My Mom

I haven't used this blog for this purpose before, but I want to pause to talk about my mom, who recently passed away, and ask you to reach out to her church.

My mom passed away Saturday morning, November 13. Hours after her granddaughter Ellie's third birthday. I was with her when she died, in a nursing home in my neighborhood, Hyde Park. She had been declining for a long while, since a heart attack in March. We moved her to Chicago in September. It was the first time she had lived outside of Ohio.

My mom had a long, happy life. Those who knew her know she was quick to laugh, always buoyant, looking for the best in people. She was a loyal friend, taking care of her aging friends, driving them to events and doctor appointments after they could not, one of the last of her group of friends to be fully independent until she fell ill in March. Like a lot of her life, she took on this role as a welcome responsibility. She was a teacher in a collapsing school system for over 20 years, arranging ways to buy supplies for children who couldn't buy them. She took on the job of union leader in her school, to make sure that teachers and students had a voice in school policy. She took on this responsibility, even as the work became harder and harder, and other teachers fled to suburban schools. Republicans like to position the words "liberal" and "responsibility" in opposition. Liberals, they'll say, manufacture a culture of dependence, encouraging the poor to expect hand outs, rather than accept responsibility for their own fate. My mom came from a long tradition of liberal politics that embraced our responsibility toward one another. She was a life-long liberal Democrat, and believed that government's role - our role - should be to take care of the vulnerable. She was a child of the Great Depression, the first in her family to go to college, starting just after World War 2, when her campus (my alma mater too, Miami of Ohio) was filled with GIs coming back to school on the GI Bill. She saw how government could give a hand up, and she never lost faith in the idea.

Her months of illness had wearied her. She always believed that things happened for a reason, that even bad events in our lives were part of a path that leads us to some reward or lesson. An optimist by nature. And as she endured the loss of her mobility - she had not been able to walk since March - and repeated trips to hospitals and three different nursing homes, and a move to Chicago that meant leaving behind her home, and church, and friends, she continued to look for a reason. Why was all this happening? She never found the answer, but the fact that she viewed her ordeal that way is a testimony to her faith and optimism.

We will hold a memorial service for my mom on Sunday, December 19, in her church, Church of the Ascension, in Lakewood, Ohio. If you want to remember her, please make a donation to the church. Ascension, which was my church when I was a boy, may have to close its doors. It doesn't have the financial resources to continue. The church was a central part of my mom's life for a very long time. It lost a lot of its membership when members - like my mom - refused to withdraw from the Episcopal Church over the consecration of Gene Robinson, who is gay, as bishop in New Hampshire. Some conservative members of the congregation had agitated for a gesture of defiance, urging Ascension to leave the Episcopal Church, to affiliate with the Anglican Church of North America, as a way to protest the election of Bishop Robinson. During the meeting of the congregation on the question, my mom made the point that her vision of the Episcopal Church was an inclusive one, in which all who felt called to share their journey of faith together could find fellowship and love. Enough members of the congregation agreed with her, and the measure to split from the Episcopal Church was defeated. Of course, the conservative members who had pushed for the measure quit, unwilling to set aside their narrow-minded views. Then Ascension had some changes in leadership - one minister was forced to leave, another, who was well-loved, left after a few years to return to his hometown in the South, and over the past several years the church has been served by an interim minister. It's hard to build a plan for the future, and attract new members, when you don't have a permanent spiritual leader. Lakewood has two Episcopal churches, one near the WASPier, well-to-do lakefront neighborhoods to the west, and one, my mom's, in the working class part of town near the border with Cleveland. The other church, St. Peter's, just raced past its capital campaign goal of one million dollars, collecting more than 1.6 million. Meanwhile, my mom's church can't pay its bills. It feels a lot like what is happening in the country. Haves and have-nots live in different worlds. And the social safety net that supports the most vulnerable is shredding. My mom's church contributes to the work of the Lakewood Christian Service Center, it is a place for families on the west side of Cleveland to find comfort, a place to pray that they don't lose their jobs, or their homes. If it is forced to close its doors, it will abandon, too, all the people it helps.

