‘Yes We Can’:

Identity politics and project politics for a late-modern world

By Henrik P. Bang

The University of Copenhagen

Department of Political Science

April 2009
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ABSTRACT

There is widespread agreement in mainstream participation studies that social capital and civic
engagement in Western democracies are in steady and continuous decline. How did it happen then
that Barrack Obama was able to mobilize 10s of millions of volunteers and supporters for his
spectacularly successful and novelty creating Presidential Campaign? This was against all scientific
odds and statistics. Part of the answer is that his campaign was directed to building political capital
for solving common policy concerns. This shows a gap in political analysis in which the study of
reflexive individuals in discursive political communities is situated. When, to an increasing extent,
such individuals are deliberately choosing not to engage in ‘big’ politics, it is not because they feel
inherently opposed to it or highly satisfied with it. It is above all because they think that the ‘old’
kind of ‘big’ politics does not leave them space and autonomy to pursue the kind of identity politics
and project politics that they prefer. Obama’s rhetoric resonates with the lived experiences of such
individuals, because it does not expect, or assume, their blind or rational obedience. Rather, it
requests them to participate directly in his project, trying to convince them that Obama’s eventual
success relies crucially on their abilities to make a political difference. This marks a creative shift in
political communication from being oriented towards keeping government effective and legitimate
to getting people freely and actively to accept and help in executing what has to be done in order to
solve common concerns. The paper discusses why this shift has not been detected by mainstream
participation studies, following their development in Almond and Verba’s civic culture, through
Putnam’s social capital framework, to Norris’ cause oriented politics. Later, Marsh et al’s new
politics of lived experience is introduced and connected to the project politics model for studying
Everyday Makers and Expert Citizens. The conclusion is that Obama’s rhetoric in particular appeals
to Everyday Makers and Expert Citizen and that their reciprocal resonance opens for a fusion of
identity politics and project politics in a new, much more communicative and interactive democratic
model for doing what neither neo-liberalism nor statism apparently can do: getting things done in a
timely and prudent manner by establishing more balanced and discursive two-way relations of
autonomy and dependence between political authorities and laypeople in their political
communities.
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INTRODUCTION

Since Robert D. Putnam published his article about how American’s were increasingly ‘bowling
alone’ (1995), many have asked whatever has happened to civic engagement in the Western world.
As Russell J. Dalton recently noted (2008: 76), there is: ‘an apparent consensus among
contemporary political scientists that the foundations of citizenship and democracy in America are
crumbling’ (Dalton 2008: 76). Similarly, Macedo et al argues (2005: 1):

Citizens participate in public affairs less frequently, with less knowledge and
enthusiasm, in fewer venues, and less equally than is healthy for a vibrant democratic
polity.

However, after having witnessed how millions of volunteers and active supporters provided time
and money for Barack Obama’s novel and spectacular campaign, the question which needs to be
asked is why no mainstream Political Scientists seem to have seen this development coming. For
instance, at its high point, my.barackobama.com had 2 million active users, more than 100,000
profiles and 35,000 affinity groups, and was the coordination point for 200,000 events. In addition
70,000 people raised $30 million using MyBO, while in the last four days of the campaign, users
made 3 million telephone calls as part of the get-out-the-vote effort
(http://www.winningcampaigns.org/Articles/Obama-Campaign-Vendors-List.html). Why given this
spectacular net of particular activities could mainstream Political Science claim that young people
had: ‘forsaken their parents’ habitual readiness to engage in the simplest act of citizenship’ (Putnam
1995: 69)? I will examine this paradox by asking these questions:

1) Why was it that the organizers of the Obama Campaign could see a potential for
participation that mainstream Political Scientists could not see?

2) What is it in the mainstream participatory models that prevent scholars from detecting that
such a vast potential for participation exist in society?

3) What kinds of new activisms was it that the Obama Campaign in particular addressed and
managed to activate?

The answer to the first question is evident in the famous campaign slogans of ‘Yes We Can’ and
‘Change Can Happen’. These slogans direct one’s attention to a new political community approach
to participation, stressing how people from different (sub)cultures, with different religions and of
different race and gender can work together for a common cause in light of their mutual acceptance
 4

and recognition of their intrinsic differences. This kind of immediate and concrete political
community action, combining identity politics and project politics, simply constitutes a black hole
in the mainstream’s underlying liberal democratic model, the key emphasis of which is how to
reach a rational and consensual decision on an existing conflict of interest. Just as identity politics is
not reducible to a matter of (minority) rights so project politics cannot be identified with a ‘small’
cause-oriented protest politics of no relevance to the conduct of ‘big’ politics.

The answer to the second question is clear when entering my.barackobama.com:

I’M ASKING YOU TO BELIEVE.

Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…

I’m asking you to believe in yours

As I shall show, this focus on, and imagining of, a two-way, non-hierarchical and mutually
conditioning authority relationship simply has no resonance for mainstream participatory models,
all of which take it for granted that political authority always involves a command-obedience
relationship between a hierarchical state and people in civil society. What is stressed in mainstream
participatory models is never that laypeople can make a real difference to the structuration of the
political regime from inside the political system. The focus is always on how people orient
themselves to government from outside in civil society, whether actively, as virtuous citizens, or
passively, as obedient subjects. In this model the building of political capital from below in the
political community plays no significant role, precisely because the responsiveness and
effectiveness of any political regime is determined by the ‘inputs’ of economic and social capital (in
the shape of facilities, legitimacy and trust) that it receives from the outside. The model which
enjoys hegemony in the mainstream is Almond and Verba’s one of the civic culture (1963) as
composed of three subcultures: the participatory culture, the parochial culture and the subject
culture. This model does not only hold for Putnam’s social capital model (1993, 2002 (ed.)). It even
applies to new approaches, moving beyond the analysis of social capital and responsible and
effective government to cause-oriented critical citizens (Norris 1999, 2003, 2007) and forms of
micro-personal political activity (Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley 2004).

