We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an external integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group discussion begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen that a sharing of our daily life—its cares and burdens, its pleasures and joys, each with all—furthers this inner, this spiritual union which is at last to be the core of a new politics. The fourth way of developing the neighborhood bond is by citizens taking more and more responsibility for the life of their community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that government satisfy those needs—the satisfaction also must be found in that fermenting life from which our demands issue. The methods of neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter XXVI.
The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments. Then shall we have the political integration of the neighborhood. This will be discussed in chapter XXVII, “From Neighborhood to Nation.” Party politics are organized, “interests” are organized, our citizenship is not organized. Our neighborhood life is starving for lack of any real part in the state. Give us that part and as inevitably as the wake follows the ship will neighborhood responsibility follow the integration of neighborhood and state.
XXIV
Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization I
The Will of the People
Many of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood organization as the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What our political life needs today is to get at the will of the people and to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be adopted from any we have hitherto known.
Where do we show political vitality at present? In our government? In our party organization? In our local communities? We can see nowhere any clear stream of political life. The vitality of our community life is frittered away or unused. The muddy stream of party politics is choked with personal ambition, the desire for personal gain. Neighborhood organization is, I believe, to be the vital current of our political life. There is a widespread idea that we can do away with the evils of the party system by attacking the boss. Many think also that all would be well if we could separate politics and business. But far below the surface are the forces which have allied business and politics; far below the surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly mated couple.
Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most important are: to give a knockout blow to party organization, to make a direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and needs and our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to create a responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the new democracy; or, to sum up all these things, to break down party organization and to make a creative citizenship the force of American political life.
An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow to party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of party, by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the people,84 (2) by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3) by putting a responsible government in the place of the irresponsible party.
First, there is at present no real unity of the people.
It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was the only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must be obtained by the manipulation of other men’s minds or by the evolving of the common mind; we must choose between the two. In the past the monarch got his power from the fact that he represented the unity of his people—the tribal or national consciousness. In the so-called democracies of England and America we have now no one man who represents a true collective consciousness. Much of the power of party has come, therefore, from the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of pseudo collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get a common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity was through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather than anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party organization was largely doctrinaire because party has given us collective action of a kind, and what has been offered in its place was a scattered and irresponsible, and therefore weak and ineffective, particularism. No “independent” method of voting can ever vie with the organized party machinery: its loose unintegrated nebulosity will be shattered into smithereens by the impact of the closely organized machine.
The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives—whether they are to adhere to party or to be “independent”—is futile. Personal honesty exhausts no man’s duty in life; an effective life is what is demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness. When we go
