May 24 is a day that will live in infamy in the history of the Democratic Party. It is the day that the Netroots were told exactly how much power they have in the US political establishment: zero. But like some other DKos posters, I am grateful for the shock that this event administered to my thinking about the Internet and politics in America.
For a long time, I have felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with the functioning of political blogs, but the Eureka moment did not arrive until the impact of the capitulation vote clarified my thinking. This diary explains how I now see the political blogosphere and why I believe that its energies are misdirected and largely wasted.
The metaphor I use for the discussion is the application of a steam engine to rig and trim the sails of a wind-powered ship instead of providing direct propulsion. Blogs like DKos use the revolutionary facilities of Internet communication to try to trim and steer the creaky vessel of an existing political party instead of applying this potent new energy source to a radically new political vehicle.
Political blogging aimed at changing the character or behavior of either major political party in the United States of America is a waste of time. It is worse than a waste of time, because it consumes precious reformer energy and generate a false sense of accomplishment and hope.
When Robert Fulton invented the steamboat, he did not apply the power of steam to the task of improving the efficiency of sailing ships. Steam engines could have been installed to drive winches that would furl, unfurl, and trim the sails of large sailing ships, thus allowing smaller crews and a modest gain in efficiency. Instead, Fulton completely replaced sail propulsion with steam propulsion. (There was an interesting transition period in which ships sported both sail masts and smokestacks, but once the engines became reliable the era of sail ended.)
Markos Moulitsas created DKos to apply the steam power of Internet community activism to the task of trimming and adjusting the policies and practices of the Democratic party to reflect the priorities of American citizens. In this it has failed, at least in the near term. But the real failure of DKos is an enormous failure of imagination, and the more it focusses on the diminishing returns available to reforming a fundamentally corrupted political party, the more foolish this effort becomes.
The Democratic and Republican parties are two public faces of the American Twoparty, a political complex dominated by corporations and wealthy individuals. These are the people who literally own America. Their perfection of the tools of broadcast propaganda, and their increasing direct ownership of the propaganda outlets, had rendered them immune to citizen-directed activism - until the advent of the public internet.
Initially, Internet blogging was tied to the Twoparty. Howard Dean famously innovated Internet fund raising, and early bloggers began cheering on their favorite Twoparty actors, but as blogging participants soon saw, NOTHING CHANGED. The Iraq war continued, in the face of direct public opposition. Outsourcing and offshoring of jobs continued; contraction of health care continued; middle class income continued to stagnate, then decline; massive subsidies to agribusiness and weapons makers continued.
Yes, the Internet steam power was hoisting the sails of the Democratic politicians, but it was the same old ship, laden with pork and slowly headed for the rocks. Finally, when the Democratic Congress voted to continue a war that their constituents overwhelmingly rejected, it became plain that Netizens would have to take matters into their own hands. The question was: how to build a new ship?
Although I am not nearly ready to produce the complete blueprint for Netizen Government, I have enough pieces sketched out to begin an exposition. I will briefly describe them here and provide more detail in subsequent diaries. There are four broad principles of Netizen Government development.
1. Disintermediation
If both Candidate X and Candidate Y are Owned by the Boeing Corporation, you cannot expect to appeal to either candidate to cut the amount of money awarded to Boeing by the US Government. The Boeing corporation was recently caught red-handed bribing officials of the US Government, trying to ram through a multi-billion dollar deal for tanker planes. A few people were fired, and now Boeing is competing again to sell planes to the Government. You will not find a US Presidential candidate or Congressman who will punish the Boeing Corporation, because the Boeing corporation contributes heavily to all politicians who may be useful to Boeing. In short, the political intermediaries who we have elected to hold Boeing accountable, work for Boeing. The same is true for Exxon, Wal-Mart and the dozens of other Corporations that effectively run the US Government. We gain nothing from appealing to political intermedaries to check these corporations. We are simply wasting our time.
2. Direct Engagement of Hostile Forces
If we disintermediate our elected "representatives," we must directly engage the corporations and other institutions acting in a manner injurious to Netizens. Economic action and non-violent protest are effective means of defeating even the most powerful and ruthless corporation. Simply put, Netizens will have to learn how to hit rogue corporations directly, with every legal weapon we have, in order to regulate their institutional behavior. Asking politicians in the pay of these corporations to do this is absurd. The enemy of progressive Netizens is not the politician defending rogue institutions; it is the rogues themselves. Bush and Cheney are just expendable bits of body armor worn by Halliburton. They will be replaced as necessary to protect the wearer. To secure geniune reform, Netizens must directly engage and defeat the destructive leadership elements of companies like Halliburton, Boeing, Exxon, Wal-Mart, and dozens of others. Attempting to do this through the political machinery of the Twoparty is nonsense.
3. A Republic of Esteem
But how do we organize and control the direct engagement of powerful hostile institutions? In any large and complext struggle, leadership and organization are vital. The reason the rogue corporations are so effective is that they have highly motivated (albeit sociopathic) personnel, tight communications, and excellent command and control networks. Fighting these dragons will not be easy without equivalent organizational structures. Where will the leadership come from. Surprisingly, the answer is in front of us on DKos. The Mojo system is an early but serviceable precursor to the machinery required to establish a Republic of Esteem, a system for electing representatives to leadership positions based, not on how much money they can raise or their hair styles, but based on the esteem they have gathered through their record of thought and action as Netizens. The future leaders of the coming battles against the rogue corporations will be chosen from the ranks of front-pagers and highly esteemed diarists on DKos and its many peer blogs. All that is needed to realize this new mechanism of political leadership is the further refinement of mojo systems (including more dignified nomenclature).
4. The Global Corporation Compact
Once we have competent and responsible Netizen leadership that can organize challenges to the rogue institutions, how can we create an orderly framework for reform and avoid an anarchic and episodic struggle against all the rogues? What is needed is a global compact governing responsible behavior of corporate entities. Just as a tyrannical king of England was forced to sign a charter circumscribing his behavior, Netizens will eventually force corporate entities to accept compacts of conduct that will strike an acceptable balance between corporate prerogatives and Netizen interests. Uniform environmental, personnel, and ethical guidlines will emerge from Netizen activism, not from the world's corporation-controlled legislatures. Globalization works for rogue corporations because the rogues act as unified global entities. Only a unified global Netizen movement can check these worldwide malefactors, who currently nimbly switch locales whenever a local reform threatens to inhibit their mischief. The US Congress cannot responsibly manage the Earth's atmosphere. The Netizens can, within an appropriate framework of regulation. The drafting and management of global corporation compacts will be the ultimate achievement of Netizen government, and it will take decades to achieve, but this goal is not illusory. By contrast, investment of further energy into "reform" of political parties owned by rogue corporations is the height of folly.
The era of Internet citizen networks serving corrupt politicians is over. Let us build a new political order in which the real centers of economic power are held directly accountable to the people of the world. Netizen government will not come easily, but it must come if the reform of political institutions dominated by destructive corporate entities is to be accomplished. The Netizens will defeat the rogue corporations. It remains for each of us to decide whether to advance or retard the time of that victory.