With the Republican and Democratic coronations still shimmering like Oz and Perot's Reform Party slouching toward irrelevance, it is understandable if Americans despair of ever being able to vote for fundamental change that improves their lives rather than against what they don't like. To be sure, there are some options, like voting for the Libertarian or Conservative Party or writing in Ralph Nader's name, but realistically most people are not going to do this.
What is one to do? Answer: Become a true citizen once again.
Though the writers of the Constitution had a limited idea of who deserved to vote and gain the benefits of citizenship, they had clear ideas about the virtues of this citizen: committed to self-study of the issues, engaged in building community with others, skeptical of power, passionate about liberty. All agreed that if citizens did not make these efforts, democracy would inevitably give way to tyranny.
Today, most people have given up being citizens, and the consequences are clear: a Potemkin village where the façades of democracy now mask the almost complete corporate take-over of the political, social, and economic spheres of life.
It is time for citizens to fight back, and an invitation to do just that has been sent out. In the August 14/21, 1995, issue of The Nation, Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer and a recent Fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, put out what has become known as "The Call." It is, in his words, a "call to populists, workers, progressives and liberals to reconstitute ourselves into a smashing new national force to end corporate rule." Specifically, Dugger wants this new organization, which has been dubbed The Alliance, to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the 19th-century Populists' National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union: to "resume the cool eyeing of the corporations with a collective will to take back the powers they have seized from us."
Since Dugger's Call, almost three dozen local Alliances and seven regional Alliances have sprung up around the country, and in November people will come together for a founding convention in Hunt, Texas, in the hill country that spawned the original Populists. The national office puts out a newsletter which goes to all Alliance members, and an editorial coöperative has produced Deep Democracy, an occasional journal that lists educational resources and explores ways people can engage in "horizontal communication" to promote the Alliance message.
At this stage of the game, the whole organization is quite fluid: local Alliances are free to organize themselves as their members see fit, and the regional Alliances act primarily as clearinghouses so that the locals can know what people are doing elsewhere. Massachusetts has eight Alliances: Boston/Cambridge, Amherst, the Berkshires, Merrimack Valley, Northbridge (towns just west of Boston), the North Shore, and two on Cape Cod. Each has its own particular mission and structure, but they all focus on studying about, and then crafting actions against, the way corporations have come to rule the hearts and minds of American citizens. Alliance members seek to once again become, and to convince others to become, full-hearted citizens in order to take back power that is rightfully theirs by birthright and declaration.
It is difficult to know just where the Alliance effort will go, but if it has any single guiding principle, it is the desire to emulate the best aspects of the 19th-century Populists, who, according to Lawrence Goodwyn, wanted to create a "coöperative commonwealth" and build a "cultural acceptance of democratic politics open to serious structural evolution of society" (a principle that meshes well with other groups such as Share The Wealth, the New Party, the Green Party, and the Center for Popular Economics, to just name a few). This is an effort that could unite citizens across many boundaries to speak truth to power, as the Quakers say. It is, in short, the work of being a citizen, an art we may have forgotten but have never really lost.
(August 1996)