Radical Democracy and Sacred Values: John Dewey's Ethical Democracy, Sheldon Wolin's Fugitive Democracy and Politics of Tending, and Cornel West's Revolutionary Christianity

Abstract

John Dewey envisioned the “American experiment” of democracy as a moral and ethical ideal, lived out in personal habits and “in our daily walk and conversation.”1 More than mere external political forms or institutional arrangements, Deweyan democracy is a “personal way of life.”2 Democratic political organizing is typically captured in campaigns focused on single issues, but broad-based community organizing (BBCO) is more closely aligned to Deweyan radical democracy as an ethical way of life. This kind of organizing is “relational organizing” that, as Mark Warren says, brings people “together first to discuss the needs of their community and to find a common ground for action.”3 BBCO is first and foremost about organizing relationships around values to create relational power. The value-laden relationships are enacted through a political culture consisting of radically democratic social practices.This essay will turn to how various publics habituate individuals in radically democratic social practices and what political conditions are required for individuals and groups to engage in an ethical way of life free of domination and arbitrary influence. I have a particular interest in showing how the political culture of Deweyan ethical democracy is lived out in BBCO and that it not be prejudiced against sacred values commonly held dear by religious political participants. Sacred values are an important part of the political cultures of groups embattled in some of the most urgent political fights of our day. To make this case I turn first to Dewey's thought on democracy. But there are particular problematics that exist in Dewey's thinking of the political, namely with regard to stark challenges in our time regarding the role of power in democracy and the dangers white supremacy poses for radical democracy. Sheldon Wolin's democratic theory might be one potential source to address these problematics, but his notions of democratic fugitivity and his politics of tending ultimately fall short, too. My reading of Cornel West's work helps to address these shortcomings in Dewey and Wolin and in so doing come to terms with the way everyday patient work of BBCO recasts Dewey's and Wolin's theories of radical democracy. Bringing BBCO together with Dewey, Wolin, and West generates a unique theory of radical democracy that is capacious enough for political struggles involving sacred values and honest enough about white supremacy and power in democratic life.To be radical, democracy must start at the root of our associational life, asking questions about the kind of persons and power formed within groups. This ethical conception of democracy places a premium on democratic individuality and each individual's potential to political participation.4 Democracy as merely about institutional arrangements or states of affairs is too “external” for Dewey. Democratic societies arise from personal “ways of life” and “habits.”5 To say that democracy is “social” and “ethical” means that democracy exists as a form of government and in its institutions only insofar as it exists in the “dispositions and habits” of its individual members.6Democratic individuality requires individuals take responsibility for freely taken choices that are possible only in association with others.7 Dewey is concerned about cultivating a democratic society grounded in self-reliant individuality.8 The heart of the ethics of democracy is democratic individuality: a form of association that consists in “having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activity of the group to which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain.”9 My sense of democratic individuality is built off of work done by Dewey, Wolin, and West, and my own contribution to this conversation will develop slowly throughout this paper as I correct and affirm aspects of radical democracy in Dewey, Wolin, and West. A recent volume on democratic individuality and William James by Stephen Bush is another noteworthy version of what I mean to call attention to: habitual character formation and formation of selfhood that is only possible in certain kinds of associational life.10 Individuality here is contrasted with individualism and forms of group life that are individualist and purport that the self is an isolatable atom from its surrounding material reality and the relationships that support its life.Democratic individuality not only emphasizes responsibility for freely taken choices in society, but also raises the challenge of self-reliance over against a culture of conformity. This social view of the self raises the possibility that one's values and interests cannot be realized or accurately recognized until one cultivates and establishes relations that are free in the sense of lacking domination and arbitrary influence over one's life.11 One way of putting this kind of responsibility in a democratic community is BBCO's term of “self-interest.”Democratic politics is fundamentally about the collective pursuit of the common good. One's self-interest is a crucial part of democratic politics because, self-interest, as Jeffrey Stout writes, “is the interest that everyone who wishes to avoid domination has in the common good.”12 Self-interest is a crucial part of democratic individuality as it requires recognizing one's responsibility for, accountability to, and participation in the broader democratic community. Democratic individuality is crucial to overcoming certain political deformations in our collective life; but such overcoming is only possible by reflecting on the values and relationships that make such a politics possible in the first place. Romand Coles looks to the Latin to highlight the relational root of self-interest (inter esse—meaning “between-being”): “at the same time that a focus on self-interest