In previous posts, I've looked at the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS) in a number of ways as: 1) a way of preventing the collapse of American Democracy; 2) the only way around all that money in politics; 3) a way of people self-organizing into voting blocs and electoral coalitions to make candidates and electoral officials accountable once again; and 4) the remedy for overcoming the threat to open society. In this post I'll write about a similar threat to open society: specifically, the possibility of the emergence of totalitarian society in the United States, and the potential for the IVCS to prevent that emergence. The IVCS enables ordinary people to recreate the mediating socio-political institutions at the community level that prevent democratic institutions from being captured by plutocratic elites. How and why it does that involves the dynamics of change among open, pluralist society, mass society and totalitarian society.
The Theory of Mass Society
During the 30s, 40s, and 50s of the last century, liberal democracies were understandably concerned with understanding the conditions that lead to the emergence of totalitarianism. Towards the end of that period, a sociologist, the late William Kornhauser, formulated a conceptual framework using two attributes: accessibility, by which he meant an individual's capability of being influenced by others, and availability, by which he meant an individual's susceptibility to mass behavior: a psychological state characterized by a focus on remote objects, a direct mode of response to these objects, vacillation between apathetic and activist responses to these objects, and a readiness to make direct responses to these objects through mass movements.
Kornhauser's framework also divided people into two simple categories: elites and non-elites. Then by categorizing the two attributes into high and low accessibility and availability and cross-classifying by elite and non-elite, he arrived at four states of society: 1) communal society, in which elites are have low accessibility and non-elites are not available for mobilizing for mass behavior; 2) pluralist society, in which elites are highly accessible, and non-elites are unavailable for mobilizing; 3) mass society, in which elites are highly accessible and non-elites are highly available for mobilizing; and 4) totalitarian society, in which elites have low accessibility, and non-elites are highly available.
This framework is overly simple and was criticized for vagueness and ambiguity, not least because it was difficult to measure power which was important in distinguishing high from low accessibility, and elite vs. non-elite, and also because the notions of high and low availability seemed biased against the style of Civil Rights and New Left activism that became important in the 1960s. Because of these problems with the framework, difficulties of measurement, and the decline of Communism, Kornhauser's work fell by the wayside, as did Popper's work on Open Society. Popper's Open Society notion, however, experienced a renaissance with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, because, suddenly many nations wanted to understand what it meant to be an Open Society, and were very open to George Soros's willingness to support the spread of Open Society ideology and activism based on that ideology.
Perhaps, however, because of the rise of an increasingly authoritarian plutocracy in the U.S., it's time now to reconsider some of Kornhauser's thinking also. It's no longer the early '90s. Today, Democracy and Open Society are threatened in the lands of their birth. In Kornhauser's terms, they're threatened because the triumphs of neo-liberal ideology, and the rapid globalization of economy it has been associated with, have created discontinuities (rapid changes in the direction of social trends) in authority, community, and society, of the kind Kornhauser wrote about, as instrumental in creating mass society.
The rapid evolution of the United States into a society dominated by the Financial, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, as well as Information Technology, has resulted in the occupational displacement of more and more people, who have found themselves either, under- or unemployed, or condemned to relatively low income service jobs delivering only a fraction of the income they once enjoyed. It has also begun to produce an education and skills gap in which the United States lags behind insurgent nations, intensely striving for admission into first world economic status. These problems have been exacerbated by the crash of 2008, and the ensuing Great Recession and are still being exacerbated by continuing high rates of unemployment, the disruption and ending of careers, and the foreclosure fraud crisis. They are literally destroying communities, and the social ties of people and families to them. But the problems existed before the crash, which has only hastened the effects of the radical social and economic changes already underway.
