Civic populism

Harry Boyte guest authors on Civic Populism at Peter Levine's blog. Please read, discuss.

Civic populism addresses the dysfunctions of a Me First Culture because it challenges the technocratic politics--domination by detached experts--that generates such a culture. Technocracy, spreading through society like a silent disease, presents itself as an objective set of truths, practices, and procedures. But it turns people into abstract categories. It decontextualizes problems from civic life. It privatizes the world and creates a pervasive sense of scarcity. It profoundly erodes a culture of equal respect.

Civic populism counters the impersonal, hierarchical patterns of technocracy while transforming the Me First Culture of isolation, fear, consumerism and scarcity that is technocracy's degraded progeny. Civic populism retrieves citizen politics as the way we negotiate the plural, relational, narrative qualities of the human condition in order to solve problems and live together without violence. It revitalizes civic cultures of mediating institutions that have narrowed in recent decades to providing services to needy clients and consumers. It generates a spirit of abundance by tapping the enormous civic energies and talents now stifled by technocracy. Finally, civic populism cultivates civic habits and outlook among professionals and amateurs alike--an understanding of ourselves as citizens working alongside our fellow citizens, neither above nor below.