The topic of the day around here is small town politics. I'll have to do a longer post later, but just a few, quick observations.
People turn up to vote, but they don't do anything beyond that. They never write letters to people in power or to the editor of the regional paper. They don't go to town meetings and they most certainly never get up to speak. Why aren't they participating beyond the voting booth? Some say these are time intensive activities. Others say that we're spending too much time on the Internet. I think that there's something else going on.
People don't participate beyond voting, because they associate letter writing and public speaking with complaining. Speaking out in this way is in bad taste. They have been taught to be good soldiers who should accept low level positions at work and to take whatever scraps are thrown at them. And that good soldier mentality extends to politics. It's beyond just low levels of personal efficacy, because they look down on others who write letters and speak up at meetings. The participators are vilified as complainers who just accept their fate like everyone else.
The few people who do participate don't do it in a public way. They pull strings and ask for favors behind the scenes. They monopolize information. We have a community garden that the town subsidizes, but only the connected families receive information about it.
I have been thinking a lot about E. E. Schattsneider. I need to extend the sphere.
Apt. 11d 
Harry Potter and the Semisovereign Prince?
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My father-in-law is a working class IRC from Brooklyn, who escaped to Staten Island shortly after his second daughter (my wife) was born. I get a lot of local political insights from him.
He would never participate in politics beyond voting because to do so would be to draw attention to yourself, and that can bring trouble. Better to keep your head down, do your work, trust your friends, and keep all the rest of it at bay. One of his pieces of advice is: “never let them know your real name”……
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There’s always VSB.
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“They monopolize information. We have a community garden that the town subsidizes, but only the connected families receive information about it.”
This is one of my favorite hates. I believe in the power of the internet to circumvent it. I vote for finding the most likely location of the bitter ironic people in your town. I swear, they must exist. They’re hard to find, though. Then start email lists that breaks all the secrets open.
Did you see the NY times column (or whatever it was or was it the Wash Post) on the irrelevance of academic political science? I was expecting blogging about it.
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JMT – Ha. Your Amazon gift card went to buy that.
I missed it, bj. What’s the link? I’ve got a different kid home this week and have been super busy.
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Laura,
You’ve got the privilege of mobility. The people you are talking about know that they are going to be dealing with their fellow townspeople for the next 20-50 years and people remember things, so you can’t stake everything on one hand. That’s “community” for you.
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That’s a really good point, Amy. Basically this is what I try to remind my students every time they start talking about community and its wonders, that there’s this other side to community: its intimate constraints, the potential viciousness of reciprocity. Think of a town as a tenured faculty and you begin to see it: not too many people want to do something that’s going to make everyone else hate them for the next 30 years if they think there’s nowhere else to go, even if they’re technically free from consequences for doing so.
I also think people have a kind of emotional and personal “budget” for complaint or critique–they know they can’t fight everything they don’t like, so they try to make choices. Sometimes they end up saving up their critical energy for so long that nothing seems adequately “grand” in scale to warrant expending all that theoretically saved energy. (Kind of like the way that deflationary price spirals work: you keep waiting for the item to drop in price, and the longer you wait, the more you feel like you should continue to wait.)
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isn’t that what mainstream education teaches our kids – sit down, do your work, follow the rules, don’t complain?
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As near as I can tell from my neighbors, being over 60 means “break the rules” and “complain the loudest whenever somebody else does”. Who in their right mind would call me at 7:00 a.m. to complain about a car that was illegally parked (not our car) just because I’d drawn the short-straw and had to ask her to move her car (parked illegally for three days during which time her two legal spots sat empty)? The night before she called at 10:00 p.m. about somebody else’s car. Fortunately, the screaming baby (who she had indeed awoke) and my wife’s scorn were so apparent that she hasn’t talked to me in close to two years.
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“Think of a town as a tenured faculty and you begin to see it: not too many people want to do something that’s going to make everyone else hate them for the next 30 years if they think there’s nowhere else to go, even if they’re technically free from consequences for doing so.”
Yes, indeed. A department is such a weird thing–it’s like a dozen-person marriage.