propels the cultivation of self-recognition, respect, and determination, this focus on self-interest also propels us into receptive political relationships with others.”13 Self-interest properly understood (not either selfishness nor altruistic do-gooderism) has a “real-depth” and is most accurately identified when the individual's good is identified with the community's good.14Democratic individuality requires individuals take responsibility for freely taken choices that are possible only in association with others.15 Ethical and social democracy is primarily concerned with the kinds of individuality habituated in associational life. Radical democracy needs to be grounded in what Dewey's forerunner, the protopragmatist and philosopher of democracy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called self-reliance.16 Dewey's attention is attuned to the democratic ways of life that are habituated in groups, but also with the quality of communication present in associational life between publics. Ethical and social democracy “is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.”17 To think of the ethics of democracy is to first turn to the conditions of self-actualization and reasoning present in our society, and second to the quality of the social practices and the values attended to in each group. Some of these values present in BBCO are sacred values and they play an especially important role in the radically democratic social practices of BBCO.We accord sacred value to those goods we take to be inviolable, objective, and intrinsically valuable. To accord something sacred value is different than claiming it to be “the sacred.” Such values are evaluative attitudes grounded in the broader social practice of practical reasoning. Social practices are social because they are based in shared assumptions, norms, practices, and goods internal and external to the practice itself. A social practical account of evaluative attitudes claims that reasoners are held inferentially accountable to fellow reasoners and responsible for their concept use. Such a norm driven account need not baptize the status quo or tend toward conventionalism, nor is it inherently conservative. Critical revision of such norms and ideals that guide our concept-use can be radically revised only within certain limits. To be a participant in a larger tradition one needs to become familiar enough in the social practice of practical reasoning so that others can recognize your concept-use as following along in the same way as the relevant precedents. A social practical account of evaluative attitudes like sacred value grounds the practice of valuation in time and space; it allows for fallibilism and constructivism of our norms and ideals, thereby also allowing for the possibility of radical revision of norms and ideals.Robert Dworkin, Robert M. Adams, and Jeffrey Stout—of those who have explicitly addressed sacred value—have arguably written most powerfully about the topic.18 Although this is not the place to delve into the philosophical background of sacred value, it might help to offer some very brief (and in broad strokes) remarks about my social practical account of sacred value. What is unique about my contribution to this conversation on sacred value is the explicit connection between BBCO, sacred value, and radical democracy that extends and refines Dewey's and Wolin's theory of radical democracy through conversation with Cornel West. For my part, that someone identifies as Christian gives them a reason to value certain things as sacred. Christian sacred values are held to certain rational standards normatively established in the tradition. Individual Christians, as Christian, stand in certain relations of judgement as to appropriate action, attitude, and concern between other Christians and to others outside their religious and ethical community. As the tradition has developed throughout time normative standards of Christian sacred value have developed, and individual Christians have taken these norms as authoritative, incorporating and embodying these standards of value in their everyday lives.A social practical account of sacred values requires certain political conditions to avoid domination and arbitrary influence. Domination occurs when a master may arbitrarily influence our practice of reasoning at any point. In my account we owe one another justifiable reasons for our actions and concept-use, and others hold us accountable and responsible for those reasons. This conceptual frame emphasizes republican freedom, non-domination, and accountability within the discursive community.One way that Deweyan ethical democracy trains our attention to the quality of the social practices and values is by asking us to think about political culture. Democratic political cultures consist in and foster relationships grounded in habits and social practices that were first born in the life of local groups and associations.19 It is crucial to see that the political culture (the habits and social practices of a public) of radical democracy is value-based.Democratic habits are instilled in the members of a democratic community, but they are not merely rote activity. Individuals are habituated into the customs, mores, and norms of groups. Habits establish the “objective conditions which provide the resources and tools of action, together with its limitations, obstructions and traps.”20 Habits of thought and action, like social norms, discipline and shape individuals, but they are equally sites of critical revision and targets by movements for social change: “Emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the mass of men create the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment and opinion only take advantage.”21 Democracy as a habitual way of life has to do with what democracy looks like—the “emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes”—that each public instills in its members.The political culture of BBCO affiliates