The answer to the third question becomes visible when browsing by category on MyBO through the
28.000 groups and circles that one can choose to join, on and off, when one has the time for it and
feels like it (checked 04.05.2009):
Local (9735), People (5248), Issues (4938)
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Interests (4291), National (3926)

As the weighting of locality, people and issues indicate when compared to those of interests and
nation, this site appeals precisely to reflexive individuals, who mix identity politics and project
politics, the personal and the communal, and the local and the global. Such individuals want
empowerment from above in order for them to be able to do things themselves from below. Such
individuals would in most mainstream participation studies be dismissed as: ‘atomized forms of
citizenship [in which] people often have only a surface engagement with political issues and
complexities’ (Stoker 2006: 11, cf. Cain, Dalton and Scarrow (eds.) 2006, Putnam (ed.) 2002),
Pharr and Putnam (eds. 2000). In contrast, Obama’s local experiences as a community organizer in
Chicago in combination with his team’s knowledge of how to use ICT for political campaigning
had shown him how reflexive individuals, who have deliberately chosen not to engage in
conventional ‘big’ politics may be mobilized for building creative political communities in virtual
as well as real space ((http://fabians.org.uk/images/stories/pdfs/yes_we_can.pdf, checked March 21
2009). This is also why Obama could mock the mainstream in his victory speech in his favorite city
(http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/05/raw-data-barack-obamas-victory-speech/):

[The campaign] grew strength from the young people, who rejected the myth of
their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that
offered little pay and less sleep. It drew strength from the not-so-young people
who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect
strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized
and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by
the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth. This is your
victory.

Obama here seems to speak directly to those whom in alternative participation studies have been
called Everyday Makers and Expert Citizens, who consider politics as lived experience and who can
be mobilized if: ‘governance initiatives can open up political spaces for young people to organize
around and articulate the issues that concern them’ (Marsh, O’Toole and Jones 2007: 221).
Everyday Makers and Expert Citizens are people who want to engage directly in helping to solve
those policy risks that confront them in their everyday lives, rather than merely helping to articulate
citizen’s wants as demands that call for collective decisions. Such political participants have a
project identity, more than a legitimating or oppositional one. They do not engage primarily in order
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to give voice to repressed interests and identities, but rather in order to help to empower people and
develop their own identities as well as their capacities to act in solving common concerns.

Whatever the outcome of Barrack Obama’s Presidency, one thing already stands out sharply from
his campaigning. His campaign suggests that there is an alternative to both market and state, namely
a multilevel governance approach to engaging people with various identities in common projects
and building reflexive political communities that enable them to express their individuality in
cooperation with others, for the explicit purpose of making a difference in the solving of common
concerns (Bang and Esmark (ed.) 2007, Bevir and Trentmann (eds.) 2007, Acheson and Williamson
2007, Clark, Newman, Smith, Vidler and Westmarland 2007). The Obama campaign managed to
form new crucial connections with laypeople, involving them in policy articulation and promising
them a stake in policy delivery when the time was ripe. His project may eventually fail, but what
stands out is his political lesson that elections today must be won by mobilizing and empowering
people to make a difference in, and through, immediate and concrete political action.

1. Identity politics and project politics: two black holes in mainstream thought

How people construct their political identity in and through their participation in concrete policy
projects on the output side of political processes is a theme which has for a decade at least been a
core subject in local political analyses (Bang (ed.) 2003, Fischer 2003, Hajer and Wagenaar (eds.)
2003). In what ways do new models of identity and project politics dissociate themselves from the
way they are treated in mainstream Political Science? Let us, for the sake of convenience, introduce
a simple model, describing how the old and new models of participation approach the relation
between government and people, and individual and community respectively:

Figure One: the Core of Old and New Participation Studies

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(neutral)
Government
[hegemonic]

(abstract) TWO- (one)

Individual DIMENSIONAL Community
[concrete] DELIBERATION [many]

(mass)
People
[reflexive]

Very crudely put, I will describe their relation as follows (Bang and Dyrberg 2003, Habermas 1997,
2002). Liberalism is rooted in the relationship of the individual to government (or the state). The
individual is endowed with certain universal rights and a contract is established by government to
protect those rights as a neutral umpire but also with force, if necessary. ‘Community’ is regarded
as an aggregate of individual preferences and government is considered a ‘necessary evil’ which
should be as small as possible in order not to lead to overregulation of the free market economy.
Simultaneously, government should be sufficiently strong to hinder violations of the individual’s
‘life, liberty and estate’.

Communitarians are directly opposed to liberals in regarding rights as secondary to learning and
integrating norms about the common good. The individual appears as a communal construct shaped
by the kind of morality, networking, learning and trust that identify a well-integrated community.
Participation is regarded as a collective enterprise aimed at achieving a common goal. Differences
are recognized but also assimilated to contribute to the common good. There is little room for
individuality here, since the individual is but the result of its collective build-up. Furthermore, as is
the case in liberalism, government is considered an omnipotent threat, though not primarily to
individual freedom, but to the common good.
 8

Republicans emphasize how political institutions foster the virtues that lead people to do their duties
as citizens (Doheny 2007: 407). Republicanism does not only argue that a republic is the best form
of government, but, in particular, that the political institutions of republican government are the
creators of individual rights and the common good. In my view, republicanism, due to its classical
Greek roots, is constitutively ambiguous with regard to whether it conceives of itself as a
universally, generalisable, logic (Habermas 1997) or as a context dependent, and historically
constructed, hegemonic power (Mouffe 2000, cf. Bang 2007). In both versions the focus is on how
republicanism induces commonality and solidarity to strengthen the deliberative spirit among
groups with different interests and identities in society. However, there is disagreement about
whether republicanism is about removing disorder from an underlying general democratic order, or
whether it is rather a matter of creating islands of democratic order out of an underlying general
disorder (ibid). In the latter version, the specificity of democracy does not lie in some universal
procedures and integrative norms for removing particular conflicts from a general form of
integration, rather, it lies: ‘in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress
it by imposing an authoritarian order’ (Mouffe 2000: 183). Here, the need is to keep a fundamental
antagonism at bay and ‘domesticate it’ in order to be able to use it for liberating purposes as
institutionalized democratic agonisms.

As indicated in figure 1 identity politics and project politics have no space in conventional
democratic theory, precisely because they investigate into what liberalists, communitarians and
republicans do not, namely how individuals, sharing in a political division of labour, can develop
political commonality from their political individuality, and vice versa. There are thus no way of
insulating individuality from commonality in identity politics and project politics, because it is
always a matter of being able to see oneself in the other and of recognizing this other in oneself
(Strong and Madsen 2003). Placing emphasis on how political individuality from commonality is
constructed bottom up, the notions of identity politics and project politics clearly dissociate
themselves from liberalism and its notions of an abstract, ‘freestanding’ individual as well as from
communitarianism and its notion of one overarching common good. But they also dissociate
themselves from republicanism in which the main emphasis is on how an institutional hegemony
constructs virtuous citizens from the top down. Thus, identity politics and project politics may be
described as the black hole in contemporary democratic studies, because they conceive of people as
reflexive, historically situated, individuals who want to govern themselves and with others through
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their concrete interventions in the ongoing processes of events in the world. However, they do have
old ancestors, since anarchists made that point long ago:

Anarchism….owes its origin to the constructive, creative activity of the people, by

which all institutions of communal life were developed in the past, and to a protest – a
revolt against the external force which had thrust itself upon these institutions
(Kropotkin in Capouya and Tompkins 1975: 57).

