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We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America
Chronic unemployment, deindustrialized cities, and mass incarceration are among the grievous social problems that will not yield unless American citizens address them.
Peter Levine's We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For is a primer for anyone motivated to help revive our fragile civic life and restore citizens' public role. After offering a novel theory of active citizenship, a diagnosis of its decline, and a searing critique of our political institutions, Levine-one of America's most influential civic engagement activists-argues that American citizens must address our most challenging issues. People can change the norms and structures of their own communities through deliberative civic action. He illustrates rich and effective civic work by drawing lessons from YouthBuild USA, Everyday Democracy, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and many other civic groups. Their organizers invite all citizens-including traditionally marginalized people, such as low-income teenagers-to address community problems. Levine explores successful efforts from communities across America as well as from democracies overseas. He shows how cities like Bridgeport, CT and Allentown, PA have bounced back from the devastating loss of manufacturing jobs by drawing on robust civic networks. The next step is for the participants in these local efforts to change policies that frustrate civic engagement nationally.
Filled with trenchant analysis and strategies for reform, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For analyzes and advocates a new citizen-centered politics capable of tackling problems that cannot be fixed in any other way.
Peter Levine's We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For is a primer for anyone motivated to help revive our fragile civic life and restore citizens' public role. After offering a novel theory of active citizenship, a diagnosis of its decline, and a searing critique of our political institutions, Levine-one of America's most influential civic engagement activists-argues that American citizens must address our most challenging issues. People can change the norms and structures of their own communities through deliberative civic action. He illustrates rich and effective civic work by drawing lessons from YouthBuild USA, Everyday Democracy, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and many other civic groups. Their organizers invite all citizens-including traditionally marginalized people, such as low-income teenagers-to address community problems. Levine explores successful efforts from communities across America as well as from democracies overseas. He shows how cities like Bridgeport, CT and Allentown, PA have bounced back from the devastating loss of manufacturing jobs by drawing on robust civic networks. The next step is for the participants in these local efforts to change policies that frustrate civic engagement nationally.
Filled with trenchant analysis and strategies for reform, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For analyzes and advocates a new citizen-centered politics capable of tackling problems that cannot be fixed in any other way.
248 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
15 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
About the author
Peter Levine
53 books9 followersPeter Levine is an author, associate dean at Tufts University, and professor of philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 6, 2018
Civic engagement is more than just "a low-turnout primary election in which private money has substantial influence". Levine thinks of corruption in the broader meaning of "the perversion of the purposes of institutions"; one of its consequences is that even well conceived policies may be poorly implemented.
Some problems have obvious policy solutions, though "we lack the political will to do anything difficult," while other more complex problems "entangled with cultural norms and personal behavior as well as conflicting rights and limited resources" which allows people in power to exploit the confusion and frustration to avoid solving the problem.
"There is no alternative to more and better work by the residents of a whole community." (Or, in Thomas Friedman’s words, “The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens.”) Levine wants people to "change the norms and structures of their own communities through deliberate civic action". Writing in 2013, he says that over a million Americans are already "working on sophisticated, demanding, and locally effective forms of civic engagement" (defined as "deliberation..., collaborative work, and the strengthening of civic relationships" that includes and empowers people from all demographics, since "[t]he business leader who enters public debates having struggled to meet a payroll while paying taxes speaks from authentic experience. So does the soup kitchen volunteer who has faced a long line of homeless people with insufficient welfare benefits.") but this work is "scattered and local because it is contrary to mainstream national policy" and thus it is "poorly funded, invisible in federal and state law, understudied by academics, neglected in education, and ignored in news and popular culture."
He argues that these people should be organized "into a self-conscious movement for civic renewal," where renewal means "efforts to expand and enhance civic engagement." Civil society, meanwhile, refers to "that scale of human action where the minuscule powers of an individual obtain enough leverage to count but are not lost entirely in the mass. It is the world of 'we,' but not such a huge or abstract 'we' that 'I' no longer matters. It is politics at the human scale."
