A Virtual Republic

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.
-Aristotle

I spent a couple hours on YouTube last night, perusing the now South Park-devoid (thanks, MTV) video sharing site to see how the political spin doctors of our day are attempting to be trendy and harness the Internet for electoral gain. Sure enough, User-Generated political commercials have already populated Google's latest addition to its empire. There was this little gem:



That of course is nothing but the same staged political nonsense of the last fifty years of media-driven elections. The Obama campaign may know how to propagate a YouTube link, but they don't get what the Web 2.0 movement is all about: engagement. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, gets it a little better:



She talks about "starting a conversation." That's closer, but it's not quite there. Do a search on any of the major candidates, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Rudy, McCain, Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, Bill Richardson. There's something for everybody. But none of them get it.

Web 2.0 is not about taking the same staged productions that have disillusioned America's voting population for the last half century, turned them away from politics, instilled abject cynicism, and implanted apathy at the heart of our nation's electoral process. Web 2.0 is about active participation, collaboration, and engagement from the masses. And that is the future of the American Republic as well, if it is to survive.

I quoted Aristotle at the top of this page, and it's clear that he understood, millennia ago, what it would take for genuine equality and liberty: participation from all. The American Republic was established to accomplish this very thing. It has taken generations for it to advance toward that goal, but it has had a good start. Because of the constraints of technology, States-Rights Federalism was engrained into the Constitution in order to protect the rights of minorities and the disenfranchised. Refusing to give the federal government complete and unbridled authority was the most effective way to protect liberty in 1787 It continues to have an effect today, but not to the same extent, thanks to the New Deal and a half century of government largesse being extracted from the people and re-distributed to meet out certain political ends.

The future of the American Republic is not in a return to Federalism, though without doubt, something could be gained from such a move. Rather, the future of the American Republic is in the Internet. Imagine a political party whose entire primary and nominating convention process were done online, where the candidates debated each other on YouTube, posted weekly (or even daily) video blogs, responded to the comments and questions of voters, etc. Imagine if, once elected, the new Internet-based Party's Congressman went to Washington and governed the same way. Instead of a staff of 10 people helping him sift through the monstrous amount of legislation, he had a staff a 10,000, through the (fictitious) website WikiBills.gov. These are the sorts of things that Web 2.0 is going to enable. The politicians who succeed in the next ten years will get it. Everybody else will be left behind.