No ruling authorities, then, No government of man by man; no crystallization and

immobility, but a continual evolution-such as we see in nature. Free play for the
individual, for the full development of his individual gifts – for his individualization
(ibid: 65).

However there are significant differences between the ‘old’ anarchism and the new models of
identity politics and project politics. First of all, they are non-evolutionary, in focusing on the
individual as a concrete, historically located subject, on government as a temporary hegemony for
exercising power over others in time-space, on community as composed of many, relatively
autonomous and historically situated ones, and on laypeople as an ensemble of historically situated
human beings who are able to make a concrete political difference whether acting alone or together.
Secondly, they do not usually specify the connection between the dominant hegemony and
laypeople as an eternal struggle between oppressors and those resisting such oppression.
Domination is described as liberating as well as oppressive, and the interventions by laypeople from
below are pictured along a scale ranging from total rejection to complete acceptance of political
authority (Giddens 1986).

This brings us to the notion of political community. What is inconceivable in the 3 democratic
models is exactly the understanding that political learning and cooperation in such a community can
spring from a deliberate choice on the part of reflexive individuals not to participate in the formal
regime institutions, except perhaps as voters. Today, this is becoming obvious, in particular in the
study of local governance and participation on the internet (Cornfield 2004, Davies 2007, Häyhtiö
and Rinne 2008, Loader 2007, Lowndes and Sullivan 2007, Marsh et al 2007). Activists, local
studies show, shun ‘big’ politics, because it does not allow them to feel immediately engaged in,
and influential in solving, the many concrete policy problems that confront them in their everyday
life (Bang (ed.) 2003, 2005, Barnes, Newman and Sullivan 2007, Coleman 2007, 2008, Hajer and
Wagenaar (eds.) 2003, Heffen, Kickert, and Thomassen (eds.) 2000, Marsh, O’Toole and Jones
 10

2007, Newman (ed.) 2005,). Furthermore, activists do not think that those involved in ‘big’ politics
regard them as reflexive political beings capable of self- and co-governance. What seems to
distinguish them from the old anarchists is that they have a project identity that means that it
depends on the concrete context whether they fight against or collaborate with the authorities
(Castells 1997). To them, recognition of difference is more fundamental to life in the late modern
Polis than are mere tolerance, eternal resistance or an overarching commonality or national identity.
Identity politics and project politics shun the notion of the individual as an abstract and universal
mechanism who dutifully plods through life’s concrete experiences leaving its rational choice on all
events and structures coming its way. Individuals are considered as ‘bundles’ of identities; as
subject and objects of the attribution of meaning; as layered into multiple levels and practices; and
as discursively (re)constructing themselves on their journey through all these levels and practices in
which they are contextually embedded (White 2008: 17, cf. Beck 1996, Giddens 1996).

In practice, identity politics and project politics are nearly inseparable, because identity is very
much a project, the realization of which depends crucially on the transformative capacity of oneself
and others (Bang 2003b, 2004, 2005). In democratic theory, however, identity politics is usually
absorbed into the old input model as an extension of the old discussion of self-interest vs. the
general interest (Kymlicka and Norman 2000). However, those studying political identity are not
only sceptical of any abstract ideal of good citizenship; they simply abandon them in favour of
developing concrete discursive practices for managing what they consider an eternal tension
between the legitimate domination of a given hegemonic power and those minorities who have been
excluded from it (Giddens 1986, Mouffe 2000). However, the link between the notions of identity
politics and project politics show how these model go way beyond the old input political question
of how conflicting interests, as well as diverse and combating identities, can acquire free and equal
access to, and recognition in, the political decision-making processes. They deal in concrete action
more than in collective decisions, meaning that they place key emphasis on the linking of identity
construction to the exercise of control on the output side. They hold that concrete influence on the
articulation and delivery of social policy is more significant and relevant to overcome problems of
exclusion than are abstract political rights.

Those studying identity politics and project politics directly accuse the ‘old’ liberal model of
universal rights for concealing how a certain hegemonic identity is operating the so-called ‘neutral
state’ as a skewed power favouring some political identities (such as white, middle-aged, Christian
men) above all else. One example is the discussion about whether to introduce quotas to secure
 11

women and migrants (with a state citizenship status) a fairer and more equal representation in
Parliament or other important societal institutions, such as executive committees and boards of
directors (cf. Lister 1997, Phillips 1998). Such quotas do violate the liberal tolerance principle,
based as it is on the notion of an abstract individual’s inalienable ‘natural’ rights. On the other hand,
they obviously represent a legitimate claim from the point of view of identity and project politics,
saying that gender equality and cultural equality will not come about in liberal democracy unless we
introduce and enforce such quotas on the majority. Indeed, it is hard to neglect how democracy is
the outcome of the play of a dominant male identity in history. This is inscribed into the workings
of all major societal institutions, as regularized path dependencies that are very hard to overcome by
rational means.

2. The Civic Culture Revisited

Let us go back and consider how it is that democratic politics has come to be identified with input
political issues concerned with how conflicting interests (and identities) acquire free and equal
access to, and recognition in, political decision-making processes. Almond and Verba’s study of the
civic culture is a convenient starting point, since they were among the first to state that (1963: 14):

incumbents and decisions may…be classified broadly by whether they are involved
either in the political or “input” process or in the administrative or “output” process. By
“political” or “input” process we refer to the flow of demands from the society into the
polity and the conversion of these demands into authoritative decisions.

By distinguishing between whether individual orientations towards the polity were directed towards
politics or administration and political or non-political outputs, they developed a notion of civic
culture centred around the questions of what knowledge individuals have of: i) their nation and their
polity in general terms (history, size, location, etc.); (ii) how their ‘inputs’ relate to their polity’s
basic structures, roles and policies; (iii) the structures and actors involved in the production of
‘outputs’ and policy enforcement; and (iv) their rights, power, obligations and possibilities of access
to influence (ibid: 16). The answers to these questions distinguishes the orientations of individuals
towards: (a) the polity as a general object; (b) input objects; (c) output objects; and (d) themselves
as active participants. This, in turn, enabled Almond and Verba to develop a notion of the civic
culture of democracy as composed of 3 types of culture, the parochial, subject and participant
culture (ibid):
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Table 1: Orientations in the Civic Culture

Orientation Polity as general Input objects Output objects Oneself as active

object participant
Culture

Parochial 0 0 0 0

Subject 1 0 1 0

Participant 1 1 1 1

In the parochial culture, people’s knowledge about specialized political objects is almost non-
existent. We are dealing with ‘unsophisticated’, ‘close-minded’ and ‘insular’ individuals engaging
in the culture in their pre-modern, tribal or local consciousness in which there is no idea of
individuals occupying specialized political roles and no separation between one’s political role and
one’s other roles.

In the subject culture, people do have a sense of the polity as a general object and of specialized
roles associated with those who exercise authority over oneself and others when enforcing (?) their
policies. This is the ‘we must obey the bastards’ or ‘government knows best’ orientation,
characteristic of people having almost no sense of themselves as active, influential, participants and
possessing virtually no knowledge of how their engagement in the culture relates to the conversion
of demands into collective decisions.

In the participant culture, participants are collectively and explicitly oriented towards their polity as
a whole. They can distinguish between incumbents and structures in relation to both inputs and
outputs and they are fully aware of their important and significant roles as people who articulate
common concerns and who seek to influence the conversion of demands into policies as virtuous
citizens. Here, we are dealing with ‘truly modern’ individuals who know how to act collectively in
order to acquire access to, and recognition in, the democratic decision-making process.

Almond and Verba’s distinction between ‘input’ and ‘output’ is derived from David Easton’s
definition of ‘the political’ as a system of decision and action, including: ‘all events, actions and
behaviours oriented towards the authoritative articulation and allocation of disputed and contested
material as well as non-material values for a society’ (1953, 1965).
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Figure 1: put into Box

The political system

Political authorities

Political regime
-----------------------------------------
(modern insulation of)
Political community

Put very briefly, the political systems model asks how ‘inputs’ are converted into ‘outputs’ and with
what ‘outcomes’ (Bang 2003a; Bang and Esmark 2007, Bang and Esmark 2009). If we begin from
the politicization of people’s wants as demands, we can study how these demands are aggregated
and/or integrated directly into collective decisions, or into issues in search of such collective
decisions. We can then establish how collective decisions are articulated and delivered as binding
actions that people accept (but not necessarily agree to) for a variety of reasons. Finally, we can
analyse how feedback from the consequences of those actions leaves its impact on the inputs of
support and demand. Support can be examined as support for: (a) political authorities as incumbents
of authority roles (for instance trust); (b) political regime as a structured set of values, norms and
power relations (for example legitimacy); and (c) political community, consisting of a group of
persons bound together by a political division of labour (for instance a sense of common destiny or
political belonging, Easton 1965: 177).

The punctuated line between regime and community in Figure 1 indicates how the black hole in
democratic analyses in which the notions of identity politics and project politics are situated stems
from, and relates to the insulation of the state (or government) from market and civil society in
 14

modern political theory and praxis. This displacement of political community from its ‘home’ inside
the political system is the main reason why the notion of political system is usually identified with
the notions of ‘government’ (authorities + regime) or ‘state’ (authorities, regime + something else,
such as monopoly control over the means of violence). As Foucault points out, the dislocation of
political community springs from a: ‘contract of rational despotism with free reason [or
emancipation]’ (2007: 203). By this he means that modernity never beheaded the sovereign King of
feudal society, but instead tried to make his hierarchical rule, and will to be obeyed, an instrument
and medium of public reason in the civic culture ‘outside’. As such, Almond and Verba simply
echoes Kant when describing the participatory culture as standing outside of government, actively
trying to give voice to people’s grievances by politicizing their wants as demands; when viewing
the parochial culture as a governmentally-protected domain for the spontaneous and free
accumulation of social capital; and when regarding the subject culture as a potential irrational
nuisance to be kept silent and apathetic by a centralized bureaucracy treating subjects as clients. The
underlying argument is that:

the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience,
on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in
conformity with universal reason’ (Foucault 2007:203).

The modern conception of political hierarchy as a means of protecting and serving the civic culture
is in my view unfortunate. It distorts the theoretical and practical significance and importance of
identity politics and project politics by concealing how laypeople in political community are
necessarily, or logically, connected with political authorities for the structuration of the political
regime. Political authority can assume many other forms than hierarchy which turns the relationship
between political authorities and laypeople into one of command and obedience (Easton 1955,
1958). The political regime can be structured in many different ways to be both the medium and the
result of the ongoing communication and interaction between political authorities and political
laypeople in time-space. The very core of political authority is difference, not opposition. Political
authorities are different from laypeople, because they engage in the systematic articulation and
solving of the daily affairs of a political system, are normally recognized by laypeople as having the
responsibility for these matters, and take actions which are mostly accepted as authoritative by
laypeople most of the time, at least as long as the authorities act within the limits of their role
(Easton 1965: 212). Laypeople do not have these systematic tasks and responsibilities, but are in
principle free to organize themselves more loosely and spontaneously for the pursuit of their various
 15

life political projects. This means that they can experiment with new political tactics and modes of
participation beyond the regime’s authoritative conception (cf. Habermas 1997). These are then
potentially available to political authorities as a kind of ‘free political variety’ that they can
institutionalize and layer into the regime via their systematic articulations and strategic
interventions. I see this duality of political authority and political laypeople as the primary reason
why it is absolutely necessary for any authoritative conception to listen and learn from how
laypeople experiment with and intervene in political decision and action outside of this conception.
The fact that many laypeople do not participate within the bonds of the authoritative conception of
the going regime does in no way make them less necessary to the continuation of the authority
relationships. In effect, political authorities cannot make and implement any political decisions
unless laypeople understand what they have to do, and can and will accept the political messages of
their political authorities as binding for their own actions (Bang 2003a). As I shall argue, a major
contributing reason for Obama’s victory was exactly his rejuvenation of the notion of political
community, bringing laypeople back into the political system as central to its construction and
reconstruction (cf. Catlaw 2006).

