Of the People, by the People: Reallocate Political Power : Government: Traditional politics gives us charge and countercharge. We need people politics for problem-solving.

The acquittal of the four officers who beat Rodney King and the ensuing riots exposed problems that conventional ideology cannot remedy. Neither liberalism, with its emphasis on government action, nor conservatism, with its stress on individual responsibility, provides the answer. The solution lies in a politics where citizens take center stage as problem-solvers.

Liberals tie the verdict in the King case and the ensuing explosion of rage and violence to “white racism.” They propose that pervasive bigotry against African-Americans takes especially pernicious form in discriminatory police behavior toward blacks, and they make a cogent case that the explosion of violence is the direct result of 12 years of neglect of the inner cities’ problems. Finally, liberals indict the Reagan and Bush Administrations for sanctioning bigotry and neglect as a matter of policy.

Conservatives, in contrast, say that most Americans are not racist. Rather, the issue is growing inner-city lawlessness that threatens the life and property of all law-abiding citizens, regardless of race. They maintain that Great Society programs for poor and racial minorities, far from being the answer, created the problem. Government action, they charge, generates a client mentality that erodes the personal responsibility essential for escape from poverty.

Both positions have elements of truth. As the Simi Valley jury’s verdict dramatized, many whites do, indeed, tend to see all blacks--especially black males--through the prism of racial stereotypes about violence-prone criminality, a view that media reporting of crime has reinforced. The Reagan-Bush years have fed racial divisiveness, especially about the distribution of government programs and benefits.

Yet, as black sociologist Orlando Patterson has pointed out, white opinions toward blacks also have changed considerably in the last two decades; black athletes, performers and even political figures like Jesse Jackson enjoy a measure of white approval unthinkable a generation ago. Worries about crime are not the fantasies of bigots; they are the result of increasing crime. Finally, public skepticism about government programs is not reducible to racism; it reflects rightful doubts about the usefulness of Great Society, welfare-state approaches.

The larger problem is that inner-city African-Americans, like poor whites, Latinos and others, have lost the political tools through which to exercise responsible impact. Politics, understood broadly, is the way people become serious players in the life of their communities and the nation. Today, poor people suffer because any political infrastructure that they own and might use for problem-solving has fallen apart.

The radical estrangement and despair in the decimated neighborhoods of South Los Angeles reflect the collapse of mediating political institutions that once connected people’s daily lives to the political process. Organizations like political parties, ethnic and business groups, public-minded churches and synagogues, neighborhood schools, local unions and settlement houses did more than represent people. Through mediating institutions, people gained a sense of ownership and a stake in the society. They developed a personal investment in politics far more vivid than that produced simply by voting in elections.

Some such organizations struggle to hold on--the black churches’ South-Central Community Organization were on the front lines in trying to quell the violence. But to do much about the devastation in Los Angeles and elsewhere will require new mediating political institutions.

Neither professional-dominated service programs nor the dismantling of government programs is the answer. Rather, the evidence of three decades is that citizens need particular kinds of government aid, tools of self-help that they can use to rebuild communities and create linkages with the political system. Programs like Head Start, community policing, community-controlled job training, housing and health initiatives can catalyze action on a scale disproportionate to cost. The tragedy of the Reagan years is that inexpensive civic resources were specifically targeted for elimination, from Neighborhood Self-Help Development to community jobs programs like CETA.

To begin to reverse the alienation and despair of inner cities, poor people today, as in the past, need mechanisms to participate in the larger society on their own terms, through their own efforts. Like all of us, inner-city residents have to regain ownership of politics. For democracy to succeed, we need a government again that is not only “for” for the people, but of the people and by the people as well.