The process should be "citizen-centered," meaning it focuses not on any one problem but on the people who will be involved so that they can set their own agenda. There should be a formal, funded effort to bring citizens together but not to determine what they talk about. “When politics is open-ended, citizens decide what to do as they work together. Their goals are not predetermined" as opposed to "ideological or interest-group movements whose goals are set in advance.” Getting results may not require agreement on overarching principles. “Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice,…argues that there is no way to settle reasonable disagreements about the ideal state. Knowing what is ideal is not necessary to make wise and ethical decisions.”
In my view, Levine resolves a question put forth subsequently by Mark Lilla in The Once and Future Liberal about whether national parties and large-scale activism should band around political ideology or identity politics. Lilla favors ideology and wants to jettison identity politics. Levine would say that the question does not need to be asked in advance or on a high level and that the most active citizens should decide for themselves at the local level what they want to work on.
There are inherent difficulties. “Engaging anyone who chooses to listen is a civic approach to strategy because it treats citizenship (membership in a community) as a sufficient condition and does not privilege status, expertise, or power. But" he acknowledges, "finding something effective for everyone to do is no easy task." He also admits a chicken-and-egg problem about how institutions can foster equal participation of people who are currently underrepresented and disempowered. Programs of civic engagement work best when people are already participating and empowering themselves. If the engine isn't already running, it's hard to get it off the ground. Furthermore, the available tasks have to be meaningful and not just, for example, asking for volunteers to pick up litter for no pay, which may alienate them.
Using public high school as an example: In the past, “[w]ork life was a continuation of classroom life, with foremen and office managers replacing teachers and principals…It was easy for young people to envision concretely the benefits they would obtain from completing [high] school.” Today, however, if the same high school diploma doesn’t guarantee a good job and if its curriculum doesn’t adequately prepare students for college, then “the benefits will be hard to see. If most other students basically doubt the social contract and do not want to participate, it is difficult for any individual student to comply.” Teachers, too, are likely to burn out when faced with unmotivated students. Civic engagement can help begin to address the problem. Levine cites Robert Putnam's findings that high civic engagement correlates with high educational performance, more so even than "spending on education, teachers’ salaries, class size, or demographics." Similarly, Levine said that "civic engagement emerged as a stronger predictor of communities’ resilience against unemployment."
An example was the 1990s effort by the Bridgeport, Conn. Public Education Fund (BPEF) to find “organizers who specialized in convening diverse citizens to discuss issues, without promoting an ideology or a particular diagnosis.” Residents held dozens of official public meetings and many offshoots of those meetings. Some participants “developed advanced skills for organizing and facilitating such conversations.” They also took action: In the public schools, “professionals take guidance from public meetings” and “citizens are inspired to work as volunteers” in mentoring roles. “These efforts have been called ‘public work’ to emphasize that participants do not just volunteer their time in the evenings, nor do they merely discuss issues. They actually create, build, and teach, often as part of their paid jobs.”
Regarding the criminal justice system, it is deliberation specifically, not civic engagement more generally (which is rare anyway), that leads to a kinder approach. "Draconian sentencing laws often begin with referenda or with legislative votes that respond to popular pressure.” Yet “when citizens deliberate, they arrive at merciful or nuanced decisions. For instance, when judges disagree with jury verdicts, it is generally because they think the jury was too lenient.” Also, "community sentencing boards still handle nonviolent cases in most Oklahoma counties. The state’s Department of Corrections argues that these boards save money and reduce incarceration." “Problem-solving courts…reject the traditional measure of success in a judicial system (speedily rendering appropriate verdicts in cases) and instead try to address an underlying problem, whether drug abuse, violence, or urban blight…[it] broadens to include social workers, community organizers, and planners…”
Levine is not trying to reinvent the wheel. He primarily advocates for more institutional funding and support for these initiatives that have already been proven to work. Once the support is in place, trained people will know how to kick off the process. He is not providing a "do-it-yourself" guidebook for inexperienced people to attempt to kick off their own civic engagement initiatives.
