Dan Kemmis on Democratic Action in "Beyond National Democracy"
Like most Rocky Mountain communities, Missoula was growing rapidly throughout the 1990s, and the question of how to accommodate so many newcomers without destroying the very qualities of livability that had brought them here presented the most pressing challenge to our ability to manage our community’s destiny. The newcomers tended to be wealthier than the median Missoulian, which meant that they were bidding up land and housing prices and making it steadily more difficult for long-time Missoulians to stay here.
For many of those hard-pressed families, escalating medical costs, the failure of the Clinton national health-care plan, and the fact that many employers provided no health-care benefits only compounded the impact of rising housing prices on modest incomes. In some cases, the incomes were vanishing altogether, as Missoula experienced the economic metamorphosis that was sweeping through so many western communities in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A region that had depended on resource extraction as its economic mainstay suddenly found itself assaulted by global economic forces that, in the case of Missoula and dozens of other old timber towns, resulted in a steady pulse of sawmill closures and worker layoffs. Missoula still struggles with these problems, and even if it could solve them all, there would just be a new crop of problems to address. But in terms of democratic vitality, I draw considerably more hope than despair from what I’ve seen this community accomplish over the last 15 to 20 years. Sawmills are still closing, but Missoula’s economy is far more diversified than ever before, largely because business, civic, and government leaders have recognized that quality of life has replaced resource extraction as the principal driver of prosperity. And they have acted intelligently and collectively on that recognition.
Unfortunately, the more livable a community becomes, the greater the pressure on housing prices. So Missoula still struggles with affordable housing; but the last few years have seen a growing number of very creative solutions, often the product of partnerships among nonprofit leaders, bankers, builders, and public officials. And the same kind of resourceful public-private collaboration has produced a highly effective (although still not adequate) program for providing medical care to uninsured families.
While I necessarily put this story in the context of my tenure as mayor—and thereby run the risk of sounding as if I think I had much to do with it—the fact is that the one clearest, strongest, and most democratic lesson that I learned from my tenure in the mayor’s office was simply this: when it came to addressing the community’s challenges and seizing its opportunities, Missoula was several thousand times smarter than I was ever going to be. It is that lesson, more than anything else, that continues to sustain my hope for democracy. And nothing enlivens that hope more than my daily walks along the downtown riverfront. So let me return to that imaginary stroll with Robert Bellah and anyone else who might want to join us.
Just a hundred yards or so down the river from our lunch spot we would have stopped to watch a handful of kayakers testing their skills against the current of the Clark Fork River as it rushes over a row of boulders creating a white-capped wave below our viewing platform. Since leaving the mayor’s office, I’ve served on the board of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, which has provided some of the funds for this latest installment in Missoula’s love affair with the river at the heart of town. But I know that most of the funds and most of the planning and momentum behind the project had come from the efforts of the kayakers themselves.
Here was just one more in a long, long series of citizen-driven projects that I’ve been lucky enough to watch, and sometimes nudge along, as they unfolded. Like so many of them, this one had taken years to bring to fruition, but unlike most of them, this project depended almost entirely on the passion, the resourcefulness, the perseverance of Missoulians young enough to want to dare the river to upend their kayaks. Because it took so long for them to navigate the seemingly endless shoals of permits, construction contracts, rising prices, more fundraising, more bureaucracy than they ever dreamed existed, I had a chance to watch these youngsters, who had only wanted to be kayakers, become citizens as well. I saw them develop civic virtues like patience and perseverance, teamwork, a capacity for give-and- take, the ability to stay in relationship with people whose seeming wrongheadedness and narrow-mindedness they could barely endure. And then, because my office overlooks the river from the other bank, I had the pleasure of watching the truckloads of boulders arrive, watched the wave emerge, watched the kayakers joyously reap the fruit of their labors while, every day, dozens of non-kayaking Missoulians paused on this viewing platform, delighting in one more way that their neighbors had made this a better place to live.
How long has it been now since we as a nation took on a big challenge in a way that we could unabashedly celebrate? I don’t mean to deny that there may still be an occasional project worthy of our best national efforts (health care comes to mind), but we need only consider the abysmal record of a recent national initiative like No Child Left Behind to be reminded that for most contemporary problems, the answer is not likely to be a national one.
There are several reasons that this now seems to be the case. One is that our legal system has moved steadily in the direction of requiring more and more procedural safeguards as part of the machinery of any governmental initiative. These safeguards are eminently well intentioned; in fact, they are motivated by unimpeachable democratic instincts to provide equal access of all citizens to decision-making processes, and evenhanded treatment of all, once the decisions are made. No democrat can quarrel with these objectives, and I wouldn’t dream of trying. But the end result of decades of pursuing these democratic ideals has been elegantly summed up in Michael Sandel’s evocation of the “procedural republic”— a decision structure so bureaucratized, so mechanized, so incapable of responding to local particularities or even to most forms of common sense, that it drives more people away from public engagement than it brings into democratic play. The procedural republic can be found now at all levels of government, and our kayakers encountered enough of it here in Missoula to have almost caused them to abandon their dream.
But the smaller the government, the more pliable it remains to personal interaction, to people relating to each other more as neighbors than as cogs in a machine. The twentieth-century adage to “think globally, act locally” reflects still this dialectical exigency of our time. If anything, we are now moving to the next phase, where we recognize that we must develop the capacity to think and act at all appropriate scales— local, regional, national, continental, and global. This requires that a fair number of us must be prepared to think of ourselves as regional, continental, or global citizens, in addition to being citizens of our communities or nations.
The fact that this may require us to lower our expectations of national democracy should not discourage us. This is just one more episode in the eminently democratic process of disenthralling ourselves from one or another way of practicing democracy that is no longer in itself adequate to the complex task. At the very least, a reevaluation of the role of national democracy would give us an opportunity to cultivate more intentionally those democratic aspirations that we see at work here in the heart of Missoula and in hundreds of other communities across the country and around the world.
Daniel Kemmis, former Speaker and Minority Leader of the Montana House of Representatives and Mayor of Missoula, is Senior Fellow of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West. Read the whole article here.