Culture Watch

In Blessed Are the Organized, Princeton University's Jeffrey Stout argues that democracy is imperiled: "The imbalance of power between ordinary citizens and the new ruling class has ... reached crisis proportions." He means crisis in the medical sense—the moment when the patient will either get better or die.

Stout's prescription? "[M]any more institutions and communities [must] commit themselves to getting democratically organized." We need to do a lot more old-fashioned, face-to-face organizing. More broadly, we need to engage the basic practices of democratic citizenship -- voting, but also listening to one another as we describe our struggles and our deepest concerns; peacefully assembling; and petitioning for redress of grievances.

Stout offers portraits of effective grassroots organizing in places as diverse as post-Katrina New Orleans and Marin County, California. Stout finds a marvelous example of the democratic practice of assembly among Katrina survivors gathered in the Houston Astrodome. The scene there was "surreal." The PA system was dominated by celebrities such as T.D. Jakes, with his apolitical message about God's provision. Organizers realized that they needed to get microphones into someone else's hands. Eventually, a less famous pastor took a microphone and preached a different kind of sermon: "I believe God expects us to do our part of the work too ... So if you've been a leader in New Orleans ... come forward and have a conversation ... about what's happening, and about doing something." In that moment, the PA system was transformed into a means of genuinely public address. Here, Stout argues, "we see ... a motley collection of displaced citizens reconstructing the rudiments of a democratic culture on the fly."

It's a golden age for documentaries. Michael Moore kick-started the era with crusading films such as Bowling for Columbine and Sicko, fusing serious social commentary with a protagonist who could be identified with by a wider audience than the "God's-eye view" used in magnificent PBS films by Ken Burns, such as The Civil War and Jazz. Burns seeks a resonant "objective" perspective, relating tales of U.S. history as if our lives depended on it (which of course, if you accept that those who forget are doomed to repeat, it does). Moore wants to place us at the story’s center, revealing the insecurities at the heart of American social strife as something that we could all do something about.

Moore and Burns are only the most popular and widely seen of recent documentarians. They stand alongside Errol Morris, whose treatment of the life of Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, may be the best analysis of how political rhetoric can mask horrific action; Michael Apted, whose Up series, following the lives of several people since their seventh birthdays in 1964, constitutes a social history of the past 50 years; and most of all the Maysles Brothers, who were among those who invented the form, with films such as Salesman, an astonishing vision of the corruption of commerce and religion, and Grey Gardens, which serves as a mirror image to the myths of Camelot that surround JFK's presidency. All of these films paved the way for recent works fusing factual cinema with an ethical eye.