Help it stay open. Send a donation to The Church of the Ascension, 13216 Detroit Avenue, Lakewood, Ohio 44107.

Show me the Capital!

For some scholars, the study of democratic politics has moved from a focus on why some societies have it and others don’t, to a speculation about why it isn’t working so well in the nations where it has been deeply rooted. Time after time, our system for electing leaders and making collective decisions seems to fall short, and we wind up unable to engineer collaborative solutions to shared problems. The next two years will be a case study in this type of dysfunction. Who is to blame for the failure of democracy’s promise? One theory – Robert Putnam's work involving the production and distribution of social capital - seems to have become popular.

Indeed, as is always the case in scholarly discourse, Putnam didn’t invent the concept. It’s a very old one. Putnam cites Alexis de Tocqueville, as his intellectual predecessor. Tocqueville, of course, is the brilliant French theorist and cultural eyewitness who traveled to the United States during our collective national infancy to observe our habits. Tocqueville concluded that we had, among all the other gifts we could call our own, a special skill at associating with one another. We were a nation of joiners. In working together in our lodges and secret societies we learned the tricks of cooperation and compromise. And from this came a readiness to work together on common problems as a collectivity. This set us apart from the rigidly hierarchical societies of the old world, where individuals owed allegiance to their superiors, and did what they were told. Europeans lacked the talent for deliberating among one another. And, more importantly, they lacked the trusting nature necessary to work together with others. Europeans acted from obligation, not consensus, and from fear of the repercussions if they failed to do as their social superiors commanded them. They trusted only in the willingness of their political and economic masters to exile them, or to seize their property, or to kill them.

America was a vast community of equals, with good-will in our hearts, and a trusting regard for one another. Tocqueville largely ignored the fact that a sizable portion of our population—women, slaves, the illiterate—were denied a part in collective deliberations and often suffered all manner of insult and injuries as a result of the decisions manufactured among the small part of the population permitted full citizenship. Also, although he couldn’t be aware of it at the time, our great machinery for manufacturing consensus and cooperation and collective solutions was due to breakdown in bloody calamity over the issues of state sovereignty and slavery a generation after his landmark contribution to social theory, Democracy in America, was published.

Nevertheless, however imperfect Tocqueville’s analysis was, it was celebrated as one of the great early contributions to social science. Tocqueville, consciously or not, invented many of our familiar social scientific tools. Democracy in America was a grab-bag of carefully made observations magnificent in size. Any scholar’s work, even the great ones, remains unfinished. Certain questions are fenced off, while analytical attention is focused on other ones (usually the easier ones). Subsequent scholars can come back and kick down the fences to expand the analytical project into new areas. Some conclusions are proven wrong by subsequent history, and younger scholars can return and reengineer the analytical apparatus to improve it, so earlier mistakes are fixed.

Social capital, as defined by Putnam, consists in the “networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” For Putnam, trust, norms and networks—social capital—improve “the quality of public life and the performance of social institutions.” Without trust and interconnectedness we can’t have public life. Or, at the very least, it would be a morally impoverished game of grab-what-you-can whenever no one was looking. This is important, because we expect (or at least we once expected) public life and social institutions to facilitate the achievement of the aims of civilization, the accomplishment of great collective projects, like building economies and physical infrastructure, legal systems and political order. The cooperation required for public life, at least on the scale required for great national societies to accomplish their far-reaching aims, is impossible without trust and reciprocity. We agree to pitch in now, lend our muscle-power and income taxes to great public projects, because we trust that we will be permitted to share in the resulting benefits and we believe that others will contribute as well. Trust and reciprocity are manufactured when individuals are connected in dense networks of association and work together, face to face, to solve problems collaboratively. Where members of a society are most likely to join others in doing shared work under the umbrella of religious, social, charitable, recreational, or occupational associations, trust and expectations of reciprocity are most likely to develop and responsive, representative democracy is most likely to flourish. There’s a type of beneficial mass delusion that takes place: because we can trust those we share secret handshakes with in our Masonic lodge, we begin to believe we can trust everyone in the huge, sprawling community that extends out beyond the horizon.

