Getting Beyond Choice - 'Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement Among Grass-roots Activists' - Review

Commonweal, Oct 12, 2001 by Eugene McCarraher

Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics
Styles of Engagement among Grass-roots Activists
Stephen Hart
University of Chicago Press, $17, 292 pp.

I supported Ralph Nader and the Green Party last fall, and in the process attended a few fundraisers, rallied with other partisans at a Nader speech, and walked door-to-door peddling brochures, pamphlets, and an exhortation to anyone who engaged me in conversation.

The Bush people were polite and occasionally bemused. (Thanks, useful idiot, I could hear them thinking.) Most of the Gore people (working-class Democrats whose support for Al was tepid and tactical) bemoaned the lack of a genuine alternative. They admired Nader and supported many Green positions--especially a living wage and national health insurance--but were candid enough to admit that they were voting for Gore out of fear.

Other Gore supporters, usually upscale "liberals" and "progressives," considered me and my ilk a loopy pestilence. How dare you "give the country to Bush," went the refrain. Besides, stocks are up, jobs are plentiful, "choice" is still safe--so what are you tree-hugging spoilers so sore about?

The reactions of "liberals" taught me a lot about what Stephen Hart calls "the cultural dilemmas of progressive politics." While Gore's liberal faithful weren't "activists," for the most part, their combination of moral fervor and technocratic haughtiness pointed to some of the broader and deeper problems that bedevil American progressives.

Hart, a sociologist at SUNY-Buffalo and an experienced activist, has explored the terrain of progressive politics before. In What Does the Lord Require? (1992), he examined how American Christians variously translate the gospel into positions on economic issues, from "democratic capitalism" to "democratic Socialism." In his new book, Hart addresses the larger issue of culture and politics. Relying extensively on histories and interviews with members of two organizations--the Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH) and Amnesty International (AI)--he attempts to identify the "cultural work" that promotes or inhibits progressive politics.

Hart believes progressives have become lazy or inept at the work of linking their struggles for social justice and civil liberties to the most powerful currents in American culture: religion (or "faith" as Hart also calls it) and liberal individualism. That "cultural work" involves balancing the competing claims of "expansive" modes of public discourse that cast particular struggles in the broadest moral and religious terms, and "constrained" styles that emphasize information and neutrality.

Progressives, Hart contends, have adopted a wonkish public style--a "constrained" one that puts "process over substance"--and eschewed more popular, forceful, expansive approaches of ritual and narrative. "Faith-based" or "congregation-based" organizers such as MICAH perform their cultural work more effectively and thus exemplify "a livelier set of cultural practices than most American social-justice movements." AI, on the other hand, provides a cautionary tale about the limits of secular activism.

Consisting of congregations rather than individuals, MICAH's membership organizes poor and working-class inhabitants of Milwaukee to fight for better housing, schools, and other social services. While most of its leaders appear to be Catholics, MICAH's practice is a model of ecumenism. Its ideology and agenda stem from an array of sources: Saul Alinsky's "back-of-the-yards" mobilizing; the "pedagogy of the oppressed" contained in liberation theology; and a more reformist Catholic social tradition currently embodied in the National Council of Catholic Bishops.

In addition to addressing bread-and-butter concerns, MICAH seeks to shape a public discussion that merges populism and religion. When organizing neighborhoods, activists--cultivated through "a kind of apostolic succession"--encourage residents to "define their concerns and needs, and the injustices they experience, themselves." MICAH's actions and its own gatherings become quasi-religious rituals that feature confrontations with the powers and principalities as well as personal testimonies that confirm the mission and devotion of the people.

MICAH also reinterprets the language of individualism by defining "self-interest" as the pursuit of health care, education, and other requirements of human flourishing. Overall, MICAH's conscious attention to the cultural form of public discussion--to "political action as dramaturgy"--explains its considerable clout in city politics.

Unlike MICAH, AI focuses on individual rights rather than social justice and proscribes discursive reliance on religion, appealing instead to the secularized human-rights tradition of the Enlightenment. Interestingly, the organization employs a similar dramaturgy and symbolic practice: vigils, letter and petition writing, a memorable logo (a candle wrapped in barbed wire). But because AI forgoes any philosophical justification of its causes and relies almost wholly on information, it has a hard time attracting and retaining recruits. "Newcomers seldom returned," Hart notes curtly, because their commitments were understood to be "random and private." Moreover, AI cannot speak religious languages that might have a broader and more powerful resonance. The conviction of AI activists about the transparent "obviousness" of their causes demonstrates to Hart their crippling (not to mention arrogant) inattention to the cultural work of educating public opinion.