"The Rules Come Later": The Priority of Practices in a Grassroots Democracy

Abstract

Blessed Are the Organized has been read by many as a significant departure from Jeffrey Stout's previous work, both stylistically and substantively. In this essay, I attempt to draw out the connections between this new book and his three previous books, in order to demonstrate how he has always been interested in the priority of social practices in the construction of social norms. In this sense, a case study of contemporary broad-based organizing in the United States has implications not just for these kinds of modern democratic movements, but for more elusive premodern movements like the early Jesus movement.

The real hope for rational discourse lies in the will to create communities and institutions in which the virtues of good people and good conversation can flourish. Philosophy is no substitute for that, but its value can be measured by the contribution it makes.

—JEFFREY STOUT, The Flight from Authority, 272

Looking Back to Move Forward

The idea of telling the story of broad-based democratic activism that this book endeavors to tell began to come into focus in the fall of 2004, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (Stout 2010, 291). Jeffrey Stout's important book Democracy and Tradition (2004) had recently been published, and he was touring the country speaking to primarily academic audiences about the current ethical and political challenges facing North American democratic societies. Stout suggested in that book that the loss of many of the most distinctive and important democratic virtues was due in no small measure to a deep confusion about the relationship between religious conviction and democratic politics.

On the one hand, Liberal political theories in the tradition of John Rawls tended to be too suspicious of religious convictions, allowing them little or no place in the version of a secular politics he had defended in his 1971 classic, A Theory of Justice. Such a form of secularism tended to generate theologies of resentment in response, a theological style Stout referred to as the "new traditionalism," symbolized most emblematically in the work of Stanley Hauerwas.

The results of this situation were ominous: "The more thoroughly Rawlsian our law schools and ethics centers become, the more radically Hauerwasian the theological schools become" (Stout 2004, 75). In other words, the impasse created by a form of secular ism that is dismissive of religious conviction on one side, and an aggressive form of Christian separatism that is dismissive of modern democracy on the other, has made the possibility of democratic discussion across "great scars of wrong" (to use one of his marvelous chapter titles) difficult even to imagine. The reason for this dialectical impasse was that everyone felt like the wronged party in those days. Many defenders of political Liberalism were sick of hearing about God and the Ten Commandments. Many Christians believed that they had absolutely nothing invested in the future of an entity badly mischaracterized as the United States of America. This is what lent the first line of Stout's 2004 book such urgency, both as cultural diagnosis and as ethical warning: "the solidarity of an aggrieved people is a dangerous thing" (1). With patience, care and close attention to what he calls "the art of tending to arrangements" (xv), Stout attempted to defend a different conception of solidarity than that inscribed by a tribe or a congregation or a class of sufferers; he attempted to describe the constitution of a people who share the rights and the responsibilities of citizenship in a civic nation. His point in all of this, as I hope to show in more detail in the next section, was to avert a still deeper and more dangerous confusion: the confusion over the relationship between communities and their rules, or to put it in the more philosophical language appropriate to that book, the relationship between social practices and the social norms that emerge from them. Hence the title I have chosen for this essay: "the rules come later." Stout's work has always put a premium on the formation of virtuous communities and just institutions that allow individuals to be properly heard.

Averting the dangers of resentment so evident in the domestic and international politics of 2004 was the primary purpose of that volume. And Stout had quite literally hit the road in order to begin to develop the book's sequel, imagined then as a more accessible version of the philosophically dense Democracy and Tradition. But the experience of discussion generated by that book changed the project decisively; perhaps it would be better to think of this new book as a supplement rather than as a sequel, since the analyses of moral language that defined the work of the former is here supplemented by far more rigorous and sustained attention to power arrangements and the large-scale injustices that they enable. Yet the narrative description of these large-scale injustices, developed in more detail on the lecture circuit, made them seem almost too big to fight effectively. Thus the story he wished to tell in Democracy and Tradition, fairly or not, seemed to be generating a hopeless response. The book was so good at diagnosing the symptoms of a desperate political and moral situation that landing upon effective curative measures was rendered even more difficult for the close reader and the attentive listener to imagine.

My use of the language of diagnosis and prescription is deliberate, and recalls a marvelous quotation from the Roman historian Livy that Stout used to great effect in his previous book, Ethics After Babel: "we have reached the point where we can tolerate neither our vices nor the means necessary to correct them" (2001, 191). That seemed a pretty close description of the emotional response that Democracy and Tradition was generating.

This was doubly problematic because that was precisely not Stout's intention; indeed, he had argued all along that hope (along with piety, and generosity or charity) was a central democratic virtue (2004, 9). He returns to that conviction in this new book, emphasizing the notion that hope is a virtue, a virtue related to central conceptions of important social goods, not an emotional state or pie-in-the-sky democratic whimsy. "Hope," he observes, "by nature outruns the evidence that can be adduced for it and is inherently hard to distinguish from wishful thinking. Still, something will have to be said about its grounds" (2010, xviii). He endeavors to describe such grounds in this new book as follows:

Hope is not the same thing as thinking that what one ardently desires is likely to happen. It is the virtue one needs when grim facts might tempt one to give up on promoting or protecting important goods. In this case the goods are liberty and justice, and the temptation is to assume that they are now essentially out of reach.

(283)

Hopelessness, in Stout's measured judgment, is as corrosive to democratic societies as solidarities born of resentment can be.

This brings us to his lecture at the University of Tennessee, in the fall of 2004. In the question-and-answer session following his lecture, Stout was challenged by a college freshman. The student found the diagnosis of our democracy's current ills compelling, but he found Stout's prescriptions for those ills doomed, in large part because they were " hopelessly vague" (emphasis added). The student, in short, was asking for a more concrete answer to the difficult questions Stout had posed, and for a more concrete solution to the problems he had diagnosed so effectively (2010, 280-81).

Stout admits that his answers and solutions were vague and unsatisfying in 2004:

I had not explained how people currently addicted to fast "food" and "reality" television might actually take back the country from the plutocrats, militarists, and culture warriors now dominating our politics. The truth is that I had only a vague idea, drawn from memories of the civil rights and antiwar movements I had participated in as a teenager and from sporadic involvement as an adult in the politics of my own community.

