Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power

I'm a teacher and a practitioner

of civics in America.

Now, I will kindly ask those of you who have just fallen asleep

to please wake up. (Laughter)

Why is it that the very word "civics"

has such a soporific, even a narcoleptic effect

on us?

I think it's because the very word signifies something

exceedingly virtuous, exceedingly important,

and exceedingly boring.

Well, I think it's the responsibility of people like us,

people who show up for gatherings like this

in person or online, in any way we can,

to make civics sexy again,

as sexy as it was during the American Revolution,

as sexy as it was during the Civil Rights Movement.

And I believe the way we make civics sexy again

is to make explicitly about the teaching of power.

The way we do that, I believe,

is at the level of the city.

This is what I want to talk about today,

and I want to start by defining some terms

and then I want to describe the scale

of the problem I think we face

and then suggest the ways that I believe cities

can be the seat of the solution.

So let me start with some definitions.

By civics, I simply mean the art

of being a pro-social, problem-solving contributor

in a self-governing community.

Civics is the art of citizenship,

what Bill Gates Sr. calls simply

showing up for life,

and it encompasses three things:

a foundation of values,

an understanding of the systems that make the world go round,

and a set of skills

that allow you to pursue goals

and to have others join in that pursuit.

And that brings me to my definition of power,

which is simply this:

the capacity to make others do

what you would have them do.

It sounds menacing, doesn't it?

We don't like to talk about power.

We find it scary. We find it somehow evil.

We feel uncomfortable naming it.

In the culture and mythology of democracy,

power resides with the people.

Period. End of story.

Any further inquiry not necessary

and not really that welcome.

Power has a negative moral valence.

It sounds Machiavellian inherently.

It seems inherently evil.

But in fact power is no more inherently good or evil

than fire or physics.

It just is.

And power governs

how any form of government operates,

whether a democracy or a dictatorship.

And the problem we face today, here in America in particular,

but all around the world,

is that far too many people are profoundly illiterate

in power —

what it is, who has it,

how it operates, how it flows,

what part of it is visible, what part of it is not,

why some people have it, why that's compounded.

And as a result of this illiteracy,

those few who do understand

how power operates in civic life,

those who understand

how a bill becomes a law, yes,

but also how a friendship becomes a subsidy,

or how a bias becomes a policy,

or how a slogan becomes a movement,

the people who understand those things

wield disproportionate influence,

and they're perfectly happy

to fill the vacuum created by the ignorance

of the great majority.

This is why it is so fundamental for us right now

to grab hold of this idea of power

and to democratize it.

One of the things that is so profoundly exciting

and challenging about this moment

is that as a result of this power illiteracy

that is so pervasive,

there is a concentration

of knowledge, of understanding, of clout.

I mean, think about it:

How does a friendship become a subsidy?

Seamlessly,

when a senior government official decides

to leave government and become a lobbyist

for a private interest

and convert his or her relationships into capital

for their new masters.

How does a bias become a policy?

Insidiously, just the way that

stop-and-frisk, for instance,

became over time a bureaucratic numbers game.

How does a slogan become a movement?

Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance,

was able to take the "Don't Tread on Me" flag

from the American Revolution,

or how, on the other side,

a band of activists could take a magazine headline,

"Occupy Wall Street,"

and turn that into a global meme and movement.

The thing is, though, most people

aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities.

So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy,

is willful.

There are some millennials, for instance,

who think the whole business is just sordid.

They don't want to have anything to do with politics.

They'd rather just opt out

and engage in volunteerism.

There are some techies out there

who believe that the cure-all

for any power imbalance or power abuse

is simply more data,

more transparency.

There are some on the left who think power resides

only with corporations,

and some on the right who think power

resides only with government,

each side blinded by their selective outrage.

There are the naive who believe that

good things just happen

and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen,

the fortunate and unfortunate alike

who think that their lot is simply what they deserve

rather than the eminently alterable result

of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation,

of power.

As a result of all of this creeping fatalism in public life,

we here, particularly in America today,

have depressingly low levels

of civic knowledge, civic engagement, participation,

awareness.

The whole business of politics has been

effectively subcontracted out to a band of professionals,

money people, outreach people,

message people, research people.

The rest of us are meant to feel like amateurs

in the sense of suckers.

We become demotivated to learn more

about how things work.

We begin to opt out.

Well, this problem, this challenge,

is a thing that we must now confront,

and I believe that when you have

this kind of disengagement, this willful ignorance,

it becomes both a cause and a consequence

of this concentration of opportunity

of wealth and clout that I was describing a moment ago,

this profound civic inequality.

This is why it is so important in our time right now

to reimagine civics as the teaching of power.

Perhaps it's never been more important

at any time in our lifetimes.

If people don't learn power,

people don't wake up,

and if they don't wake up,

they get left out.

Now, part of the art of practicing power

means being awake and having a voice,

but it also is about having an arena

where you can plausibly practice deciding.

All of civics boils down to the simple question

of who decides,

and you have to play that out

in a place, in an arena.

And this brings me to the third point that I want to make today,

which is simply that there is no better arena

in our time for the practicing of power

than the city.

Think about the city where you live,

where you're from.

Think about a problem in the common life of your city.

It can be something small,

like where a street lamp should go,

or something medium like

which library should have its hours extended or cut,

or maybe something bigger,

like whether a dilapidated waterfront should be

turned into a highway or a greenway,

or whether all the businesses in your town

should be required to pay a living wage.