Putnam’s enormously influential contribution, Bowling Alone, carried this conclusion: if our political institutions and public life are miserable, we have no one but ourselves to blame. The reason we are in the political mess we are in is because we have allowed our Elks memberships to lapse. We have quit going to church. We have abandoned our workplace bowling team. In some venues, this message resonated with the right-wing talking heads on television and neo-conservative public intellectuals. They joined Putnam in pointing the finger at the T.V. addicted masses, who turned their backs on the original spirit of American volunteerism.

Bowling Alone has a convenient blindness to the dysfunctions of our contemporary political process and their role in the decline of democracy in the U.S. The corrupting role of money in politics and the unequal distribution of wealth, not the collapse of our local gardening clubs and Boy Scout troops, go a long way to explain the sad state of participatory politics in the U.S. The withdrawal of trust in the U.S. is a predictable and easily understood consequence of a social and political system that fails to serve the needs of the nation’s population.

At the core of Putnam’s work is the idea that American’s are somehow to blame for their failure, because they have lost their skill at negotiating trust and interconnectedness. They don’t believe in themselves enough. They can’t come together for the big hug (or the thousands of local hugs in their neighborhood lodges and clubhouses) that builds civic union. But this ignores the machinery Republicans have built to shred trust, to destroy our unity, to tear us apart. Putnam refers to social capital as both the “lubricant” that helps societies get things done, and the “social glue” that holds them together. This contradictory language, both slippery and sticky, is still somehow right. At one point, Americans found ways to more easily glide toward agreement, and we stuck together through difficult and contentious times. Today’s Republican Party is devoted to making agreement harder, and using crises to splinter us apart.

We have, in fact, turned away from a shared associational life, stopped working together in small and larger ways, crafting collaborations and engineering solutions. And we don't trust one another. Maybe we never did, not completely. Many of the associations Putnam pictures when he talks about his work - Elks Clubs, bowling leagues, Episcopal churches - were awfully white. Maybe the work of building trust was only accomplished within this sliver of our wider diversity. We just didn't notice because whites were the politically relevant class within our society for a very long time. They all got along! And things worked out OK. (Putnam's new book, American Grace, makes the interesting case that something similar was going on in African American communities, in black churches especially, where trust and expectations that we can work cooperatively were fashioned. And one consequence of this was the civil rights movement, a political effort that required trust, far-reaching cooperation, and expectations that big problems can be overcome with shared effort.)

The idea that we manufacture trust in local settings, and become conditioned to be trusting, is a robust idea, supported by lots of research of many types. In psychology research, in sociology, and anthropology, we find evidence that our vast social landscape, populated by millions and millions of people we will never meet, is made understandable, familiar, navigable, and less frightening because of lessons we learn (and trust we develop) in more intimate settings and face to face encounters.

For me, this says we need to build more local ties, reaching out across class and race, religion and age, and all the things that separate us. For this to work, we need to set aside our deeply rooted prejudices and hatreds, to be open to learn to trust others not like us. This is hard to do. In an earlier posting I discussed one reason why this might be true - a part of the nation holds an out-dated view of what it means to be an American. For this group, America is a white, Anglo-Saxon nation. It has been since its founding, and its core culture - the wellspring we draw our identity and strength from - still is. Republicans in recent years have been spinning a narrative about the country, and its problems, that reinforces rather than challenges this idea. In truth, all national identities evolve over time. Here is what I said in that earlier posting about America:

This narrower view of who we are imagines America as a land settled, long ago, by Europeans. This group, first to risk building something in the new world, and still the majority, should, properly and without apology, be at the levers of our governmental systems, and our state, our schools, our national identity, should all reflect this majority’s culture and morality.

