The recent death of Michael Jackson, icon of the 1980s, made me think about how much the world has changed since that time. In the 1980s, we still lived in the mass market, mass media world that futurist Alvin Toffler called "The Second Wave" in his 1980 book The Third Wave (See http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Increasingly, we live in a Third Wave world of what management thinker Tom Peters calls "de-massification" and "narrow casting," a world where there is no single "King of Pop," for example. I think that Liberals and Democrats need to consider what this increasing trend toward decentralization means for progressive causes.
WHY MICHAEL JACKSON MATTERS
The untimely death of Michael Jackson touched a lot of people at the end of the Baby Boom and the beginning of the Gen-X age coteries. The King of Pop's music, for many of them, formed part of the soundtrack of their lives, to use a hoary old cliche.
However, his career demonstrates a deeper sociological and political truth: there is no new King of Pop, like Jackson (and Presley, Sinatra and Crosby before him), because music, like the rest of our culture, has become more diffuse.
In the Second Wave world, one artist could dominate the Top 40 world of Broadcast. In our Third Wave world of what Tom Peters calls "narrowcasting," no one artist can dominate all the discrete Top 40 lists.
This truth touches more than art. It touches politics as well. I think that we are on the cusp of a change to the political landscape, much like those changes to the arts and the media that probably made Michael Jackson the last "King of Pop." I think the emerging meme is one of Liberal ends achieved through the Conservative means of limited government. The French Revolution could be summed up with the phrase, "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity." I think this change can best be summed up with the phrase, "Legitimacy, Resiliency and Transpartisanship."
THE CONSTITUTION CREATES A GOVERNMENT THAT IS BOTH LEGITIMATE AND RESILIENT
Many thinkers, such as James Kunstler (See http://kunstler.com/... on the Left and John Robb (See http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/... in the Center are convinced that our society must adopt a "Resilient Community" model to survive. Others, such as Transpartisan Joseph McCormick, see the resiliant community approach as something that is useful, in terms of quality of life and sustainable growth, even though they do not see the country's situation as being as dire as Kunstler and Robb do. Some thinkers, like Paul Starobin, even see viable session movements as a possibility. (See http://online.wsj.com/...
What these very bright people do not emphasize is that our Constitution creates a fundamentally resilient structure, with a fractal distribution of power to the Federal, State and Local levels, each with its own purpose, powers and limitations. Such a structure is, by its nature resilient. Where greater Resiliency is needed, we can return to that original Constitutional structure of limited and distributed government.
Ever since the turn of the last century, we have become more centralized, an approach that was probably in tune with the the centralized, mass-market nature of Second Wave business and technology, for example, the rise of Network Radio and later Television. This approach makes diminishing sense in a Third Wave world, where, for example, Narrowcasting creates dozens (hundreds?) of Networks. Decentralization, as called for in the Constitution, far better suits a Third Wave world.
Just as we no longer live in a world where everyone dances to the same music or hums the same song, we no longer live in a world where centralized approaches solve local problems. Justice Brandeis's view of the States as the "laboratories for democracy" can now come to the fore.
The recent adoption of gay marriage statutes by several state legislatures, as opposed to state
courts, is an example of how this trend can advance "Liberal" causes, without the kind of blow back, Proposition 8 in California for example, that came with this change being made by a court.
Where change is made by the people or their representatives, it appears to have greater legitimacy than if that change comes through the courts. Where this decision is made on a local level, the change appears to have more legitimacy than if the change were made on high, at the Federal level, as with Griswold and Roe.
TRANSPARTISANSHIP: IT IS NO LONGER ENOUGH TO LOOK AT LABELS
"If you look at California on the recent vote against raising taxes or spending, when you get 64 percent of the state voting with you, it tells you that in the most Democratic districts of the state, there was a solid majority against raising taxes and spending," Mr. Gingrich told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.
"So I would urge, for example, conservatives in California to find a Democrat to run in every Assembly and Senate seat in California that can't be contested by Republicans, and then to run a Republican in every seat they could possibly win, and then have an overt goal of creating a bipartisan conservative coalition," he said. "I'd do the same thing nationally." (See http://www.newsmax.com/...
Newt Gingrich "gets" Transpartisanship. If Liberals fail to see that this is no longer about Party or Labels, they risk irrelevance.
What matters today are ideas that exist in both parties and among both people who consider themselves "Liberal" and those who consider themselves "Conservative:" these core beliefs favor more freedom, more efficient and less intrusive government and a working legal and regulatory system.
It is this trend that sees the NYCLU and Ron Paulist groups working together to insure that Constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure are protected under amendments to the Patriot Act. It is a trend towards ideas and not soundbites, policy and not drama, statesmanship and not showmanship. In many ways, this is the view that drew many Republicans to vote for President Obama and which created some support among Liberals for arch-conservative Rep. Ron Paul, despite the fact that he was virtually unelectable.
It is time to have a serious discussion about what Liberalism means in a Third Wave world.