The Fulcrum Repairing America's Broken Democracy
Rachel Kaganoff Stern is CEO of Junior State of America. Rachel shares her thoughts on the mission and impact of Junior State of America in engaging young people in government and improving their communities.
The interview is part of a collaboration between Bridge Alliance and CityBiz entitled Repairing America's Broken Democracy.
The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks.
If you imagine our civil society as an organism, one would think its reaction would be to try to reclaim its previously perceived stable state. However, in nature, many organisms are well-equipped to embrace new realities and adapt in order to persist. For our society, we need to support and guide social change that can progress our democracy into a new paradigm. We can do this by stepping back and building new relationships for the purpose of understanding across our differences and creating change together.
I study change processes as they occur through transformative learning networks. These loose- knit social networks prioritize learning from others. To move through complex crises and spawn new realities, the people who gravitate to these networks take risks by disrupting their usual social patterns to build new relationships and understanding across ideological, institutional and geographic boundaries. These networks can give way to new professional fields, new schools of thought and even new organizations. For example, the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network started as a group of individuals from different walks of life who all wanted to build community resilience in the face of wildfires; they just had different ideas about how to do it. Acknowledging that wildfire management is too complex for a single approach, they pooled their diversity of experiences and connections to innovate new solutions.
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We have all heard the phrase “the only constant in life is change,”attributed to ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Martin Luther King Jr. is credited with proclaiming, “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”Human communities have evolved with a set of evolutionary biases that enable us to ignore and resist change. A prime example is our collective ability to discount the very real evidence for and effects of climate change. We fail to notice all the pieces of change as they assemble themselves until we are surprised by the qualitatively different state in which we find ourselves.So here we are, stunned and unsure how to make the next move.
In the mighty rhizome, nature demonstrates for us why change may surprise us and how, while we cannot stop change, we may be able to guide the change we want to see in the future. If you have ever weeded a garden you know about rhizomes. Invasive weeds (like Japanese knotweed and giant horsetails) and pretty ones (like wild iris) are all subterranean organizers. Rhizomes have no beginning and no end, they are decentralized, they struggle and spread underground hidden from our view and occasionally surface into the sunlight in bombastic manifestations showing us an organism we forgot existed has only gained vigor while we were not paying attention.
Even though we cannot see most of the rhizome's biomass and activities, underground it gathers energy, branches, twists and turns, breaks through barriers, and expands its network until it is ready to show itself again. The rhizome is a prolific botanical metaphor used by French philosopher Deleuze and his social activist collaborator Guattari along with contemporary organizational philosophers and change scholars to understand the complexities of social change as non-linear, heterogenous, non-hierarchical and subterranean.
The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks, create new bonds, branch out and break through the barriers that constrain us. Engaging in civic society, participating in new relationships and learning from those who are engaged across social and political spectrum can help us reconfigure our understanding of our possible futures and gather our collective strength until we are ready to emerge as something new.
Connecting across our differences is scary. Thanksgiving tables across the country last month were full of anxieties associated with communicating in spite of our differences. We may prefer our instinctual draw to familiar homogeneous social gatherings that reinforce our biases and to fall in line under hierarchical organizational structures that provide clear rules on how we must behave. But, if we take on the rhizomatic view, we can instead be comforted by the knowledge that change happens through subterranean activity and if we want to be part of that change we need to build uncomfortable connections so we can learn together and imagine a new future.
So take a risk, be disruptive and find new people who challenge your assumptions and build friendships that create conditions for you to learn new things. You never know — you may be starting a new social movement.
Risien is the director of transdisciplinary research at Oregon State University and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
The National Summit on Civic Education was hosted by the Jack Miller Center last month.
Just a week after the election, the Jack Miller Center — a nonprofit organization focused on civic literacy where I serve as president — convened about 185 leaders, educators and philanthropists for a two-day National Summit on Civic Education in Philadelphia. We knew in planning the summit that there was some risk it would be ill-timed in the aftermath of a contentious election.
We decided to press forward. We would lean into civics. After all, what could be more important to the health of our constitutional democracy than to join together around shared civic meaning and purpose?
The summit theme was “Educators and Innovators: Our Civics Moment.” With a lot of work by our extraordinary program team, we put together an agenda that would highlight the voices of educators and innovators who are doing game-changing work to elevate civics as the cause of our age.
In my opening remarks, I told the group that we were there to lift up solutions, not, as a friend likes to say, “to admire the problem.”