Some problems have obvious policy solutions, though "we lack the political will to do anything difficult," while other more complex problems "entangled with cultural norms and personal behavior as well as conflicting rights and limited resources" which allows people in power to exploit the confusion and frustration to avoid solving the problem.
"There is no alternative to more and better work by the residents of a whole community." (Or, in Thomas Friedman’s words, “The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens.”) Levine wants people to "change the norms and structures of their own communities through deliberate civic action". Writing in 2013, he says that over a million Americans are already "working on sophisticated, demanding, and locally effective forms of civic engagement" (defined as "deliberation..., collaborative work, and the strengthening of civic relationships" that includes and empowers people from all demographics, since "[t]he business leader who enters public debates having struggled to meet a payroll while paying taxes speaks from authentic experience. So does the soup kitchen volunteer who has faced a long line of homeless people with insufficient welfare benefits.") but this work is "scattered and local because it is contrary to mainstream national policy" and thus it is "poorly funded, invisible in federal and state law, understudied by academics, neglected in education, and ignored in news and popular culture."
He argues that these people should be organized "into a self-conscious movement for civic renewal," where renewal means "efforts to expand and enhance civic engagement." Civil society, meanwhile, refers to "that scale of human action where the minuscule powers of an individual obtain enough leverage to count but are not lost entirely in the mass. It is the world of 'we,' but not such a huge or abstract 'we' that 'I' no longer matters. It is politics at the human scale."
The process should be "citizen-centered," meaning it focuses not on any one problem but on the people who will be involved so that they can set their own agenda. There should be a formal, funded effort to bring citizens together but not to determine what they talk about. “When politics is open-ended, citizens decide what to do as they work together. Their goals are not predetermined" as opposed to "ideological or interest-group movements whose goals are set in advance.” Getting results may not require agreement on overarching principles. “Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice,…argues that there is no way to settle reasonable disagreements about the ideal state. Knowing what is ideal is not necessary to make wise and ethical decisions.”
In my view, Levine resolves a question put forth subsequently by Mark Lilla in The Once and Future Liberal about whether national parties and large-scale activism should band around political ideology or identity politics. Lilla favors ideology and wants to jettison identity politics. Levine would say that the question does not need to be asked in advance or on a high level and that the most active citizens should decide for themselves at the local level what they want to work on.
There are inherent difficulties. “Engaging anyone who chooses to listen is a civic approach to strategy because it treats citizenship (membership in a community) as a sufficient condition and does not privilege status, expertise, or power. But" he acknowledges, "finding something effective for everyone to do is no easy task." He also admits a chicken-and-egg problem about how institutions can foster equal participation of people who are currently underrepresented and disempowered. Programs of civic engagement work best when people are already participating and empowering themselves. If the engine isn't already running, it's hard to get it off the ground. Furthermore, the available tasks have to be meaningful and not just, for example, asking for volunteers to pick up litter for no pay, which may alienate them.
Using public high school as an example: In the past, “[w]ork life was a continuation of classroom life, with foremen and office managers replacing teachers and principals…It was easy for young people to envision concretely the benefits they would obtain from completing [high] school.” Today, however, if the same high school diploma doesn’t guarantee a good job and if its curriculum doesn’t adequately prepare students for college, then “the benefits will be hard to see. If most other students basically doubt the social contract and do not want to participate, it is difficult for any individual student to comply.” Teachers, too, are likely to burn out when faced with unmotivated students. Civic engagement can help begin to address the problem. Levine cites Robert Putnam's findings that high civic engagement correlates with high educational performance, more so even than "spending on education, teachers’ salaries, class size, or demographics." Similarly, Levine said that "civic engagement emerged as a stronger predictor of communities’ resilience against unemployment."
An example was the 1990s effort by the Bridgeport, Conn. Public Education Fund (BPEF) to find “organizers who specialized in convening diverse citizens to discuss issues, without promoting an ideology or a particular diagnosis.” Residents held dozens of official public meetings and many offshoots of those meetings. Some participants “developed advanced skills for organizing and facilitating such conversations.” They also took action: In the public schools, “professionals take guidance from public meetings” and “citizens are inspired to work as volunteers” in mentoring roles. “These efforts have been called ‘public work’ to emphasize that participants do not just volunteer their time in the evenings, nor do they merely discuss issues. They actually create, build, and teach, often as part of their paid jobs.”
