1. Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life
Principal Investigator: Harry C. Boyte, University of Minnesota

Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life
Harry C. Boyte, University of Minnesota

Project Summary
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(Partially supported by CIRCLE funding; forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)

Book Description by Boyte:

Everyday Politics rests on the conviction that politics holds resources to reverse the negative directions of our society -- to "save a culture from itself," in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The question is what a redemptive politics might look like.

For all the travails of formal politics – soundbites, sectarian posturing, and attack ads -- America in the last generation has also been a laboratory for creative civic experiments. These have generated an everyday politics of negotiation and collaboration that is more concerned with solving problems than with apportioning blame along ideological lines. This different kind of politics is rooted in local cultures, not only in geographic localities but also in the cultures of institutions where people encounter each other on a regular, face-to-face basis. It is philosophical, based on values such as participation, justice, and plurality, not ideological. It has grown under the surface of mainstream attention across lines of partisan and other differences around significant public problems, from housing shortages to environmental hazards.

Everyday Politics argues that such hands-on, accessible, and rooted politics is the ground for an alternative to politics as usual and the reconnection of citizens and public life. Everyday politics holds potential to reunite two kinds of populism -- progressive challenges to corporate power and conservative challenges to liberal professionals -- that now bitterly divide America into “blue regions” and “red regions.” In the process it changes today’s populism from protest to positive vision of a democratic way of life. It begins to re-grow a nonpartisan root system for a deeper meaning and practice of citizenship, as well as more productive political parties. It can generate the civic energy and talent to address the multiplying problems across the world that government alone cannot solve, but that cannot be solved without government. It is the way to democratize institutions, from settlements to schools, political parties to public health clinics, unions to universities, where a narrow, meritocratic professionalism now dominates.

To develop and spread such a politics means seeing citizens as co-creators of a democratic way of life, developing their power and skills to engage a world of mounting problems. Everyday politics, in large terms, melds interest-group bargaining with civic ideals. And it requires emphasizing the work of politics. Politics is more than a fight about who gets what. Everyday politics highlights the making of the “what,” as well: the public wealth on which we all depend and for which we are all responsible.