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.

My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.

My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.

Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.

Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.

Anyone who remembers the “civility wars” from a few years back in the Ozblogosphere would also recall the lesson that the worst possible way of getting a more civil commenting community is to call for one! The dreaded meta-post would open old wounds, and bring out the worst in people. The facilitation of community on blogs requires a sense of humour, a democratising of the conversation, and participants who are actually interested in doing practicing community in the first place. None of those things is particularly evident in the MSM “blog” threads for a whole range of reasons. But one of them is the distance between the journalist/columnist and the “readers”, even if they’re anachronistically dubbed “bloggers”.

Trevor Cook has also very astutely picked up on this – the well known phenomenon that the tone of an online space and the deportment of its facilitators will shape the character of the debate – by questioning whether News Limited’s online practice itself isn’t full of ad homs and a sneering and derogatory tone to those who dissent. See his post for more.

A lot of the expectations and framing of the work of the journalist is in terms of the “public sphere” – a presumed space where rational and civil debate takes place (Habermas has a lot to answer for). But as any Rawlsians out there will know, you bring your own status and commitments with when you try to inhabit a “neutral” and “rational” space. And a big part of that is the “professional” – the journalist – talking (even if they try to descend a few inches down the pedestal) from an authoritative speaking position – Megalogenis himself refers to his own professional status and its habits of thought. But we live in a world where arguments from authority are failing, and talk is being democratised (in a sense).

I’d like to counter that image with one I picked up in something I read recently – we should think in terms of a ludic and performative public sphere. We’re not doing world shattering things when we “natter on the net”, to quote Dale Spender. We’re not sorting out the destinies of the world. We are doing something meaningful, and if we approach it in a spirit of play, then you’ve actually got more genuine communication and debate occurring.

Just sayin…