A Placemaking Journal

You know things are getting dicey when the outgoing president of the United States feels obliged to remind us there’s still hope for American democracy at about the same time the incomer is on Twitter alleging (again) that America’s democratic institutions are plotting against him.

So just another day in the news. This one, Tuesday, January 10. President Obama was on stage in Chicago exhuming the “yes we can” spirit. President Elect Donald Trump was at his favorite online podium calling allegations that the Russians are blackmailing him a “witch hunt,” a conspiracy of government intelligent agencies and the mainstream media to undermine him.

Here, in Obama’s words, is an analysis of the dilemma — maybe the only analysis — that likely resonates with the 45 percent of Americans who lean his way and the similar percentage who are cheering Trump on:

“For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. In the rise of naked partisanship and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste, all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable.

And increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.”

See the full text of President Obama’s speech via The New York Times here.

The difference in perspectives is the conviction that the other guys are the ones trapped in a bubble.

We used to be comforted by research that suggests trust in government solidifies as you move from the federal to the state, then to the local level. But when the data is parsed a bit, there are unsettling hints about levels of local distrust, especially among those you’d hope to be supportive of government processes and programs.

A 2016 report from the National Resource Center found “the longer a person lives in a community, the less trust he or she has in local government.” Most disquieting in the possibility that the experience of engaging in community affairs over time is what undercuts the trust:

Even if conflicts are handled fairly by government staff and even if the resident finds herself always on the winning side (if there are sides), much of the local chatter around a community problem includes the arguments of both disgruntled residents and those pleased with the solutions. Conflict, though ubiquitous and necessary in democratic societies, can be corrosive, especially if local governments attend more to solving the problem than creating a field of dispute that honors winners and losers. Earlier research conducted by NRC has shown that public trust declines for those who more often attend community meetings, because community meetings typically attract residents when problems arise.

This might seem counterintuitive to those who want desperately to believe in President Obama’s charge to fix what’s ailing America through more involvement in processes that produce better policies and programs. But it’s likely to ring true to those of us trying to enable better policies and programs in local communities. Worse still, in the current context of pervasive distrust, those of us who see ourselves as transforming good ideas into meaningful action may be going at it the wrong way. Could be our bubble, the one that isolates us in the world view of the educated professional class, is obscuring the path out of political paralysis.

Those of us in the educated class are trained and rewarded by a commitment to an idea-to-action process that goes like this: You begin with agreement on a good idea, then move to strategies likely to support that idea and deliver outcomes in harmony with it. But it’s a bubble-dependent perspective that assumes a debate taking place in an environment of trust, where it’s possible to reach consensus on facts and engage in respectful debate over approaches likely to get us to places we want to go. You know, kind of like a graduate seminar. And decidedly not like the broader environment we’re in right now.

For about half the people in the country, the place where they find themselves stuck is not where they want to be. Which suggests to them the path they got them there, the rules they thought they were playing by, the elites who led them to this place all betrayed them. The whole system sucks and is quite possibly rigged. And appeals from the same people, people who look and sound like us, to reinvest in the same processes that deceived them here are lousy arguments.

So maybe a better strategy is to begin at the end, to start with delivering a better place, both literally and figuratively. And to do it now. If we skip right to the part where we create real examples of places and programs that perform as promised, even a small victory from even the most tentative collaboration, we can reverse engineer the tools and strategies that allow that to happen. And we can keep doing it till we reclaim trust in processes that connect what we want to do with what we actually do.

We’ve hammered on this theme a bunch over the last few years — here, for instance; also here and here and here. Now, with the transition to the Trump era looming, the sense of urgency to recalibrate our approaches, to get good stuff on the ground as models worth replicating, is growing.

This struggle may not be what we signed up for. But look on the bright side. Maybe we’re lucky to have so few options and so little time. The good thing about running out of alternatives is the opportunity to concentrate on the ones we have left.

–Ben Brown

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