The Path to True Democracy

Thirty years after graduating with the Class of 1968, I find myself back at Harvard for a semester's fellowship at the Institute of Politics. I have been pleasantly reminded of how central to one's identity a great, good place like this can remain even through long absences. I delighted in seeing the strength and depth of my alma mater reflected in Nelson Mandela's gracious acceptance of the honor Harvard had bestowed upon him. Perhaps like many others in Tercentenary Theater that day, I found myself peering through the prism of my identification with Harvard to consider my other identities--as a politician, as a Democrat, but most of all, as a provincial.

My first identity at Harvard was that of a provincial. The admissions office appeared committed to having every state represented, and in that class I alone represented Montana. It soon became clear that no small part of the purpose of my education was to eliminate as much of my provincialism as could be wrung out of me, and in this endeavor I was a willing accomplice. As it turned out, though, I could never be anything but provincial. When Harvard was kind enough to invite me back this fall, I came as a far less naive but far more committed westerner than when I first arrived.

The only requirement imposed on Institute of Politics fellows is to lead a discussion group on a topic of our choice. Beyond that, we have the run of the University, including an open invitation to audit courses. I have settled on Samuel Huntington's course on "American National Identity" and William Gienapp's "Coming of the Civil War," and I am offering a study group on western regional politics. To me, this all fits together in a pattern which makes perfectly good sense, but I know the pattern is far less apparent to most of the people around me.

The topic of regionalism, for example, is outside the mainstream of Harvard concerns, and no doubt should be. Still, at a time when various forms of regionalism--both supra-national and sub-national--are commanding increasing attention around the world, it is surprising how convinced Americans remain that our Civil War settled the question of regionalism once and for all. To me, as to many westerners, a course on challenges to American national identity would naturally include some discussion of place-based or regional challenges, but this is clearly not what brings most students to the course. Racial and ethnic strains on nationhood are well understood, but the idea that a region like the Rocky Mountain West might begin to question the prevailing nationalist assumptions seems outlandish--or, in another word, provincial. But such an attitude no longer becomes a world-class center of learning.

Ninety years ago, Harvard almost single-handedly engendered a great debate about the most appropriate apportionment of a person's loyalties. The most influential contribution came from Herbert Croly, whose 1909 book The Promise of American Life became the intellectual foundation both of Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Croly argued that democratic citizenship was fundamental to American identity. Recognizing that the people are sovereign, but "only insofar as they succeed in reaching and expressing a collective purpose," Croly concluded that by the 20th century, we could only fulfill our democratic potential by becoming "frankly, unscrupulously, and loyally nationalist." Josiah Royce, one of Croly's contemporaries, suggested a human-scale approach to nationalism. Specifically, he argued that we should seek "to train national loyalty through provincial loyalty."

If the twentieth century was the judge of that debate, clearly it has rendered its judgment in favor of Croly. Or has it? Why, then, at the end of the century, is there such an incessantly growing literature on "the end of the age of the nation-state"? Why would Nelson Mandela pay tribute to Harvard, not as an American institution, but as one which "sees the world as its stage"? Why would he refer to himself more often as an African than as a South African? And why (on an infinitely more humble scale) would someone who had every opportunity to have the provincialism wrung out of him by Harvard, come back here thirty years later as an unabashed loyalist of the Rocky Mountain West? The answers to all these questions have fundamentally to do with democracy.

It is the human urge to self-determination which bound Mandela so strongly to his Harvard audience. It is the imperative of self-determination which gives us no choice now but to become global citizens. But as citizens of this vulnerable planet, we must also cultivate an effective form of citizenship and loyalty toward those real and significant places which sustain and shape our being.

One of my own lifelong loyalties is to the Democratic Party, and as a western Democrat, I am naturally concerned that the West is now the most Republican region in the country. No small part of the blame for that can be attributed to the Democratic Party's thorough nationalism. This continent's mountain region has always felt itself colonized by the national government. That it still feels that alienation is reflected in the fact that the Republican Party, always willing to trash Big Government, now dominates every level of government in the interior West. As a Democrat, I think the time has come for my party to begin trusting westerners with far more control over their own landscape. But the real issue is not about the Democratic Party, but about the democratic spirit.

There may have been a time when what democracy most needed was the nurturing of a new nationalism, but what it needs now is what Royce called "a new and wiser provincialism." Harvard could do worse than to nurture that kind of wisdom and that kind of provincialism.

Daniel Kemmis '68 is a fellow at the Institute of Politics. A former speaker of the Montana House of Representatives and former mayor of Missoula, Mont., Kemmis is now director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West.