In addition, there are cultural gaps between American Main Street perspectives and beliefs, and the perspectives and beliefs of urban and suburban communities more integrated into the globalized economy. These gaps relate to perspectives on religion, science, education, the role of Government in the economy, and immersion in the new developing Information Technology. In Kornhauser's terms, the effects of these various gaps among segments of American society are to disrupt authority relations, communities, and social ties, leaving many citizens and potential voters detached from the social context in which they lived their lives before. This detachment also makes them susceptible to mobilization by counter-elites (such as the leaders of various tea party factions) using the tools of ideology, propaganda, and people-to-people organizing efforts to mobilize people in support of the goals of the counter-elites.
We see this happening in the tea party mobilization going on right now around the symbols of American individualism, and I suspect it will not be too long before we start to see mass movements organized around the symbols of social and economic justice, rather than small government and individualism, appear. The only reason why the latter hasn't happened yet is because the election of Barack Obama has co-opted leftist activism for awhile, and channeled it through organizations and structures who believe they must work through him to represent their memberships. However, as the gap between social justice ideology and the reality of the Administration's accomplishments sinks in, people looking for justice will also look for new organizations to relate to, or else the old organizations will leave the "veal pen," and try to mend relationships with those they are attempting to mobilize, and whose loyalties they are now rapidly losing.
The main point here is that the breakdown in social ties experienced by large numbers of Americans makes them available for mass movements and mass behavior, and depending on what's happening in the area of intra-elite fragmentation that availability could support either the emergence of mass society, or, in the worst case, totalitarian society itself, if one faction of the elites can gain the upper hand in political struggles among themselves so that it is no longer constrained by other factions.
The elites in America are not yet so unified that this has occurred, but the convergence of political, corporate, and media elites around corporatism, and their ability in a post-Citizens United world, in George Soros's terms, to manipulate the cognitive functioning of citizens to distort perceptions of reality, suggests that the time of unification may be coming. In fact, the corporate elites themselves may be manipulating the conditions for such unification by creating a faux challenge to their authority from a tea party mobilized in back of the candidacy of a figure like Sarah Palin, who seems so unacceptable to a majority of people that they will fall into the arms of a thoroughly corporatist candidate. The corporatist would then continue the extraction of financial resources and entitlements from America's middle class as it has already done with its poor, while simultaneously and gradually restricting the civil liberties of dissenters using the danger from terrorism as a rationale, and increasing their manipulation of the cognitive functioning of the American people so that fewer and fewer are willing to challenge the trends supporting the transition from mass to totalitarian society.
The IVCS, Mass, and Totalitarian Society
From the point of view of the theory of mass society, what has happened to America is that its pluralist democratic society, what Popper and Soros called its Open Society and Kornhauser called its pluralist society, has gotten hollowed out, in the sense that the institutions creating and maintaining social ties: the informal group relationships, mediating voluntary associations and interest groups, and accessible interest groups, and political parties standing between individuals and the State have disappeared. Now lonely individuals stand naked before extremely powerful and inaccessible institutions including modern lobbying organizations and political parties. These individuals are disaffected by social trends and open to mobilization by ideological appeals and astro-turfing organizations funded by a financial oligarchy. The result has been a transition away from open/pluralist society to mass society, which while still having the form of democracy, no longer supports the social and psychological requisites for it. Depending on what happens in the arena of elite conflict, mass society in the US can even transform itself into totalitarian society if current trends continue.
The movement towards mass society and totalitarianism has been driven by social and economic discontinuities that have destroyed social ties and the social ecology of interaction among Americans, the first step in creating counter-trends that can drive America back towards pluralism and Open Society is to re-integrate people into a social context which will relate them to their fellow citizens, and also provide them some way of influencing their fate by gaining access and influence to the political elites, in order to make them accountable once again to non-elites.
Another and very important way of looking at IVCS is that it can provide an environment that will perform that re-integration, remove the vulnerability of people to cognitive manipulation and political propaganda, make non-elites unavailable for mass behavior, and make political elites accessible and accountable once again to the people they are supposed in democratic theory to represent. Let's take a closer look at IVCS capabilities to see how it can restore social ties making non-elites unavailable, and also create the influence relationships necessary to make political elites accessible.
