Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Public Work
creates cultures based on a philosophy of scarcity. It profoundly
erodes the subjective experience of equal respect.
Public work counters the impersonal, abstract, decontextualized
culture of technocracy and its associated left versus right politics.
At the molecular level of everyday experience, public work brings
back a view of politics as about negotiating the plural, grounded,
sometimes conflicted but also relational qualities of the human condition
in order to solve problems. At a somewhat larger level of
analysis it recasts professional work as a public craft, with experts “on
tap, not on top,” to use the organizing phrase. At the largest level
of analysis, public work is an important ingredient in a strategic
reconceptualization that emphasizes movement-building alliances
to advance democratic society. Such movement building reaches far
beyond elections, ideologies, and formal institutions of government
to advance democratic values like equality, openness, participation,
respect, and the commonwealth in many arenas, in a time when such
values face enormous threat.
The features of this approach, what might be called civic populism,
have rich antecedents, but to draw on them effectively requires
a sharp strategic shift in emphasis. Although the reference point for
today’s politics continues to be the cultural and political wars of the
1960s, the more relevant period to look at for direction is the 1930s.
Technocratic Politics
Technocracy—control over significant portions of life by detached,
formally credentialed experts—is a pattern and philosophy
of governance with particular force in a knowledge society. The
characterization of our country as a knowledge society grows from
the work of theorists like Raymond Aron and Daniel Bell a generation
and more ago. Bell and others drew attention to the increasing
role of knowledge creation as a source of power in its own right.
Energy generated by steam and electricity transformed preindustrial
societies into industrial societies. Money replaced raw materials as
the main strategic resource. Today, data-transmission systems and the
theoretical knowledge required to organize information are the driving
forces of innovation, strategic resources and power, shaping a
81