consists of democratic individuals, each a part of a larger relational fabric, enacting this ethical way of life in habits of thought and action. To speak of political culture is to say certain actions and values are permissible while others are not. This is why, as Richard Wood writes, value-language is the “first-language” of organizers and this language is carried in “specific symbols, stories, songs and institutions of the divine.”22 Those values and their “carriers” are not disconnected from democratic habits that make up the basic work of organizing accountability sessions and listening campaigns, collecting voter data, mobilizing neighbors around a specific platform during a neighborhood walk, or engaging in issue-related research.23 The habitual life of a constituency reveals the deep connection between collective values and self-interest, political culture and democratic individuality.The political culture holds the broader narrative of who we are, what we care most for, and what we are willing to sacrifice for those sacred values or do in public to protect them. Paying attention to political culture helps us see how value-work pervades democratic habits and practices. Too often we fail to notice the role values play in BBCO, and instead only focus on political issues. This leads to a vision of democracy as merely a state of affairs or institutional arrangement and not as an ethical way of life.Take the example of how the Gamaliel affiliate, Nashville Organized for Action and Hope (NOAH) organized a collective response to the police shooting of a young unarmed Black man in the summer of 2018. On July 26, a police officer fatally shot Daniel Hambrick in the back as he was fleeing for his life after the police illegitimately stopped him to supposedly investigate a stolen vehicle charge. By the time of Daniel Hambrick's murder, NOAH was already engaged in a number of research actions on police activity and practices in Nashville, but they had not taken public, confrontational action. Mike, the white middle-aged lead organizer for NOAH, recounts how NOAH's tactics shifted after a video was released detailing Hambrick's brutal murder. “We had to do something,” he explained: “This was here, this was our city.”24 Alexandrea, a Black organizer for NOAH, agreed: “With this particular situation it was a case where, ‘enough is enough’ and it was time to make a response.”25 Soon after the video was released NOAH held a press conference issuing a public statement with three primary demands: 1) The immediate termination of the Chief of Police; 2) Mayoral endorsement of the Community Oversight Board, a citizen-led effort to establish a police oversight board; 3) Expedite deployment of body and dash cameras throughout the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD).In order for NOAH to issue the public statement a quorum of its sixty-one member institutions had to adopt the statement. A board meeting was called to discuss the demands. For Mike, this sort of discussion was truly unique after a horrendous shooting: “Where else in the city was that discussion going on—particularly with white and Black groups in the same meeting? Where was this kind of representation?”26 That meeting, for Mike, was NOAH living out a democratic political culture, expressing its values in dialogue, discussion, negotiation, and contestation. Alexandrea recalled a particularly important moment: “In the past NOAH has always done a good job of responding strategically. But I remember one point brought up during that meeting was that we can't keep making strategic plans while people lay dead in the street.”27NOAH's statement was not successful in removing the chief of police, but perhaps it is best to see this action's purpose as that of ratcheting up the political pressure on police chief, while leveraging their values and self-interest in the public arena. NOAH as a group decided that the shooting of Daniel Hambrick violated a value they held sacred, that of Black life, and as Alexandrea said, “Enough is enough.” The violation of their sacred value clarified their self-interest. The political culture of NOAH—enacted in this example through habits and practices like debate, discussion, disagreement, and negotiation—allowed the group to act in a publicly powerful way. They acted because a sacred value within their political culture had been violated.Examples like NOAH illustrate that the ethical life of radical democracy inside publics is just as important as the quality of democracy in the broader political context. In The Public and its Problems Dewey argues that ethical and social democracy is grounded in a theory of publics making judgments about and taking action on interests that concern them. Publics are groups formed around “the perception of consequences which are projected in important ways beyond the persons and associations directly concerned in them.”28 Two crucial points follow from Dewey's concept of “public” that are relevant for our conversation on radical democracy and BBCO. The paragraphs that follow offer a different—although related—account of radical democracy in BBCO than the consociationalism that Luke Bretherton has recently offered.29First, radical democracy as I envision it claims that there is something fundamental to democracy's spirit in face-to-face encounter. Dewey, for his part, was certainly clear that publics consist not only of “face-to-face relationships” and “immediate contiguity.” There are ethical lessons for democracy that cannot be captured except in the kinds of community found most prototypically in groups like BBCO affiliates. “There is no substitute for the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment,” Dewey teaches us.30 The local community is the “home” of ethical and social democracy.31This is clearly borne out in the fact that BBCO starts with local institutions and a practice called relational meetings—a one-on-one meeting that establishes a public relationship, provides clarity