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Dozen-person marriage, yah. And in a real marriage, there is sex, which makes people feel good and like each other. A department has all of the disadvantages, and not much of the joy.
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My impression has been that there’s a very vocal and active subset in Ithaca, NY. I would not say that the majority of people in town are activists, but that there’s a very visible subset of the population that identify as activists, spend time and take a lot of pride in their identity as activists. So I do think there’s a regional difference.
(Technically, I hear Ithaca’s a city, but it’s a very small one so I’m not quite sure we count as such.)
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I’m in the process of starting a social experiment via the web, and am in need of someone that can write really well. The details of the project is laid out on my website at http://www.accreation.org. I’m looking for someone that can edit the content in a more easily understandable format. Please visit the site, and contact me if you or someone you know might be interested in participating in the project. Thank you.
PS. This is NOT a paid position; I’m looking for like minded individuals who are interested in making this prjoect become a success. Thank you.
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I think the points about having to continue to live with / deal with the other community members are key. In a small community, your place in the scheme of things is pretty much defined. You are someone’s spouse, child, in-law, parent, business partner, customer, employer, Sunday School teacher, sports teammate, etc.
To be an “activist,” to overtly set out to change things, is to be deliberately stepping outside the defined order and also trying to get everyone else to step out. That does not happen easily. But I think it does happen. In my experience growing up in a small community, change happens through the established pathways, rather than in defiance of them.
A small community is, on the positive side, a place where everyone knows and cares about you. On the negative side, a small community is a place where everyone knows and cares about you. You work with that dynamic, or you leave.
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In my experience, living in a small town made it much easier to find someone to buy beer before I was old enough. However, it was also easy for somebody who knows your parents/teachers to see you. So, you have to go clear out into the sticks to drink the beer. So, pretty much what Valerie said about it being a mixed bag.
Also, I remember one guy the year behind me in school. He had kids with two different women within months of each other. I had always assumed that at least some of the people involved would leave town, but according to my alumni newsletter, the kids just graduated. Which must have been some kind of awkward that you can’t experience in a city.
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I think I should have defined small town better. I live in a small town, but the town has 10,000 residents. People do not have personal relationships with the people in power.
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“People do not have personal relationships with the people in power.”
10,000 is only a smidgen bigger than my home town of origin. Even if you don’t have “personal relationships” with the powers that be, your paths will keep crossing indirectly, and the number of degrees of separation between you and any of them will be very small.
Our family lives within the university community of a medium-sized city now, and even after less than two years of observation, the density of relationships (often double or triple relationships) is amazing. I’m always surprised who knows who.
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There is a difference between “participation” and “complaining,” and I think in my small town it is that difference that keeps me from doing more.
Here’s the thing: I have volunteered to be on committees. Once you get on, and show willingness and commitment, you are suddenly getting assigned all of the projects and then you are the head of the committee and then you realize you are devoting all of your time to the committee because no one else wants to help, and then you get burnt out.
Then, the next time you think about joining a committee, you think about the 100s of hours you spent on the last one, and you don’t do it.
I was asked to run to be on the local school board, and declined because I wasn’t willing to make the huge time commitment involved. Now, when I have a complaint about the school, though, I think to myself, “I had the opportunity to go do something about it, and declined. Going to make a stink about it now just seems like whining.”
In general, I think in most small towns, BECAUSE there is so little participation, anyone who wants to participate and get involved can. As a result, those who do not participate in this way feel like they don’t really have the right to complain.
(And those that do complain without getting involved actually DO look like whiners. Complain about a zoning issue and you hear, “Well, there’s an open seat on the committee . . .”)
With more community involvement overall, it is easy to help a little. The way things stand, your only realistic choices are either (a) “In for a penny, in for a pound,” (b) complete out, or (c) uninvolved crank.
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I think that a 10,000 person town in Texas is different from a 10,000 person town in New Jersey simply because of the population density. In an relatively unpopulated area, your work, home, school, shopping, church, etc. are pretty much limited to that town so you have closer relationships to others in that town. In dense areas, where you live is not where you do most activities, so you don’t get all of the overlapping relationships.
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“Our family lives within the university community of a medium-sized city now, and even after less than two years of observation, the density of relationships (often double or triple relationships) is amazing. I’m always surprised who knows who. ”
I live in what any would consider a reasonably big city, and yet, the same is true here. The people whose paths you cross are not a random sampling of the 3M metropolitan area; the paths are bounded by common interests, life choices, income, children, religion . . . . I once randomly encountered a neighbor at the birthday party of my child’s classmates. After about 2 minutes conversation, I correctly identified the person as someone who knew my husband’s cousin’s wife in another city about 200 miles away.
(I agree MH, that a 10K town that’s embedded in the northeast corridor is different from a 10K sound in Texas or Idaho or Alaska. I also think my 3M town out here in the wilderness is a smaller “town” than any comparably sized city in the Northeast).
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MH,
The under 10,000 town I was thinking of is my home town in rural Western Washington and our current community in Texas has a population in the low six figures, but you’re still right that “In an relatively unpopulated area, your work, home, school, shopping, church, etc. are pretty much limited to that town so you have closer relationships to others in that town.” The scale of distances is pretty big in Texas. There’s a major city at intervals of an hour or two or three hours of driving, but our community does feel like an island. The university has a big gravitational pull on the surrounding community that various community calendars (for school, parish, etc.) seem to just automatically sync with the university calendar.
“In dense areas, where you live is not where you do most activities, so you don’t get all of the overlapping relationships.”
That was the exasperating thing about DC–the fragmentation between different functions. We did two years of suburban Maryland and then were in residence on campus for four years, and it eventually dawned on me that we weren’t really going to see much of the adult population of the university that way. The faculty just bungeed into campus to work and then bungeed out again to their far-flung homes. Only the undergraduates spent much time on or around campus. There were so many people who seemed really worth getting to know, but in most cases, we never really got to spend enough time with each other. The distances and commute-times involved were just astronomical.
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Laura:
I can’t find the political science/policy article I read (yes, very frustrating). I know it must have been in the Post or the Times (and I think it was on the left hand side of the page a couple of days ago). The theme seemed relevant to your interests — basically complaining that academic political science had become dominated by modeling of complex behaviors, and thus irrelevant to actual policy making.
BTW, not directly relevant to the small town, but kind of, I think:
This Land
At an Age for Music and Dreams, Real Life Intrudes
By DAN BARRY
Published: April 15, 2009
Tiffany Clay, 18, is the top violinist at her high school in Ohio, but her dreams are bound by money worries.
It’s the story of a 16 year old magician and academically able girl whose life path and choices are bounded by her small town. It felt tragic to me, but, clearly, a great social divide exists between her and me, and would have even if we’d grown up in the same small town.
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Musician, not magician. Really, I don’t know what’s happening to my typing. I don’t think it’s just spell correction.
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My town of 16,000 is small enough for people to have personal relationships with the folks in power and with the relatively small proportion of folks who are regularly involved. I guess my question/issue would be whether people get involved and participate to improve the general good or they get involved/participate to advance their own narrow, parochial interest. Yes, we all get involved in things where we (or our kids/families) stand to benefit, but are we asking for/complaining about something specific to our kid, street or are we participating to further some collective good. What do people perceive about someone’s participation? Do they see it (have we been conditioned to cynically see it) as always self-serving? Is there a sense of community spirit or public service?
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Really good questions, Drew, and excellent comments from everyone. I don’t know the answers.
Somewhere down the line, I would love to do more research on all of this. My dream project would be to have a team of people in different parts of the country observing town council meetings and conducting surveys of local residents. In the early 70s, there were projects like this in communities in urban areas, but there hasn’t been anything like that in recent years. And suburban political and social life has been completely ignored.
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There is stimulus money for research and your project would make for a great number of hard-to-outsource jobs. However, the deadlines for submission (at least for health care) are so soon that you either have to have a proposal nearly completed or the ability to dump all of your other work.
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“There is stimulus money for research and your project would make for a great number of hard-to-outsource jobs. However, the deadlines for submission (at least for health care) are so soon that you either have to have a proposal nearly completed or the ability to dump all of your other work.”
Go, Laura!
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