In recent years, “populism” has been claimed by left and right alike. According to the late David Broder of The Washington Post, Sarah Palin issued “a pitch-perfect recital of the populist message.”1 Progressives contest the label. “To rebuild its coalition, the left must return to its populist roots,” argues Eric Alterman in The New York Times.2 E.J. Dionne, noting the “kaleidoscope of populisms,” calls for “a new seriousness about what Populism meant for our past and means for our present” in Our Divided Political Heart.3 This symposium answers Dionne's call.Populism has two dimensions. One involves the language of change. Populist movements are culturally based, not structurally based. “The people” is not historically indeterminate, but it is a different category than “class” or “interest groups,” a different idiom than the charts and statistics that dominate in conventional social science, and a different politics than election campaigns with poll-tested sound bites. Populism challenges not only concentrations of wealth and power, but also the culturally uprooted, individualized, rationalist thinking characteristic of professional systems, left and right. Populist movements are narrative. They grow from the sense that an elite is endangering the values, identities, and practices of a culturally constituted people, its memories, origins, and ways of life. “People” is understood through language, stories, symbols, traditions, foods, music, and memories. A people has a moment of birth, sacred texts, foundational spaces, as well as dual, even contending identities, as conveyed in W.E.B. Du Bois' great work, The Two Souls of Black Folks.4 An inclusive, egalitarian account of “peoplehood” is at the heart of Dionne's treatment.My first serious engagement with such populism came when I was working as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. One day I was caught by five men and a woman, members of the Klu Klux Klan. They accused me of being a “communist and a Yankee.” I replied, “I'm no Yankee—my family has been in the South since before the Revolution. And I'm not a communist. I'm a populist. I believe that blacks and poor whites should join together to do something about the big shots who keep us divided.” For a few minutes we talked—with animation which amazed (and greatly comforted) me about the possibilities of populism. Then they let me go. Learning of the incident, Martin Luther King told me that he identified with populism and assigned me to organize poor whites. From 1966 to 1972, with time spent at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I organized in Durham North Carolina, among textile mill workers, inspired by the intelligence and decency of the people and heartened by their interests in allying with blacks. Their stories contrasted sharply with the pejorative comments about “rednecks” which I heard from leftists at Duke. The contrast produced abiding skepticism about ideological politics.I saw community organizing as about not simply bread and butter issues—schools, housing, jobs—but also about the meaning of “peoplehood.” My views grew from SCLC's Citizenship Education Program (CEP), which organized citizenship schools across the south. These taught literacy, countering the use of literacy tests to disenfranchise blacks, and also skills of collective action, framed with the question, “What is citizenship?” Citizenship schools located the fight for a democratic a way of life in the possibilities of America, drawing on founding ideals of equality, freedom and democratic self-government. The movement's belief in American democratic possibilities drew on democratic ideals of “peoplehood,” which, as the late political theorist John Schaar described, creates a rich repertoire of themes for those seeking to make change, especially in America. “We love our land—America!” read the Citizenship School Workbook. The movement's democratic and open patriotism can be contrasted with bellicose nationalism and legalistic definitions of citizenship on the one hand and the “citizen-of-the-world” model widespread in liberal education on the other. Noting that others in the Western Hemisphere also had claim to “American identity,” the authors added, “In Africa and Asia new nations are being born as people of color everywhere are demanding the freedom to decide their destiny.”5I also learned another dimension of populism in the movement—“the people” as an agent of change. SCLC worked closely with allies in the executive branch and Congress, as well as state and local governments. But the movement based its power on the American belief in citizen self-organization, expressed in the freedom song “We are the ones we've been waiting for.”6 This emphasis on civic agency, neglected in treatments like Michael Kazin's The Populist Persuasion, which focus on populism as rhetoric, has begun to appear in mainstream definitions.7Americans' spirit of civic agency amazed Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer, in his travels in the 1830s. He noted that American citizens engaged in self-directed action to accomplish multiple tasks undertaken by governments in Europe. Civic agency also animated democratic movements in America. As Robert Bellah put it, “political parties [in America] often come in on the coattails of successful popular movements rather than leading them.”8 In The Story of American Freedom, Eric Foner shows this dynamic in the 1930s. “It was the Popular Front, not the mainstream Democratic party, that forthrightly sought to popularize the idea that the country's strength lay in diversity and tolerance, a love of equality, and a rejection of ethnic prejudice and class privilege.”9Learning more of populist history especially from Lawrence Goodwyn, I came to believe that the “new populism” advocated by the community organizing leader Monsignor Geno Baroni was not a cover for “stealth socialism,” as is charged by today's conservatives.10 Rather, populism is best