Then, Citizen University founder Eric Liu gave a rousing address and made it clear that we had come together for an important cause at just the right moment. Liu spoke of the need for a civic education that emphasizes “better arguments” for the causes we believe in even as we respect one another as fellow citizens, and that emphasizes the importance of “union” even as we embrace our commitments to local community.
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An opening plenary session featured inspiring educational entrepreneurs including Ian Rowe of New York’s Vertex Academy, Stephanie Almeda Nevin of Yale’s Citizens Thinkers Writers Program and Matthew Brogdon of Utah Valley University’s Center for Constitutional Studies. These leaders are part of a new wave of innovation in civic thought and leadership studies happening in K-12 schools, higher education and a host of nonprofit organizations educating youth and adults alike.
Participants joined in breakouts focused on civics in classical schools such as Emet Classical Academy in New York, the nation’s first Jewish classical school; religious schools such as those served by the nonprofit organizationCivic Spirit; community colleges such as those supported through a new professional development program organized in partnership between the Jack Miller Center, the Great Questions Foundation and the Teagle Foundation; and civics competitions such as the new National Civics Bee organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
Repeatedly throughout the two days, speakers and panelists talked about a “civics renaissance” that is getting underway.
Anika Prather, an extraordinary champion for classical learning, took part in the panel on civics in classical schools and later wrote her reflections on the summit. The gathering, she wrote, was about “celebrating democracy and the passion for training the next generation on how to participate in this great American conversation. There were people from different political affiliations, organizations, and faiths Some I agreed with, and some I didn’t….But we all agreed on one thing: that we each have the equal right to exist, think, believe, and speak as we do, and to show respect for others’ right to do the same.”
She continued: “What struck me even more was that there was little talk about the election (thank you, Jesus). Instead, we simply enjoyed being in a democratic community. It was like water for my soul. It was exactly what I needed. This gathering reminded me of my sense of purpose in this work, even after the heartache of the election. It felt like a family room—where we could gather, eat, laugh, hug, debate, and just breathe.”
If a civics renaissance is in the offing, it would be a movement like Prather described — one that brings people together, that builds community and that reminds us all of our shared commitments to constitutional democracy. And it would be a forward-looking movement.
In a plenary session on “Depolarizing Civics,” Jane Kamensky, the CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, said celebrations marking the 250th anniversaries of the American Revolution and founding should center on the theme of “launch and invest,” rather than some kind of completion. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look to our history to inform our actions in the present. According to political philosopher W.B. Allen, we should “relive the moments of the founding so that re-founding is second nature to us.”
Could there really be a civics renaissance in the works? Let’s pray so. There could hardly be a more fitting way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
Zeiger is president of the Jack Miller Center, an educational venture to advance the history, documents and ideals we hold in common as Americans.
New York's daily newspapers had very different headlines the morning after Donald Trump was convicted in s hush money trial.
The American media has a bootleggers-and-Baptists problem.
“Bootleggers and Baptists” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition, and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians benefited by playing both sides.
There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.
Across the ideological spectrum, from the Chomskyite left to the Bannonite right, partisans, politicians and journalists themselves inflate the power, influence and importance of “the media.”
Let’s stay with the journalists for a moment. Members of all professions have a tendency to hold themselves in high regard. Nearly everyone, from politicians to plumbers, wants to believe that what they do matters. But with the possible exceptions of politicians and actors, journalists probably have the highest estimation of their own importance.
My point isn’t that they’re wrong — heck, I like to believe what I do matters. It’s that they exaggerate not just their power and influence but also their celebrity and personal authority. Heart surgeons are famously arrogant, but there is not an endless stream of conferences, books, editorials, essays and academic courses dedicated to the indispensable role of cardiothoracic medicine. I doubt there is any sanitation or plumbing trade journal that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Sewage” on its front page.
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In psychological terms alone, it’s in the interests of journalists to encourage the widespread obsession with the Fourth Estate. But the media are a mess in part because they believed their own hype.
I should be clear: I’ve had my own obsessions over the years, working as a conservative media critic and writing scores of columns about liberal media bias — which is real.
But I’ve grown weary with media criticism, again not because the criticisms are necessarily wrong but because they overestimate the power of the institutions they question. That’s the Baptist and Bootlegger problem: The outsize power and influence of the media is a lie that all sides have agreed on.
It’s like American journalism is an exhausted prizefighter on the brink of collapse, held up by his opponent to give the crowd a good show.