A person wanting to use IVCS will do so because he or she is dissatisfied with the behavior of the elites and the outcomes of their dominance of government decision-making, and wants to do something about it. They will have seen a problem or problems and want to have their say in proposing a solution(s). The system will provide facilities (e.g. forums, web conferencing) that people can use to communicate about the problems they concerned about with other people, in an effort to clarify and state them clearly for themselves. In the process of communicating, people will align themselves with or against others, create a social context, social relationships, and social ties, which they did not have before using IVCS.
IVCs’s cognitive mapping capability will allow people to compare the cognitive profile of their own policy agendas with other policy agendas available in the Knowledge base. This will help people place their agendas in the context of the views of others, and prepare the way for social interaction and collaboration with them in voting blocs. People using IVCS will also be able to use social networking capabilities like those in such well-known applications as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster. In addition, they will be able to access their social network graphs, use social software such as blogging, micro-blogging, wiki participation and origination, sharing videos, images, and policy agendas, create communities and discussion groups, exchange ideas, and search for and locate experts. Finally, using capabilities based on text and data mining, and also the cognitive mapping capability mentioned earlier, people using IVCS will be able to find, contact, and create social relationships with other voters having statistically and/or conceptually similar priorities. These capabilities are a gateway to other people. They can help in creating new social ties integrating people into communities once again AND in building winning voting blocs, political parties and electoral coalitions that have the voting strength to elect representatives who will enact their priorities into law.
If an individual wants to join with others to form a voting bloc to solve any problems the voting bloc may uncover, or to influence office-holders or turn the voting bloc into a primary force or a political party, then that’s going to take collaboration, and collaboration over time creates friendship, mutual identification, and, frequently enduring social bonds. The IVCS system will offer individuals a wide range of collaboration capabilities and opportunities so that voting blocs and the individuals in them will be able to function. The more general collaborative capabilities in the IVCS will include team-based workflow to allow teams of people to plan and implement common tasks involving specialization. This capability can be very powerful in campaigns and also in complex problem solving processes also involving specialization. In addition membership and participation in teams often creates strong social relationships, as well.
IVCS will also include virtual team workspaces. These are like forums, but have more comprehensive capabilities. IVCS will include application and desktop sharing in virtual collaborative sessions. Users will be able to collaborate on documents such as policy agendas, policy options, impact analyses, and blog posts. Wikis, which are inherently collaborative will be available, as well. Again, there will be discussion forums for people to use in creating voting bloc coalitions. Project, Task, and Event Management tools will be provided, as will tools for web-conferencing for online meetings to recognize and formulate problems, develop solutions, criticize them, and mobilize support for policy agendas and for voting bloc campaign activities. IVCS will support collaborative prioritization of policy options as well as planning and prioritization of political initiatives to get policy options passed into law. It will also support a voting/polling capability. The capability can be used in any number of collaborative contexts, but for IVCS its most important application is for getting agreement in voting blocs, and then using the agreed upon policy agendas as a legislative mandate for elected representatives and electoral candidates.
IVCS will provide a collaborative e-learning facility that will support people in getting access to content fragments gathered from across the Internet that are relevant to a problem they’re trying to solve. The facility will provide a variety of virtual environments for collaborative learning for teams.
Finally, while IVCS will allow voting blocs to safeguard confidentiality to the extent that seems reasonable to them, it will also emphasize the importance of transparency and inclusiveness in most voting bloc processes. These characteristics are essential for open and pluralistic societies, and open collectivities of all kinds, because, in contrast to secrecy, they create mutual trust and reinforce social relatedness. At least a moderate level of trust, along with a minimum of honesty in public affairs are important for the functioning of open society, and for facilitating the way back from mass society and the trend towards totalitarianism, because trust supports the maintenance of social ties and the ability to interact with others in political and problem solving contexts.
