{"id":936,"date":"2006-07-18T23:01:49","date_gmt":"2006-07-19T04:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.stier.net\/?p=936"},"modified":"2012-05-27T06:45:31","modified_gmt":"2012-05-27T06:45:31","slug":"the-politics-of-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/?p=936","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the third in a series <\/span><\/a>of efforts to articulate in broad terms what it means to be a progressive or liberal in Pennsylvanian and Philadelphia today
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Hope is Brewing<\/strong>
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In the little over a year since Neighborhood Networks was founded, I have been asked again and again by reporters how I account for the growing movement for progressive reform in Philadelphia. What, they want to know, explains the development of our organization, the growth of Philly for Change, the Anne Dicker campaign, the two Ethics Reform charter changes that have been overwhelmingly approved by the voters, and the hundred or so new committee people that have come out of our organizations?
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One answer, that people are frustrated by corruption and poor government, is clearly mistaken. People have been frustrated by the corruption and incompetence of our government for years, perhaps since the day Richardson Dilworth resigned as Mayor. Nothing is new about that.
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What is new is that people are starting to become hopeful about our city once again. I am not quite sure why that is. Partly it is, I suppose, because of the revival of Center City and surrounding neighborhoods. Partly it is because new residents, and especially new young people, are moving into the city. They don’t have the same jaded and low expectations of some of the folks who have lived here a long time. And partly, it is because cities all over the country, and indeed around the world, are hot again.
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The Politics of Fear <\/strong>
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While I don’t know why hope is brewing, I do know that it can make an enormous difference in the future of our city.
\nPolitics in Philadelphia has for a very long time, been on based on fear. Our political leaders have governed and campaigned by means of fear. And, in doing so, they have divided people from one another\u2014black from white, poor from rich, young from old, and one neighborhood of the city from another. Lately, they have even tried to divide those who use the internet from those who don’t.
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Fear is a powerful force in politics. It is an effective way to win elections and hold on to power. Machiavelli taught long ago that it is “better to be feared than loved.” And that is how our politics functions most of the time. Our politicians get their way by implicitly or explicitly threatening to take jobs, money, and political support from each other and from the people who depend on them.
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We live in a city where government is far from transparent. Political alliances can determine who gets contracts and business from the city, who gets to build what and where, whose business establishments and homes have to meet the regulations of the Department of License and Inspections and whose do not. If you are a community organization, political alliance determine whether you can close down nuisance businesses to block inappropriate development. If you are a homeowner, they can determine how large your tax bill is.
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Everyone who needs something from the city\u2014which is most of us at least some of the some and some of us most of the time\u2014is fearful of getting one of the powers that be mad at them. And so we go along to get along.
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The Limits of the Politics of Fear<\/strong>
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If your only goal is power within the existing political system, Machiavelli’s advice makes sense. But while fear is a very effective means of getting your way in the political system as it is today, it has it limits. Fear cannot bring about dramatic reform in government and public policy, no matter how much we need them.
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When people are afraid, they want, more than anything else, to protect what they have. Thus they think about the preserving themselves in the short term, not improving themselves in the long term.
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When people are afraid, they forget what they have in common. They focus only on themselves. They forget that we’re all in this together. And so they look at government only as a means of serving their own interests or that of their family or that of their neighborhood, ethnic or racial group, or economic class.
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When people are afraid, they don’t trust one another. They don’t expect others to keep their word or act fairly in the hopes of sustaining a long term relationship.
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And when people have more than one political leader or faction to be afraid of, as they do in Philadelphia, they are especially paralyzed. No one, after all, wants to get caught in the war between one group and another.
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Fearful people oppose any new ideas that might risk losing something in the present, even if those ideas are likely to benefit everyone a great deal in the future. And they especially oppose any new ideas that ask everyone to make a small sacrifice today, in order to get something much greater tomorrow. In a fearful political community, no one trusts anyone else enough to accept any sacrifices for the common good.
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If enough people are fearful, then even those who are not afraid will be paralyzed. Political action is difficult enough. If we have no hope of change, how can even those of us who are not fearful get up the energy to act?
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People are afraid at every level of our politics, from the committeeman and neighborhood activist up to the members of Council and the Mayor. And that is why the kinds of reform in public policy we need has been so difficult to accomplish.
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Even though we are afraid, we sometimes do reach agreements through compromise. But our compromises are of the worst, lowest sort. We typically allow each group a veto over public polices that might serve the common good. This, too, blocks reform and progressive public policy.
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Some Examples<\/strong>
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We know that our murder rate can be dramatically reduced. New York and Boston have done it. But it won’t come down unless we increase our police force, dramatically redeploy it, and use that police force to more aggressively get guns off the streets. But our politicians won’t ask us to pay for a larger force, the top echelon of the police department likes the old ways of doing things and a history of tension between police and communities makes aggressive policing difficult. All of these barriers can be removed if each group is willing to work together, and make short term sacrifices for the long term good of everyone in the city. I know that the FOP is eager to expand and redeploy the force and to work to improve community relations. But we have not had the political leadership necessary to bring all groups into agreement. And that leadership is difficult because we have little hope that things can be better and we don’t trust each other to make the sacrifices to make it better.
