CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan

CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics

Critics called Michael Dukakis a "technocrat" during last year's campaign. But exactly what that meant was usually a bit obscure. Mostly, it seemed a jab at Dukakis's affectless style; the candidate himself thought so, hence his pathetic protests in the second debate that yes, he really cared deeply about things.

The technocracy problem went a lot deeper of course, and not just for Dukakis but for the Democratic party itself. As Harry Boyte suggests in his new book, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics,* the Democrats long ago became the national party of experts and programs. They speak at voters from the standpoint of government, rather than at government from the standpoint of voters. There is little sense of political culture, of people solving problems on their own, beyond the biennial electoral flurry.

CommonWealth is about public space - how Americans define it, what they do to fill it. It is about the blight that has encroached upon public space. If national Democrats see public space as a land of elections and programs - as a gaping void waiting to be filled with "policy" - then to Republicans it shouldn't even exist. Under Reagan, Boyte observes, Republicans redefined community in economic terms, as a marketplace in which the only legitimate activity is the pursuit of self-interest. They claimed public life in order to disparage it.

"Reagan's focus on the marketplace as the key public space for citizen activity - as consumers, not citizens - obliterated ground for common action, and with it, the possibility of public life itself," Boyte writes. (And even now, the best the Democrats can come up with is a bidding war, holding forth an IRA tax break for the merely wealthy to counter a Bush capital gains cut for the very rich.)

Boyte speaks from the decentralist, Jeffersonian strain of the Democratic tradition, as opposed to the Hamiltonian, top-down view that dominates the party and its New Republic/Kennedy School intellectual axis. Based in Minneapolis, he has long experience in local organizing. Unfortunately, the style of CommonWealth is oddly out of synch with its message. The book began as a Ph.D. thesis and it shows. There is much tedious exposition of the obvious and much burdening of points with superfluous academic authority. (Such as this startling revelation from Robert Dahl: "A has power over B to the extent he can get B to do something that B would not do otherwise.") The historical research is patchy; for some reason, much of the best material is relegated to footnotes. Most important, Boyte gives short shrift to the rich historical dimensions of the commonwealth theme. So when he...