The Foundation as Borderland Institution

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I.

How, short of civil war, does a nation typically work through periods of intense social polarization?  In the United States we face persistent racial and ethnic divisions as well as stark income and asset inequalities.  We’re currently experiencing these differences in the context of some very uncivil election year rhetoric and the emergence of a new kind of American class consciousness characterized by the Occupy Movement.

Given these polarizing forces, what is the glue that keeps contemporary American society from spinning apart?  Is it simple inertia, a kind of consumerist satiety?  Do we ever in fact learn to resolve our differences, or do they come into greater or lesser focus depending on the whims of our commentariat?  If we manage somehow to work through our divisions, where does this bridging work happen?

It’s not the first time in recent history that we’ve come to a perceived boiling point.  In a 1995 book titled Beyond Individualism,  Michael Piore wrote about a “social deficit” created in the 1980s and early 90s that eventually led to increased political mobilization and social instability.  A pivotal event of that era, according to Piore, was President Reagan’s crushing of the federal air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, an action that “galvanized anti-union managerial factions in a whole variety of industries and occupations where union organization had previously been unassailable.”   It was open season on organized labor.  The wealthiest Americans saw a marked increase in their standard of living while the incomes of blue collar workers declined.  The savings and loan crisis and its attendant bailout presaged our contemporary financial market meltdown and moved some commentators to dub the period between 1985 and 1995 the “Looting Decade.”

Political life also took a nasty turn.  The Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ads in 1988 alienated black Americans, while the family values rhetoric of the 1992 campaign targeted single mothers, feminists, and gays and lesbians.  Against this backdrop of political turmoil, identity groups grew in visibility and pressed their claims on American society.  According to Piore, we could not, during this fiscally lean era, opt to settle these claims through massive social spending.  All of this created an atmosphere of tension and instability, perhaps not substantially different in feeling and tone from the one we’re currently experiencing.

To address this increased polarization, Piore suggested that politicians and policymakers champion the borderlands, institutions in which “social claimants” could cross group boundaries and communicate their needs and concerns to society at large.   Through dynamic give-and-take “political conversations” in these borderland institutions, marginalized identity groups could become agents in the creation of a new national culture.  Participants in these discussions would interpret their actions to themselves and others in ways that acknowledge the effects of one community of meaning upon another.  Perhaps on occasion these discussants would even celebrate their inevitable clashes of interpretation.

II.

There’s so much that’s compelling about Piore’s vision of the borderlands, rooted, as it appears to be, in Aristotle’s view of Man as the “political animal.”  Somewhere between Wall Street and the Occupy Movement’s encampments in Zucotti Park there would be a space where both bankers and activists could plead their cases.  Ideally the 1% would get a clearer sense of the effect of their actions on people with modest means, while the 99% would better understand the economic system that for better or for worse implicates us all.

Unfortunately, in twenty years or so of nonprofit work, I’ve known only a handful of organizations* that fit the description of a borderland institution.   First, most civil society organizations are segregated by race, ethnicity, class, and the other divisions that borderland institutions are expected to bridge.  Even when these organizations are not segregated, they seldom make it their mission to champion give-and-take conversations across group boundaries.  From my own experience of participation in diversity trainings, poverty summits, and other intergroup meetings, these bridging conversations are fiendishly difficult to pull off.

Of course the mixing of people from different backgrounds happens outside the context of civil society organizations, in such venues as grocery stores, sports stadiums, parade routes, and popular music concerts.  But these are not typically places consecrated to boundary-crossing deliberation and the forging of a new civic culture.  The fact that Piore dubs his institutions “borderlands” suggests how marginal this kind of discussion has become.  Perhaps in some real or imagined past we talked through our differences in the town square or the agora.  In these nefarious times, however, we’ve pushed these conversations to the edges of civic life, we’ve made them exceptional rather than central to the political and other processes that shape our national character.