(2010, 281; see also 2004, xiv-xv)

The 1960s were simply too far removed in existential time and space for the college students in Stout's audience. And so a new strategy for this new book gradually emerged. Blessed Are the Organized is designed to inspire hope, but a hope that is based on long-range realism and close attention to the contemporary practices of broad-based community organizing; it is located on the ground, among ordinary citizens, and imagined as an antidote to that Tennessee student's expression of well-meaning despair.

Ethics, Not Ethnography

"When despair is the disease one hopes to remedy," Stout observes, "anecdotes can be antidotes. That is why the book is full of stories and has such a high ratio of quotation to commentary" (2010, 283).¹ This book proposes to look at the experiences, and especially the sometime successes, of a number of grassroots activists, and to look at them as enacting the most distinctive practices of democratic citizenship. Such practices hinge on several interrelated features: the habits of attending to new and emerging constellations of power; the disposition to hold such power accountable, and to object with appropriate and measured anger to the appearance of any political relations that appear to be dominating ones; and the practice of talking, the give-and-take of respectful listening and honest speaking. The aim of such interrelated practices is to hold authority figures and others who wield power accountable for the questionable decisions they make as well as the misuse of the power currently in their hands.

The book focuses on four primary locations where such abuses of power were especially egregious and thus where grassroots success stories were most dramatically in evidence: in post-Katrina New Orleans, and following some of the displaced population to the Houston Astrodome, where organized protest had dramatic short- and longer-term consequences in ameliorating the truly oppressive living conditions of the people involved; in a region on the Texas side of the Texas-Mexico border where perhaps as many as fifteen hundred impoverished colonias were eventually successful in organizing their demands for the provision of safe drinking water, sewer systems and paved roads; in southwestern Arizona, where the passage of Proposition 200, requiring proof of citizenship papers for voter registration and the provision of state benefits, raised important questions about the reigning conception of citizenship and how such status is granted, recognized, or withheld; and finally in the densely populated Maywood district of central Los Angeles, where organized police targeting of Hispanic drivers designed to enable the impounding of vehicles driven by anyone not then in possession of a driver's license created such economic and social turmoil that at last it inspired organized citizens' resistance—the creation of a counterforce where the involvement of a local Roman Catholic congregation (Saint Rose of Lima) was decisive.

The most important thing to notice about this new book is that it is not intended, nor is it imagined, as a work of ethnographic analysis; Stout is the first to admit that his time among the organizers he interviewed in these four regions was brief. No, this book is not a work of ethnography; it is ethics. Here is how Stout frames that important distinction at the outset:

I do not think of myself as an ethnographer, let alone as an investigative reporter, but as an observer and critic of the political and religious dimension of contemporary democratic culture. My goal throughout has been to elicit from the testimony of active, hopeful citizens a conception of what citizenship involves and then to subject that conception to scrutiny in light of the most important criticisms that have been brought against grassroots democracy.

(2010, xvii, emphasis added)

This methodological statement bears several important implications that connect Blessed Are the Organized to its 2004 predecessor. First, and most directly related to the previous book, we are privy here to the literal fleshing out of a claim that was methodologically central there: that democracy is a distinctive experience of deliberative sociality, one that is itself an enactment of Pragmatism, in Stout's understanding of that term as essentially a public form of philosophy.

Since, as Stout humorously observes, American Pragmatism is Hegelian but "without the obscurities of Hegelian diction" (2004, 273), it is important to identify the central Hegelian insight with which Stout identifies most clearly. It is the one I tried to identify in this essay's title: Social norms emerge out of the experience of common practices in a community with a social memory that take place with relative consistency over many years. Broad-based organizing, as we are shown repeatedly in this book, is one such practice. And norms are not rules.² Stout very effectively used the example of soccer to make this essentially Hegelian point in Democracy and Tradition (270-73).³ Soccer was not invented by people who wrote a rule book and then took to playing the game; that is the falsifying notion that Hegel roundly criticized in Social Contract theories of constitutional governance (a tradition with which John Rawls may or may not be fairly identified). Such theories made too much of principles of justice, about which there is rarely as much consensus as we think or hope, and too little of the virtues and habits of simple democratic sociality. Stout made this point methodologically pivotal well before Democracy and Tradition was written:

[I]t is by no means obvious that our life together in society depends upon our mutual respect for a principle. The right set of habits and dispositions distributed in the right way across the members of a society should suffice to make life together possible. Everybody's conscious assent to a principle might help, but it hardly seems necessary, and it seems in any event like too much to ask for.

(1994a, 16)⁴

And he did so to defend a more pluralistic conception of tradition that was informed by his own normative commitments: to an Aristotelian moral theory grounded in the virtues; and to a republican conception of good governance.

To return to the soccer analogy, then, soccer was not a creation of rules or principles. Rather, men and women engaged in an informal game, consistently over time, and gradually came to a revisable consensus about what made certain actions fouls, and what kinds of sanction or penalty should follow from such actions. In other words, the rule book came later, only after years of playing the game together. Similarly, the democratic practices of discussion, debate, and holding one another accountable made the U.S. Constitution possible, not the other way around. Democracy is thus an enactment of Pragmatism. An intentionally public philosophy, such as the one in which Stout understands himself to be engaged, is placed in the service of the retrieval of what is best in a tradition, or traditions, that put a premium on the virtues.

Here is how Stout put this point in 2004: "pragmatism is democratic traditionalism . . . the philosophical space in which democratic rebellion against hierarchy combines with traditionalist love of virtue to form a new intellectual tradition that is indebted to both" (13). And later he added that Pragmatism, as he understands it, just is a phenomenology of American culture (21). So Pragmatism describes a space rather than defends a theory, and ethics is a form of social engagement that puts a premium on practices rather than on codes and regulations (270-86). In other words, the democratic habits of discussion, of granting respect in the form of a charitable hearing, of expecting accountability for oneself and one's fellow citizens—these are the distinctive aspects of a loose ethical tradition such as the one a modern democracy in the United States has long aspired to embody. The constitutional form that tradition has taken in the United States is that of a democratic republic, a tradition whose implicit values must be made explicit—and thereby "retrieved"—by every generation anew (2010, 9-14, 139-47, 246-48). This is ultimately what the grassroots organizers he discusses are up to, and that is what Stout is up to in laying out the "theories and doctrines" that help to make sense of their stories, their practices, and their occasional successes over time.

