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dialogue, compromise, mediation, and reflection—that can make them effective citizens.
    Above I suggested a critical role for schools in learning the democratic arts. But equally important are the voluntary associations in which the majority of Americans are engaged—through religious affiliations, or in groups like the PTA, the League of Women Voters, Kiwanis, or Greenpeace. Can we come to see such involvements not just as means to solve a particular problem, or to address a given issue, but as occasions for learning the democratic arts, as opportunities for learning that can sustain our involvement throughout our lives?
    So many people who become involved in addressing social problems experience early “burn out.” If we do not attend to the arts of reflection and evaluation of our progress, if we do not work to perceive how our particular effort is tied to long-term society-wide change, we soon feel like retreating into our private worlds. We deny our need to make a difference in the larger world. We deny ourselves.
    As we begin to value the process of democratic renewal itself, seeing our efforts not as stop-gap measures but as engaging in long-term cultural change, we can attend to making that process rewarding —consciously measuring our success in incremental steps, deliberately creating celebration and cultural expressions to sustain our energies.
    Growing up, most of us learn that “politics” is about staking out a position and defending it. The “art,” if there is any, is winning—not listening in order to understand the interests and values of others. If we are locked into pre-set positions, interaction at best hones our arguments but cannot awaken us to new possibilities. Creativity is lost. Thus, in the emerging citizen politics, listening may be the first art. Many are taking its cultivation seriously; one example is the Listening Project.
    The Listening Project, a national program based in North Carolina, is a community organizing and outreach tool that uses in-depth, one-on-one interviews with people in their homes. Instead of the usual quick, check-off survey, organizers ask open-ended questions about people’s values and concerns. In one home, a middle-aged European-American man complained that the biggest problem he saw was the noisy black teenagers who hung out on the streets and caused trouble. On a simple survey, that one comment might have gotten him labeled as a racist. But the organizers listened. They didn’t argue. Their questions encouraged the man to look deeper. As he talked, he began to reflect as well. By the end of the interview, he himself had restated (and re-understood) the problem in his neighborhood as the lack of recreational facilities and opportunities for young people. 24
    These are some of the themes of citizen democracy. What they add up to is a profoundly different approach to social change than most of us are accustomed to. It means, for both Right and Left, breaking the habit of what I call the “manifesto approach” to social change: We decide on the program, and then “sell” it to others, or preferably, “convert” others to our truths. But, if in drawing up our alternative designs, we appear merely as more “experts” with our own brand of specialized knowledge, we do nothing to diminish the sense of powerlessness that people feel. If our process mimics the dominant instrumental view of politics—or of it fuels the polarized, highly moralized brand—we do nothing to encourage prople to take on the joys and frustrations of public engagement. In so doing we fail to address the real crisis. For the real crisis is not that justice, freedom, and biological sustainability have not yet been achieved. It is that people feel increasingly disenfranchised from the public processes essential to their realization.
    If this is true, then the real challenge is neither to proclaim beautiful values nor to design elegant answers ourselves; it is to create a politics of