American Renewal After the Pandemic
As the country slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, is there hope for building a better, fairer and more productive America—for citizens to connect on a community level beyond culture wars and Trump-inspired conspiracy theories? The country is still deeply split along partisan lines. A majority of Republicans don’t believe that Joe Biden is the legitimate president and most support anti-democratic efforts to repress voter turnout.
As a California native I’ve always been an optimist about the prospects for renewing the democratic promise of America—but I’m not Pollyanish. I’ve tried to base my optimism and activism on what works in practice to make a better society.
In 1984, I received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation titled “Learning from Ourselves” for travel to cities across the country to examine case studies of citizen participation and urban reform. In the 80s, I was also a co-founder of the Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies which sought to bring together activists to share ideas and strategies about political and economic reform. Our first gathering was hosted by Paul Soglin, the young liberal mayor of Madison, Wisconsin and his deputy, former investigative journalist, Jim Rowen. In subsequent annual meetings, we brought together elected officials, administrators, community activists and policy thinkers from mid-sized California cities like Berkeley, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara and Davis; from mid-west cities like St. Paul and from Chicago and Detroit with mobilized Black communities; from northeast cities like Hartford, Ct. and Burlington, Vt. that had elected an insurgent community organizer named Bernie Sanders as mayor; and from southern towns like Austin, Texas where populist Jim Hightower had been elected state agriculture commissioner. It felt like a democratic wave was spreading across the country at least among our generation.
I co-edited an annual Policy Reader for the meetings for which we compiled examples of local legislation and programs such as urban farmers markets, well-designed affordable housing, community-based policing, sustainable environmental planning and neighborhood-based economic development. We commissioned policy studies including The Wealth of Cities by consultant Ed Kirshner on the underutilized resources of urban jurisdictions and a study of publicly owned banks such as the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. We published articles in Working Papers, a quarterly journal of politics and public policy; I served as West Coast editor.
Pierre Clavel, a professor at Cornell, chronicled many of these reform efforts in his book The Progressive City: Planning and Participation. Clavel also established a valuable Progressive Cities archives at the Cornell School of City and Regional Planning. Some of the participants in our network went on to higher office including Bernie Sanders, North Dakota’s populist tax commissioner Byron Dorgan who became a US Senator, Cleveland’s mayor Dennis Kucinich who was elected to Congress and Arkansas’s attorney general Bill Clinton who made it to the White House.
Based on this experience, I wrote a national urban program for President-elect Clinton, hoping that the Department of Housing and Urban Development might promote and support these local progressive efforts. Unfortunately, Clinton’s choice for HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, had little interest in anything but self-promotion. I found myself pushed out of domestic policy matters, and returned to an earlier field of interest, diplomacy, by becoming the US ambassador to Finland.
As ambassador, I had to explain to my host nation why Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party decided to shut down the Federal government. I also learned that the Conference on Alternative State and Local Policy had lost its modest funding and the organization had folded. After Vice President Gore lost a narrow race to George Bush, 9/11 and the War on Terror seemed to suck the reform energy out of the American political system while the country’s embrace of globalization drained economic resources from local communities. Dysfunction and stagnation coupled with wealth accumulation for the few seemed to be the new American model. Rampant homelessness and racial strife became the default urban policy.
Funded by right-wing billionaires and corporate political funds, the Republican Party won control of many state legislatures, enacting a wave of conservative legislation which targeted the teaching of American’s history of slavery, limited women’s access to abortion, and increased voter suppression measures.
But largely out of sight of the national media, some good things were happening. In 2012, two journalists, Jim Fallows, a correspondent for the Atlantic magazine , and his wife Deb Fallows, returned from their years reporting from China and decided to reacquaint themselves with their own country. Making use of Jim’s skills as pilot, the couple crisscrossed the country in a small plane for five years, looking for stories of change and renewal, mostly in mid-size towns. They chronicled what they found in articles in the Atlantic, compiling them in a best-selling book, Our Towns-A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America.
Our Towns documentary (HBO)
The Fallows decided to expand their domestic work on multiple media fronts— cooperating on an HBO documentary based on the book and then, even more significantly, establishing the Our Towns civic foundation which utilizes the tools of 21st communication—Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and an electronic newsletter—to build a virtual network of civic minded Americans engaged in renewing their communities.
The most recent newsletter reports such optimistic stories as the effort in Erie, Pa. to support refugee owned start-ups and on the Lake Area Technical College in Watertown, South Dakota, one of the best community colleges in the country. The examples that the Fallows continue to uncover and document are not trivial or inconsequential. In many instances, these efforts transcend Left/Right, Progressive/Conservative, and Black/White categories. They are not about winning partisan battles but about reclaiming the American democratic spirit. The tools include micro-breweries and minor league baseball stadiums as well as community colleges and community newspapers. The abiding faith is that America can be redeemed and renewed through democratic means.
I’ve been giving copies of Our Towns to new ambassadors appointed to Biden’s America, and encouraging the diplomats to use the book and the newsletter as guides for getting out of DC and seeing areas of the country that CNN and Fox News ignore. I’m also recommending to the Biden administration that they instruct his new ambassadors to link up citizens in the country where they’re serving with the Our Towns network to make it an international web of civic activists so that we learn not just from ourselves at home but also from citizens around the world who are renewing their own communities.
Of course, I hope that a few Republican Senators would take the time to read Our Towns and reflect on the kind of country we really want America to be.
Derek Shearer is Chevalier Professor of Diplomacy at Occidental College, former US ambassador to Finland, and a former planning commissioner in Santa Monica, Ca.