This book takes a journey in search of democracy, through an America that Tocqueville and Whitman never knew. It begins in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina and moves on to the Houston Astrodome, in the days when the hurricane survivors were there. It tours the borderlands of Texas, where hundreds of immigrant shantytowns somehow became habitable neighborhoods. It touches down briefly in Arizona, and then passes through some of the poorest communities in California, before ending in a well-to-do synagogue in Marin County.
In each of these places, we will meet people who want to explain, on the basis of their own experience, what they think citizenship means. Their stories will have much to teach us about the nature and prospects of grassroots democracy. Periodically, in the course of the journey, I will pause long enough to clarify some feature of life in a modern republic: citizenship, responsibility, authority, power, domination, freedom, anger, grief, leadership, ideals, values, ends, means, passions, interests, religion, secularity, and the concept of democracy itself.
There is a lot of talk these days, most notably from the president, about grassroots democracy. Change, he says, needs to come from the bottom up. There is, however, a good deal of confusion over what this might mean, how this sort of change might work, and what it can achieve. To dispel the confusion, one needs to look away from the centers of elite power and ask ordinary citizens what they are actually doing in their own communities to get organized, exert power, and demand accountability.
How do they build an organization? How do they analyze power relations? How do they cultivate leaders? What role does religion play in the organizational process? What objectives are being . . .