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 conclusion—Things to come In the last ten years, I have found myself in the same situation over and over again. The recurring scene is a planning meeting: the people in the room are talking about how to mobilize citizens around a key issue in their community. The composition of the group varies from place to place, but it is usually a mix of public officials, long-time volunteers, neighborhood activists, and directors of nonprofit organizations. I am there to listen, and to describe what other communities have done. For the most part, the tone of the discussion is hopeful: these are capable , confident people, leaders who believe that they can make progress on an issue like education, crime prevention, or public finance. They are talking about the difficulties of getting citizens, public officials, and community organizations to work together. Suddenly, the conversation comes to a complete halt: someone turns to me and says, “You’ve got to understand —it’s different here. It’s political.” The response to this statement is invariably the same: people nod solemnly , sigh, sometimes laugh a little ruefully, and move on. They act as though there is nothing they can do about “politics.” They seem to think their community has been infected by some unique, incurable virus. There are two ironies here. First, I have watched this scene being enacted so many times that I can say, from firsthand experience, that the scourge of “politics” is not unique to any one community. People in very different cities and towns have very similar complaints; if they had the chance to talk it through, I suspect they would come to roughly the same conclusions about what is wrong with public decision-making and problem-solving. Second, these leaders seldom realize that what they are doing, or planning to do, is changing the very nature of politics. They may be focused on improving the schools, ending racism, or balancing the city budget, but their work is about more than that: they are trying to transform the ways  The Next Form of Democracy in which citizens and government interact. They are part of a shift that is broader and deeper than they know. In fact, we are all sailing on this same sea. In communities throughout NorthAmerica, the skills, capacities, and frustrations of ordinary people are spilling over into the political process. Despite their disgust with politics, or perhaps because of it, citizens have become a stronger, more vocal force in public decision-making than at any time in the last 100 years. Obviously, these generalizations gloss over class and cultural differences—as usual, the “haves” are more connected than the “have nots,” raising the question of how changes in democracy may reinforce social inequalities—but even in economically impoverished neighborhoods like Southwest Delray Beach and Rochester’s Sector 10, people are demonstrating both their capacity for action and their impatience with expert rule. At the same time, local leaders are trying to solve daunting public problems without the same levels of funding, legitimacy, and public trust that they used to enjoy. Practitioners in planning, education, law enforcement, human relations, environmental protection, housing, economic development , and public health are realizing that they need more support if they are going to succeed. They are increasingly unwilling or unable to sidestep citizens by hiding behind financial data or scientific jargon. They seem more aware of the benefits and complications presented by cultural difference . Many of them, like Mark Linder and Tom Argust, have experience as community organizers or neighborhood activists, and so they have seen the citizen-government divide from both sides of the barricade. These conditions have set the stage for the development of democratic governance. It is neither a “top-down” shift nor a sign of grassroots “bottomup ” change: it is the result of both, interconnected, happening at the same time. Though these pressures are most visible at the local level, they are increasingly evident in regional, state, and federal politics as well. Citizens and officials are becoming frustrated with each other, and trying to find new ways to work together, even on policy questions like homeland security and pandemic influenza. The ripples are extending far beyond local politics, into the realms of the media, the Internet, presidential campaigns, and foreign policy. It may be a little misleading to call this transition an “evolution” of democracy, since that term implies that we are moving inevitably toward some higher, better, more advanced plane of public life. It is unclear...

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