on mutual self-interest and the values that might ground and sustain participation in the BBCO affiliate. The first step in organizing is to engage in relational meetings. After enough relational meetings a connection can be formed between individuals and their institutions based on values and issues (indirectly or directly experienced), thus laying the groundwork for a new public to emerge.32It is often said that BBCO has difficulty scaling up and cannot match modern state politics. The critique seems to be that BBCO is too local and cannot address political problems at the regional, national, or global level. There is some merit to this claim: some BBCO national networks seem allergic to sharing power; some BBCO networks have vested too much in the veritable claim that all politics is local. But BBCO has seen its organizing strategy win at the state level in harsh political conditions.33 Doubling down on the lesson that relational meetings drive organizing, other BBCO networks are building national strategies and taking the social practice of radical democracy as an ethical way of life to federal levels.34 More needs to be written on the theory of subsidiarity and BBCO organizing, but if such a subsidiary model is further incorporated the BBCO networks will remain democratic only insofar as they habituate members into the social practice of radical democracy within and between its various publics.Second, publics are more than local relationships and instead include those who are indirectly concerned with the “extensive and enduring” consequences and outcomes of certain actions.35 A democratic public consists of responsible, free, and accountable individuals who engage in democratic habits and practices grounded in values and interests affected by the outcomes of “public” actions. Public actions—as opposed to private actions that only concern those directly involved—include those who are affected by “extensive and enduring” consequences of “transactions between persons in the Populus.”36 People organize themselves into publics insofar as they seek to care for and protect their interests and values that are directly and indirectly affected by enduring and extensive consequences. More needs to be said on radically democratic publics, especially in regard to what Mary Douglas calls the “group” and “grid” aspects, but I don't have the space here. Instead, I want to turn to Wolin's and West's innovations to Deweyan ethical democracy.Sheldon Wolin claims that Dewey's ethical democracy, for all of its moral and ethical power, depoliticizes democracy. Dewey's democracy is rather weak on its grasp of modern power, Wolin thinks. Dewey's focus on inquiry and experimentalism reduces democracy to a “method of discussion.” “The result,” Wolin argues, “is to homogenize democratic action while stripping it of dissonance so that it merges with the ideal form embodied in the actual behavior of scientists. In the end Dewey's most crucial concepts—experimentation, method and culture—were ways of evading questions about power.”37 To Wolin, Deweyan radical democracy reeks of “methodism” that trivializes the drama and demands of theorizing that cannot be boiled down to methods of data collection or communication.38 Radical democracy needs to be freed of its naive assumptions that a correct method of inquiry will yield a political culture ethically and morally consonant with democracy. Instead of a toothless account of radically democratic political culture, Wolin turns to deeper criticisms of modern and postmodern power while offering his version of fugitive democracy as an ephemeral experience of commonality on the plane of the political.Cornel West does not go as far as Wolin in claiming Dewey's a methodist version of democracy. For Dewey, West claims, there is a crucial distinction between the scientific method and scientific attitude.39 But even so, Dewey's confidence in the creative power of humanity siphoned through a scientific attitude falls prey to an “optimism and enshrinement of power.”40 Dewey is one of the most profound democratic thinkers in the last century in the U.S., but his democratic community is relatively homogenous and implicitly white. Dewey's principal agents of change are liberal middle-class professionals and reformers.41 Dewey does not consider how his emphasis on radically democratic political cultures are formed and shaped by racial social norms and late modern centers of capitalist power that attenuate and constrict democratic individuality and community. Working to dethrone Dewey's middle-class reformism and his optimism in human creative democratic energies, West turns to Afro-American religious thought, and progressive Marxism in his version of radical democracy.Wolin's fugitive democracy is ephemeral and momentary. Fugitive democracy as it is experienced on the plane of the political is different from democratic politics. The political is the plane of generality, the space where, Wolin claims, commonality is generated despite relevant differences and where the demos achieves a unity capable of powerful political action.42 Politics is the activity of legitimate contestation between organized and unequal parties vying for access to the public resources available to political authorities. “Politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless,” Wolin writes. “In contrast, the political is episodic, rare.”43 In Wolin's larger project, it is the political as experienced by the fugitive demos that he is really after.44 Fugitive democracy recalls and renews what it means to be the demos. As I will come to show, radical democracy as it is practice in BBCO presents particular challenges for Wolin's account of fugitivity and his politics of tending. These challenges go to the very heart of Wolin's conception of radical democracy: the moments of solidarity established on the plane of the political and the temporality of what Wolin calls a politics of tending.Recently, Juliet Hooker has worked to “extend