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We know that economic development is possible in cities if we adopt a mix of tax reform and community economic development strategies. It has happened in New York and elsewhere. But to adopt that mix, we need smart tax reform. We can’t just cut taxes for businesses without making up the revenues from somewhere else. And, if we want to save our neighborhoods, we can’t make up those revenues by increasing the property tax burden on residents with low incomes. Instead, we have to shift our tax burdens in a way that increases incentives to invest in the city while at the same time making our tax system more progressive so that the haves pay more than the have-nots. I have proposed such a tax plan that, again, asks various groups to make short term sacrifices for the long term good. But without hope for the future, and trust in one another, it will go nowhere.
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We know that we can have an influx of new middle class residents in neighborhoods without driving out long term residents. The public policies that make this possible are well known and include limiting eminent domain, providing more affordable housing through inclusionary zoning and public housing policies, protecting homeowners from rapid property tax increases, helping people rehab their homes, limiting tax sales of homes, and neighborhood and community organizing block by block. The challenge is not to find the right policies but to get them enacted. Developers have to accept limits on projects that threaten established neighborhoods and have to accept some of the burden for providing affordable housing. And neighborhood organizations have to accept the change that development brings and work to guide it in the right direction. Again, if all sides do not have hope for the future and trust in one another, these agreements will be impossible to reach.
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The Politics of Hope<\/strong>
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We need leaders who can point the way to a much better future if we want to make Philadelphia the great city it can be. And we also need compromise, but not the least common denominator compromise. We need the kind of compromises that transform the terms of public policy, that ask every group to think of how they benefit from new ways of doing things or that asks them to sacrifice a little now, so that we can all do well in the end. Those transformative public polices can not be created if we don’t have hope and confidence in the future and trust one another.
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Philadelphia is primed for a great future. We all know this. We see neighborhoods being redeveloped. We see new restaurants and shops opening. We see an arts scene that has never been livelier. We even see some signs of progress in our schools. We can feel the excitement. We can see ourselves dancing in the streets in the near future.
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At the same time, we are scared. We are scared of change. We are scared of each other. We are scared because our politicians encourage us to be scared.
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But most of all, we are scared that the established ways of doing politics in our city will, once again, strangle our potential for growth, for justice, and for greatness.
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The only way to overcome our fears is to embrace a politics of hope.
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How to Change Politics in the City<\/strong>
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The picture I painted above is a bit bleaker than it probably should be. There are, as I said at the beginning of this post, signs of hope around us. And there are two sources of hope upon which we can build.
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The first is to draw the neighborhood organizations into our efforts. We have always had hope in our neighborhoods. This incredible city has had been saved from our corrupt politics by the thousands and thousands of activists who have protected and improved their neighborhoods and by the hundreds of activists who have fought for good public polices that affect the whole city, whether it is parks, or the elimination of billboards, or the economic development of neighborhoods, or progressive tax reform.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The second is the outpouring of new activist energy city wide. In the last year alone, four city wide progressive groups have been created and have been working together. They have been the force behind political candidates who are challenging the status quo, who are speaking for everyone in Philadelphia and who are changing the way we do politics.
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And the voters are beginning to respond. We overwhelming passed ethics reform charter changes in the last two elections. Progressive activists have been elected as committee people and as ward leaders. Two young progressive state representatives have recently won office and a third just missed.
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We need to sustain this response and build upon these progressive organizations. One way to do that would be for the various progressive groups to coalesce around key issues and elections.
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But most of all, we need to bring the neighborhood and city wide activists together. It is time that those civic activists look beyond their neighborhoods and beyond single issues and join the city wide activists to become a force in the city as a whole. It is time we recognize that we are all in this together.
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What a Politics of Hope Can Accomplish. <\/strong>
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In short, everything we want.
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If we overcome our fears and embrace our hopes we can overcome the barriers to dramatic reform in our politics and public policy.
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We can create a large progressive organization that brings tremendous pressure to bear on the politicians who block the policy changes we seek.
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We can elect visionary progressive leaders to office.
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And then we can institute progressive economic development policies that lift whole communities out of poverty, create economically and racially integrated communities, build a twenty first century transit system, make dramatic reductions in crime, and develop as system of public financing for our campaigns.
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It won’t happen overnight. It probably won’t happen in four years. Philadelphia has been mired in a politics of fear for a long time. But it will happen if we can sustain our hopes, take advantage of the growing appeal of urban life, and build one success upon another.
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On a wall in my study, I have framed another line from Machiavelli: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Given what he says about fear, that might sound like a warning to us not to try to change things. But, in fact, it is a challenge that Machiavelli expects real leaders can meet. He knew that good politics, and good political leadership, is impossible if people do not have enough hope and confidence to overcome their fears.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

More than anything else, it is that politics of hope that we need in Philadelphia today<\/span>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to my friend Hannah Miller for long talks that shaped this\u00a0approach to understanding politics in Philadelphia and for suggesting the phrase The Politics of Hope to describe it.
\n<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the third in a series of efforts to articulate in broad terms what it means to be a progressive or liberal in Pennsylvanian and Philadelphia today Hope is Brewing In the little over a year since Neighborhood Networks was founded, I have been asked again and again by reporters how I account for the growing movement for progressive reform in Philadelphia. What, they want to know, explains the development of our organization, the growth of Philly for Change, the Anne Dicker campaign, the two Ethics Reform charter changes that have been overwhelmingly approved by the voters, and the hundred or so new committee people that have come out of our organizations? One answer, that people are frustrated by corruption and poor government, is clearly mistaken. People have been frustrated by the corruption and incompetence of our government for years, perhaps since the day Richardson Dilworth resigned as Mayor.\u2026 Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[57,58,59],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p35YuU-f6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6754,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions\/6754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}