Community and the Politics of Place

Introduction

Joel Garreau, in his Nine Nations of North America, has already brought us to Ecotopia, hence to the Pacific Northwest, and to MexAmerica, Los Angeles and the SouthWest. We are now returning to Garreau's misnomer, the Empty Quarter. What we say here can stand as well for other wide-open spaces such as the MidWest, the BreadBasket, which Garreau has also discussed.

Our reading of Dan Kemmis's Community and the Politics of Place brings us to Big Sky country, to Montana. The other areas of the West are coastal: California and the Pacific Northwest. Kemmis's vision of the Mountain West pertains to the desert to the south and to the states of Oregon and Washington east of the Cascades and even to the BreadBasket in the MidWest. The Coastal West will stand in contrast to the Mountain West as I pursue these notes, largely for the sake of contrast. Indeed, we probably are more familiar with California than any other section of the West.

Biography of Dan Kemmis

Daniel Kemmis is well known as an important Western political leader. He had been minority leader and then Speaker of the Montana House of Representatives and later a two-term mayor of Missoula, Montana. He holds a law degree from Harvard University. Utne magazine has chosen him as one of the most outstanding visionaries of our era. Quite a distinction for a practical politician.

Although his book has depth and scholarship, he is not a full time academic, rather an adjunct professor of Regional Planning at University of Montana. Kemmis is now the executive director of Northern Lights a major think-tank and advocacy group for the Mountain West, located in Missoula, Montana. As you read his book, keep constantly in mind that he is, through and through, a creature of the West, writing for a Western audience.

Political Theory of Placeness: Chapters 1, 2, & 3

In his Pre-Amble stroll through Constitutionalism, what is Kemmis doing? I think he is grounding his radical message in the U.S. and the Montana Constitution to show his potential critics that he is deeply patriotic, but that his patriotism extends beyond a ideological conviction to a political system but to the land itself. The Montana Constitution specifies its placeness in gratitude and recognition of a precious gift. This point is critical but never acknowledged in the U.S. Constitution. Kemmis thus incorporates place into the discussion and also grounds his thought in Constitutions.

How to bring citizens into concrete relationships with each other and the landscape? He adopts a powerful image from social philosopher Hannah Arendt: the vanishing table. The abstracted notion of the public (pp. 4-8) must give way to the concrete place (the metaphorical table) to become real. This can be the unique contribution of the West to a political theory and practice which can be made universal. This may be tough going, but it is important to grasp. Kemmis reveals his goal: the revival of a vibrant political culture around social relationshps of place.

What went wrong? Kemmis points to Shay's rebellion in Western Massachusetts in the spring of 1787 (pp. 10-11). Kemmis uses Shay's rebellion to illustrate several fault lines in American political structure:

Debtors (farmers, rural inhabitants) versus creditors (financial and commercial interests, the most powerful of city dwellers)
The Country (really, the colonial West, which was then along the Connecticut River Valley) versus the City (financial centers such as Boston and New York --- located to the east)

Kemmis sees the early rebellion in the West as sending a shiver down the spines of those (urban and Eastern) interests that framed the Constitution. The solution to the threat of citizens banding together to solve their own problems was the establishment of a complex, divided, bureaucratized, fragmented government dubbed the procedural republic, which became an instrument for the title of Chapter 2: Keeping Citizens Apart. Kemmis (pp. 14-21) sees this doctrine of Madison as destroying the social basis of direct citizenship which Jefferson craved, thus the origin of Big Government and Remote Control. By implication, the destiny of the West was sealed: control by overreaching bureaucrats from Washington, D.C., and a loss of popular control of the West by the West. Kemmis quotes (p. 14) Rousseau: "Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics." Madison got his way, a political culture of citizens "dispersed, disconnected, out of touch with each other."

Citing Hegel (pp. 23-24) in 1820, Kemmis notes that only when the frontier is settled and people form a more compact society will a real civil society be possible. Noting that 100 years after the "official" closing of the frontier in 1890, made famous by the Turner thesis of the Western historian Frederick Jackson Turner, such a civil society is ripe. Dan Kemmis is pointing the way, as a scholar and as a person of public stature.

The Turner Thesis is the stuff of Chapter 3, The Descending Horizon. The frontier is over, gone. There is (with the exception of Alaska) no "safety valve." Hegel's reckoning is upon us. But the situation is still worse for the West. Kemmis sites these reasons:

The populist, Jeffersonian vision of rural, farm-based society was decisively defeated in 1896 when William Jennings Bryan was defeated by William McKinley. Bryan championed the sectional interests of the West and the South, such as free silver. On McKinley's behalf, Mark Hannah, a wealthy New York industrialist, triumphed with a money-based politics of mass-advertising, inventing the modern style of political campaigns. Thus, finance, industry, and mass communications sealed the fate of rural, small-town, Western, Southern, agriculture America. See pages 28-31. Kemmis concludes (p. 31): "The fundamental faith of ordinary people in their ability to govern themselves has been lastingly diminished."
The procedural republic intensified with the "launching of the regulatory bureaucracy," so hated in the West. Kemmis associated this phenomenon with the career of Theodore Roosevelt (harkening back to the film on Hetch Hetchy), the rise of imperial ventures overseas under the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, and the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Regulatory bureaucracy became a new tool by the enlarging federal government for "keeping citizens apart." See pages 31-33.

Stalemate in the Empty Quarter: Chapters 4 & 5

Kemmis borrows Garreau's regional slur for Big Sky, the Empty Quarter, to reveal how little the region means in the eyes of the interests who triumphed in the procedural republic. Lightly populated and resource rich, Big Sky is ripe for mind-numbing exploitation. Kemmis goes through several scenarios, concluding that the only worthwhile, feasible alternative is what the Bioregionalists call reinhabitation. Follow the logic from pages 40-43:

Place-specific issues, in the face of the regulatory bureaucracy, requires the West to re-invent the public sphere to determine (p. 41) "what we now, can, should, and will do with that part of the world we call home." (Emphasis is mine.) Note the tone and the language on page 41. This is essential Bioregional politics.
Following the West's poet laureate, Wallace Stegner, and his call for cooperation, Kemmis quotes:

"This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society worthy of the scenery."

The alternative is laid out in the following chapter, Stalemate, a case study of trying to solve local and regional disputes using the formal machinery of the regulatory bureaucracy, "the fulfillment of the Madisonian scheme of government." Note the story of Missoula Jobs. The chief instruments of decision and policy making are the courts and the public hearing, which Kemmis wryly notes, is neither.

Note:

More to come, but you, dear student, should be able to handle the rest. Tough stuff is behind you by this point in the book.

Part II of Kemmis deals with the concrete practices of reinhabiting regions and building a civic republicanism. I have started a second web page dealing with practice, from ch