There is a moral to these stories, of course, and it came into particular focus in the Houston Astrodome, not long after Hurricane Katrina had forced a very large number of people to seek shelter there in what quickly degenerated into grotesque and unliveable conditions:

[N]o governmental bureaucracy, no capacity to restrain corporate power from dominating. No autonomous citizens' organization, no effective power for citizens. No effective power for citizens, no accountability for corporate, governmental, or nongovernmental power. No accountability, no way for power to be anything but arbitrary in its exercise and dehumanizing in its effects.

(Stout 2010, 76)

Blessed Are the Organized is Aristotelian rather than Platonic, if you will, paying close attention to the particulars and staying fairly close to the ground of common democratic practice. The ideas emerge from that close attention to the particulars, much as a rule book emerges from the long experience of common practice and respectful play together. That central methodological commitment plays out in an appealing book structure where alternating chapters move from the quotations, where the organizers and other citizens tell their own stories, to Stout's higher-order analyses of what is being argued implicitly by the subjects in his story (what Stout calls, echoing Robert Brandom, "making it explicit" [2004, 188-89]). So we are witnessing our fellow citizens making certain fundamental democratic commitments, and then we are witnessing one of our finest public philosophers making these citizens' ethical and political commitments more explicit, as well as holding them accountable to traditional standards of democratic virtue.

I would like to focus now on several of the most noteworthy, and some of the most surprising, ethical claims that this in-depth analysis of the actual practices of citizens in the figurative moral trenches brings to light. The first is also the foremost. Stout insists, as he always does, on terminological precision. So there is an important distinction to be made at the outset between broad-based organizing and other kinds of issue advocacy that normally are captured by the name of grassroots organizing (2010, 7-8). Indeed, the real subject of this book, to the degree that there is just one, is a remarkable organization called the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), "a confederation of community organizations founded in 1940 by the legendary Saul Alinsky" (2). Many of the groups with which Stout talked and traveled in his explorations throughout the southwestern United States are affiliates of this remarkable confederation.

The purpose of broad-based organizing is well captured by the name: it is about the phenomenon of social organization itself. A broad-based organization like IAF is not limited by issue or geography. It is not organized to confront a specific issue, nor is it organized in the name of a specific locale. Rather, IAF is designed to make democratic community and its implicit ethical commitments both more intentional and more formal. It intends to have done the important organizational work so that, when an issue comes up in any given locale, an organized citizen body may respond more effectively. Think of it as a moral militia of sorts.

Businesses are very well organized, Stout quips, and that is why they are blessed these days. Broad-based organizing is about the creation of a counterforce as much as anything else, a counterforce constituting nodes of democratic resistance to antidemocratic structures of privilege and unearned preference. "If grassroots democracy is going to address the most pressing issues now emerging at the national and international levels, and sustain itself over time, broad-based organizing will have to be expanded and strengthened" (2010, 8). Broad-based organizing, then, is one essential strategy for a tradition of grassroots democracy to survive, and perhaps even to thrive, in especially unsettled economic and political times.

Given the close attention Stout pays to ordinary citizens and their stories, it is not surprising that several characters emerge as central to the message of the book and the lessons it aspires to teach. Three especially noteworthy figures are Saul Alinsky, Ernesto Cortés Jr., and Carmen Anaya. I have already mentioned Saul Alinsky, the legendary founder of IAF. Alinsky wrote two books that explain his philosophy of broad-based organizing: Reveille for Radicals in 1946, and Rules for Radicals in 1971 (Stout 2010, 2-3). Central to Stout's ethical vision is the idea that it is necessary "to keep one's piety within bounds" (2004, 8). True to that spirit, Alinsky's published ideas come in for some very pointed, and very important, criticism, given his self-confessed position as an "immoralist" (Stout 2010, 116-21). But at its best, Saul Alinsky's genius lay in his understanding of the importance of organizing his organizing, without becoming narcissistic or creating an organization that became mindlessly self-perpetuating. In addition to several successful advocacy campaigns in Chicago and Rochester, he created organizations that trained organizers to travel around the country in order to create further organization. His leadership training programs were designed to create the cohort of organizational leadership who would seed future organizations that would then become part of a far-flung network committed to radical political reform.

Ernesto Cortés Jr. is one product of Alinsky's training and of IAF's philosophy (Stout 2010, 6-14). He was already working as an organizer in Texas, albeit a frustrated one, when Rules for Radicals came to his attention. He was inspired to enroll in Alinsky's Chicago-based IAF Training Institute, but had only been there for a short time when Saul Alinsky died. His mentor was thus Alinsky's successor at IAF, Ed Chambers. Cortés was decisively formed by Chambers's mentoring, and he returned to San Antonio, where he helped found Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), an especially vital and long-lived organization that has lobbied most effectively on behalf of the Latino community. Cortés moved from success to success and is now the supervisor of Southwest IAF, whose regional authority "extends from Mississippi to Idaho to California" (6).⁵ The philosophy behind a broad-based organization like IAF is precisely grassroots and democratic, in the tradition of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, or of Whitman and Thoreau, believing that "democracy depends for its very survival, as well as for its health, on what citizens do" (6).