Regarding the criminal justice system, it is deliberation specifically, not civic engagement more generally (which is rare anyway), that leads to a kinder approach. "Draconian sentencing laws often begin with referenda or with legislative votes that respond to popular pressure.” Yet “when citizens deliberate, they arrive at merciful or nuanced decisions. For instance, when judges disagree with jury verdicts, it is generally because they think the jury was too lenient.” Also, "community sentencing boards still handle nonviolent cases in most Oklahoma counties. The state’s Department of Corrections argues that these boards save money and reduce incarceration." “Problem-solving courts…reject the traditional measure of success in a judicial system (speedily rendering appropriate verdicts in cases) and instead try to address an underlying problem, whether drug abuse, violence, or urban blight…[it] broadens to include social workers, community organizers, and planners…”
Levine is not trying to reinvent the wheel. He primarily advocates for more institutional funding and support for these initiatives that have already been proven to work. Once the support is in place, trained people will know how to kick off the process. He is not providing a "do-it-yourself" guidebook for inexperienced people to attempt to kick off their own civic engagement initiatives.
July 15, 2017
This is an academic book, not a light nonfiction that you would pick up at a bookshop. I really liked the premise but the book was very dense. I feel like it would be easier to understand in the form of an article than drawn out in book form. But the idea was really interesting and one that needs to be talked about more.
October 19, 2019
Libertarians: Militarizing police and then making their budgets dependent on criminalizing nonviolent behavior so they target the most vulnerable for enforcement isn't okay.
This book: Libertarians just want everyone to get a bucket of asphalt instead of roads.
I know it's easier to talk about ideologies in their most radicalized form, but it's simply not accurate when describing 99% of the population's beliefs. One day libertarianism will join the ranks of feminism, going from a word that incites immediate backlash to a general understanding of the definition.
Now onto the actual review (haha, whoops).
I highly recommend We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For, especially to people who don't work in policy but are/want to be politically active. Page 107 tells you all you need to know about how things really operate, and it saves you $100,000 in a political science degree:
"...Congress compounds the problem by delegating its lawmaking role--not so much to the president and the cabinet as to administrative agencies, civil servants, and special courts and panels within the executive branch. They do this by passing statutes that empower regulatory agencies to make policy within very broad outlines. In 2004, federal agencies generated 78,851 pages of proposed rules... the administrative agencies tended to delegate their powers further down, to various boards and committees that were forums for negotiations among stakeholders."
Yeah, take everything you learned in your 8th grade civics class (if you were middle class and even had one) and throw it out the window.
I think why I really enjoyed this book though, is because Peter Levine is a libertarian and just doesn't know it yet. Exit vs voice, advocacy for charter schools to increase opportunities, flexibility, and improve public schools? He gets it!
But then he calls Reagan a libertarian-leaning president in the same sentence that he describes Reagan's enormous federal spending as the cause of major national deficits? Funny, I thought a core tenet of libertarianism was lower federal spending.
This review became a defense of libertarianism I didn't intend, but! if you read this book, just take Levine's criticism with a grain of salt. That being said, one of my most enjoyable reading experiences this year.
This book: Libertarians just want everyone to get a bucket of asphalt instead of roads.
I know it's easier to talk about ideologies in their most radicalized form, but it's simply not accurate when describing 99% of the population's beliefs. One day libertarianism will join the ranks of feminism, going from a word that incites immediate backlash to a general understanding of the definition.
Now onto the actual review (haha, whoops).
I highly recommend We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For, especially to people who don't work in policy but are/want to be politically active. Page 107 tells you all you need to know about how things really operate, and it saves you $100,000 in a political science degree:
"...Congress compounds the problem by delegating its lawmaking role--not so much to the president and the cabinet as to administrative agencies, civil servants, and special courts and panels within the executive branch. They do this by passing statutes that empower regulatory agencies to make policy within very broad outlines. In 2004, federal agencies generated 78,851 pages of proposed rules... the administrative agencies tended to delegate their powers further down, to various boards and committees that were forums for negotiations among stakeholders."
