Gianpaolo Baiocchi - The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life

Making a Difference in American Political Life

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Elizabeth A. Bennett,
Alissa Cordner, Peter Taylor Klein, and
Stephanie Savell

First published 2014 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, 1971
The civic imagination: making a difference in American political life / Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Elizabeth A. Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Taylor Klein, and Stephanie Savell.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61205-305-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-61205-314-1 (library eBook)
1. Civics. 2. Political participationUnited States. 3. Political cultureUnited States. 4. Social changeUnited States. I. Title.
JK1764.B35 2013
306.20973dc23

2013022330

ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-305-9 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-304-2 (hbk)

A few short months after we concluded the fieldwork for this book, the Occupy movement burst on the scene and captured Americans' collective imagination. For our research team, the idea of a movement for the 99 percent was intriguing, not only because we had been thinking and writing about creative forms of engagement but also because inequality resonated as one of our greatest concerns. Occupy, as the movement came to be called, was not unique; other such spontaneous democratic protests arose elsewhere in the world, from the Spanish Indignados, to Real Democracy Now! in England, to the Arab Spring. It felt, in some ways, that a common thread of hope, outrage, tenacity, and creativity was beginning to weave together populations that had previously seemed worlds apart. Despiteor perhaps because of Occupy's lack of a clear ideology, a specified platform, or a direct relationship with existing movements, "occupy" quickly became a one-word moniker for fighting structural injustice. Public encampmentsliterally, "occupations"sprang up nearly everywhere in the United States, as did symbolic and metaphorical iterations, like Occupy Rosh Hashanah and the more recent Occupy Sandy. Despite some early derision from members of the Democratic Party, and outright hostility from commentators on the political Right, Occupy appeared to capture Americans' need to have a more meaningful experience of democracy.

We were struck by how many of the issues raised by the Occupy movement resonated with our findings about contemporary political culture in America. In Providence, the site of our research, Occupy arrived a bit late, though a small cluster of tents remained in a city park for months, reminding passersby of the "99 percent." The city eventually deemed the occupation "unsafe" and "illegal." The city court mediated negotiations with the activists, who eventually agreed to disband the camp in exchange for a new day shelter for the homeless to be sponsored and hosted by a local Catholic church. Though controversial and complicated for the activists, the mayor's office dubbed the agreement a "peaceful end of Occupy Providence's encampment" (Taveras 2012). Indeed, Occupy activity soon dwindled, and attention returned to Rhode Island's severe economic recession and high rates of unemployment.

The sudden appearance of Occupy in Providence connects with several of the themes that were apparent throughout our fieldwork, and that we discuss in this book. In particular, we found that dissatisfaction with the political system is at the core of how Americans experience democracy, and that creative imagining of new futures is central to how they work to rebuild it. Americans' frequentand vehementdisavowal of politics is not necessarily a route to thin commitments or to avoid important issues. Instead, it creates space to rescue a sense of democratic possibility and renewal. That Occupy turned its back on traditional politics while creating a movement centered on addressing inequality and reinventing democracy should put to rest any notion that widespread disavowal of politics necessarily signals that democratic values have been lost.

Occupy's manifesto includes a stated mistrust of "the political elites of both parties that run this country." In this book we describe many activists who assert, "What I do isn't political," and that "politics is dirty and broken." Occupy may not see eye to eye on all things political with the neighborhood association leaders, tech-savvy entrepreneurs, or education activists we describe in this book, but this commonality should not be underestimated. Indeed, these shared sentiments hold unique possibilities in the current moment for unusual and unexpected alliances. As many a commentator has noted, Occupy's broad appeal won over sympathizers from beyond the usual suspects of movement activists. Even the business-oriented magazine Wired hired a writer to embed with Occupy camps around the country and file gritty (if mostly complementary) stories on the movement, its activists, and their clashes with the police (Norton 2012).

Occupy also shows that the relationship between citizens and the state is complicated, that inequality is hard to talk about, and that, even with the best of intentions, people can be blind to some aspects of social lifeall issues we examine

Our goal in writing this book has been to contribute to ongoing efforts to reinvigorate civic and political life, and to do so with attention to, and normative preference for, activism that begets greater equality. Many of our stylistic and analytic choices were underwritten by these greater intentions. We hope that the civic imaginations we describe will be fodder for debates in cultural sociology; yet we wish them to be even more consequential for engaged citizens and students trying to understand the potentials and limits of certain ways of seeing, judging, and imagining the world. Another one of the choices we made, which was somewhat at odds with our academic reflexes, was to rely on a mode of critique that literary theorist Eve Sedgwick (2003) calls "reparative." Both "reparative critique" and its more typical counterpart, "paranoid critique," unmask power and unveil domination. However, paranoid critique stops thereblinding us to possibility and impoverishing our ability to see agency. Paranoid modes are important and powerful, but Sedgwick invites us to also think about what the knowledge we produce can do and urges us to question the steadfastness of power that paranoid critiques assume. Our writing has rested, instead, on the assumption that a text may seek to unearth surprises, draw attention to creativity and agency, richly describe the world, and point to renewed possibilities and avenues for change. Finally, following in the path of normative philosophers and critical sociologists, we are unapologetic for injecting the value of equality into our analysis of what it means to revive and to live in a democracy revived by civic engagement.