2.1. The Civic Culture Today

Party membership has fallen considerably in the last decades and so has turnout at election time
(Hay 2007). Labour unions and other big interest organizations experience increasing troubles with
getting new members and activating existing ones (Stoker 2006). Engagement in social movements
is not as high as it used to be (Putnam (ed.) 2002). Even such intrinsic citizen practices as attending
political meetings and writing to politicians are shrinking (Hay 2007). Furthermore, citizens no
longer primarily get their political identity from their identification with political parties (Dalton
and Wattenberg (eds.) 2000), nor are they as obedient as they used to be (Bang 2003a and b). In
fact, reflexive individuals increasingly loathe hierarchical commands. They demand a much more
communicative and problem-oriented authority, if they are going to accept and support it.

Most mainstream Political Scientists see these developments as signs that apathy is spreading and
undermining the civic culture. They adopt Putnam’s early pessimism from ‘Bowling Alone’ (1995,
cf. Wattenberg 2007) and blame individualization and consumerism for reducing social capital, by
undermining active participation in public affairs and, thereby, undermining the stability and
effectiveness of representative institutions (cf. Putnam (ed.) 2002). A vicious circle is created in
 16

which increasing political apathy leads to more social distrust and disaffection, which, in turn, leads
to escalating political apathy, etc. If we do not manage to stop this, we will be: ‘cursed with
vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust’
(Putnam 1993: 15).

However, Putnam’s stories of decay, which echo those of Almond and Verba, who also emphasize
the close connection between the accumulation of social capital in a mixed civic culture and
responsive and effective formal political institutions, are not unchallenged in mainstream Political
Science. Another group of researchers, with Pippa Norris (1999, 2003, 2007) and Pattie, Seyd and
Whiteley (2004) at the forefront, argue that Putnam’s pessimistic view of citizenship results from
his presumption that civic engagement is only for the sake of helping ‘the lonely crowd’ to voice
and organize their concerns in the formal and institutionalized arenas of modern democratic
government. They suggest that fewer people engage in this kind of civic engagement because more
are participating in a range of new modes of protesting, consulting, deliberating and co-governing
beyond conventional organizations and formal institutions. New cause-oriented critical citizens and
forms of micro-personal political activity are on the march, revealing how most stories of decline
and apathy are merely a product of: ‘the older focus on citizenship activities designed to influence
elections, government, and public policy-making process within the nation-state’ (Norris 2007:
641). Participation research, as Norris demonstrates, must move beyond the formal institutions to
appreciate how the new protest movements and forms of micro-politics have:

more fluid boundaries, looser networked coalitions, and decentralized organizational

structures. The primary goals of new social movements often focus upon achieving social
change through direct action strategies and community building, as well as by altering
lifestyles and social identities, as much as through shaping formal policy-making
processes and laws in government (Norris 2007: 638).

Norris emphasises that the old participation studies are dated because they do not grasp how new
modes of life politics and identity politics are becoming increasingly visible. Norris also ‘sees’ how
politics is spreading to the output side as: ‘cause-oriented repertoires, which focus attention upon
specific issues and policy concerns’ (ibid: 639). Yet, she soon withdraws into a mainstream position
tracing these repertoires back to the input side, as evidence of new identity conflicts giving voice to
new post-materialist values beyond materialist interests.
 17

In this way identity politics is co-opted by interest politics, whereas critical, cause-oriented activism
is relegated to the domain of ‘small’ politics. As Stoker succinctly puts this position (2006:202):

The old rules of politics have not changed; politics remains about people expressing
conflicting ideas and interests and then finding a way to reconcile those ideas and
interests in order to rub along with one another (Stoker 2006: 202).

By definition, therefore, all new forms of identity politics and project politics are, in the final
analysis, subordinated to more traditional representative political processes and arenas. Democratic
government is still considered the ‘neutral’ arbiter of clashing interests; political community is still
a unified national community; laypeople still appear as masses tied to clearly identifiable group and
class interests in society; and the individual is still thought of as an abstract, universal one endowed
with certain ‘natural’ rights. Identity politics and cause-oriented project politics are regarded as
momentary ‘disturbances’ in the democratic chain of government. They are subjected in ‘the
Kantian way’ to the rational choice of individuals and the integrative norms in civil society in order
to prevent them from doing harm to the democratic goal of equal freedom. Marcuse has a term for
this: he would have called it ‘repressive tolerance’:
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm.

2.2. Politics as Lived Experience

The theoretical challenge confronting the study identity politics and project politics is most of all
Almond and Verba’s model of the civic culture which contends that:

• politics is only about inputs, whereas outputs are solely about administration;

• autonomous administrative power is what all democratic pluralists must fight with any
available means to avoid monism and the arbitrary, illegitimate, use of coercion;

• freedom and equality require the insulation of the civic culture from political and
administrative power, as well as the control of these powers by a constitutional regime,
ensuring that they are put to use in a rational, responsive and effective manner.

What we got to demonstrate is how this model is in a peculiar sense very ‘unpolitical’:

a) It sees those in the participatory culture as set up to fight political power with moral and
instrumental reason, rather than with a logic of immediate political action;
 18

b) It treats those in the parochial culture as being concerned with creating social networks and
accumulating reciprocal social trust in themselves and their social localities, not with
creating cooperative political communities and expanding their capacities to ‘make a
difference’ in, and through, their communicative and interactive political actions;

c) It conceives of those in the subject culture as obedient subjects, who either hate politics or
feel that ‘government knows best’, they are not reflexive and cooperative individuals who
stand prepared to accept and recognize themselves as bound by political authority, precisely
as long as that authority does not threaten or command them to do so.

Marsh, O’Toole and Jones (2007) challenge this non-political conception of political culture by
starting out from an examination of how people themselves define ‘the political’ in their concrete
everyday practices. Thus, they break away from the mainstream to study identity politics –not by
isolating and privileging particular aspects of identity (class, gender, race, etc), rather by
considering all such particular identities as revealing a politics of lived experience about how
people themselves draw the line between what is political and non-political. As they show, many
young people may have avoided the ‘old’ formal politics because they felt it had nothing to offer
them. Hence, to write them off as: ‘politically apathetic is too simplistic and sweeping a statement’
(2007: 22). In fact, these ‘apathetic’ youngsters may turn out to be the most active in more informal
and ad hoc governance networks and practices, such as the new kinds of blogging, making
comments on blogs, viewing , posting, and forwarding news stories and videos as ways to
participate (Coleman 2007, 2008, Cornfield 2004, Häyhtiö and Rinne (eds.) 2008, Kline and
Burstein 2005, Loader (ed.) 2007).

