Self-organizing is a natural, spontaneous thing among a people who feel themselves to be free and in control of their lives

Sgt. Mom makes an excellent point which I have not seen discussed elsewhere. From Self-Organizing Community by Sgt. Mom. She starts out with a brief history of the Tea Party Movement, one of our great missed opportunities. A spontaneous decentralized movement across the nation for 2-4 years of small-government, fiscally conservative constitutionalists. They revealed the temper of the electorate and the establishment parties in collusion with the mainstream media ignored and sidelined them without ever understanding them.

The system sought to heal itself but the healing threatened the sinecures of the Mandarin Class and they suppressed it.

Now the Mandarin Class laments polarization and the "irrationality" of the electorate. Idiots.

The interesting point is at the end of the post.

What I came away from this experience, and a good few others besides, is an understanding that functioning communities self-organize – from something like a massive Tea Party rally to the Cajun Navy responding to disastrous floods, to something as minor as a traffic accident where those were merely passing by turn out to rescue the trapped and render first aid and comfort until the official responders turn up. It’s not a strictly American thing, but because of our history, experiences, expectations and culture. It’s a thing in our social DNA. Communities – successful communities self-organize. It’s the dysfunctional ones which cannot – for whatever reason, mostly learned helplessness, or even an ingrained expectation that someone else will step forward and do the needful. Those are the communities which are the meat and playground of professional community organizers, and the presence of a funding money-bags, preferably one with very big money bags. Presumably that was the kind community that my Open Salon accuser was most familiar with. She just could not wrap her mind around the concept that self-organizing is a natural, spontaneous thing among a people who feel themselves to be free and in control of their lives.

The observation strikes home.

My city government has been a one party affair since 1855. It is majority black and there has long been a very successful coordination between white business interests and black politicians. It has been an immensely productive alliance which has facilitated growth and prosperity for decades. Growth and prosperity in which everyone has had at least some share.

That model is now under pressure. Practices which worked in a city of half a million or a million begin to break down as you pass 2 million, 3 million, 6 million. A city which was once a binary of black and white now is multi-racial with Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans now also wanting a place at the table. A city which was once a solid majority black is now at the tipping point of pluralism with no one group in majority.

The growth and prosperity is also fostering more and more apparent corruption, insider dealing, and terrible public services. The model needs reforming but because it is a one-party town, the pressure for reform is muted. However, as in a seismic area, many small earthquakes are far preferable to one big earthquake. The insiders will not self-reform on behalf of the citizenry so reform, when it comes, will happen outside normal procedures and the Mandarin Class will wail and bemoan loss of norms.

It has been too lucrative for the Mandarin Class to stick with the status quo even when they have the chance to proactively reform themselves regardless of how obvious that reform is needed.

This dynamic echoes the national election of 2016 in which the anointed candidate was rejected by the great unwashed and the Mandarin Class have been bewailing the outcome ever since. Gnashing their teeth and resisting but still not cleaning up their act.

In the meantime, here in my hometown, the natural self-organizing alluded to by Sgt. Mom has taken the form of communities incorporating as their own townships. They secede from the unorganized county and create their own city resulting in lower taxes, better services, greater transparency and a more civil community.

My neighborhood is working hard to mitigate the absence/poor quality of city services. It is an uphill battle because the interlocking insider interests are so tightly enmeshed with one another.

I was speaking with one city employee this past week trying to get her to focus on some particular activities that the neighborhood wants to get addressed. We would rather do it through the city than do it on our own because that is the proper way to address the problem but the city is strongly allied with developers with a different agenda.

It was a fascinating, disturbing, and aggravating conversation principally because we were actually speaking different languages, exacerbated by her not being particularly bright, not having much education and having little experience in purposeful activities.

I was having a normal constructive conversation discussing how the neighborhood was working together, how the neighborhood was defining the problem, the range of solutions being considered, the contextual facts that had been investigated and discussed, the parameters of the outcome being sought, etc.

Her focus was scattershot and undirected. She wanted to address nebulous abstract issues such as how the community was being defined. Were we including people from outside the neighborhood, the community. When pressed to define the parameters of community, she was unable to do so. Effectively, community was anybody who wanted to be involved even if they were not going to contribute and not pay the consequences if poor decisions were made.

Her own inability to define what she thought should be done led to defensiveness and that is when it got to be interesting. Her authority comes from working as an agent of the city. She can provide City resources to taxpayers or deny them.

She wanted to establish her credentials for effectiveness. The only experience she had was "organizing a community" to improve a park. Out of politeness and curiosity, I asked about that experience. Turns out, it wasn't her community at all. She lived elsewhere. She went into a poor neighborhood and saw an opportunity to gussy up a park. She had to work through community resistance. When she couldn't get them onside she worked around them and implemented her plan anyway, using City money, grants from advocacy groups, corporate donations.

To her, this was community organizing. To me, it was the very antithesis. The community did not organize itself to achieve an outcome. The bureaucrat imposed her will on the community because she thought it was a good idea.

Basically she was a symptom of the problem. Which is Sgt. Mom's point,

Those are the communities which are the meat and playground of professional community organizers, and the presence of a funding money-bags, preferably one with very big money bags.

The definition of a healthy community might be the very fact that there are no community organizers. The community self-organizes as needed.

UPDATE: And today, a story about a new book which celebrates the America of self-organizing communities and the generous spirit of the nation.