Are the people of Longmeadow united by their membership in a community where citizens have broadly shared values, institutional obligations, and economic interests? Or, is Longmeadow a town where residents share resources, have overlapping cultural values, but see their relationship with town government as economic; the way consumers see producers in the marketplace, or employers see employees on the job?My sense is that the latter better describes the perspective of most Longmeadow residents. Unfortunately, this model of citizenship is starkly at odds with both the actual form of government in Longmeadow (the New England town meeting) and its attendant theory of democratic citizenship; a theory to which virtually all of Longmeadow's 11,932 registered voters probably aspire and (ostensibly at least) subscribe.
We are not practicing what we preach. We conceive of "ideal" democratic citizenship as involving broad and active citizen participation in community governance, and the willful subordination of personal interests for those of the community by citizen and elected official alike, but we operate in our daily lives as if democratic citizenship is confined to a supervisory, even transactional, role in which citizens hire and fire elected policy makers whose job involves satisfying constituency demands and delivering public services. We justify our operating assumptions as necessary concessions to reality without ever really questioning the appropriateness of our idealized criteria for judging political reality in the first place.
We behave as if politics is a job (a dirty job) and politicians are used car salesmen. Every public utterance from a "politician" is a career enhancing effort to make a sale. This disgusts us because we judge this "reality" against the "ideal" of the self sacrificing, community oriented statesman and citizen, without any awareness of our own role in the realization of this self fulfilling prophesy.
It's hardly surprising then that many withdraw from politics in order to avoid what they see as its moral hazards. Ironically, this understanding of "realpolitik" depends almost entirely upon the unconscious assumption of classical (read participatory/community first) notions of democratic citizenship and community. In Longmeadow, this counterproductive, but ubiquitous, cognitive dissonance is further encouraged by the survival of a quintessentially participatory and communitarian form of democratic government - the New England Town Meeting. Even the physical layout of the town bespeaks adherence to a participatory model of citizenship. Town greens provided the physical space for community life, a life that centered on collective action and governance.
When the Long Meddowe Days Committee tried to eliminate political signs from the green during their event last year, it was a vivid reminder of the disconnect between our town's political forms and our residents' perceptions of the town's political functions. The committee's insistence that politics was not appropriate at a "family friendly" event represents a profound and alarming obliviousness to our town's founding principles, as well as its present day institutional forms. Imagine if fans at a baseball stadium tried to discourage players from playing on the field because doing so would corrupt or interrupt their enjoyment of buying hotdogs and paying attention to the sights and sounds of the jumbo-tron. Political form and function have been divorced in our town and most folks haven't even noticed.
I believe our town needs to reconcile its political values and its political institutions. We should not continue to expect professional governance from a form of government designed to prevent that very thing. Nor should we expect governance that is acutely sensitive to the people's will if we refuse to express that will thoughtfully, routinely, clearly, and collectively. There are certainly credible intellectual arguments for trying to close this gap by either reforming our governing institutions to reflect our individualistic, market mentality or by campaigning to educate town residents about the advantages of modifying this dominant approach in an effort to resuscitate the participatory and communitarian norms of citizenship that formed the philosophical and even cultural foundations of our present system (i.e. a town meeting form of government). But, because moving in either direction too deliberately might prove "a cure worse than the disease," I propose we meet in the middle, incrementally modifying our governing institutions while simultaneously attempting to convince Longmeadow residents that participation in town politics can and should improve their lives.
I think a conversation about charter reform should be a high priority. Unlike last time, this conversation cannot bypass the conceptual foundations of democratic governance, but rather must make our contradictory and competing notions of democratic citizenship the centerpiece of the conversation and the conceptual road map to institutional reform. Our latest charter change was, no doubt, at least partially (though not explicitly) driven by these fundamental philosophical issues. I suspect, however, that this conceptual rift was never properly identified and explored for its potential role in the design of a more "effective" town government. It seems to me that our new charter's marginal modifications were primarily based on the desire for increased "efficiency" in the "delivery of town services." This type of language is itself evidence of a more limited notion of citizenship and community. Can you imagine family members using these terms when referring to the accomplishment of household chores? To the degree that "effectiveness" was considered in the latest charter reform, I don't think it was consciously addressed within the context of Democratic theory. In other words, I don't think the conversation clearly addressed the competing, but unspoken, assumptions of town residents regarding their responsibilities as citizens, or their definitions of community.
I believe a new conversation about charter reform must begin with a very clear and very public effort to educate residents about the two incompatible approaches to participation (and by implication, community) at play in our politics. I consider such an effort to be an essential component of any move toward institutional reform. If we hope for such reforms to better reflect a town-wide consensus on democratic values, then residents must be willing and able to clearly identify, articulate, and distinguish their values premises.
A "representative town meeting" form of government might be a reasonable and positive reform idea for our town that would represent an acknowledgement of both our participatory aspirations and our practical need for some degree of professionalization in 21st Century town government. Indeed, the present disagreement among active townspeople about the conduct and purview of our newly created Town Manager position is very likely a product of these conflicting (and sadly unconscious) assumptions about the locus of decision making power in our present form of government.