Yeah, take everything you learned in your 8th grade civics class (if you were middle class and even had one) and throw it out the window.
I think why I really enjoyed this book though, is because Peter Levine is a libertarian and just doesn't know it yet. Exit vs voice, advocacy for charter schools to increase opportunities, flexibility, and improve public schools? He gets it!
But then he calls Reagan a libertarian-leaning president in the same sentence that he describes Reagan's enormous federal spending as the cause of major national deficits? Funny, I thought a core tenet of libertarianism was lower federal spending.
This review became a defense of libertarianism I didn't intend, but! if you read this book, just take Levine's criticism with a grain of salt. That being said, one of my most enjoyable reading experiences this year.
November 11, 2017
I'm excited to meet Levine this weekend when he comes to speak at a citizenship event. I appreciated his philosophical and theoretical approach to writing this book.
March 21, 2022
I felt that this novel had some very important and useful information in it, but overall, I found it to be dreadfully boring. It could be condensed and get to the point much faster than it does.
September 26, 2014
Peter Levine has been one of my favorite bloggers (see here: http://peterlevine.ws/) for about as many years as I've been aware of blogs. He has been a constant, unflagging, reliably insightful observer of national politics, and particularly the way our political culture and constitutional and electoral systems either encourage, or (more often, unfortunately) discourage, the sort of civic action and participatory decision-making and democracy that is closest to his heart. This book of his expresses, in painstaking and sometimes rather wonkish detail, just what is good about community organizing and citizen involvement, what its limits and parameters are (in terms of both its aims and its scale), what stands in its way, and what can be done about removing those obstacles and becoming more responsible citizens. It's a short book for covering so many topics, and that sometimes makes the prose a little dense, but by and large I found it filled with thoughtful proposals and inspiring ideas, written by a passionate man who simply rejects the fatalistic idea that economic inequality or other undemocratic elements of our present society make it impossible for people to experiment with taking control of their lives.
Levine structures the book in terms of an overarching political scheme: to be able to organize and effect popular change in a mass democracy, we have to be clear, first of all, on our values; and then second, we need to agree on the facts; and then finally, we have to have a strategy which is both practical and engaging. The book's structure works, I suppose, though sometimes it makes certain discussions come off as a little over-thought-out and pedantic. The most interesting parts of the book for me came when Levine explored, in several different contexts, what it means to identify that which is truly "common" to a defined group of people, and how we have find, in the midst of those commonalities, sufficient leverage to move sufficient numbers of those who share in those common values and goals to effect real democratic change. Levine doesn't provide any easy solutions for putting together winning coalitions, but he makes about as good a case for trying as I've ever read.
Levine structures the book in terms of an overarching political scheme: to be able to organize and effect popular change in a mass democracy, we have to be clear, first of all, on our values; and then second, we need to agree on the facts; and then finally, we have to have a strategy which is both practical and engaging. The book's structure works, I suppose, though sometimes it makes certain discussions come off as a little over-thought-out and pedantic. The most interesting parts of the book for me came when Levine explored, in several different contexts, what it means to identify that which is truly "common" to a defined group of people, and how we have find, in the midst of those commonalities, sufficient leverage to move sufficient numbers of those who share in those common values and goals to effect real democratic change. Levine doesn't provide any easy solutions for putting together winning coalitions, but he makes about as good a case for trying as I've ever read.
August 13, 2014
Makes a clear and cogent case for more civic engagement focused on bridging differences rather than advocacy work centered on "beating" the other side. What remains to be seen is whether the nascent civic renewal movement, which Peter argues has more than a million participants, can take a more self-conscious and self-sustaining role on the national stage--a lot of this work is currently either too local or too dependent on foundation support to be that assertive. But we need it.
January 2, 2017
Great if slow read about civic engagement. I learned a lot and am still thinking it all over. Recommend.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews