The Nutter Administration stands at a crossroads. And so do we activists.

It is not because the judicial decision barring the administration from closing libraries is an existential threat to the necessary powers of the Mayor. That claim, as I’ll explain in another post is nonsense.

What is really at stake is whether, at this critical moment, the Nutter administration will decide to fix the broken political culture of our city or whether it will continue to work within it.

What we do as activists may help determine the result.

The civic spirit of Philadelphians

In the few weeks we have seen a dramatic outpouring of civic energy and spirit. Those of us who have been community and political activists for years in Philadelphia were not surprised by it. We have seen that spirit time and again in one setting after another—in town watches; in volunteers working to renovate public parks, recreation centers, and playgrounds; in campaigns to save historic buildings; in efforts to insure that new development fit our communities; in long meetings to develop plans for the Delaware River waterfront; in struggles to increase education funding; in a citizen run referendum on casinos; and in a fight to protect tax breaks for working people and in many other settings.

And all this energy and spirit has broken through in a political culture that does not welcome of citizen activism at all.

Asking what went wrong in the administration

It is important to understand this culture for it explains something that many people seem to find otherwise inexplicable: that the Nutter administration been so resistant to the effort to save the libraries.

Many of us have had discussions, mostly in private, in which we have speculated about the answer to this question. Those speculations have focused mostly on personalities—of the Mayor, of his top advisors—and on circumstances—the tensions of making difficult decisions in a hurry.

But the truth of the matter is, I believe, far deeper. The actions of the Nutter administration are, in fact, par for the course in our political culture. We are only surprised because we expected something different from this administration.

Liberal democracy

To explain what I mean, I need to go back to fundamentals for a moment. The genius of our form of government—which we political theorists call liberal democracy—is not that we directly or indirectly elect those who hold power over us. It is not our separation of powers or our checks and balances. It is that government in liberal democracies works by means of continued interchange between officials, interest groups, and citizens in a public sphere characterized by endless discussion and debate.

Liberal democracy at its best is not government by elected monarchs or councilors who make decisions among themselves, in private, and who then announce the decisions to us. It is government in which those decisions are openly debated and reviewed before and after the fact and in which political officials take part in those discussions.

The politics of fear in Philadelphia

We have not really had that kind of government in Philadelphia for a very long time. For reasons and in ways I will explain in a post on my blog, we have had a political culture in which decisions are made behind closed doors and in which our public debate, when it took place at all, was essentially a farce—-a song and dance by electeds and appointeds that was meant to give the impression of real democratic interchange but that had nothing really to do with how the government worked or why it did what it did.

Some folks like to blame John Street for this kind of politics. But it is nothing new. It is a product of one party dominance, of a strong party machine, and of uncompetitive elections. It has been practiced by every Mayor in this town since Richardson Dilworth. And people accepted it because they were afraid. Our Mayor had so much power over the city and our district council members so much power over their own districts, that the people who could object—business and cultural leaders in the city and activists in local community associations—were too afraid to demand real discussion and debate. That’s why I’ve called our form a of politics a “politics of fear”

Insurgents have arisen. For example, blacks did build political organizations to gain entry to a white dominated power structure. But their goal has not been to transform our politics but, instead, to get their piece of power. Now African American political factions have taken their place among the white political factions that jockey for power and the contracts and patronage that go along with it.

But the system has remained unchanged.

The Nutter Administration

Then Michael Nutter was elected without the support of the political machine and any faction. He did promise something new. And he has delivered it. He has to some extent replaced government by factional struggle with government by expertise. He has looked outside the city both for political appointees and for the best practices of municipal governments.

But he has not tried to transform the relationships between our government and our citizens. Indeed, Mayor Nutter’s reliance on experts has actually added to the problem. For now it is not just contempt for those outside the inner circle of politics that leads to opaque, secretive government. That contempt is still there. But it is reinforced by the assumption on the part of the administration officials that they know so much more than the rest of us.

The Library Fiasco

And the result is clear to see for everyone who has followed the Nutter administration’s twists and turns on the library issue. The administration’s song and dance has never addressed the real reasons for closing libraries or for closing particular libraries; has never provided the information we need to evaluate their claims; has never been forthcoming about its plans to provide alternatives to libraries; and it seems has not been telling the whole truth about the budget crisis either. Now it is making up stories about the grave threat to the Mayor’s power posed by the lawsuit we won last week. And, most of all, the experts in this administration have shown that they don’t really understand the role libraries play in our communities.

This is all very sad both because it is so typical of Philadelphia politics and because there is an alternative to this politics of fear. And that is a politics of hope, one that draws on the enormous energy and spirit—and knowledge—of the citizens of this city, a spirit and energy and expertise that has been raised to new heights by the Obama campaign.

What citizen activism might mean in Philadelphia

Imagine what we could accomplish in this city if, instead of repressing that energy and spirit and knowledge, our government embraced and nurtured it. The glory of liberal democratic government, when it works well, is not just that government is continually responsible to the people and continually informed by what citizens know, not just about their fields of expertise but about their own neighborhoods. It is that liberal democracy can, more than any other form of government, draw on the activism and engagement of its citizenry.

What might that mean in Philadelphia? Here, just off the top of my head are some ideas for making our city better and, by the way, saving money.

• We could be continually engaging citizens in projects to clean our city and to spruce up our parks, recreation centers, and other facilities.
• We could be asking citizens to come together in their own neighborhoods to plan transit improvements. There is much SEPTA doesn’t know about how its schedules creates problems for us and much the city doesn’t know about how to integrate various forms of transportation—mass transit, private cars, Philly car share, bikes, etc. don’t work. Local transit councils could dramatically improve how we get around in this city.
• We could be drawing on our citizen energy to provide volunteer staff for our libraries, recreation centers and schools.
• We could be engaging citizens in the process of zoning reform, giving them the tools to help us create a new zoning map that would lead to good new development that fits with our local communities. (If we don’t do this, we are likely to get zoning “reform” that allows bad development to run roughshod over our communities.)
• We could be drawing on volunteers to provide the guidance and traffic control we need at events. The city in recent weeks become reluctant to provide this, as least for the Mummers Parade (but not, of course, for Eagles and Sixer and Flyer games). We could even reward those volunteers with free tickets in the Mayor’s box at those games.
• We could be asking citizens and city workers and unions to take part in efforts to reengineer our government. The 311 system is a fine idea. But if our goal in Philadelphia is only to provide good customer service to our residents, we will stop treating both our residents and our work force as citizens who have the know-how to improve that government.
• We could dramatically expand the number of people who take part in town watches through out the city, helping our newly energized police force drive down our crime rate even further.
• We could build a political movement in this city and in our suburbs to get the fiscal relief we need from Harrisburg.
• We could engage the best minds from every community in Philadelphia—academics, business owners, community leaders, and our work force—to start doing what Ray Murphy keeps reminding us we are not doing, developing a plan for rebuilding our economy beyond cutting taxes and creating casinos. (Not that cutting taxes is always bad, although as I’ve said before, it would be nice to see us tax smarter not just tax less.) We might even come up with some priorities among that $2 billion of projects the Nutter administration gave to the Obama transition team.
• And, of course, we could have an honest discussion about how bad our budget situation really is and how to fairly share the pain that it will create among both people who pay taxes and people who use city services.

Can Michael Nutter rise to the occasion?

Those of us who saw Michael Nutter speak many times from the beginning to the end of his campaign saw a pretty amazing transformation.

When I saw him at an early fund raising event at Ken Weinstein’s house, he was, as always, engaging and funny. But he had no real theme and few new ideas about make the city better. At his campaign kick-off, he showed, for the first time, a real passion for making the city better, although again it was not really clear how he wanted to do so. As his campaign developed, themes did emerge, and Nutter began to challenge this city to move forward courageously and smartly, to embrace the best ideas and minds and remake our city government.

And, in the months leading up to the November election, Michael Nutter really found his voice and began to make speeches that combined humor, passion, expertise, and vision.

It was an incredibly impressive political campaign and personal transformation on the part of Michael Nutter.

I hope it is not over yet. I was reading a book about a transformative leader, FDR, last week and saw that one thing that impressed people about Roosevelt’s first fireside chat was how unusually open and clear he was in describing the banking crisis and his approach to resolving it. FDR could speak for the country because he spoke openly and honestly to the country.

Michael Nutter has found his voice. But if he wants to really remake this city, he has to find our voice.

He has to become a politician who speaks to us openly and honestly and, because of that, can speak for us in addressing difficult times.

The whole library fiasco and the town hall meetings has been so depressing to those of us who had higher hopes for this administration precisely because Nutter has not been speaking openly and honestly to us. And thus he has failed to speak for us.

Our job as activists

That can change. And our job as activists is to keep building the movement not just to save our libraries but to change our government. Sooner or later we will find political leaders who understand that they can build on our movement rather than trying to govern in opposition to it.

It might be Michael Nutter. It might be someone else. But it will happen, because when the people are united in struggle in a liberal democracy, it always does.