More specifically, Marsh, O’Toole and Jones challenge the mainstream, identifying four flaws in its
participatory models (2007: 18-19):

(1) Although the mainstream is moving beyond the narrow conception of participation as
revealing a relation between social capital, interest politics and the formal institutions of
democratic government, ‘there is little engagement with how young people themselves
conceive of the political and there remains a tendency in their work to imposes a view of
‘the political’ on their respondents’.

(2) There is a serious lack of understanding of non-participation in democratic government:

‘Put simply, it is frequently assumed that if individuals do not engage in the activities that
researchers take to represent political participation, they are politically apathetic’.
 19

(3) ‘[A]ge, class, ethnicity and gender are viewed merely as independent variable, rather than as
‘lived experience’, and, hence, the relationship between these and political engagement is
poorly understood’.

(4) ‘[M]ost researcher pay insufficient attention to the broader context of patterns of
governance and citizenship, the ways they are changing and the consequences of these for
political participation’.

These four flaws are prompted by a political practice in which government decides what is to be
regarded as legitimate and illegitimate. For example, when Tony Blair called the demonstrations
against the WTO and G8 meetings in the UK and elsewhere ‘mindless thuggery’ (quoted in Marsh,
O’Toole and Jones 2007: 23), he was attempting to depoliticize their engagement (cf Hay 2007).
His underlying presumption was that only political activity sanctioned by formal political
authorities is legitimate. By viewing and specifying the protesters as non-political and illegitimate
hoodlums, Blair could legitimate their policing by the state. However, in regarding the protesters’
informal, unconventional and unorthodox form of political participation as irrational and
undemocratic, Blair and the police actually demonstrated that they did not, or would not, understand
what was going on. There was an explicit reason why the protestors chose confrontational tactics,
rather than ‘civic’ ones, namely that they had earlier experienced how ‘non-violent protests are just
completely ignored….despite a massive turnout’ (Urban quoted in Marsh, O’Toole and Jones 2007:
23). So, what Tony Blair and the police experienced as being the irrational behaviour of hoodlums
seeking trouble was actually a calculated event flowing from the belief that: ‘a certain amount of
trouble is the only way to get the media to cover a protest like this’ (ibid).

This point made is not to justify violence, but to suggest that what is political is in the
eye of the beholder and what is regarded as legitimately political is policed by the
state. To analyse politics and political participation, we need to rethink the claim that
individuals who do not participate in politics in conventional, orthodox ways are
politically apathetic (Marsh, O’Toole and Jones 2007: 23).

From this follows the obvious conclusion that: ‘we should distinguish between political
participation and political non-participation. This leaves open the question of why individuals do
not participate in formal politics’ (ibid).

Marsh, O’Toole and Jones describe their position as a critical realist one, conceiving of the politics
of lived experience as a structured and structuring process. This means first of all focusing on how
 20

participants’ understanding of age, class, gender and ethnicity shapes their perception of what are
political and non-political. But, this should be done within: ‘the structural as well as the discursive
constraints on how individuals construct and indeed live their identity, or what Butler (1999) calls
their ‘performativity’’(2007:29).

Indeed, the politics of lived experience brings us way beyond the mainstream view of participation.
Yet, although it is pointing us in the direction of a notion of a political community composed of
reflexive individuals and groups, it seems to me that Marsh, O’Toole and Jones in their critical
realism still give priority to the emancipatory ‘input’ goal of freeing ‘the people’s voice’ from
exclusion. Their approach seems to be more ‘input driven’ than ‘output directed’, in the sense that,
‘in the last instance’, what counts is that policy contributes to inclusion, that is to securing that all
interests and identities enjoy free and equal access to, and recognition in, the political decision-
making processes. In this way, their socially structured politics of lived experience also
imperceptibly turns into a struggle between having a resistance identity and a legitimating one. In
contrast, project politics is tied to an ongoing project of empowering people and enabling them to
make an autonomous difference to the articulation and delivery of policy on the output side. Such a
project identity differs from both the legitimating and oppositional one.

Was it perhaps an ingrained resistance identity and sense of exclusion which made the protestors in
Britain choose the tactics they did in their struggle against globalization? Apparently not! When
reading what they said, it is not so much hostility, or a feeling of exclusion, which decided their
choice of tactics. But, nor was it obviously a legitimating one that proceeded according to what
those in the formal institutions would accept and recognize as ‘valid’ democratic participation.
Rather, the demonstrators had a project which was dear to them and which they thought was worthy
of public attention, although it was developed outside the formal institutions and also ranged far
beyond these in its global and local orientation. They neither believed in the legitimacy of ‘the
system’, nor did they appear as feeling entirely estranged from it. They simply wanted to get media
coverage for their struggle for better and more humane ‘glocal’ policies. Thus, the protesters’
immediate actions were not primarily targeted at giving voice to repressed interests and identities in
civil society. Their focus was primarily on how to make their project public in face of limited or no
media attention. Their project identity was not prompted by some general norms or reasons. It was
constructed in and through their concrete experiences with how to make a difference as members of
a reflexive political community (cf. Figure 2). This brings me to what I consider the next conceptual
element in forging the relation between identity politics and project politics, namely the notions of
 21

everyday makers (EMs) and expert citizens (ECs) (Bang and Soerensen 2001, Bang 2003b, Bang
2005, Bevir (2004), Blakeley and Evans 2009, Box 2005, Catlaw 2006, Coleman 2008, Lie and
Marsh 2008, Marsh, O’Toole and Jones 2007, Rhodes 2007).

3. Everyday Makers and Expert Citizens: New Participants in Search of a New ‘Big’ Politics

Marsh, O’Toole and Jones conceive of ECs and EMs as the very embodiment of their politics of
lived experience. They demonstrate how the mainstream participation literature, by dismissing ECs
and EMs as ‘free riders’, ‘mindless thugs’, ‘small p’ participants etc conceal their contributions to
creating a more inclusive politics. ECs and EMs often belong to groups which are oppressed as a
consequence of a lack of both recognition and a belief in their political capacities for exercising
their differences on their own terms and conditions as members of a communicative and interactive
political community (cf. Schneider and Ingram 1997) - whether as immigrants, gays, lesbians or
whatever.