This brings us to Carmen Anaya (Stout 2010, 95-113), perhaps the unlikeliest of heroines in this book and, at least in Stout's telling, also the most compelling. Her successes constitute, in Stout's judgment, "one of the most impressive victories for grassroots democracy in the United States since passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964" (91). That is high praise indeed. It is instructive that Stout reserves the telling of Anaya's story for a chapter entitled "The Authority to Lead" (93). His first concern in this chapter is to insist and to remind us that democracy as a political form is not mindlessly leveling, "eradicating all forms of authority and hierarchy" (93). That is the crude caricature of democracy Nietzsche famously created, suggesting that democracies aspire to make everyone the same size by cutting the heads off of tall people.⁶ No, Stout says that authority and hierarchy can be compatible with democracy; it all depends on the kind of authority and the kind of hierarchy in question. "As a social formation democracy has more to do with structures of earned and accountable authority than it does with leveling" (94).⁷

Anaya's authority was earned in the purest sense of the term. Strictly Spanish-speaking and scarcely literate, she nonetheless was the bearer of what Max Weber famously called charisma, a term that he believed would help to explain the phenomenon of authoritative religious leadership in a sociological sense. Stout worries that invocations of "charisma" tend to mystify more than instruct, but the way he tells her story is more than a little suggestive of the ways in which her charisma was a central part of Carmen Anaya's success (2010, 94). It still is; since Anaya had died before Stout paid his first visit to the colonias whose material life Carmen Anaya had been so instrumental in transforming, he encountered her primarily through the way she was remembered by those who admired and even adored her (96):

Stories about Carmen Anaya are retold in part to reaffirm the shared values of Valley Interfaith, but they also serve as an example for a generation in search of guidance concerning how leadership is to be earned and exercised. The life presented in the stories is an example of democratic moral authority and an example for those who wish to acquire it.

(111)

The charismatic power of Carmen Anaya's legendary personality is also evident in her children, who continue to work within the contours of a movement she articulated: her daughter, Consuelo Maheshwari, is the principal of an organization-sponsored school in McAllen, Texas, and her son, Eddie Anaya, is an attorney who now works for IAF (107, 113). Carmen Anaya is thus a morally exemplary person, a leader who illustrates what the enactment of several important democratic virtues looks like in the context of a whole life, and its subsequent recollection. She is a link in a sacred chain, a part of the very chain that constitutes a tradition in the first place.⁸

Emotion in the Organizing

If precise terminology and exemplary leadership are crucial for the sustenance of a healthy and robust democratic culture, then so are certain intense emotional commitments. Perhaps most surprising in a work of ethics is Stout's insistence on the importance of anger as a constructive moral emotion. Here is one place where connecting this book to its predecessor volume is especially important, in this sense: anger is best understood not as a sense of aggrievement. It would not be too much to say that solidarities of aggrievement are dangerous precisely to the degree that aggrievement is a hopeless emotion, felt by someone who has lost all reasonable hope for meaningful political solutions. By contrast, anger is a reasoned response to a grievance, a grievance one fully expects to be recognized sympathetically and then promptly addressed (Stout 2010, 95-96, 308n46).

Such expectations pretty well defined the organizational career of Carmen Anaya, as a quotation from her in the book's epigraph illustrates:

Lupita tells me that she has serious problems because she has no sewer service and the same with this one and that one and that one. This is the way we begin to have a relationship. And then, if you don't have water and I don't have water, let's have a meeting to fight for this.

(Stout 2010, vii)

"Let's have a meeting to fight for this." There are a lot of meetings, a lot of different kinds of meetings, described in this book. Understanding the necessary and progressive relationship between one type of meeting and another is central to the work of successful broad-based organizing. When would-be organizers first arrive in an area, they schedule one-on-one meetings, in which they essentially try to take the temperature of a moral community, to find out from local residents, and in their own words, what their problems are. Such one-on-ones, coupled with neighborhood walks, if they identify matters of widespread and common concern (like Carmen Anaya's eloquent concern for water), may then result in house meetings of citizens united by a common grievance, culminating in planning meetings where strategic plans for organized petition and protest may be formulated. Finally, and by far most importantly in Stout's analysis, such communities may organize accountability sessions in which political representatives or candidates for political office are invited into the community to say publicly where they stand on issues of widespread community concern.

All of these things take energy, careful listening skills, and time. The work of democratic citizenship is long work, and slow work; patience is as much a virtue as hope. But the accountability session in particular bears closer scrutiny, if for no other reason than it may appear, on the surface, to be organized in a problematic and ironically anti-democratic manner. It is a common feature of such accountability sessions that a candidate who refuses to answer a straightforward Yes or No question, and who attempts to make a stump speech instead, will find his or her microphone turned off by the meeting's organizers (Stout 2010, 45, 119). How is this compatible with the democratic practices enunciated in Stout's previous two books?

Stout has a fascinating answer to this question—several answers, in fact. First and foremost, these are meetings called by organization leaders and they set the agenda. This is one of the few opportunities that grassroots democrats have to meet on their own turf and on their own terms; making the most of that venue shift is simply prudent. As a part of that setting, politicians who attend such an accountability session are expected to listen well, and to place their primary attention on doing so, not on giving self-promoting speeches of their own (there are abundant opportunities for them to do this kind of thing in the new world of electronic media). But more than an assertion of citizens' power, a symbolic exercise of broad-based community counterforce, these accountability sessions are social rituals; that insight is central to what Stout wishes to argue in both books. Social practices actually create and instill norms, in part by enacting them. These sessions provide "rites of solidarity" for fledgling community organizations that may be fairly new to their realization of common concern.

Still more, these accountability sessions are "rites of commitment" for the political invitees. Stout suggestively likens them to rites of marriage:

An accountability session, like a wedding, is an opportunity not to give speeches, but rather to declare one's commitment in a way that fully clarifies a significant relationship and the obligations that flow from it. An unwillingness to say "I do," without further elaboration, when asked for a public commitment to enter an important relationship is itself a significant act with consequences for all involved. But to say "I do" is to enter into a relationship. . . .

The public official is free to refuse to say "I do" when asked to give a public commitment to a publicly offered proposal. The refusal can subsequently be explained at any length, in any terms, and on any occasion the official deems appropriate. Public officials lack neither the means for explaining themselves, nor access to the media. But if officials are to be held accountable, there need to be moments when they are called on to decide what their publicly acknowledged commitments and relationships are going to be. Refusal to commit onself to supporting a proposal, or to entering an alliance, is itself something for which one can be held accountable.

(2010, 120)

This is a most suggestive reading of the situation, one that attends helpfully to the ritual context of certain political speech acts. But it seems to beg two important questions.

The first is the most obvious: did the public official in question know that he or she had been invited to a wedding? Did he or she know that vows, rather than ideas, were to be exchanged there? The reason this question bears the weight it does is that anger is often one of the results of such IAF accountability sessions; politicians can walk away from such affairs incensed that they were boxed in or silenced in ways they did not expect. To be sure, there are exercises of power on all sides of such social transactions, but resentment at the impression that one has been dominated or duped by an undue exercise of power can be a very reasonable response to the perception of abuse, and is (I take it) precisely the emotion that Stout is trying to avoid.

