Hyperdemocracy

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Special interests are legendary for distorting facts and preying on fear. The letter from the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare that helped trigger the rapid-fire repeal of a 1988 law to ensure catastrophic coverage under Medicare began with the words, "Your Federal Taxes for 1989 May Increase by Up to $1,600 . . . Just Because You Are Over the Age of 65" -- even though 60% of all seniors wouldn't have paid a dime more in taxes. The tone of cool reason favored by the Founding Fathers is similarly lacking from this Jerry Falwell mailing: "American troops are again facing madman Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf -- but the enemy here at home may be much more dangerous! . . . Homosexuals are Bill Clinton's 1 allies."

Still, special interests often do traffic in facts. Their stock in trade is sounding alarms about legislative threats to people's interests, and often they can do that honestly. This, in a sense, is more disturbing than the cases of dishonesty or demagoguery. It means that the corruption of the public interest by special interests is no easily cured pathology, but a stubbornly rational pattern of behavior. The costs of each group's selfishness are spread diffusely across the whole nation, after all, while the benefits are captured by the group. Though every group might prosper in the long run if all groups surrendered just enough to balance the budget, it makes no sense for any of them to surrender unilaterally.

Given that accurate information, rationally processed, often leads people to undermine the public good, how excited should we be about Gingrich's Thomas, the online data base of congressional documents? Granted, there may not be a lobbyist manipulating the data flow. But that does not mean interest-group politics won't result. In cyberspace, technology may have finally reached a point where groups form spontaneously; on the Internet, passing information to a neighbor of like interest is a push-button exercise and can easily trigger a chain reaction. The result is a mass mailing that requires neither a centralized mass mailer nor the cost of postage and paper. And the next step can be a genuine, unrehearsed protest -- grass roots, not Astroturf -- that rolls into Congress or the White House via E-mail. Gingrich promises that Thomas will take power away from lobbyists, but if so, that may just mean Thomas has taken over their dirty work. (And after all, why should lobbyists be exempt from technological unemployment in the information age?)

Already the spontaneous formation of a single-issue interest group has been seen on the Net. In 1993 the Federal Government announced plans to promote the Clipper chip, which would have ensured the government's ability to decipher / messages sent over phone lines by modem. The circulation of an anti-Clipper petition turned into a kind of impromptu online civil-liberties demonstration, boosting the number of signatures from 40 to 47,500.