ECs and EMs may be regarded as the living proof of how the resistance identities of social
grassroots and social movements in industrialist society are changing into project identities, aiming
at politically transforming an increasingly glocalized network society (cf. Castells 1997: 356-358).
Their participation is governed by a project identity which makes them put concerns for immediate
and prudent action above worries over rational decision-making. Whether they engage in protests,
collaborate in public-private or state-civil society partnerships, make alliances with the media, or do
voluntary work in their neighbourhoods, they always have a concrete project in mind that they aim
at realizing. They can be out fighting against ‘the system’ in one particular context and then shift to
teaming up with it in another; they can ignore an institution’s attempts to involve them, but they can
also help the institution in solving its problems on the condition that it simultaneously empowers
them to pursue their own life-political projects. The important thing is that, to ECs and EMs,
participation and support are not solely a matter of being either for or against ‘the system’. They
adopt an oppositional or legitimating identity only if it is functional to developing their project
identity and, thus, to meeting their specific life plans or policies (Bang 2005, Collin 2009).

ECs are most often new professionals, particularly in voluntary organizations, who feel they can
articulate and do policy as well, and even better, than politicians and other professionals from the
public and private domain. They deal with all types of elites and sub-elites who somehow are
significant and relevant to securing the success of their various projects. ECs:
 22

• have a wide conception of the political as a discursive construct; a full-time, overlapping,

project identity reflecting their overall life style;

• possess the necessary expertise for exercising influence in elite networks;

• place negotiation and dialogue before antagonism and opposition;

• embody a view of themselves as autonomous parts of the system, rather than as identical
with it or external and oppositional to it.

ECs put policy before politics in their project identity. They are more concerned with having an
impact on the concrete articulation and delivery of policies that helps them in realizing their various
projects, rather than in fighting so that all can enjoy free and equal access to, and recognition in,
collective decision-making. Since they have become habituated to think of ‘big’ politics as relating
solely to conventional input politics, they have deliberately chosen to develop their ‘small’ tactics
for ‘making a difference’ outside of the formal institutions of democratic government. Because
they see themselves as placed inside, rather than outside, of ‘the political’, they are not afraid of
using their knowledge, skills and tactical judgments to influence others. They build networks of
negotiation and cooperation with politicians, administrators, interest groups, media and private
companies across conventional boundaries, and in the process they develop their project identity
and network consciousness. As compared to more traditional activists, ECs are not in the game to
fight or cherish ‘the system’. They may do so, if it suits their projects, but, mostly, they want to be
taken seriously as prudent and competent partners to the exercise of good governance.
Consequently, ECs are also a resource or political capital for the going system. In particular, they
have a fund of everyday experience about how to deal with policy problems of exclusion based on
‘race’, gender, poverty etc.

EMs are in many ways a response to ECs whom they confront in nearly all the institutions, network
and projects that they traverse in their everyday lives. EMs do not feel defined by the state and they
are neither apathetic about, nor opposed to, it. Like ECs, they don’t want to waste time getting
involved in the ‘old style’ civil society politics; they prefer to be involved as reflexive individuals
participating with other reflexive individuals for getting a particular and very concrete project
going, right where they are. They typically think globally, but act locally. They normally are
interested in ‘big’ politics, but they do not derive their primary political identity from it. They are
somewhat sceptical of ECs, whom they think are too system-conforming and too concerned with
‘winning’ the games that professionals play. EMs make a distinction between participating to feel
 23

engaged and develop oneself and participating to acquire influence and success; they draw a clear
line between participating in policy-politics as laypeople and as professionals. They aim to
encourage more spontaneous and lowly organized forms of involvement than those of ECs, who
typically will seek to professionalize all ‘spontaneity’, such as collaborating with media in the
timing and spacing of certain protest projects. Unlike ECs, EMs don’t want to mould the identity of
others in the direction of certain goals. They rather want to pursue a credo of everyday experience,
stating:
• Do it yourself
• Do it where you are
• Do it for fun, but also because you find it necessary
• Do it ad hoc or part-time
• Do it concretely, instead of ideologically
• Do it self-confidentially and show trust in yourself
• Do it with the system, if need be.

Like ECs, EMs do not believe that representative democracy can be rescued, either by governing as
a unity from above, or by accumulating more and more social capital from below. They present a
practical alternative to Putnam’s notion of ‘strong government’ and ‘thick community’. EMs
identify themselves with neither. Their commonality does not build on a common good, but on the
acceptance and recognition of their common capacities for making a difference, which is precisely
why they are not satisfied with being obedient supports or ‘virtuous’ citizens of the state. EMs, like
ECs, are concerned with creating political capital by enhancing political capacities for self-
governance and co-governance in and through various communicative and interactive projects and
networks.

ECs and EMs demonstrate in their discursive practices how political participation is moving from
the input side to the output side. They argue that creating identity relies crucially on getting control,
and, consequently, that power is as significant and important to building viable political
communities as are values and norms. This brings us back to the Obama campaign which precisely
indicates that there is another crucial mode of political communication and interaction which does
not begin by examining how the accumulation of social capital is tied to political decision-making
for the sake of keeping it effective and responsible (Putnam 1993). This is the ‘output’ mode of
communicative governance, which depends for its success on actors’ practical abilities to ‘make a
 24

difference’ inside ‘the political’ to the articulation and delivery of salient policy values (Bang 2003
a+b, Hajer and Wagenaar (eds.) 2003).

Therefore, the primary reason why the mainstream literature did not foresee what was coming stems
from its identification of ‘the political’ with ‘input politics’, with how people’s wants are given a
social voice and politicized as demands that are converted into collective decisions (cf. Little 2008).
As is the case in the notion of civic culture, this makes one believe that outputs, as the programming
and implementing action, are simply the domain of non-political administration. What the fusion of
identity and project politics shows is that ‘administration’ is political through and through as
revealing how the social and the economic are politically constructed in and through the exercise of
political authority (Bang 2003a, Bang and Esmark (2009), Clarke, Newman, Smith, Vidler and
Westmarland 2007, Easton 1955, 1958, Hajer and Uitermark 2008). The argument here is that state,
market and civil society could not have come into being, except through the exercise of the political
capacity to articulate and deliver a policy-package which is acceptable to, and recognized as
binding by, at least the most important and relevant actors in the societal field.