This may be one of the places, then, where Stout's analysis takes the point of view of the organizers too quickly, such that the customary nuance, and charity, of his descriptions of the argumentative situation suffer. Bear in mind that our elected officials are citizens as well, even if many of them seem to be part of a new (and democratically suspect) class of professional politicians. Bear in mind as well that the organizers Stout admires most are adepts at anger, constructive expressions of anger. Their anger often inspires them to choreograph social rituals that generate further anger from their political leadership. But not all forms or expressions of anger are salutary. Stout knows this very well, of course, and warns us of as much in his discussion of anger as a political emotion (2010, 64-69). Anger, he observes there, is ideally an emotion that is tempered by the virtues; blind rage is its vicious extreme: "Rage is what anger becomes when justice, courage, temperance, and hope do not shape it into perfected⁹ response to a situation that merits anger" (65). Thus the good organizer needs to be a virtuous person in the Aristotelian sense, one who is capable of experiencing feelings of anger "at the right things in the right way and [using] this passion to motivate the level of political involvement essential to striving for significant social change" (65). This is all fairly argued, but it is not entirely clear that the angry organizers whom Stout interviews so sympathetically and with such care are not sometimes consciously orchestrating social events intended to enrage their opponents. That seems a problem of both practical and ethical import that is worthy of further reflection, one addressed primarily in a chapter entitled "On the Treatment of Opponents" (114-24).

Analyses of Emotion

I puzzle over this question in part because it relates to two of the most puzzling aspects of Stout's new book. The first concerns a brief foray into brain science (Stout 2010, 153-64); the second concerns his use of the language of power and his very brief discussion of Foucault (301, 303n33).

Stout's interest in brain science is directly implicated in his passionate commitment to the importance of face-to-face meetings in the work of broad-based organizing. Here he contends that we literally incorporate the emotions of other people when we are in their physical presence, and so are able to see their faces: "[E]motions travel from one person to another in the face-to-face encounter" (2010, 153). Stout goes on to suggest that Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein were both working in anticipation of these new scientific revelations, by rejecting the emotional metaphors that posit an "inside" and an "outside" in emotional space. In such a world picture, emotions are thought to reside inside the person, and there is always a gap between one person and another that is never fully bridgeable. We bridge it, "if at all, by our attempt to infer what is going on within them" (153). The scientific discovery of "mirror neurons" suggests to Stout that we need not merely infer; our access to the inner emotional state of another person is more visceral and corporeal than that. We can register what is going on rather than simply infer.

There is something to that important shift in metaphor, but it has dangerous implications. The more confident I am that the gap separating you from me is indeed bridgeable, and that I have successfully bridged it, the less I am in a position to listen properly to you. I think I already know, viscerally, what you think and feel. The good organizer—who is consistently and without fail a good listener—ought not assume too quickly that he or she knows what I am feeling, or why I am feeling it. His or her task is, first and foremost, to listen to me express my anger, hopefully in virtuous ways that keep it from becoming rage or aggrievement, emotions that are figuratively blind.

Here again, Stout knows very well that not all organizers are good listeners; the first organizer to whom he introduces us, Broderick Bagert Jr., the man who took him on his first tour of New Orleans, was not a particularly good listener (2010, 32-33). As a good Pragmatist with strong ties to Hegel, Stout is clearly unwilling to rest content with responses of emotional immediacy alone. Rather, the mirror neurons provide the empathetic first step of a process of bridge building, one whose critical intermediate steps are reflexive criticism (129-30) and the transformation of an expressive emotion into a more substantive moral claim (158-61).

Good democratic organizers tend to exhibit a number of distinctive traits: confidence, hopefulness, practical wisdom, tempered anger, a commitment to justice, the courage to persevere in a tough fight, the willingness and ability to listen to what others are saying, an aptitude to care non-instrumentally about the people being listened to, and a capacity to mirror, empathize with and help conceptualize the concerns that ordinary citizens are expressing.

(161-62)

Stout's larger purpose in developing this analogy from the brain sciences, we soon discover, is sociological. To that end, he briefly discusses two rather striking emotional disorders: Moebius syndrome and autism (162-64). In the former, Stout tells us, a person is incapable of registering emotion on the face; in the latter, an emotional freeze renders the person incapable of responding empathetically to another's distress. In both cases, the mirror neurons are not functioning properly, if they are functioning at all.

The autistic person flies into blind rages; the Moebius type expresses no emotion whatsoever. Now, what are we to make of this brief digression into the science of brains and behavior? It seems as if the conclusion—or rather, the diagnosis—we are invited to draw here is that we are living in a social order where appropriate emotional connections that create the possibilities of sympathy, empathetic understanding, and righteous anger have been seriously eroded. In short, we live in an autistic culture, and many of our democratic institutions are currently suffering from the Moebius effect. This is a powerful diagnosis indeed.

If these are the lessons we are intended to draw, then to what end are we invited to draw them? The first is probably the most telling: we are being encouraged to be suspicious of undue reliance on the new electronic media that render face-to-face communication more and more rare (MoveOn cannot be a broad-based organization like IAF, if it is strictly internet-driven [2010, 163-64]). The rules, after all, come later, after a lot of face-to-face meeting. But there is more than the hint of a suggestion in this book that the kinds of grassroots organizers Stout has interviewed here are Socratic therapists for the sickness of soul that afflicts contemporary U.S. society. The dangers of self-righteousness, and the temptation to bombast, are acute in such Socratic types, once they have permitted themselves to believe such things about their society and their own fairly liminal place within it. Contrast this with the therapeutic vision of Walker Percy, who offers what he calls "[a] note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them, but also what is wrong with you" (1971, 39).

Analyses of Power

This brings me at last to the discussion of power and, implicitly, of moral responsibility. It is worth observing, as Stout has done, that this explicit attention to unjust exercises of power and to dominating power relations is what marks the real difference between Blessed Are the Organized and its predecessor, Democracy and Tradition, a volume that focused far more on moral discourse. The trick is to bring these two analyses together, to develop the discursive skills necessary to analyze distorted power relations accurately and to deliberate strategically about how to change them most effectively.

