Dana Nelson advocates more power for the people

by Jim Patterson
photo by Daniel Dubois

Who will save America? Will it be John McCain or Barack Obama?

Which presidential candidate has the intelligence, charisma and acumen to fix our economy, deal with Iraq, address rising oil prices, eradicate poverty, lead democracy and put the nation on a better moral track?

It’s a trick question, and every four years we pound our heads against a wall trying to answer it, according to Dana Nelson, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies.

The answer is, “Neither.” If we want to save America, we have to do it ourselves.

“The president-as-superhero myth promised all the democracy with none of the work,” writes Nelson in her new book Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People.

“As such, it teaches citizens to admire rule by strong individuals and to abjure the messy workings – disagreements, slow debates, compromise, bargaining – of actual democracy.”

The book, published by the University of Minnesota Press, has been heralded by political writer William Greider as a provocative and persuasive argument “that the mythological status accorded the presidency is drowning our democracy.”

Nelson urges citizens to embrace the very thing candidates always promise to curtail with their leadership: arguing.

“One of the things that fascinates me right now is we have all these models proliferating on the Internet and in business culture that are demonstrating the value of dissent in decision making,” Nelson said. “We know that groups make better decisions when there are people in the group who disagree openly with the group, even if the grounds of their disagreement are wrong. These people push the group to be more careful about the decision they’re making.

“We’ve been developing an appreciation for productive disagreement in business and knowledge culture, and I think we need to bring that appreciation into our political culture to remake the way we conduct democratic business.”

In the book, Nelson tracks the steady drive by presidents – Abraham Lincoln used the Civil War to increase executive power – to move more and more clout from the hands of the people to the Oval Office.

Most of the time this power shift occurs because of fears about foreign relations or war powers,
Nelson said. And when the people step up to contribute, they’re often told to stop.

Nelson offers the response by citizens in New York following the Sept. 11 attacks as an example.

“In this calamity, the people instantly emerged as the lifeblood and force of the country, risking their lives, rescuing strangers, coordinating shelter, relief and recovery,” Nelson writes. “The nation faced a crisis, and the response was democratic power in action: The people took the lead.”

But President George W. Bush’s speech at Ground Zero on Sept. 14 “activated the powers of presidentialism, signaling that we should all stop worrying and go home,” Nelson writes.

“Soon, he would make this message literal, telling American citizens that the best response to this extraordinary act of terror and the crisis into which it threw the country was simply to conduct business as usual: Go to work, go to school, go on trips, go shopping.

“As the nation’s symbolic hero, President Bush soothingly and effectively deactivated citizen heroism and civic agency. And his job-approval ratings, pollsters emphasized, went sky high.”

Nelson, who came from the University of Kentucky to Vanderbilt in 2004, counts work in the Nashville community helping incarcerated women and the homeless as part of her own contributions to democracy.

“Democracy is not something that’s practiced just in government,” she said. “Democracy is something you can work on in your business, social and religious communities. It’s all about trying to get involved with people genuinely different from you so you don’t just encounter people with whom you already agree politically.”

The kind of debate Nelson is advocating is not of the variety seen daily on most cable television shows and in syndicated columns.

“We’re a culture that loves to argue, but I think the ferocity of the mode of argument we currently favor is actually reducing our tolerance for disagreement,” Nelson said. “These days, disagreement is about demonization. Your opponent can only be wrong and needs to be excluded from the political game rather than valued for the disagreement they bring to the picture. What I’m saying is, let’s re-imagine the value of a productive partisanship, the kind of differences that enhance the good of the larger whole. That’s what the framers of the Constitution idealized, and they were right to do so.”

Nelson acknowledges the “political realists” who say that citizens don’t want to do the work necessary to wrest power back for the people.

“I think we’ve been trained to not want to do that work from our earliest days in school,” she said. “We’ve been trained to believe that the president is some kind of superhero who’s going to unify the nation and lead democracy and do all the work for us. But I think there are a lot of people who are tired of ‘business as usual’ and hungry for change. Many are really fed up with presidential abuses of power, the shouting-head media culture and blogosphere, and they want ways to use their democratic energies productively. 

“I think we’re in a prime moment for change. Whether that change will come, I don’t know,” Nelson said. “History is full of accidents. I hope the accidents work in favor of citizens reinvesting in the work of democracy.”

Posted 08/01/08