Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Technoprogressive Majority

Good friend and ally James Hughes points me to this Wall Street Journal poll, from last September:
A survey of 2,242 U.S. adults in Sept. 6-12, 2005

"Please indicate whether you support or oppose the policy."

Percent supporting:

96% Medicare (health insurance for the elderly and disabled)
93% Use of birth control/contraception
92% Condom use to prevent HIV and other STDs
91% Medicaid (health insurance for people with low incomes)
87% Sex education in high school
87% Funding of international HIV prevention and treatment programs
75% Universal health insurance
70% Embryonic stem cell research
70% Funding of international birth control programs
68% Withdrawal of life support systems/food for those in vegetative
state
63% Abortion centers

I was instantly reminded of a study I had read about in the Alternative Energy Blog, a survey of American attitudes on environmental issues conducted for the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies by the Global Strategy Group just a couple of months before the one James cited.

According to the study
93 percent [of Americans] want the government to require the auto industry to improve gas mileage, an opinion that showed no gender or political gap.

This puts the electorate squarely at odds with Congress, which recently rejected a proposal to make SUVs and minivans more fuel efficient....

Across the board, people favored more solar power facilities, wind-turbine farms and increased funding for renewable energy research.

Taken together, these results suggest that there is an emerging technoprogressive majority in America commited to the technoscientific redress of shared social problems, especially problems of environmental damage and healthcare. Radical, social, and progressive democrats (and Democrats, too) need to embrace the secular, critical confidence of Americans in the capacity of intelligent and responsible human beings to collaborate in the solution of shared problems. It is a testament to the resourcefulness, hopefulness, and good sense of average Americans that they can retain their confidence in democratic technoscientific collaboration and social struggle in the midst of the fraud and hype of uncritical unscrupulous corporate-military technophilia with its megaphones as well as in the midst of the uncritical fear-mongering and false-nostalgia of religious fundamentalist technophobia with its megaphones.

The experiment of American democracy confronts a larger world that will no longer tolerate technodevelopmental adjection at the hands of American corporate-military globalization in a twentieth-century mode. And so, American democrats must affirm the secular pragmatism of the American people as always and only the simultaneous affirmation of consensus science and stakeholder politics (locally, nationally, globally). Only as both a scientific and democratic culture can the American experiment hope to be a force for good in a century that must grapple with the equally unprecedented threats/promises of the end of nonrenewable energy and the beginning of modification medicine. Without democracy technodevelopment will bring utter disaster, without a focus on technodevelopmental social struggle democracy will wither into irrelevance. The stakes are high, but majorities are with us. It is high time for technoprogressive politics to assume its place at the table.

No comments: