“This will not be the first movement in human history to flourish by incorporating the wisdom of unorthodox groups hitherto exiled to the margins of respectable society. … [I]t’s time for a conservative parallel polis. But the outline of that polis is already there, to be discovered and nurtured, not created. It’s up to us to provide it the attention and resources that it deserves.”
The Giving Review co-editor William A. Schambra participated in a panel session about “Alternative Political Structures” at the National Conservatism conference put on by The Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington, D.C., last week. The panel also included the pseudonymous N. S. Lyons, who writes on Substack at The Upheaval, South African filmmaker and writer Ernst Roets, and The Heritage Foundation’s Delano Squires.
At a previous National Conservatism event in April in Brussels, Lyons delivered an address on conservatism’s failure to counter the left’s “long march through the institutions” and the need to begin constructing a “parallel polis”—an ultimately successful strategy of resistance to Communism developed by Czech dissidents in the Cold War to counteract the “atomization, isolation, and degradation imposed by the state through the creation of a network of underground communities.” He expanded upon those thoughts at last week’s session.
Schambra has written about conservative philanthropy and the parallel polis here, and an edited version of his remarks to the session are below.
***
Some 30 years ago, I began a decade-long stint as a program officer at The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. There, I had the honor of working with two gentlemen who are in the audience today, Michael Hartmann and Dan Schmidt. Dan, by the way, went on to serve as a member of the advisory board that The Edmund Burke Foundation created as it was being founded.
Mr. Lyons’ notion of “parallel polis” was familiar to us, since it had guided our work behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. While the major American foundations supported foolish and utopian projects like nuclear disarmament, Bradley surreptitiously funded the activities of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity in Poland, and Memorial in the Soviet Union.
Even after the Iron Curtain fell, and thanks to Dan and Mike’s efforts, Bradley worked to kick-start free associations in the civic ruins of the former Soviet Union. Bradley contributed to the Salvation Army in Moscow; bought a bus for a scout troop run by a Russian Orthodox nun; and funded a Muslim group caring for single expectant mothers and battered women in Kazan.
That experience led us to wonder if there might not also be a parallel polis here at home, in America. After all, by the 1990s, no one believed anymore that our vast, costly therapeutic social-service state was meeting the needs of its citizens. Even Democrats were pledging to “reinvent government.”
If free civil-society groups arose to address those needs under totalitarian rule, we thought, surely we could find the same sort of civic vitality here, within the associational nation celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville.
As it turns out, we found plenty. In our own backyard, for instance, Milwaukee’s Black community had been trying for decades to reform the costly and ineffective local school system. All such efforts, however, had been systematically thwarted by the powerful teachers’ union.
And so Black Milwaukeans, along with other disgruntled religious and ethnic groups, had undertaken—at great personal expense, and while still paying taxes for useless public schools—to found their own educational institutions.
Soon, Baptist, Pentecostal, Afro-centric, Hispanic, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish schools joined a pre-existing array of Catholic and Lutheran schools. Just as Bradley had supported dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, so now, through school choice, it supported these critical civic innovations, in the face of the establishment’s fierce opposition.
Theory and practice
We conservatives like to think that school choice sprang full-grown from the brow of Milton Friedman. But the fact is that without the unsung labors of those ethnic and religious insurgents in Milwaukee—long before the Bradley Foundation was even established, and without having read a word of Friedman—school choice would have remained an economist’s dream.
It occurred to us from this work: what if there were, within our hard-pressed communities, a larger parallel polis that we had simply not seen before? What if we had overlooked it because it wasn’t built by conservative intellectuals in elegant theory, but rather in messy, everyday practice by those struggling against the abuse and neglect of the social-service state? Maybe we had been looking for Tocqueville in all the wrong places.
So we asked Bob Woodson to come to Milwaukee and survey the landscape. Woodson, as many of you know, is the premier champion of low-income grassroots groups, and their innate capacity to understand and solve their own problems.
He checked in with the local barbershops, hair salons, and taverns, asking the question: to whom do people turn first in this neighborhood, when they need help? It was never the licensed social worker at the local public mental-health clinic. It was alwaysthe pastor at the storefront church, or the beloved grandmother running a neighborhood daycare.
And so by tapping into local wisdom, seeking out those who possessed moral, not credentialed authority, Woodson brought to our attention Bill Lock’s church-based business incubator; Victor Barnett’s basketball program for at-risk youth; Cordelia Taylor’s community-based senior care facility; and dozens of other homegrown organizations.