Power makes its explicit appearance in this book when we are introduced to one of the central practices in which IAF organizers engage when they first enter a community. They perform what they call a power analysis, to get the lay of the land, structurally speaking, and to begin to draw a map of the ethically and politically significant power relations that will help or hinder their work. Stout unpacks what he takes to be at stake in such IAF power analyses, as I noted, in one of the longest and most important notes to the book (Stout 2010, 301n33).¹⁰ Power, as Stout and IAF understand it, "is the capacity to produce socially significant effects." Obviously, this is not in and of itself a bad thing (and it is important, as Alinsky repeatedly argued, to get over the false sense that 'power' or 'self-interest' are bad words) (300n27). Everything hinges on what kinds of effects power produces. Armed police have the power to do great damage if they kill the innocent; they have the power to do great good if they protect law-abiding citizens from abuse and contribute to the general sense of social stability. So power in general is not ethically problematic, but dominating exercises of power are actually deadening to democratic culture. " Domination is not merely any form of power-over people, but rather the defining trait of relationships in which one person or group is in a position to exercise power arbitrarily over others" (301n33, emphasis added). In other words, dominating social relationships are those in which one person or group of persons is unable to hold the power exercised upon him or her or them accountable to ethical scrutiny. Domination is unaccountable power, and precisely insofar as it stands beyond account, it is the purest symbol of anti-democratic social arrangements.

Stout briefly discusses Foucault's work at this precise juncture, and the main purpose of that excursus is to emphasize the point that, for him (and for IAF), domination is a normative term, not merely a descriptive one, as it sometimes appears to be for Foucault. Stout appreciates the way in which Foucault was trying to escape a falsifying kind of subjectivism in his own analyses of power, working (much like Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein) to get away from the image of atomistic individuals who are involved in complicated power relations with one another, two at a time. Power, in the Foucauldian universe, is profoundly dispersed. And—here is the key for Foucault—power is constitutive of selfhood, not merely a hindrance to the exercise of selfhood.

No power, no self—and, as he suggests somewhat whimsically, no truth either. That is why Foucault was nervous about facile invocations of "domination" in contemporary sociology and psychotherapy, and that is why some of his critics consider his later work ironically "disempowering." Though sympathetic with the genealogy of Foucault's thinking, Stout largely agrees with this criticism, preferring IAF's power analyses to Foucault's: "IAF employs a much richer reflective vocabulary than Foucault uses when he speaks of power and domination," in Stout's judgment. "On this point, practitioners on the ground have something to teach the theorists" (2010, 301n33). Here, once again, it appears that social practices come first; the norms (and the theories) come later.

Power analyses that result in the unmasking of domination reveal it to be a normative category, not a descriptive one. That distinction is an absolutely central tenet of IAF organizing and of Stout's ethics. While Stout agrees with Foucault that certain "power/knowledge constellations" may indeed be anonymous, and while he also agrees that we would do well to get beyond the overly individualist and subjectivist accounts of the exercise of power Foucault criticized, he worries that the contemporary fascination with anonymous power may cause us to neglect, not just the difference, but the terrible social cost that arbitrary power exacts. We cannot be coy about domination, Stout cautions us, and an explicitly normative vocabulary like IAF's helps us to keep the central moral tasks before us more clearly in mind. In this sense, Stout is simply less chary about calling "domination" by name than Foucault appears to have been.

Foucault's later writings seem to me to have more to contribute to Stout's analysis than he believes (although it is important to acknowledge that he confesses to having neither the time nor the desire to complicate his picture of Foucault further by looking at his later work on the History of Sexuality, where "ethics and care for the self" become major concerns, as they are for many virtue ethicists). Foucault was involved in marches and sit-ins as well as philosophical analyses, so his credentials may be greater and his analyses more amenable than Stout alleges. In any case, what I offer here is intended more in the form of a sympathetic supplement than a criticism, designed to suggest one way in which Foucault's ideas may provide richer resources for the work in which Stout is currently engaged.

In a 1977 interview that was later published as "Truth and Power," Foucault made the following critical observation:

If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the entire social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.

(1980, 119)

Stout is quite properly concerned with what he takes to be an undue focus on the anonymity of power as Foucault imagined it in later years. If power is utterly anonymous, the result of a complex interplay of social and institutional forces dispersed throughout the social body, then it will be very difficult to hold it accountable. I take that point, but Foucault seems to me to imply a very different one here, one with which Stout's analysis resonates quite well. An honest and self-critical power analysis, very much in the spirit of IAF, ought also to ask what we are getting out of our current arrangements. It takes seriously Foucault's point—which is also an ethical point—that power arrangements would not survive if most of us were not getting something out of them. I would be very interested to see Stout add that insight to this appreciative sketch of IAF's explicitly normative power analyses.

If one were forced to identify with a single name what Stout worries about most in the early twenty-first century, then it is plutocracy. And he has been an eloquent critic of the ways in which a global plutocracy has succeeded in creating a world of transnational corporations that lie beyond the political scope and the ethical capacity of any current nation-state to hold them accountable for their actions. British Petroleum is simply one link in a global chain, a symptom of a global metastasis. In the first major symposium dedicated to Democracy and Tradition in November 2003, here is how Stout put his concerns:

Meanwhile, multinational corporations have become the latter-day equivalents of the East India Company. We now have government for the corporations, by the corporations, but almost no government of the corporations. That's what "deregulation" means. "Corporate despotism" may be the best name for the mode of government we now have, but the term "democracy" remains a good name for a people's disposition to hold one another, their leaders, and their corporations responsible for their acts. It may be a latent disposition, but it's still worth singling out and cultivating to the degree we can.