conceived as a democratizing, non-ideological politics. From this vantage the question posed in 1906 by the German socialist Werner Sombart, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” is a distraction, preoccupying intellectuals through the twentieth century, reappearing in 2009 when the late Tony Judt used it in a lecture about growing inequality and public squalor, continuing in the New York Review and elsewhere.11 Focusing on what is “missing” in American politics eclipses the populist alternative. This tradition has intellectual wellsprings, such as the legacy of Carey McWilliams described by Derek Barker.12 It also has a political economy—small property as a source of independence, different than the class consciousness of the left, as Gerald Taylor demonstrates.13 The populist ideal of independence, tied to cooperation, is what creates the “individualist communitarianism” described by Dionne as the heart of American culture. Populist politics builds popular power through cooperative action. Unlike left wing skepticism about institutions such as congregations, ethnic groups, and families, populism develops the possibilities in communities bound together in shared destiny. Its animus is a faith in the talents of everyday citizens.Focus on agency today necessarily has a multi-dimensional view of power, concentrated not only in what is called “neoliberalism”—corporate giants, financial institutions, and the global market—but also in invisible expert domination, a default positivism woven into the social landscape. The French strikes of May, 1968, surfaced the problem. As Alain Tourain described, “The enemy is no longer a person of a social category, the monarch or the bourgeoisie. He is the totality of the depersonalized, ‘rationalized,’ bureaucratized modes of power” in modern society. Or as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “What is happening today is the ‘great mutation’ from an older bourgeois to a new technocratic society [that] creates conflict and dissidence not only at its margins but at its centre.”14 In the late 1970s, my debates with Michael Harrington and other progressives about “socialism versus populism” revolved around this question of technocratic power. As Xolela Mangcu shows in his essay about the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in South Africa, these debates also roiled the Global South.15 The BCM's challenge to the triumphalism of the European Enlightenment dramatically illuminates the populist challenge to modernism and technocracy.Jane Addams, in an essay published in 1902, warned about the emergence of a class of detached professionals, “experts” as she described them, who saw themselves outside the life of the people. In her view, detached expertise reinforced existing hierarchies based on wealth and power and created new forms of hierarchical power that threatened the everyday life of communities.18 Her warnings anticipated what Xolela Mangcu calls “technocratic creep” in its various forms, from polarizing politics which divides the world into innocents on the one side and evil doers on the other, to an assumption, rarely deeply interrogated but nonetheless pervasive in our time, that trustworthy knowledge requires an outsider stance of “objectivity” and “distance.”19Polarizing politics is one dramatic effect whose techniques include the door-to-door canvass, robo-calls, direct mail fundraising, internet mobilizations, and other mass communications methods. These build on ancient human tendencies to demonize those outside one's own worlds, as well as modern tendencies, fed by inventions like the printing press, to see those outside “imagined communities” of nationhood, ethnicity, religion, partisan politics and other differences in antagonistic ways. At times, as in the abolition movement, polarizing approaches have had democratizing consequences.20 But polarizing methods have taken “us versus them” to new levels of civic damage as well as psychological sophistication, using advanced communications techniques based on a formula: find an enemy to demonize, define the issue as good versus evil, stir up emotion with an inflammatory script that shuts down critical thought, and convey the idea that those who champion the victims will come to the rescue. Mobilizing and polarizing techniques based on Manichean messages have spread across the world with global telecommunications. In the US, they dominate across the political spectrum, a signature of mass society that conceives of people as frozen into categories and market niches. Though they originated in modern American politics on the left, theorists on the far right have found them immensely useful. Thus Jeffrey Bell argues in The Case for Polarizing Politics, that divisive social issues are key to Republican success because they appeal to working people's deep-seated worries, across racial lines, about the erosion of the social fabric.21Broad-based community organizing incubates “a different kind of politics” in a specific location: community organizations made up of diverse institutions especially, but mainly religious congregations. These are sometimes described as “universities of public life,” cultivating a politics of the common good with attendant practices and habits. In such settings, people from different vantages, backgrounds, and interests negotiate diverse interests and visions of the good. As Bretherton puts it, “The political vision [which] organizing encapsulates holds that if a group is directly contributing to the common work of defending, tending, and creating the commonweal then they deserve recognition as a vital part and co-labourer within the broader body politic.”22 Such politics cultivates a sense of nuance, ambiguity, complexity, and the ironic, even tragic qualities of the human condition far different than reductionist simplicities of polarizing politics. It understands human agents in narrative terms, as dynamic storytellers and