According to many on the right — who often unwittingly repurpose old left-wing formulations first introduced by progressives, “cultural Marxists” and other lefty bogeymen — “the media” create narratives and manufacture consent (a term coined by Walter Lippmann and adopted by Noam Chomsky) that the rest of us are powerless to overcome.
Consider climate change. The press has invested vast resources to climate coverage and has been hectoring and catastrophizing about it for 20 years. And yet, climate change remains at or near the bottom of every public opinion survey about the “most important issue.” If the media can manufacture consensus, why is there so little consensus about climate change?
This is just one example of the media thinking not just that it should — but can— define the interests of the public. The amount of energy and handwringing that has been put into, say, AP Stylebook revisions over terms like “illegal immigrant” or whether to capitalize “Black” or “white” when discussing race is premised on a grandiose theory of the role of the press as guardians of the American mind or soul. The whole “defund the police” conversation in the press transpired amid near-zero support for the idea among most Americans.
Or consider Donald Trump. I’m no fan, but I look like a MAGA rally front-seater compared to many in the media (and not just among opinion columnists), and yet Trump not only won but improved his standing with nearly every demographic group.
The response from some on the left is a variant of the old “but real socialism has never been tried!” trope. If only the media had really held him accountable — or took climate change, race, etc., more seriously — things would be different.
The response from many in the media is to wrap themselves in the mantle of heroic martyrdom as Trump attacks them.
And on the right, the ineffectiveness of the media to control the narrative is occasionally celebrated but it never diminishes the hysteria about its alleged omnipotence. The media, Michael Shellenberger insisted last summer, “is arguably more powerful than the government itself.”
Really? It has a funny way of showing it. The industry has been shrinking for decades. Since 2000, of the 532 industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers saw the single sharpest decline, 77 percent. Trust in the media is in the gutter.
So here’s an idea for the press: Just tell the truth as best you can and stop worrying about narratives. The American people will write their own.
Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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Reading, Pennsylvania, can be a model for a path forward.
The stark divisions surrounding the recent presidential election are still with us, and will be for some time. The reason is clear: We have a crisis of belief in this country that goes much deeper than any single election.
So many people, especially young people, have lost faith in America. We have lost belief in our leaders, institutions and systems. Even in one another. Recent years have seen us roiled by debates over racial injustice, fatigued by wars, troubled by growing inequities and disparities, and worried about the very health of our democracy. We are awash in manufactured polarization, hatred and bigotry, mistrust, and a lack of hope.
I believe the recent election was yet another proof point of these prevailing conditions in society that have been deepening for the past few decades.
Where does this leave us? If we as a country, as communities and as individuals aim to meet this moment, I believe we must focus on what it actually will take to address this crisis of belief.
Reading, Pennsylvania, a community I’ve been working with for over three years, provides a window into this challenge.
Some 10 years ago, a New York Times cover story declared Reading the poorest community in the United States. Once a predominantly white town, today it is nearly 70 percent Latino. For both the Trump and Harris campaigns, the community held deep significance as a Latino stronghold in a key battleground state.
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Each campaign held rallies there to activate potential voters. Both made promises as to how they’d serve the community if they were elected. Both, in my estimation, failed to see Reading for what it really is.
Where they saw people as voters, I see people as community members. Where they saw possible campaign donors, I see people's everyday contributions to the life of their community. Where they saw divisions to exploit, I see people coming together amid their real differences. Where they saw the opportunity to use poverty and working class struggle as a political football, I see people trying to support one another to improve their individual and shared lives. Where they saw a broken educational system, I see the community coming together to make education the entire community’s business.
After the election, I naturally thought of Reading. In fact, I visited the community just days later to release what The Harwood Institute calls a “ripple effect report.” This report documents the systemic change the people of Reading have created in just a few short years through our work together.
Reading is on the move at a time when so many communities feel stuck. Consider the following:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, change in Reading started small and grew over time. It was led by everyday folks who care deeply about the place they call home. Ultimately, Reading is proving that we can create a more promising future and restore our belief in one another by forging a new civic path.
So yes, we have a crisis of belief on our hands. But we also have communities like Reading that are demonstrating that there is a better way forward. That there is a real alternative to our current divisive politics. That we can believe in something again. And that we can spread this belief from the local up to the national level.
More empty promises from politicians is not the answer to what ails us today. The answer will come from our local communities.
Harwood is president and founder of The Harwood Institute. This is the latest entry in his series based on the "Enough. Time to Build.” campaign, which calls on community leaders and active citizens to step forward and build together.
