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

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

The Village for Beginners

Upgraded and Adapted from Comments: Blinking blushing naif "peco" asks, in response to my last post: Why are Republicans the only ones helped by "healing," "bipartisanship," etc.?

Well, up front, please just let's assume that there are appropriate qualifications around all the nevers, nones, alls, and so on in this admittedly polemical formulation so that we don't have to go through the joyless ritual of endless hairsplitting corrections on this score, when what matters here is simply finding a way forcefully to articulate so as to come to grips with the overwhelming fact of just how many Republicans are scoundrels, thugs, and hypocrites, and all the damage they have done as such.

You ask: Why is it Republicans who benefit most from "bipartisanship" and "healing"? Well, of course, the answer is: They don't.

Of course, Republicans themselves engage in the most vitriolic partisanship and divisiveness and wasteful harassing fishing expeditions in search of exploitable improprieties in their opponents imaginable. They could care less about bipartisan compromise in the service of the good governance of a diverse citizenry, healing bitter wounds that stymie needed reconciliations, treating fellow citizens with whom they differ on policy questions with civility or any of that.

What I actually said is that Republicans benefit from calls for "bipartisanship" and "healing" that suffuse the public sphere from the Village any time there is any suggestion that Republicans be held to account for their misconduct in any way.

What such calls for "bipartisanship" have come to mean in the Village is simply the demand for instant utter capitulation to the right by the left under all circumstances.

What such calls for "healing" have come to mean since Nixon and since Iran-Contra historically is that

(a) Republican wrongdoing is never exposed so that lying mass-mediated Republican narratives and frames (Reagan Years As Golden Age, for example) can substitute for reality in the Village's "CW" or "common wisdom" and

(b) Republican wrongdoers are never brought to justice so that they can wait in the wings to do their mischief over and over and over again.

Since I'm explaining basics to you here, "peco," I'll also point out that "the Village" is a left Netroots shorthand description for the tiny insular parochial in-bred out-of-touch inside the Beltway klatch of Machine politicians of both parties (along with their handlers and lobbyist friends) who jealously govern the country, often in sublime indifference to the expressed will of the people who elect them, and more particularly for the even smaller klatch of superficial gossipy reactionary consolidated-corporate media pundits (many of whom fancy themselves progressive, most actual evidence to the contrary) in tight corrupt cronyist relations of friendship and patronage to the elected representatives and professional administrators they are entrusted to hold to account for their conduct.

What I call p2p democratization (this is often called, simply, People Powered Politics) is undermining the politics of the Village for the good of all, which is why one hears so much from the Villagers about "angry bloggers" and their lamentable "lack of professional standards" and about the crying need for docility, er, I mean, "civility," and all the rest of that crapola. It is only the unearned privileges and unquestioned authority of incumbent interests (among them, conspicuously, the Villagers themselves, whether notionally "conservative" or "liberal") that is threatened by the citizen journalism, digital townhalls, online organizing, rapid networked pushback, small campaign donor aggregation, and so on that characterize p2p democratization at this moment.

All the evidence suggests, by the way, and precisely to the contrary of interminably touted Villager common wisdom, that popular participation in politics rises when people are given real choices reflecting the actually existing differences in the country and that people understand perfectly well that people disagree about stuff and both appreciate and enjoy the political process of working through these differences in public.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh. That was an excellent explanation--I didn't quite get what you meant by "p2p democratization" (before you posted, I didn't, now I do).