Recovering Participatory Politics for the 21st Century

Back in the early days of Strong Towns, there was a vocal group of people that I found to be generous, patient, yet challenging to this engineer/planner searching for answers. Two in specific—Elias Crimm and Rebekah Grace Potts—went out of their way to encourage me, always hinting that there were deeper truths out there I was uncovering (and gently suggesting that I might need to abandon some of my dogmatism.)

Never scolding. Never condescending. Always forgiving. I remember being confused by their generous spirits since we had never met and, as far as I knew, we weren’t likely to.

That changed when I started being invited to speak across the country. On one occasion, I found myself in Michigan and was able to meet Grace when she generously hosted my traveling road show in Saginaw. Elias would host me a few years later in Valparaiso, which was a fantastic event. We even did a podcast together! But that’s rushing things.

Elias and Grace were part of a network of thinkers that would ultimately, in 2013, coalesce into something they call Solidarity Hall. From their website:

When we began, a group of us writers came up with what we felt was a special recipe for a group blog. Based mostly on our own enthusiasms, we wanted to combine localism, various forms of radical Christianity, agrarianism (particularly in the Wendell Berry version), new urbanism, and a nascent movement called the New Economy. We didn’t worry too much about whether or how exactly these ingredients worked together.

The ingredients are still coming together in a way that is fascinating and beautiful. Just look at their three most recent posts: (1) On Taking Sides with Ivan Illich, a give and take discussion among Solidarity Hall writers about the Catholic philosopher; (2) Why You Should Be Reading Astra Taylor, which is essential a book review of such eloquence I bought the book; and the most recent (3) No Lives Matter Until Black Lives Matter, a reflective that strays far enough outside the contemporary white-male discourse to be really valuable.

I really love what is going on at Solidarity Hall. They were generous enough to do a web broadcast series with us and, on brand, thoughtfully wrote about it. I’m going to quote from Strong Towns and our Social Infrastructure Deficit at length because it will give Strong Towns readers a sense of both the depth of thought and what I mean by their way of generously nudging me down a path towards a different kind of intellectual enlightenment:

Strong Towns could be described as an initiative to recover the traditional way of building habitat, including its “spooky wisdom.” (Chuck has a wonderful section early in his book on strolling around the streets of Pompeii and “reading” what lessons in human scale and sociability the little retail shops are telling us.)

What I’m suggesting here is that Strong Towns is already close to embracing the master idea within which habitat is a component: the traditional way of political economy.

A helpful term for that master idea is the social economy— i.e., the traditional (i.e., pre-nineteenth-century) model of markets embedded in and controlled by the larger society, as opposed to our system of a capitalistic economy which has disembedded much of civil society in pursuit of efficiency and centralization. This, surely, is a key driver of our newly-exposed fragility.

To recover the social economy—to re-embed markets within it—we need to think about recovering a very old kind of participatory politics, the kind that focuses not on building up self-aggrandizing parties but on creating the self-governing groups that are a kind of school for Strong Citizens.

A few years ago, I was talking to a young black activist about his neighborhood group and their frustrated dealings with Chicago City Hall. “I get it,” I said to him at one point, “you guys are just asking for a place at the table.” He paused and then said, “Actually no. We’ve pretty much decided to go build our own table.”

He was talking about something political but non-partisan—and not about conventional party politics at all. I would describe it as dual power, the global rise of bottom-up neighborhood/civic governance sometimes known as fearless cities or insurgent cities, within a movement called municipalism. It’s the very old tradition of self-government which the Founders experienced in their New England town hall meetings, with roots going back to the citizen assemblies of fifth-century Athens.

Thank you to all my friends at Solidarity Hall. I’m grateful for all you are doing. Please, keep patiently nudging me in the right direction. 

You should follow Solidarity Hall on Facebook, Twitter, and on their website. Also, they are doing a free webinar tomorrow on how to build self-governing communities like the ones described above. Don’t miss it.

Cover image via Flickr.

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