But this isn’t how it should be in America. Or, at least, given one tradition, one strand of our national DNA, this is unacceptable: we are a national organized around a set of inclusive principles, a community of distinct groups, retaining their customs and faiths, yet combined, part of a shared destiny. According to Michael Walzer, our “political culture” – our system of laws, the assumptions behind them, our form of government – was established by the earliest settlers and, as a result, was “English and Protestant.” But other aspects of this Anglo Saxon culture were never firmly established, and subsequent groups weren’t “assimilated entirely into the dominate culture.” They resisted assimilation, preserving their separate cultures. All these groups, living intermixed and dispersed across the broad landscape of the country, occupied a “common political space,” and shared a common concern to use politics (and the state) to advance their common safety and well-being. Thus, this mix of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups finds their collective and separate fates joined. Each group plays a role in shaping the nation’s direction and history, and hence a takes a part in our narrative. America became what Walzer calls “a nation of nationalities.” It may not always be pretty, but, Walzer (and liberals like me) believe this works. Groups, perhaps invisible, perhaps bullied into fearful silence, perhaps uninterested in previous political issues, but now awakened by an issue that has salience and meaning for them, find a voice and articulate their views. Perhaps most central to our concerns, groups can demand a new, more just arrangement for their incorporation into the political process. What follows is a period of negotiation and a new, more just incorporation into the political contract. This is how the circle of inclusion and citizenship was widened over the nation’s long history.

This is how each group is written into our narrative and becomes "American." But Republicans have been deliberately sabotaging this process, persuading some of us that this machinery for transforming our narrative and our sense of ourselves and widening our community is weakening us, diluting what it means to be American.

I firmly believe this is undermining our prospects for a reinvigorated, more participatory political and civic life. If we can't push past our prejudices, and roll up our sleeves and work together on PTAs, in community organizations, and in our churches and synagogues and mosques, and perhaps more importantly, the interfaith efforts our churches and synagogues and mosques engineer, then we will capitulate to commercial and corporate interests and the wealthy, who view our splintering as a gift.

Interaction on Facebook isn't a substitute. Nor is pat-yourself-on-the-back volunteering. I know our lives are full, but this matters. Join your PTA, coordinate efforts at your church or synagogue to open and run a soup kitchen or shelter, support a network for substance abusers, or battered women, or new immigrants, or cancer survivors. What matters is working with others, those like you and different than you, doing the collaborative planning, the decision making, and shared effort necessary to accomplish your aims. It has to be hard, sometimes contentious. Simply showing up to ladle soup one Saturday a month isn't enough, because you aren't fighting with others, finding solutions, and building trust unless you are part of the planning and management of the effort.

Trains, Planes, and Automobiles

Life can be a bumpy ride sometimes. Certainly the last two years have been rough. Unless of course you work for Goldman Sachs or one of the other Wall Street titans. Goldman, in particular, we've found, is Doctor Manhattan - indestructible, omnipotent, able to refashion the world around it according to its preferences. Goldman has cruised along, barely slowed, while the rest of us have been left behind, trying to get our old jalopy out of the ditch.

On Saturday, while 200,000 or so attended Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity, I walked down the street and attended Barack Obama's much more modest rally on the Midway, on the campus of the University of Chicago. Maybe 20,000 people showed up, a disappointing turn out, in my view, after the 300,000 or so who attended Obama's election night rally two years ago. Clearly some people have gotten off the bus.

Americans love their cars, so perhaps it isn't surprising that both Obama and Stewart turned to automobile-based metaphors to describe our current political dilemma on Saturday. Stewart, standing before a video screen with images of cars moving slowly in heavy traffic, said:

Look on the screen. This is where we are, this is who we are. These cars. That's a schoolteacher who probably think his taxes are too high, he's going to work. There's another car, a woman with two small kids, can't really think about anything else right now. A lady's in the NRA, loves Oprah. There's another car, an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car's a Latino carpenter; another car, a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan.

But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief, and principles they hold dear - often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers'. And yet, these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze, one by one, into a mile-long, 30-foot-wide tunnel, carved underneath a mighty river.