Their legitimacy came not from their willingness to parrot a political line, but rather from their ability to meet the immediate, everyday needs of this particular neighborhood.
Founded by the communities themselves to solve their own problems according to their own moral and religious lights, they became for us domestic versions of the parallel polis we had found behind the Iron Curtain.
Securing the future
Bob Woodson has been my friend and mentor ever since our days together at the American Enterprise Institute in the ’70s, where he worked with Peter Berger and Father Richard John Neuhaus on AEI’s “mediating structures” project.
More recently, Bob reminded us that it was precisely Black America’s historical ability to create its own parallel polis that allowed it to survive and even flourish, giving the lie to the 1619 Project’s narrative of Black helplessness in the face of America’s settler colonialism.
So it’s no wonder that I found Mr. Lyons’ notion of a conservative parallel polis appealing. As he pointed out in his talk to the European NatCon conference, we are “awash with economic, social and spiritual problems” that have not been solved by—indeed, have been exacerbated by—our vast bureaucratic empire of service providers.
Just as had happened behind the Iron Curtain, whoever steps forward with effective, practical, immediate solutions to these problems will secure the future.
By way of friendly amendment, though, I would point out that conservatives need not create their own social service complex. Sending an enthusiastic corps of volunteers into the inner city preaching moral reformation would enjoy no more success than have progressivism’s therapeutic legions.
Following Bob Woodson’s lead, it’s instead possible to discover the institutions of a parallel polis, institutions that make up in moral authority what they lack in material resources.
But the problem is, they don’t look conservative to us. They’ve never written an op-ed calling for tax cuts for the wealthy; they don’t subscribe to National Review; they may never have even cast a vote for a Republican, if only because few have ever appeared on the local ballot. Indeed, they may still have a tattered copy of Barack Obama’s “Hope” poster on their walls.
Nonetheless, through the very act of assuming responsibility for solving their own problems, they embody Tocquevillian principles. They thereby reject progressivism’s claim that only professional experts are competent to address our problems. They also thereby reject the contemporary left’s claim that only revolution can address the disabling effects of settler colonialism.
Those grassroots groups, by example and by exhortation, teach personal responsibility, self-discipline, spiritual commitment, and civic obligation. They may not refer explicitly to the Founders’ writings about the importance of the republican virtues. But they embody and practice those virtues every day, because, as the Founders themselves told us, only such virtues enable truly self-governing individuals and communities.
Trusting relationships
It’s no surprise, then, that American conservatives have in fact periodically embraced Bob Woodson’s understanding of grassroots civil society. Ronald Reagan had his private sector initiatives effort; George H. W. Bush championed “a thousand points of light; and George W. Bush launched a program of “faith-based and community initiatives.”
But the embrace is fleeting. It takes patience—not public relations—to establish trusting relationships with unorthodox allies, who don’t share our narrow partisan allegiances.
The left is ever vigilant to disrupt those relationships by waving the bloody shirt of racism. And our own Conservatism, Inc., insists that such uncomfortable long-term work isn’t necessary.
They say: Just give our DC think tanks and nonprofits a few million more to win this next election or pass this next piece of federal legislation, and our cause will triumph at last. We already have a conservative parallel polis in those edifices along Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Avenues, don’t we?
No. As Lyons points out, our lavishly funded think tanks and nonprofits are only there to tinker with the details of the social-service state, not to challenge it wholesale. The parallel polis delivers effective, concrete, long-lasting services at the local level, not fleeting partisan victories in the capital.
Nonetheless, this year alone, conservatives will contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to political campaigns, which will instantaneously evaporate into TV airtime. A fraction of that money, diverted to supporting Woodson grassroots groups, would begin to build enduring relationships of trust that would have immense long-term effects.
The effects would not be all in one direction, though. That’s another reason why working with the grassroots parallel polis can be challenging.
We may hope to bring over those groups to our larger political principles in time, as trust is built up. But that trust will be built only if it flows both ways—only if we’re prepared to learn from our grassroots allies as well.
We must be willing to integrate their experience and wisdom into our own policy prescriptions. No one understands better than Woodson groups, at a granular level, how the social service state has failed. And no one knows better than they how it might be reformed or replaced, often in ways that are completely mystifying to conservative policy intellectuals.
This will not be the first movement in human history to flourish by incorporating the wisdom of unorthodox groups hitherto exiled to the margins of respectable society.
Mr. Lyons is right: it’s time for a conservative parallel polis. But the outline of that polis is already there, to be discovered and nurtured, not created. It’s up to us to provide it the attention and resources that it deserves.