Think about the change that you want in your city,

and then think about how you would get it,

how you would make it happen.

Take an inventory of all the forms of power

that are at play in your city's situation:

money, of course, people, yes,

ideas, information, misinformation,

the threat of force, the force of norms.

All of these form of power are at play.

Now think about how you would activate

or perhaps neutralize these various forms of power.

This is not some Game of Thrones

empire-level set of questions.

These are questions that play out

in every single place on the planet.

I'll just tell you quickly about two stories

drawn from recent headlines.

In Boulder, Colorado,

voters not too long ago approved a process

to replace the private power company,

literally the power company, the electric company Xcel,

with a publicly owned utility

that would forego profits

and attend far more to climate change.

Well, Xcel fought back,

and Xcel has now put in play a ballot measure

that would undermine or undo

this municipalization.

And so the citizen activists in Boulder who have been pushing this

now literally have to fight the power

in order to fight for power.

In Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama,

there's an organization on campus

called, kind of menacingly, the Machine,

and it draws from largely white sororities

and fraternities on campus,

and for decades, the Machine has dominated

student government elections.

Well now, recently, the Machine

has started to get involved

in actual city politics,

and they've engineered the election

of a former Machine member,

a young, pro-business recent graduate

to the Tuscaloosa city school board.

Now, as I say, these are just two examples

drawn almost at random from the headlines.

Every day, there are thousands more like them.

And you may like or dislike

the efforts I'm describing here

in Boulder or in Tuscaloosa,

but you cannot help but admire

the power literacy of the players involved,

their skill.

You cannot help but reckon with and recognize

the command they have

of the elemental questions

of civic power —

what objective, what strategy, what tactics,

what is the terrain, who are your enemies,

who are your allies?

Now I want you to return

to thinking about that problem or that opportunity

or that challenge in your city,

and the thing it was that you want to fix

or create in your city,

and ask yourself,

do you have command of these elemental questions of power?

Could you put into practice effectively

what it is that you know?

This is the challenge and the opportunity for us.

We live in a time right now

where in spite of globalization

or perhaps because of globalization,

all citizenship is ever more resonantly,

powerfully local.

Indeed, power in our time is flowing

ever faster to the city.

Here in the United States, the national government

has tied itself up in partisan knots.

Civic imagination and innovation and creativity

are emerging from local ecosystems now

and radiating outward,

and this great innovation,

this great wave

of localism that's now arriving,

and you see it in how people eat

and work and share and buy and move

and live their everyday lives,

this isn't some precious parochialism,

this isn't some retreat into insularity, no.

This is emergent.

The localism of our time is networked powerfully.

And so, for instance,

consider the ways that strategies

for making cities more bike-friendly

have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen

to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle.

Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting,

where everyday citizens get a chance

to allocate and decide upon

the allocation of city funds.

Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil

to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago.

Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles

and many cities between

are now organizing to stage strikes

to remind the people who live in their cities

what a day without immigrants would look like.

In China, all across that country,

members of the New Citizens' Movement

are beginning to activate and organize

to fight official corruption and graft,

and they're drawing the ire of officials there,

but they're also drawing the attention

of anti-corruption activists all around the world.

In Seattle, where I'm from,

we've become part of a great global array of cities

that are now working together

bypassing government altogether,

national government altogether,

in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals

of the Kyoto Protocol.

All of these citizens, united,

are forming a web,

a great archipelago of power

that allows us to bypass

brokenness and monopolies of control.

And our task now is to accelerate this work.

Our task now is to bring more and more people

into the fold of this work.

That's why my organization, Citizen University,

has undertaken a project now

to create an everyman's curriculum

in civic power.

And this curriculum starts with this triad

that I described earlier of values,

systems and skills.

And what I'd like to do is to invite all of you

to help create this curriculum

with the stories and the experiences

and the challenges that each of you lives and faces,

to create something powerfully collective.

And I want to invite you in particular to try

a simple exercise drawn

from the early frameworks of this curriculum.

I want you to write a narrative,

a narrative from the future of your city,

and you can date it, set it out one year from now,

five years from now, a decade from now,

a generation from now,

and write it as a case study looking back,

looking back at the change

that you wanted in your city,

looking back at the cause that you were championing,

and describing the ways that that change

and that cause came, in fact, to succeed.

Describe the values

of your fellow citizens that you activated,

and the sense of moral purpose that you were able to stir.

Recount all the different ways

that you engaged the systems of government,

of the marketplace,

of social institutions, of faith organizations,

of the media.

Catalog all the skills you had to deploy,

how to negotiate, how to advocate,

how to frame issues,

how to navigate diversity in conflict,

all those skills that enabled you

to bring folks on board

and to overcome resistance.

What you'll be doing when you write that narrative

is you'll be discovering how to read power,

and in the process, how to write power.

So share what you write,

do you what you write,

and then share what you do.

I invite you to literally share

the narratives that you create

on our Facebook page for Citizen University.

But even beyond that, it's in the conversations

that we have today

all around the world in the simultaneous gatherings

that are happening on this topic at this moment,

and to think about how we can become

one another's teachers and students in power.

If we do that, then together

we can make civics sexy again.

Together, we can democratize democracy

and make it safe again for amateurs.

Together, we can create a great network of city

that will be the most powerful collective laboratory

for self-government this planet has ever seen.

We have the power to do that.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)