And they do it, concession by concession: you go, then I'll go. You go, then I'll go. You go, then I'll go. "Oh my God - is that an NRA sticker on your car?" "Is that an Obama sticker on your car?" It's okay - you go, then I go.

Because we know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land. Sometimes, it's just New Jersey.

In Chicago, several hours later, Obama said:

Around the country I've been trying to describe it this way. Imagine the American economy as a car. And the Republicans were at the wheel and they drove it into a ditch. And it's a steep ditch, it's a deep ditch. And somehow they walked away.

But we had to go down there. So me and all the Democrats, we put on our boots and we repelled down into the ditch. And it was muddy down there and hot. We're sweating, pushing on the car. Feet are slipping. Bugs are swarming.

We look up and the Republicans are up there, and we call them down, but they say, no, we're not going to help. They're just sipping on a Slurpee, fanning themselves. They're saying, you're not pushing hard enough, you're not pushing the right way. But they won't come down to help. In fact, they're kind of kicking dirt down into us, down into the ditch.

But that's okay. We know what our job is, and we kept on pushing, we kept on pushing, we kept on pushing until finally we've got that car on level ground. Finally we got the car back on the road. Finally we got that car pointing in the right direction.

And suddenly we have this tap on our shoulder, and we look back and who is it? It's the Republicans. And they're saying, excuse me, we'd like the keys back. And we've got to say to them, I'm sorry, you can't have the keys back. You don't know how to drive.

Why is this? Why at two rallies, 600 miles apart, are audiences asked to think about our economy and our politics through the all-American experience of our automobiles, and the trouble that can befall us when we set out for a pleasant ride? American middle class families have always cherished their cars. It is a persistent symbol of stability and, as one does better and can afford a luxury sedan, a sign of success and comfortable indulgence. Growing up in Cleveland, in a working-class suburb, I think about the neighbors who had succeeded in the construction industry, or had risen up from the shopfloor to work in management. They often lived in the same house they bought when they started out, but the car in the driveway was a Cadillac or some other high-end Detroit-made chariot.

About a year ago I wrote this:

My mother-in-law has always thought I believed Obama was a savior of some sort. That's not true. At least I never thought he was a messiah. We use language in flexible ways sometimes. You know how you might say to someone, "Oh! You're my savior!", when all they've done is stop to help you fix a flat tire and get your car out of a ditch, when your kids are in the back seat miserable and hungry, and it's getting dark? Obama's that kind of savior, helping us pull the nation out of the ditch the Bush administration steered us into.

If it's an image I can conjure up out of the buzzing white noise in my head, it's an easy image to imagine. Surely, Obama could do better than this. And a moment or so later, he did:

In the words of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, we also believe that government should and must do for the people what they cannot do by themselves individually. We believe in an America that rewards hard work and responsibility for everybody and creates ladders of opportunity. We believe in a country where we look after one another, where we say, I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. That's the America we believe in. That's the America we know. That's the choice in this election.

It's about time. Where has this simple rhetoric been throughout this election? Why are Democrats so frightened to say: We believe people shouldn't be left to suffer, to be overwhelmed and ground up by the gears of a global economy they don't engineer? Why can't they say: we owe the unemployed a new chance, through education, and stimulus spending, and every other opportunity government can provide? And even: we failed you because we haven't done enough, but we pledge to do what we can.

Almost two years ago I said:

I see people turning away from a Republican party that promised nothing and delivered less, a party that believed we owed nothing to one another and we should expect nothing from our government. I see people who want to believe that we can collectively fashion solutions to shared problems.


Like many, I'm disappointed that the Obama administration didn't achieve much of what it promised. It hasn't dramatically reengineered public education, we are still pointlessly wasting lives and resources in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My euphoria was naive, or perhaps premature. But can anyone really believe that the Obama administration doesn't believe the core principles behind these aspirations? Or that Obama represents our best chance in two generations to achieve something transformatively different? Today's election will map out the short-term fate of these efforts to build an America that is humane and decent, committed to social justice and equality. Yet I think, just as the 2008 elections seemed to promise, that more Americans want to live in that America. Getting there is just going to get a little harder.