A Lever Long Enough to Suppress the World
Archimedes famously said that if you gave him a long enough
lever, he could lift the world. Well, it works both ways. Using the long
lever arm of mass media, a tiny core of politically powerful people
controls
the
rest
of
the
population's
choices, economics
and future.
Systems design is the study of how to balance inputs into
and outputs from a dynamic process so that it optimally serves the needs
of the highest possible number of users of the process. From a systems
design standpoint, American politics is a disaster:
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286,196,812
184,744,527
100,000,000
2,000,000
50,000
2,862 |
Americans*
non-voters*
inconsequential
voters
voters
who matter
political
activists
political
power elite |
 |
About a third of Americans vote, but
most vote so consistently that their votes, needs and opinions are
inconsequential. Just a few "swing" voters are the target
of politicians' attention and advertising, the only voters who matter.
In the 2000
election, Gore received 50.5% of the popular vote, while losing
3 states–41 electoral votes–by a total of 6,611 votes.
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Last time, I suggested that there's only a tiny sliver of
the population zealous enough to be active in politics, and that it
even takes a kind of zealotry to get out and vote. I don't have the
figures,
but do
any states
have
more than 1,000 full time activists? Sure, there are a lot of political hobbyists
who
will canvass occasionally or show up at a state convention and perform as
directed,
but
by activists I
mean
those who live for or off of politics and do their party's bidding whenever
asked. My working
hypothesis is that there are no more than 50,000 active political foot soldiers
at any one
time, less than.02% of Americans. Even if you think there are double or triple
the number, the fraction is still vanishingly small.
In turn, those few activists
are manipulated by
a tiny political elite which is probably no more than .001% of the population
(2,862
politicians, lobbyists, journalists and business leaders sounds
about
right for the political power elite in our enlightened Republic, don't
you agree?). Clearly, Americans aren't chatting each other up to get out
the vote, but rather responding to the unfolding media messages in the same
passive way they might discuss episodes of Friends around
the water cooler.
And, as Dave Winer often
reminds us, it's even worse than it appears. This tiny group of power brokers
drives the agenda for a nation
which the
rest
of the
world
depends
upon for its very existence, in a protection-racket kind of way. This is
a system that no conscientious systems architect would sign off on, but which
most Americans meekly accept as how things have to be.
Paul Boutin points
out in an enlightened Slate
article today that attracting new voters is the secret sauce for any
winning candidate, and that's what the Dean campaign did well, though no
one has the statistics to prove it. Dean's coterie of new activists were
an energizing force that establishment Democrats cynically shut
down as fast as they could:
Recent polls showed Kerry and Bush at a dead heat.
But it's not so much a 50-50 split as 25-25—half the voting-age
population has failed to show up in recent elections. Bringing in new
voters—if you could find a way to do it—would swing an election
much more easily than converting the people who already plan to cast
their ballots for the other guy.
It's this mechanism that the Dean campaign didn't get quite
right in time to empower its true believers to evangelize ever larger
circles of new true believers. Next time, I'll suggest (and demonstrate)
that the meatspace evangelism failure may have been as much a web design
fault as a political process breakdown.
12:24:18 PM 
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