3.1 Obama as a New Empowering and Communicative Authority Figure for ECs and EMs

This brings me finally back to the Obama campaign. Drawing on his experiences as a local
community organizer, Obama ‘nationalized’, and rapidly acquired, global support for his critique of
the political mainstream and its stories of a people in decay:

And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility,
what gives me the most hope is the next generation -- the young people whose
attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this
election (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/18/obama.transcript/, watched
March 27 2009).

Obama’s famous slogan of ‘yes we can’ echoes the ‘Si se puede’ of Ceasar Chavez and his
United Farm workers in their fight for better wages and working conditions
(http://ufw.org/_board.php?mode=view&b_code=hotissue&b_no=3241). But, it is actually a
slogan that many formal policy institutions and agencies make use of, such as the British
‘Together We Can’ initiative (Home Office 2005a, b), which was addressed to securing
better urban integration (cf. Lowndes and Sullivan 2007 and Musterd and Ostendorf 2008).
What Obama above all is trying to make evident is that the building of a community
 25

dedicated to change is political not social, because it is about the ability to make a concrete
difference to the political governing of the social by listening to and learning from one
another about how this is to be done. Dryzek would call this an example of a bridging
rhetoric (2009:7):

[This] takes seriously the outlooks…of an intended audience that is different in

key respects from the speaker – and from the kind of people or discourses the
speaker represents

Transposing his locally developed bridging rhetoric to the national and federal level, Obama has
accomplished the first comprehensive attempt to build identity politics and project politics into the
democratic equation of ‘big’ politics. What he is illuminating is how mainstream conceptions of
citizenship tend to neglect how participation in a political community first of all requires
transformative capacity - that is sharing in power - to bring about an intended state of affairs. The
credo of ‘Yes We Can’ reintroduces the notion of political community and locates it at the heart of
‘the political’. Due to the separation of input politics from output administration in mainstream
Political Science, this political community has long seemed like a black hole, invisible to those in
both state and civil society. As a result, community has largely been identified with the building of
social capital, whereas ‘the political’ has mostly become synonymous with effective and
responsible government. The Obama campaign shows that there is a 3rd way between economically
effective and socially responsible government in which the idea and practice of prudent political
community governance is situated (Flyvbjerg 2006). This 3rd way involves sharing in a political
division of labour as the condition of developing a sense of mutual identification and a capacity for
making a real difference in common (Bang and Esmark 2007, 2009, cf. Crozier 2007, Fischer 2003,
Hajer and Wagenaar (eds.) 2003), Dean 1999, 2007, Rose 1999).

When Obama’s rhetoric did its job it was first of all because it managed to build a bridge between
identity politics and the new projects politics of reflexive individuals such as EMs and ECs. Obama
articulated an image of himself as a commonality inspiring political authority who does not expect a
‘blind’ or rationally motivated form of obedience. He spoke about authority as a reciprocal and
communicative, two-way, power relationship, which combines (a) goals, (b) tactics and (c) ethos, in
order to get people with different, and sometimes even incompatible, identities and projects freely
to accept that cooperation across all conventional boundaries may be the only way to solve America
 26

and the World’s common challenges and problems. As Obama said in his victory speech
(http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/05/raw-data-barack-obamas-victory-speech/):

I know you didn't do this just to win an election. And I know you didn't do it for
me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.
For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will
bring are the greatest of our lifetime -- two wars, a planet in peril, the worst
financial crisis in a century.

Obama here speaks directly to laypeople who:

• refuse to be treated as obedient subjects (the subject culture);

• are not at all parochial, but have a very precise sense of the difference between orienting
oneself to ‘inputs’ or to ‘outputs’ (the parochial culture); and

• think that political participation is way too enjoyable, significant and important to be
handed over to virtuous citizens, who do not think of ‘the political’ as an ongoing project
but as a chore and an omnipotent threat to their freedom which must continuously be
resisted and made legitimate (the participatory culture).

Had Obama tried to command obedience, had he appealed to the parochial in people or had he
required that his volunteers should be only grave and morally dedicated citizens opposing or
attempting to legitimate ‘the system’, I doubt that he would have been able to get so many
volunteers engaged in canvassing, block by block, to help get voters to the polls and spreading the
rhetoric of ‘yes we can’ to every municipality, neighbourhood, city and village in the US.

Obama’s campaign appealed to people, who felt estranged by, or external to, the ‘old’ political
machine, and also considered it untrustworthy and unable to deliver (Hay 2008, Little 2008). It
managed to politicize the whole domain of administration, convincing participants that the
prospects for solving our common challenges and problems depend on our reconnecting in new
political communities for the exercise of good governance (Bang (ed.) 2003), Bevir and Trentmann
(eds.) 2007, Hajer and Wagenaar (eds) 2003, Heffen, Kickert and Tomassen (eds.) 2000).

As David Easton pointed out about political community many years ago (1965:326):

Where the members [of a political system] identify strongly with one another, they can
tolerate intense and passionate dispute among themselves without jeopardizing the
integrity of the community.
 27

Political community will always exist in tension with social community. Members of a political
community cannot thrive in a morally unified and normatively integrated social community, exactly
because they derive their political integrity from their reciprocal acceptance and recognition of each
other’s differences. As we have seen, the mainstream conception of the civic culture makes one
blind to this kind of creative political capacity characteristic of political communities. In viewing
the exercise of political authority as a matter of legitimate domination, the mainstream literature
conceals how members of a truly democratic political community could not submit themselves to a
hierarchically organized authority requiring their blind or rational obedience. They would insist that
the exercise of political authority is not primarily about commanding and disciplining people in
society ‘outside’ (Hajer and Uitermark 2008). Rather, it has to do with communicating and
interacting with each other inside ‘the political’ for the sake of empowering people and improving
their political knowledgability and life-chances (Carens 2000, Thomson 2007, Wenger 1998).

Introducing the means and goals of community governance at the state and federal level, Obama
joined forces with those political researchers outside the mainstream literature who, for many
years,have argued that:

If the traditional forms of government are unable to deliver – either because of a lack of
legitimacy or simply because there is a mismatch between the scope of the problem and
the existing territorial jurisdiction – then networks of actors must create the capacity to
interact and communicate (Hajer and Waagenar 2003:11).

At the same time, the Obama Campaign made it evident that a political authority which would take
this communal political capacity to interact and communicate seriously could renew the democratic
imagination:

reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and
realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for
change (Presidental Annoucement February 10 2007, http://obamaspeeches.com/099-
Announcement-For-President-Springfield-Illinois-Obama-Speech.htm).

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