Hyperdemocracy

• Share

(2 of 8)

One problem with all this enthusiasm about electronically wiring the citizenry to the Washington policymaking machine is that in a sense, it's already happened. Politicians are quite in touch with opinion polls and have learned not to ignore the Rush Limbaughs of the world, with their ability to marshal rage over topics ranging from Hillary to the House post office. Public feedback fills Washington fax machines, phones and E-mail boxes. From C-SPAN's studios just off Capitol Hill, lawmakers chat with callers live -- including callers who have been monitoring their work via C-SPAN cameras on Capitol Hill. More messages from the real world pass through the Beltway barrier than ever before. And contrary to popular belief, politicians pay attention. What we have today is much more of a cyberdemocracy than the visionaries may realize.

The other problem with all the plans for a new cyberdemocracy is that judging by the one we already have, it wouldn't be a smashing success. Some of the information technologies that so pervade Washington life have not only failed to cure our ills but actually seem to have made them worse. Intensely felt public opinion leads to the impulsive passage of dubious laws; and meanwhile, the same force fosters the gridlock that keeps the nation from balancing its budget, among other things, as a host of groups clamor to protect their benefits. In both cases, the problem is that the emerging cyberdemocracy amounts to a kind of "hyperdemocracy": a nation that, contrary to all Beltway-related stereotypes, is thoroughly plugged in to Washington -- too plugged in for its own good.

The worst may be yet to come. The trend toward hyperdemocracy has happened without anyone planning it, and there is no clear reason for it to stop now. With or without a new Tofflerian constitution, there is cause to worry that the nation's inevitable immersion in cyberspace, its descent into a wired world of ultra-narrowcasting and online discourse, may render democracy more hyper and in some ways less functional. We have seen the future, and it doesn't entirely work.

"Electronic town halls" featuring push-button voting have always faced one major rhetorical handicap: the long shadow of the Founding Fathers. The Founders explicitly took lawmaking power out of the people's hands, opting for a representative democracy and not a direct democracy. What concerned them, especially James Madison, was the specter of popular "passions" unleashed. Their ideal was cool deliberation by elected representatives, buffered from the often shifting winds of opinion -- inside-the-Beltway deliberation. Madison insisted in the Federalist Papers on the need to "refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations."