As Obama’s liberal supporters wait uneasily for January 20 to find out whether he really will use his post-partisan stance as a sweetener to implement progressive policy, Crooked Timber blogger and political scientist Henry Farrell has published a rather fascinating article on the uses of partisanship in increasing political participation. Farrell has some fascinating insights on the failures of deliberative democracy and the role of political blogs:
This isn’t the first time that scholars have misunderstood the basis of civil society. Scholars of civility and debate have held up the London coffeehouses of the 18th century as models. Political theorist Jürgen Habermas depicted these coffeehouses as the paradigmatic example of an emerging “public sphere” of discursive political participation. However, these coffeehouses were less the occasions of civilized and genteel discussion than they were the sites of vigorous partisan contestation. As the historian Brian Cowan argues, London coffeehouses, like blogs, often identified with one of the two major political parties of the era. These parties’ adherents sometimes came to blows with each other. Nor was this partisanship accidental to coffeehouse culture. Cowan claims that the “public sphere” of coffeehouse debate was actually “born out of the practical exigencies of partisan political conflict.”This isn’t merely an academic point — it has implications for national politics. Obama’s political project faces a dilemma that goes back to his own roots in the civic movement. Despite his efforts to build consensus with moderates and conservatives, his campaign’s organizational innovations depended on and may be helping cement the politics of partisan division. As Obama shifts focus from electoral politics to administration, he is trying to take online structures that were built around decentralized partisan participation and reorient them to a less partisan national agenda.
Evidence suggests that people who are strongly engaged in politics and hence likely to volunteer for campaigns are strongly partisan and tightly clumped around the ideological poles (they are strongly liberal or strongly conservative). If this is right, online activists are unlikely to follow Obama if he moves toward a post-ideological politics of citizenship and may even use Obama’s own machine to organize against him (as they did within MyBarackObama.com when Obama announced his support for controversial wiretapping legislation). By rebuilding the Democratic Party around a model that is friendlier to decentralized online participation, Obama is both making it easier for Democratic activists to organize in protest against overly “moderate” decisions, and forcing Republicans to adopt similar organizing techniques in order to win elections.
I’d encourage folks to read the whole article.
Update: Farrell blogs about his article.
Update: Farrell blogs about his article.
First things first: the term and concept “post-politics” is utterly illusory, and it needs to have a nice illusory hole dug for it, and to be gently, illusorily, placed into it. Now then.
I seem to recall Putnam made a differentiation between bonding socialisation (building links with people like you) and bridging socialisation (building links with people unlike you). It seems to me that that’s the critical thing about the way the political internet has developed in the last four years or so; that there is far less sphere now than then for the right and left to talk to each other in meaningful ways.
Of course, for this I blame the Right entirely.
Its clear we are very much post the execrable right-wing-blogosphere. YAY!
That noxious bubble of marsh-gas peaked and popped around the time of ‘Rathergate’. So the opposition right now against the Left-arm-of-capital’ ( Gordon, Rudd and Oh-blah-blah, etc ) will have to advance in diversity and strike in unison at them.
This naturally rely on the net because the opposition includes Ron Paul revolutionaries, Muslims, GIBLETS, anarchists and many, many other million plus groups and individuals. The net enables timely measured responses to all the latest ‘Left’ outrages in real-time. The net is our best weapon.
But this is still politics as a conversation and as such the alternative to war, so its all good. Better jaw, jaw, jaw, etc.
Its becoming clear now that a failed Democratic socialism’s days are numbered and libertarian ( post-left) socialism is coming. Its morning on the internet and its morning for the worlds first rolling revolution. The revolution to take down ALL the governments.
“It seems to me that that’s the critical thing about the way the political internet has developed in the last four years or so; that there is far less sphere now than then for the right and left to talk to each other in meaningful ways.”
Yup, no one gets to see the whites of their eyes or meet their debating partners in person and so read for the extra levels of meaning conveyed by tone of voice and body language. Which makes it far the easier to savage and depersonalize your pissy interlocuters as “the other”.
It’s like a collapsing communal household where the novelty of staying up late without parental restrictions has been replaced by labeled foodstuffs in the fridge and phone bill feuds waged through snarky notes bluetacked to doors. But without the fun of locking them out of the bathroom while you have a good candlelit fuck in the tub.
Or so I’ve heard.
“Scholars of civility and debate have held up the London coffeehouses of the 18th century as models.”
Can’t have been very good scholars. Even a cursory delve into the pamphlets, proto-newspapers and flyers generated out of 18th century London coffeehouse by ambitious caffine-energised blokes in wigs (or boring it up whigs) with too much time on their hands would have rapidly disabused anyone of the notion that that time and place was an oasis iof civilised debate.
Coffee + short run printing presses = Red Bull + blogs.
Oe the other had though, at least that era offered more opportunities for resolving festering debates through the code duello or a bit of horsewhipping in the streets.