meaning-makers. This points toward possibilities for creating broad cross-partisan alliances about issues, such as cultural degradation, which are now almost entirely the province of conservative politics.Such possibilities were suggested in a classic of contemporary organizing, Organizing for Family and Congregation, written in 1978. The document conveys the discontents of a hypercompetitive, consumerist, and degraded culture: families struggling to meet bills, community pressures like drugs, pornography, crime, violence, overscheduling, and hidden technocratic messages. “Television tells people how to eat, how to look, how to love and how to feel.” The overall battle, in contemporary society, thus amounts to a “values war” over the question “Who will parent our children? Who will teach them, train them, nurture them? … Will this parenting take place in a strictly secular setting where the system is said to be the solution, or time is money, or profit is the sole standard of judgment? Or will the true teachers and prophets—parents and grandparents, pastors and rabbis and lay leaders—win this war … ”23 From a vantage which appreciates the survival of civic agency in a technocratic world, such universities of public life are more than welcome. But there is a defensive quality about BBCO that thwarts their potential. These groups create oases of democratic politics in a desert of technocratic society, but they are pessimistic about democratic re-vegetation.A story illustrates.When Lonnie Bunch, now director of the National Museum of African American History for the Smithsonian in Washington, became director of the Chicago Historical Society a decade ago he met with Ed Chambers, lead organizer of United Power, the IAF affiliate in Chicago, and director of the IAF network. “I said I wanted to partner with them in changing the public story of Chicago,” Bunch told me. “I wanted them to help me shift public understanding of Chicago's history from an elite narrative to a plural, citizen story that could convey the richness and diversity of working peoples' contributions to the city.” Chambers replied, “We don't do things like that.”24This refusal of larger cultural struggle is embodied in BBCO's theory of power. “Power … comes in two basic forms, organized people and organized money,” argues Mike Gecan, director of New York Metro IAF.25 By putting “organized people” in touch with political leaders and “organized money,” citizen groups develop highly interactive patterns of power. Yet this framework neglects to acknowledge power based on control over the flow of information, communications, professional practices, and cultural productions—what can be called knowledge power. If knowledge power operates everywhere, it centrally shapes the cultural apparatus where it is in often open struggle with concentrated money, the power of capital. The cultural apparatus includes institutions such as higher education and schools, entertainment and communications industries, professional associations, and the intellectual life of a society.Sometimes the omission is obvious. Gecan's analysis of people and money is confounded by the example of Nehemiah Homes Project of the East Brooklyn Churches in New York, where coverage in the New York Times and on local network television proved crucial to its success.26 Sometimes, the omission is subtle. Gecan touts “relational workers”—service providers such as teachers and health professionals—as the heart of a democratic society, making a sharp contrast with government and business. But seeing these workers as “pre-political” because they are concerned with helping, he ignores the highly unequal power relationships between professionals and their clients or customers which are pervasive in helping professions.27 Anyone who has sought to translate organizing into such settings encounters this “technocratic creep,” and quickly comes up against the invisible exclusions and hierarchies of positivist knowledge power. It is worth recalling the organizing for cultural change that has been lost.In 1950 Baker Brownell published The Human Community, a jeremiad against the world which he had just entered as a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. “Truth is more than a report,” he said. “It is an organization of values. Efficiency is more than a machine; it is a human consequence.” Brownell argued that the professional classes, captivated by technique, method, specialization, and abstract modes of thought, had lost sight of face-to-face relations. “It is the persistent assumption of those who are influential … that large-scale organization and contemporary urban culture can somehow provide suitable substitutes for the values of the human communities that they destroy,” he declared. 30Brownell had worked during the depression years in Montana and elsewhere with the cooperative extension system, a rural organizing program connected to the United States Department of Agriculture and to land grant colleges and universities. In those years, such schools were often called “democracy's colleges,” a term to which we will return, animated by a vibrant conception of democracy as a way of life. Extension work of this kind was based on what can be called “citizen professionalism,” professionals doing public work infused with respect for local knowledge. Thus soil conservation scientists were told “the community's knowledge is more important than yours,” despite the obvious contributions they made to contour farming. Extension workers, advocating “rural democracy,” helped communities organize cooperatives, soil conservation districts, rural electrification programs, business incubation, and a vital “little country theater movement,” celebrating, democratizing, and tapping the talents of communities across the Midwest.Brownell's criticisms of mass society and its technocratic culture bear striking resemblance to those made of modern mass society by Saul Alinsky, the founding figure in