The cumulative effect of these various IVCS capabilities is to create an environment that provides opportunities for people to create new social relationships and to re-integrate into society. IVCS enables ordinary people to recreate the mediating socio-political institutions at the community level that prevent democratic institutions from being captured by plutocratic elites. People who join voting blocs in IVCS and become active in them, will no longer feel isolated and alienated, and will no longer be available for mass behavior. They will identify with their voting blocs and the people in them, and will be far less susceptible to mass propaganda appeals coming from the corporate media or anywhere else, because they will use their IVCS social networks to filter and evaluate the propaganda that is sent their way.
In addition to its effects in blocking the availability of individuals for mass behavior, IVCS will also restore the accessibility of elites. Right now, the channel of elite accessibility proceeding from the people to political elites, to elites in the private sector appears to be broken, since political elites seem increasingly to be ignoring the interests of their constituents in favor of accommodating the desires of those elites funding their campaigns. The channels of accessibility can be restored by IVCS, because the aggregation of political power in its voting blocs and electoral coalitions, will occur within the IVCS environment, and outside of the reach of the corporate media and its channeling of elite world views and propaganda to people. The IVCS will disrupt the cognitive manipulation of non-elites proceeding from the corporate media on a continuous basis, by exposing its members to a variety of points of view freely available with the IVCS. Because cognitive manipulation will be less ubiquitous in the IVCS, the possibility of voting blocs emerging that hold and support different narratives than are being pushed in the corporate media will be very much greater than in pre-IVCS politics, and policy agendas different from those favored by elite officeholders and candidates are more likely to emerge from these narratives.
At that point, the creation of new accessibility channels is facilitated by IVCS tools for communicating with officeholders and candidates. When people running for office are contacted by voting blocs with many thousands and in some cases even millions of members, the numbers in these blocs will get the attention of those running. When bloc leaders ask for commitments to bloc policy agendas and make clear that these agendas will be viewed as mandates for the blocs, and that the performance in office of those elected will be evaluated in terms of these mandates, the influence of big money raised to pay for mass media propaganda will radically decrease, because the only thing that talks louder than money in politics is the ability to deliver masses of votes. Since voting blocs in the IVCS will have that ability, the influence channel that now goes from well-funded interest groups to politicians, will be eclipsed by one that goes from voting bloc members to voting bloc leaders to politicians, making political elites once again accessible to people. And once that link is forged, it will be possible once again to influence the behavior of economic and other private sector elites through the political elites.
Conclusion
In the United States today representatives in both the Legislative and Executive branches of Government seem to have escaped the bonds of influence relating them to working people and making them accountable to them. Replacing those bonds is the growing influence of the wealthy and major corporations in a variety of economic sectors. In turn, events set in motion by globalization and other corporate activities have damaged or destroyed the social ties and intermediate organizations relating people to the State. Individuals stand naked and isolated and subject to cognitive manipulation and mass mobilization, by huge multi-national corporations and the very wealthy, the astro-turfing organizations they create to do their bidding, the dominant political parties, and the big Government that today serves them and not the people.
One way to look at this problem is from the viewpoint of cognitive manipulation controlling political participation causing the breakdown of Open Society: The Popper/Soros way. Another way to look at it is through Kornhauser's framework suggesting that we have to re-build social ties and influence channels to move mass society back toward pluralist society. I think the Interactive Voter Choice System can help to both re-build social ties and provide effective new influence channels making political elites accountable once again. The sooner we can implement the IVCS and get it used by many millions of people, the sooner we still stop the trend toward mass behavior and totalitarianism. American Society moves very fast these days. It has moved rapidly toward the destruction of democracy and Open Society. It can move just as rapidly back toward pluralist/Open Society. The IVCS can make a difference by 2012. And, soon after that, the American people will have their democracy back entirely.
(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).