Here be a response to Vlad Vexler recent post on Twitter. You may find the comment below:
Do you want to know what the world is going to look like, Vlad? It’s more of this -- more of this Information Age. Accelerated. Packaged. Perfected.
And yet utterly and completely representative.
That’s the crux of the issue: before the internet, our wishes as a collection of democracies were mostly ignored save for rhetoric, the political sausage made behind closed doors. We required information brokers to act as our medium of comprehension. Now it’s the complexity of the issues, not the complexity of action or process, which obfuscates politics.
Except that’s not true, either, is it?
We are discovering, collectively, as a species, that our political representatives possess alternative motivations, that rhetoric and action aren’t meshing. Politicians want to be reelected, they want to satisfy their own ideals, and to do that they must preserve the status quo – that’s the cost, that’s the ticket to entry. Revolutionary change becomes impossible because to attempt earnestness is to court disenfranchisement.
[Coming from ‘X’? Start here:]
Just as The People can watch the political process play out on YouTube, so too can the wealthy interests. It used to be that a politician could hide in anonymity -- tilt the balance and claim, two-faced, that one-side or the other simply had too strong of a position. In doing this the politician acted as the power mediator between the oligarchy and the democracy. Between whim and means.
In the Information Age this relationship is completely upended. We are approaching a political environment where it is impossible to satisfy two interest blocks simultaneously.
I posit that this is for the best. Compromise is what you do when you cannot achieve your objectives, and, nearly universally, compromise enables the continuation of suffering.
1. The 3/5ths Compromise.
2. Jim Crow.
3. The fucking ACA.
American examples...but I’m American. Forgive me.
In each of the above cases the underlying, minority interest was maintained and empowered, and the victims condemned an entire generations to never experience the promised liberty. It took one-hundred and four years after the end of the Civil War for Black Americans to enjoy equal protection under the law.
Why? What special right does the minority have to dictate to the majority? Why are we mediating to preserve wealth and property if the only legitimate font for power to is The People’s vote?
So, Vlad, you argue the public can’t “imagine” democracy in twenty years. So you say that they experience anxiety, pessimism, and doubt.
Of course they do. This is what happens when you explain to a child that Santa Claus isn’t real. Disappointment is to be expected. But you know what you can also expect? That the child will begin buying their own presents.