BBCO, a generation later in Rules for Radicals. Alinsky fulminates against “our alleged educational system.” As he puts it, “The products of this system have been trained to emphasize order, logic, rational thought, direction, and purpose … it results in a structured, static, closed, rigid, mental makeup.”31 Here, Alinsky is arguing something akin to Mangcu and Polanyi's focus on culture as a web of meaning and power in the face of hardship, neglected by the rationalist, modernist bent of the conventional academy, which has a strong affinity with what Ralph Milliband called the modernist rupture “with all forms of tradition.”32Both Brownell and Saul Alinsky were shaped by the struggle against fascism which for the first time, in any large scale way brought “culture back in” among progressives seeking change. The struggle against fascism took the form on the left as the Popular Front against Fascism. The movement was also broader than the left, growing from a tradition of small property as the foundation of civic independence which Gerald Taylor depicts vividly. As Foner has observed, the relative absence of a strong socialist or labor party did not signal a void, but rather the presence of something else. “Precapitalist culture … was the incubator of resistance to capitalist development in the United States,” wrote Foner: “These movements inherited an older republican tradition hostile to large accumulation of property, but viewing small property as the foundation of economic and civic autonomy … Not the absence of non-liberal ideas but the persistence of a radical vision resting on small property inhibited the rise of socialist ideologies.”33 This theme of civic autonomy created a penchant for skepticism of bureaucratic institutions and top down control.In the 1930s and 1940s the populist tradition, emphasizing independence, became fused among progressives with the Popular Front, which involved a shift from the ‘Third Period” struggle for socialism, a polarizing politics of left versus right, to center-left coalition building. Progressives also substituted the category of “the people” as a change agent for the left focus on “the working class.”34 Such alliance-building politics, a world-wide phenomenon, sheds light on the emergence of “neo-Aristotelian” political theory advanced by Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and Bernard Crick, who were shaped by these years. The movement against fascism, especially its anti-Stalinist elements, shaped key figures in the black freedom movement such as A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Myles Horton, and Bayard Rustin, as well as mainstream political leaders such as Hubert Humphrey.This movement included organizing on an enormous scale in the cultural apparatus. Such efforts generated cultural and professional unions, challenged dominant public narratives, and framed on the ground organizing of unions and cooperatives with a more pluralist, democratic, and cooperative vision of America's promise, often using the language of democracy as “a way of life,” not simply elections. In The Big Tomorrow, Lary May describes the ways in which a group of cultural workers in the film industry, led by Will Rogers, generated a sustained movement to change the values and images of “The American Dream,” and had considerable success until the McCarthy repression of the 1950s. In Cultural Front, Michael Denning traces organizing among “cultural workers” of many kinds during the New Deal, including journalists, screenwriters and artists, scholars and educators, and union organizers. Cultural organizers constituted what he calls an “historic bloc” of forces addressing a myriad of issues but united by goals such as the struggle for racial and economic justice, the fight against fascism, and the effort not only to defend but also to deepen democracy. The populist concept of “the people” became the central actor. As Denning puts it, “‘The People’ became the central trope of left culture [in the Popular Front], the imagined ground of political and cultural activity.” This involved a fierce contest over the meaning of “the American Dream” and “America” itself. “The figure of ‘America’ became a locus for ideological battles over the trajectory of U.S. history, the meaning of race, ethnicity, and region in the United States, and the relation between ethnic nationalism, Americanism, and internationalism … less a sign of ‘harmony’ than of the social conflicts of the depression.”35Alinsky's first book, Reveille for Radicals, published in 1946, crystallized insights of the movement against fascism, with which he explicitly identified. Of particular importance, he emphasized the need for popular organizations to be rooted in and work through local cultures. “The foundation of a People's Organization is in the communal life of the local people,” argued Alinsky. “Therefore the first stage in the building of a People's Organization is the understanding of the life of a community, not only in terms of the individual's experiences, habits, values and objectives but also from the point of view of the collective habits, experiences, customs, controls and values of the whole group, the community traditions.” Efforts at democratic change must always be undertaken from the inside out. “The starting of a People's Organization is not a matter of personal choice. You start with the people, their traditions, their prejudices, their habits, their attitudes, and all of those other circumstances that make up their lives.” To know a community “is to know the values, objectives, customs, sanctions, and the taboos of these groups. It is to know them not only in terms of their relationships and attitudes toward one another but also in terms of what relationship all of them have toward the outside … To understand the traditions of a people is … to ascertain those social forces which argue for constructive democratic action as well as those which obstruct democratic