Democracy Talk 

September 11, 2001. Nineteen hijackers, with a few thousand terrorists cheering them on. We reeled in horror, astonished by what a relatively few smart, organized, committed, persistent people could do . . . to destroy.

If humans are capable of such coordinated evil, why do we so often doubt what small numbers of people with those qualities can do for the greater good? Consider the impact of just four in the wake of 9/11-four who became widows on that day.

"I'm enormously impressed that laypeople with no powers of subpoena, with no access to insider information of any sort, could put together a very powerful set of questions and set of facts that are a road map for this commission," said Jamie Gorelick, former deputy attorney general of the United States, at the 9/11 Commission hearing.

"It is really quite striking. Now, what's your secret?"

"Eighteen months of doing nothing but grieving and connecting the dots," replied Mindy Kleinberg, one of the four 9/11 widows who had pushed hard for the commission. The commission's findings left huge questions, but at least Americans learned, finally, that we had been warned of al-Qaeda's threats and that hijacked planes might be used as weapons. And we got a least a hint of the scope of mind-boggling lapses by aviation authorities that tragic morning.

Without Mindy and her allies, we wouldn't have had a 9/11 Commission, acknowledged the coauthor of the legislation creating it.

Or consider the process of coming up with the design for rebuilding the World Trade Center site: "a turning point of American planning" is how the architecture critic Paul Goldberger characterized it. "Thousands and thousands of people talking seriously about urban design is something I never thought I would see," he added. In the end, the city-hired architects had to scrap their initial designs and pretty much start over with the public's priorities in mind.

So Congress gave way to pressure mounted by four outside-the-Beltway women, among many others, and top professionals gave way to citizens' insights.

It is a paradoxical time. Striking examples of the power of organized citizens' influence are emerging even as channels narrow for citizens' voices in shaping public policies-at least those we'd long thought were ours. Chapter Six highlighted the underappreciated power of choices we make every day in our many economic roles from purchaser to worker. Here we turn to the underrecognized power of organized citizen action.

Bottom-Up Power Politics

Forty years ago, political parties, however limited, felt like real forces in communities. My parents knew their party precinct leader. Now, though, many Americans experience both major parties as elite-driven, distant, image-selling machines. The consequences of this historic shift are enormous, but they're hard to see without a contrast.

Try Brazil: in a 2002 landslide, voters elected as president a former shoeshine boy and labor organizer, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva-known simply as "Lula." His top campaign pledge was to end hunger and address poverty. What made this possible? Lula's political party, the Workers' Party, has deep roots among the poorest and biggest classes.

There is no American parallel. Only 4 percent of low-income Americans get involved in political campaigns, one quarter the share of upper income Americans.

Into our apparent political void, many "regular" Americans have been quietly-and not so quietly-walking, as we saw earlier in New York's Working Families Party. They are going far beyond protest, although there's plenty of that. They are innovating.

I realize that this upsurge is hard to see. Much more visible is hand-wringing over the decline of civil society as Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and others tell us that we're all too busy watching TV to join sports leagues or choral societies.

Such laments about what we've lost miss a couple of things. First, much of what has atrophied consists of groups like the American Legion or women's clubs that were important social glue, to be sure, but not schools for building citizen power. Second, backward gazing might allow us to miss new forms of neighborhood-level citizen empowerment right under our noses.

Regular citizens, many connected through religious congregations and union locals, have jump-started a breakthrough in democracy itself, from campaigns in scores of cities for "living wages", easing the lives of millions of poor families, to "study circles" in Kuna, Idaho, which opened the door for major school improvements, and to a poor people's nationwide campaign that convinced H&R Block to change its policies; from a legally binding pact in Los Angeles requiring a huge airport expansion to benefit the surrounding community to new housing trust funds building affordable dwellings; and more.

These citizen-driven successes are telling us that democracy is not a "thing" we have, something done for us or to us. Democracy is what we do-something rewarding because it meets our deep needs and capacities for connection with each other and effectiveness in the larger world. Human beings didn't evolve to be passive spectators, they're saying. We were meant for better things.

Yes, power at the pinnacle of the political world seems tighter than ever. Government secrecy is increasing; listening is decreasing-with less and less compromise across the aisles in Congress.

But at the local and state levels, something else is happening.

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