and sharpen” Wolin's conception of fugitivity by exploring Frederick Douglas’ own wrestling between democratic and Black fugitivity.45 Black fugitivity is a recurring theme within Black political thought, Hooker tells us and Douglas squarely belongs in the tradition. This is because of Douglas’ intimate understanding of the “necessarily different and fraught relationship of the enslaved to the rule of law,” and the “fundamental” and “permanent” way that slavery has shaped “political subjectivity” for Douglas, thereby transforming the temporality and the actual practices of democratic politics. The tensions between democratic and Black fugitivity can be stark, but elements of both can be found in Douglas’ life and work, which makes him a better partner than Wolin to today's democratic fugitives: “the DREAMers or Black Lives Matter protesters who enact exemplary democratic practices even as their status as citizens is precarious, and as their political activism renders them vulnerable to increased state reprisal.”46 Similarly, I work to recast Wolin's sense of fugitivity and a politics of tending in order to come to terms with radical democracy as it is practiced in BBCO. Wolin and Dewey both provide crucial insights into radical democracy, but we'll need to turn to West's work to grasp the depth of structural white supremacy and power in our late modern capitalism. First, it helps to get Wolin's view out in front of us.According to Wolin, a narrow focus on politics without the political has prevented political theorists from adequately assessing modern and postmodern forms of power. Modern power as it is embodied in the nation state is primarily centripetal. The modern nation state dominates political life, so that politics is merely electoral politics, opinion polls, and experienced through mass communication like TV and the internet. Citizens are more like subjects (not political agents) at the mercy of a virtual reality built on an inauthentic politics by lying politicians.47 What was previously the public is now dominated by private interests and the free market, and so society is effectively depoliticized. All other aspects of life are to be placed under the logic of bureaucratization and rationalization of modern science.48 But, modern power has been eclipsed by a centrifugal manifestation of postmodern power that de-centers state power without decentralizing it.49 Postmodern power is both centrifugal and centripetal, and thus completely totalizing: “What might be emerging in the United States,” Wolin wrote in 1989, “is a new form of totalizing power that blurs the domination of the state by contracting its functions to the representation of civil society while at the same time the disciplinary procedures of society are being tightened.”50 Wolin would come to call this death-hold of political life, Economic Polity, and later Inverted Totalitarianism.51The true loss at the advent of Economic Polity is the receding of a truly democratic political culture. As Wolin writes, “The persisting conflict between democratic egalitarianism and an economic system that has rapidly evolved into another inegalitarian regime is a reminder that capitalism is not solely a matter of production, exchange, and reward. It is a regime in which culture, politics and economy tend toward a seamless whole, a totality.”52 In Economic Polity all other social and political relationships are subverted and dominated by economic relationships that are shorn of their material and human roots. The economy is a form of political power that is completely autonomous, that simultaneously totalizes its power while running straight through previously thought secure limits of community, government, or territory. Economic Polity is politics without the polis and dominated by a corrupt political culture.Yet, the archaic specter of a politics of counter-memory, of fugitive democracy, haunts our current Economic Polity.53 The constitutional and institutionalizing roots of Economic Polity attempt to arbitrarily establish the “rules of the game” of modern politics.54 The power of fugitive democracy is the genuinely alternative political vision imaged in the historical counter-memory of the demos. This memory appears out of time and out of synch with postmodern power. It is a “new interpretative mode of understanding that is able to connect past and present experience.”55 Fugitive democracy seeks to play a whole new political game. It is “attuned to slower rhythms” than Economic Polity. Fugitive democracy takes time. Political judgements and democratic deliberation that lead to “the likelihood of durability” emerges in its own time.56 As we will come to see, however, I doubt Wolin's sense of fugitivity actually resonates with the slow and patient work of radical democracy in BBCO.The metaphor of “players in a game” helps redirect my vision of radical democracy. The “rules” of our current political “game” are set by Economic Polity and rigged for corporate elites and ever-increasingly deregulated financial capital flows. In this political landscape, citizens are more like “players” gambling not only their labor but their moral, ethical, human, and spiritual health.57 Wolin's fugitive democracy changes the game by archaic moves, recalling democracy as grounded in a demos, and a democratic political culture.A politics of tending is crucial to the democratic political culture at the heart of Wolin's fugitive democracy. Wolin attempts to make explicit the importance of pluralism and difference in a politics of tending. Tending implies attention to and care for “historical and biographical beings,” Wolin writes, and so “proper attendance requires attentiveness to differences between beings within the same general class.”58 Wolin sees tending to differences as inherent to fugitive democracy because it implies discussion and dialogue, contestation and negotiation. Differences do not remain static because fugitive democracy is “a recurrent aspiration” for the poli