action.”36This is a brilliant formulation of what can be called a populist cultural politics which discovers and develops democratic possibilities in radically diverse cultures, including those marginalized by Enlightenment-centered and “WASP” norms and values. But in the 1960s, Alinsky severed the connection between community organizing and the cultural organizing necessary to develop broader democratic possibilities. As his biographer Sandy Horwitt has described, Alinsky rejected place as an organizing site. “For more than a decade, as people scattered to the suburbs, he had talked about the declining importance of the old geographical neighborhood where people had lived, worked, and played.”37 More generally, in the 1960s, in reaction against what he saw as the hyperbolic rhetoric and posturing of the New Left, Alinsky depicted American mass culture in sweeping terms, denuded of cultural complexity. His last book, Rules for Radicals, is full with tactical wisdom (which has made it, ironically, a favorite manual among some of the same conservatives who excoriate “populism”). But the spirit of the American democratic tradition which animated Reveille for Radicals and its hope for transformative democratic change disappeared. While he criticizes educational institutions and the “structured, static, closed, rigid, mental makeup” they produce, in language echoed by Chambers' sweeping dismissal of academics 20 years later, he offers no hope for changing them.Broad-based organizers in the Industrial Areas Foundation and other groups see themselves going beyond the late Alinsky in exploring the democratic resources of faith traditions. But they accept his fatalistic assumption that the broader society cannot be changed. They thereby cede the terrain of culture-making and knowledge production. This has led to an absence of BBCO from elections, the professions, higher education, intellectual life, and the struggle over the meaning of the nation and the identities of its people.In the first instance, accepting Alinsky's move away from local communities as a site of democratic cultural development and his inattention to knowledge power has led to neglect of strategies for seriously countering degraded cultural dynamics described in Organizing for Families and Congregations. Interestingly, Barack Obama identified one aspect of the problem early on, reflecting on his organizing experiences in an essay in After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, in 1990. “Most community organizing groups practice … a ‘consumer advocacy’ approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities … that exist in communities.”38 Obama's focus on the limits of “consumer advocacy,” learned from his mentor, John McKnight, co-founder of the Gamaliel Foundation, one of the BBCO networks, led him to work with the Asset Based Community Development institute. But in our work and the work of our partners, we have seen how bringing into explicit focus knowledge power and cultural organizing provides resources for pushing back against the degraded cultural dynamics described in Organizing for Families and Congregations.Thus, William Doherty, Tai Mendenhal, Shonda Craft, and their colleagues at the University of Minnesota's Citizen Professional Center have pioneered in the practices and theory of citizen professionalism, which adapts BBCO organizing practices and public work concepts of productive citizenship to family and health professions. Their citizen professional model begins with the premise that solving complex problems requires many sources of knowledge, and “the greatest untapped resource for improving health and social well-being is the knowledge, wisdom, and energy of individuals, families, and communities who face challenging issues in their everyday lives.” The Citizen Professional Center has generated multiple partnerships including suburban movements of families working to tame overscheduled, consumerist lives, out of control birthday parties, and advertising messages which hypersexualize little girls; an African American Citizen Fathers Project fostering positive fathering models and practices against dominant cultural messages; a new project to change civil service practices into public work; and a pilot with Health Partners Como Clinic, called the Citizen Health Care Home, which stresses personal and family responsibility for one's own health and opportunities for patient leadership development and co-responsibility for health.39 Similarly, in Public Achievement, the youth civic learning and empowerment initiative developed two decades ago by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship in which young people choose public issues to work on, cultural issues regularly surface, ranging from bullying to pejorative images of young people in the mass culture, sexual harassment, substance abuse, and teen suicide.40 Politically, such work offers crucial resources for a democratic, broad, inclusive alternative to the polarizing politics of reactionary groups or extreme left wing groups alike.Secondly, addressing cultural organizing and knowledge power challenges the iron-clad distinction between organizing in BBCO and participation in election campaigns (with a few notable exceptions, such as Maurice Glassman, a political theorist active in the IAF affiliate London Citizens, whose “Blue Labour” populist vision has become central to the debates on the British Labor Party). It recognizes the obvious: for all their degraded qualities, elections remain a unique arena where people debate and consider overarching directions about their future, an arena full of opportunities to talk about the nature of citizenship, the meaning of politics, and how public problems are to be solved. Every major organizing network makes a distinction between “building broad-based organizations,” which they define as their aim, and “movements,” which they equate with late sixties' protests, ephemeral, thin, and tran