(Springs et al. 2010, 433)¹¹

What, then, are the majority of U.S. citizens getting out of our current plutocratic arrangements? Dreams, among other things. The reputed moral of the Horatio Alger myth runs very deep in American culture and the democratic psyche, and what it renders most difficult to see clearly is the degree to which the current underclass is structurally doomed to remain in its current position. It is not as simple as the naïve belief that everyone is just one lottery ticket away from becoming a millionaire. No, it is the myth of upward mobility that makes it very difficult for citizens to see themselves as anything other than upwardly mobile and aspirationally middle class. This tempting way of seeing seems to invite many to vote against what would otherwise seem to be their immediate interests—all in the name of longer-range aspirations, hopes and dreams. The power of the current American plutocracy does not merely say no, as Foucault suggests; it induces pleasure, produces discourse (advertising and marketing) and, I would add, it produces a curious kind of materialist hope. These may or may not be false hopes in the main—Stout shows how the middle class is in fact shrinking in the United States today—but acknowledging the degree to which we are all implicated in the current system does seem an important check on organizational and progressive hubris.

Now, I take it that Stout grows impatient with such overly complicated power analyses. He is quite right to worry that such nuances of power are lost if you are on the receiving end of a loaded gun.¹² Many of our current power arrangements are so lopsided as to make domination virtually inevitable, and in this sense they make the position of the underclass more like the unarmed person facing a loaded gun, alone. That is one reason why the long course of time linking abolition to civil war to civil rights is such an important trajectory in Stout's story: the arbitrary exercise of police power by whites against blacks demonstrates as clearly as anything why dominating relationships are so troubling. In this story, the meetings were more important than the rules. Abolition as a principle was going nowhere when William Lloyd Garrison, understanding this, called for broad-based and grassroots organizing around the issue in 1832 (Stout 2010, 148). It is in this sense that abolition becomes a paradigmatic example of progressive organizing in Stout's terms:

[T]he story of the great democratic reform movements supports this explanation. Before 1830, abolitionism was an elite movement with little internal structure and little power. After 1830, when face-to-face interaction gradually became its organizational basis, abolitionism acquired considerable strength.

(149)

The conclusion he draws from this history is very strong: " Lincoln could not have emancipated the slaves had there not been a shift in American abolitionism, around the year 1830, from an elite movement centered in Philadelphia lawyers to a grassroots organizing effort that encompassed all of New England" (148, emphasis added). This urgent historical reminder, with its emphatic grassroots conclusion, lies at the very heart of Stout's purpose in this book.

The moral essence of democratic culture is quite simple, because "love of liberty and hatred of domination are two sides of the same coin" (59). Stout develops this idea at some length in an important early chapter entitled "Domination, Anger, and Grief" (53-69). The chapter begins with an epigraph from Abraham Lincoln: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy" (53; see also 55, 59-60, 140-41).¹³ That pithy definition of democratic sympathy, and the ethical commitments that inspire it and flow from it, is one of the central messages of the book. Stout's own experience of this history, and of the importance of face-to-face organizing in it, came in the waning years of the Civil Rights movement in Trenton, New Jersey. He discusses this briefly (181-82), but the lessons he draws from it are also long. A part of the process of identifying with such a grassroots organization was what he calls a "rite of initiation." In his case, members were required to join in pairs, pairs that "had to include two races." This required Stout to identify himself as white (and presumably to reflect more on what this meant), and then to identify a person (and a family) of a different race to whom he could make a commitment of care and common concern. "The friendship that developed with my partner [a young man named Alonzo Younger] mattered enormously to me, as did the sense of belonging to a larger group committed to bridging the racial divide" (182).¹⁴

Religion, At Last

This brings us, at last, to the topic of religion and religious belief. The roots of both abolitionist and civil rights activism clearly lie within religious traditions and religious communities. All of the grassroots organizations Stout discusses rely heavily on religious communities for infrastructure as well as financial support. In several of the cases with the most dramatically positive outcomes that Stout describes, absent such support, there would have been no success. This book thus echoes descriptively a point that Stout has made repeatedly in historical (1981, 179-255), philosophical (2001, 163-88), and political (2004, esp. 63-117) terms before. The modern notion that morality is an independent and autonomous sphere of inquiry often assumed a very particular process of secularization, and this has had unintended political consequences. The political left, Stout has long insisted, needs to get over its almost allergic reaction to the presence of religion and religious belief in political discussion (especially Christian beliefs, one suspects); by attempting to silence it completely, a large group of what Stout calls "lifestyle liberals" (2010, 221) has lost its ability to engage various forms of religiosity effectively and to enter into a democratic conversation with charity or grace. The possibility of forming temporary coalitions along lines of common interest is seriously hampered in the process (319n110). One central tenet of IAF organizing is "no permanent enemies, no permanent allies" (122). Secularism, so Stout has suggested for many years, runs the very real risk of making a number of religious communities into permanent enemies, at best a very imprudent strategy for social change.

So far, so good; readers of Stout's previous books will find themselves on familiar ground here. And yet it is one of the curious features of this book that the chapter dedicated most explicitly to these concerns, "The Contested Sacred" (2010, 210-34), is also one of the more difficult to read. There is a lot going on in a relatively few pages, as well as in the notes; one has the sense that this chapter is the promissory note for a book that Stout has yet to write.¹⁵ The shift in language from "religion" to "the sacred" offers one important clue to his larger purpose (317n102). Conceptions of sacred value, especially the sacred value of human life, provide a foundation on which some very broad-based coalitions could well be formed to work against state-sanctioned and state-sponsored torture or unilateral declarations of war, for instance (to be sure, notions of sacrality—especially the sanctity of life—also create new cultural impasses, as they have in the ongoing debates over abortion). This chapter concludes with the description of an interfaith meeting held at the synagogue of Kol Shofar, just north of San Francisco, where Ernesto Cortés Jr., sporting an unruly yarmulke, was the main speaker. He concluded his address by recalling the Kabbalistic notion of zimzum, the moment immediately preceding creation in which God had to make room for something else to be. The spirit of creativity requires the making of such room, Cortés concluded, in order that things of beauty, things that can truly be called "good," can come into view. This idea nicely captures the spirit of respectful social and religious engagement for which Stout has long been making an appeal.

