corporatist trade conferences cities around the world. Speak truth to power, right? It’s a yawner for the press. They undercount the numbers and say the movement is losing steam. They broadcast the grandstanders who break windows, and ignore the issues. The police funnel the crowds into free silence ghettos far from the conferees and the press.

It’s not simply a matter of shaving our ideas down to appealing phrases. These have their uses. Our slogans may resonate with some of the stories that people carry in their heads but won’t speak unless they’re prompted. Our signs and chants signal pandering politicians that there is a market for truth-telling. But soundbytes and slogans are just too shallow to carry system-challenging arguments. Or, depending on their outrage quotient, they may strengthen the regime in the long run, by alienating people from any political participation at all.

There was a discussion on All Things Considered (NPR, 4-15-04) about attack ads in the presidential campaign. One guest expert explained that attack ads are designed, not to persuade people to change their votes --that’s way too big a gulf to cross, in most cases-- but to discourage opposing voters from voting at all. That’s something a smear campaign can manage with relative ease.

We don’t want to shut people out. We want to bring people into the process. That’s a core part of our project. Unlike the campaign consultants, we do have to move folks to big ideas (or, as I’ll argue below, help our best ideas emerge from cold storage).