Democracy and Its Roots of Grass

In 1962, I was one of the several dozen people in their teens and early 20s who assembled at Port Huron, Mich., to spend several days debating and reworking a draft manifesto written by former California state senator Tom Hayden for the Students for a Democratic Society, the new left organization that sparked the mass antiwar protests of the 1960s. Our chutzpah was palpable: We thought, despite -- or because of -- our youth, that we could correct decades of left-wing failure and invent a fresh vision to inspire social action. And, indeed, the Port Huron Statement continues to merit attention today, if for no other reason than that it introduced a new phrase into the political lexicon: "participatory democracy."

Coined by Arnold Kaufman, Hayden's philosophy professor at the University of Michigan, the term distilled the vision of Kaufman's hero, John Dewey, of a never-ending political and social mission to extend the opportunity for human beings to have a voice in the "decisions that affect their lives." Such a mission strives to replace top-down control with democratic deliberation in every institutional structure from the nation-state to the family. New Leftists saw participatory democracy as a synthesis of the best elements of older radical ideological streams -- pacifism, anarchism, socialism, populism -- that expressed the common core of these: a quest for a social order in which human beings are increasingly able to determine their common fate rather than live at the mercy of dominating elites or impersonal forces.

Participatory democracy was a lens for looking at society at large; for many '60s activists it was also a frame for scrutinizing their own internal practices and relationships. Sixties social movements consciously tried to see if participatory democracy could, in fact, be practiced in their own organizations and communities. The books "Freedom Is an Endless Meeting" and "Making a Place for Community" describe such experiments, appearing 40 years after the Port Huron Statement.

Francesca Polletta's "Freedom Is an Endless Meeting" focuses on three '60s groups and their methods: Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the network of black and white youths founded in 1960, created by those who had sparked the sit-ins and freedom rides and became the prime organizers of the Mississippi freedom struggle; Students for a Democratic Society, which tried in the mid-'60s to emulate SNCC's organizing approach in several Northern cities and, after launching protests against the Vietnam War, became a membership organization of tens of thousands; and the women's liberation movement as expressed by a variety of local collectives and consciousness-raising groups.

Polletta's interviews with scores of veteran activists lead to a deep portrayal of the ways in which activists tried to fuse moral principle and strategy. This portrayal challenges the common assumption that morality and strategy are incompatible, that those who aim at winning must compromise principle while those who insist on morality are destined to be ineffective.

Decision-making in these groups, Polletta shows, borrowed from the Quakers and other pacifist groups and emphasized consensus. She explains that the adoption of consensus was not only a matter of principle, it also ensured that their high-risk organizing and protesting derived from the genuine commitment of all. Rather than forge group discipline on command, as armies or revolutionary undergrounds do, these groups sought solidarity through deliberation and open communication. It may have led to the frustrations of "endless meetings" but also made members take ownership of group decisions.

SNCC worked in the poorest black communities of the Deep South, trying to mobilize people who lacked formal schooling and were unaccustomed to public talk or action. Yet rather than lead in the usual sense, SNCC organizers taught and listened, enabling the "indigenous" people to take leadership. SDS' organizing efforts in poor Northern neighborhoods emulated this principle of participatory democracy: to train voiceless people to speak in their own interest rather than be spoken for.