But there is a great deal more he might have said about the "religious" implications of this work, and I would like to suggest one such trajectory briefly in conclusion here. Central to Stout's work has been the conviction that communities come before principles, scriptures, or creeds. The Sabbath was made by men, not men by the Sabbath. To put it in the starkest terms, the people we meet in the New Testament did not have a New Testament. To be sure, these early followers of Jesus did have a scripture, the Greek Septuagint. But what they made of that scripture is often hard to say, and the way in which they were remaking it had a lot to do with what kind of community they believed they were in the process of becoming. It is clear that they no longer saw their scripture as a rule book (if they ever had), and that they were no longer interested in playing an older game. The game in which they were engaged was changing, and a new scripture would emerge one day from within the social world created by their new way of playing together: new rules for a new game with very different teammates, different habits, different virtues, different fouls, different goals.

What I would like to invite are Stout's reflections upon the relevance of this new work to that mysterious, though ever-more popular,¹⁶ period of early Christian formation from the perspective of broad-based organizing. The nascent Jesus-movement, viewed in this way, begins to look like the IAF network of its day. In order to illustrate this point, I would like to rewrite three important sentences from Stout's book that I have already discussed. Here they are:

Before 50 CE, the Jesus-movement was an elite movement with little internal structure and little power. After 50 CE, when face-to-face interaction gradually became its organizational basis, Christianity acquired considerable strength.

(adapted from Stout 2010, 149)

And again:

Peter could not have emancipated the religiously oppressed had there not been a shift in the Palestinian Jesus-movement, around 50 CE, from an elite movement centered around Jerusalem lawyers to a grass-roots organizing effort that encompassed all of the eastern Mediterranean.

(adapted from Stout 2010, 148)

A third point of subtle connection may be this: a popular Jewish teacher, with evident rhetorical and argumentative skills that proved especially volatile in the political tinderbox of Roman Palestine, was remembered by his followers as having delivered an extremely simple message with shattering and revolutionary social complications: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of religion. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no religion" (Stout 2010, 53, adapting Lincoln's words). Clearly, the grassroots organizers in the nascent Jesus movement engaged in a lot of travel and a lot of talk, both in one-on-ones (think of Philip talking to an anonymous Ethiopian eunuch, in Acts of the Apostles 8:26-39)¹⁷ and urban neighborhood walks (think of Paul and his friends at Corinth or Ephesus, not to mention Jesus and his fellows on their first visit to Jerusalem). Later, they would recall the success stories (and the failures) of their finest organizers from the previous generation. Later still, communities organized themselves with regular house meetings (in places scholars identify as "house churches"), engaged in larger-scale planning sessions (like the Council of Jerusalem, described in Acts of the Apostles 15:1-35), performed the requisite power analyses of their local communities and the imperial center in Rome. They organized themselves into complex hierarchies of elders, deacons, and bishops; got smarter about strategies of social engagement; and suffered whenever their leadership failed to continue talking to the community, thereby working diligently and deliberately to earn its authority and its trust. They talked a great deal about virtues and vices; the rules (and the scriptures), as I have repeatedly emphasized, came quite a bit later.

Given his interest in the elective affinity between a certain form of Christianity and a certain kind of modern democratic society,¹⁸ and given that Whitman's "Democratic Vistas" is a significant and recurrent essay in Stout's democratic literary canon (Stout 2004, 19; 2010, 7), it would be most interesting to have him tell us a bit more, and a bit more explicitly, about the sacred value of democracy in the Pragmatist tradition he has undertaken to defend and promote.

In Closing

But for now, it is sufficient to note how Blessed Are the Organized is designed to answer that plaintive question from a college freshman in the fall of 2004:

There is a way to begin. Do a preliminary power analysis. Talk to one institutional official in your community. Then talk to another. Search out potential leaders. Begin cultivating their skills and virtues, as well as your own. Keep talking until you can form a planning group. And reach out to professional organizers for help. This is what some of us are now doing in my own county in central New Jersey. How much we can accomplish remains to be seen. (Stout 2010, 285)¹⁹

Stout continues by laying out very brief programmatic descriptions of the various roles that can and must be played by intellectuals, by the press, by clergy, and by gifted orators. But the lion's share of this work will fall to We the People, of whom that college freshman in Tennessee, now presumably long graduated, is an essential member. As are we all. And that is the central and urgent point with which this volume concludes.

The cover of Democracy and Tradition boasted an interesting painting by Ben Shahn (1898-1969) called Wheat Field (1958); "think of this [book] as a Ben Shahn mural in prose," Stout observed (2004, 19). He illustrates what he sees going on in this painting with two rather diverse texts, Walt Whitman's "Autumn Rivulets" (a cluster of poems from the 1870s) and Meridel Le Sueur's novel North-Star Country (1945). Both texts put a premium on the glittering light of the creative individual whose greatest gifts have been nourished and unleashed by the sacred individualizing spirit of a healthy democracy. There is just a hint of color to the right of the wheat field; in that burst of color, a new thing is in the offing. But it cannot survive alone, apart from the other stalks in the field by which it is surrounded and the soil in which it first took root.

The cover of Blessed Are the Organized is a composite photograph. There is an indeterminate group of folding chairs in the foreground, on what appears to be a wooden gymnasium floor or church basement. Looming over this surprisingly informal space is what appears to be a very large American flag, only some of which is visible. The foreground is what makes the background meaningful in this photograph. The message seems to be on the one hand that this surprisingly informal space is also surprisingly powerful; it created that flag, and all that it represents, with its constantly evolving sea of stars. First came the meetings, the gradual formation of a moral community; the symbols, like the rules, came later. The text that Stout chose as an illustration of what he sees at work on that cover is "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar," by Robert Duncan (n.d.):

I see always the under side turning,fumes that injure the tender landscape.From which up breaklilac blossoms of courage in daily actstriving to meet a natural measure.

(Stout 2010, 290)

Our moral and political landscape is tender, fragile, liable to suffocation amid the toxic fumes of plutocratic privilege, and the general malaise born of a hopelessness that threatens to consume it. But individual blossoms battle, all green and eloquent, against such domination, muscling courageously to the surface each springtime, often with surprising names, unexpected agendas, and even more surprising success. They strive, and in their striving, they defend a natural measure. That natural democratic measure is grounded in a single, simple, yet overwhelming credo: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."

Of such simple insight broad-based movements of great moment have been, and may yet once more, be born.²⁰