“Democracy is on its way,” concluded Dick Morris in 2001, in an article entitled “Direct democracy and the internet”. Five years earlier, John Perry Barlow, the founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, published a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. It began with suitably grandiloquent flourish: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
The early years of the online revolution inspired considerable overt utopianism. Barlow’s internet activism emerged from the counterculture (at one time, he penned lyrics for the Grateful Dead). Morris, by contrast, was a former Republican strategist who became an advisor for Bill Clinton (before they spectacularly parted ways). In particular, Morris championed the so-called “Third Way”, in which ostensibly left-of-centre politicians such as Clinton assimilated rhetoric and policies traditionally associated with conservatism.He was not, in other words, a traditional idealist – something that, in retrospect, makes his predictions even more interesting.
“The internet offers, Morris declared, “a potential for direct democracy so profound that it may well transform not only our system of politics but also our very form of government.”
Of course, that’s not what happened – or, at least, not in the way Morris expected.
Today Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, says we’re at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution. He explains: “The first industrial revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The second used electric power to create mass production. The third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a fourth industrial revolution is building on the third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.”
If nothing else, Schwab’s argument makes clear that the internet has become every bit as central to the developed nations as Morris predicted back in 2001. Yet, rather than embracing internet-augmented direct participation, the political class seems increasingly hostile to democracy altogether.
For instance, in his recent book Against Democracy, the libertarian economist Jason Brennan rejects the basic assumption underlying any democratic system: the legitimacy of the electorate. On the contrary, he suggests many – perhaps most – voters don’t possess the competence necessary for sensible decision making. “A large percentage of people have no clue what’s going on at all,” he says, “and for them, their votes are almost random.” In place of universal suffrage, Brennan argues for something he calls “epistocracy” – a system in which only the well-informed may vote.
Brennan’s position might be extreme. But throughout 2016, versions of that argument were voiced with increasing regularity.
Matt Taibbi noted the explicitly anti-democratic tenor of the media response to Brexit. “Because the vote was viewed as having been driven by the same racist passions that are fuelling the campaign of Donald Trump,” he explained, “a wide swath of commentators suggested that democracy erred, and the vote should perhaps be canceled, for the Britons’ own good.”
In Foreign Policy, James Traub, the magazine’s contributing editor, published an article entitled It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses; prolific blogger Andrew Sullivan explained that “elites” were “the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself”. In Australia, billionaire retailer Gerry Harvey threw niceties aside and flatly called for a dictator: someone who would not have “to bother with parliament and elections”.
Trump’s unexpected victory in November only intensified the sentiment, with many pundits declaring the system fundamentally broken.
But it’s not just that the digital revolution hasn’t rejuvenated democracy in the way that Morris predicted. It’s also that the critiques of the system often identify as particularly broken precisely those aspects of democratic practice that the internet was supposed to foster.
For instance, in 2001, Morris suggested digital connectivity would help voters surmount national borders. “The internet will provide a central nervous system for the global body politic,” he insisted. “Through its electronic linkages, voters will bind together with people from other lands to create a global political entity that has never existed before. Bypassing national representatives and speaking directly to one another, the people of the world will use the internet increasingly to form a political unit for the future.”
In fact, almost everywhere in 2016, polls registered an upsurge in nationalism, xenophobia and overt racism, as well as a growing hostility to global institutions and supranational blocs such as the European Union.
Equally, Morris thought that what he called “online voting through the internet” would make politicians pay “closer attention to the views of their constituents”.
In reality, opinion surveys consistently show that voters feel their views go unrepresented.
“The internet will,” he declared, “allow … intimacy and involvement in decision-making at even the most local levels and it will catalyze a vast new expansion of political participation.”
On the contrary, levels of political participation have sunk throughout the developed world. Despite the sharp polarisation in the US, nearly half of Americans did not cast a vote at all in the presidential election. Everywhere, rather than involvement we’re seeing a kind of sullen apathy.
“It is likely,” Morris said, “that direct democracy will lead to a variety of instances in which the voters step aside and listen to those who are better informed.”
In the referendum over Brexit, the broadsheet papers and the liberal intelligentsia overwhelmingly campaigned for a Remain vote, just as, in the US election, the political elite largely supported Clinton. In both cases, rather than stepping aside, voters seemed to delight in confounding the expectations of the “better informed”.
If anything, Barlow’s manifesto has fared worse. He identified the online space as “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth … where anyone, anywhere, may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Those words ring particularly hollow in 2016 given the rise of that loose grouping of white supremacists, misogynists and neo-fascists known as the alt right, whose distinctive identity emerged from precisely the online space (sites such as 4chan and 8chan) that Barlow claimed as free of privilege and prejudice.
What then went wrong?
By way of answer, let’s consider another online pioneer of 2001, an up-and-coming Australian backbencher by the name of Mark Latham.
In the same year as Morris published his article, Latham established what he described as one of the first examples of internet-based direct democracy.
Specifically, he began posting queries about the issues of the day on his site, inviting his constituents to vote by email and promising to take the results to parliament, caucus and the media. This would, he said, be a way of countering the influence of “elites” and “restoring the public’s faith in democracy”.
The first question asked whether the government should ban online gambling – and when nearly 70% of the small number of respondents voted yes, Latham, true to his word, wrote a newspaper column on the issue and raised the subject in parliament and with the shadow minister. Unfortunately, that aligned Latham with the Howard government, against his own party – and, within a year, when Latham ascended to the shadow ministry himself, the experiment was quietly abandoned.
More importantly, as John Cane and Hage Patepan argue, Latham’s polls didn’t really amount to direct democracy in any meaningful sense, since “Latham left large questions, such as managing the economy, to politicians who understood them better and stuck to ‘moral’ issues on which politicians should claim no particular expertise.”
Of course, the excision of economic issues from public debate has become the bipartisan political wisdom, partly because of the Third Way orientation that Morris helped drive. As Tim Dunlop says in his book, Why the future is workless, “the idea that we could aspire to a social condition of our own making, outside of the allegedly miraculous organising power of the market [has] become laughable.” That’s a central facet of Schwab’s fourth industrial revolution, which is fairly explicitly predicated upon an acceptance of free-market capitalism as the only basis upon which society can be organised.
As a result, a great deal of what was central to political contestation throughout the 20th century is now regarded (by the political class at least) as no longer subject to discussion.
What does this mean for democracy?
To answer, we must first look more closely at what the word actually means.
Handily, Morris introduces his claims about the potential of the internet via a historical analysis of the American Founders’ ideas about democracy. He notes Thomas Jefferson’s enthusiasm for participatory democracy based on town meetings – a system that Jefferson said made every man “a sharer … a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.”
By contrast, Alexander Hamilton described the populace as “the Beast” and argued at one stage for a modified version of the British monarchy to keep them in check.
Morris explains America’s current system of representative democracy as a compromise between Jefferson and Hamilton, a model championed by James Madison.
He suggests Jefferson’s participatory system lost out because of its organisational unfeasibility: “the impossibility of a national direct democracy,” he argues, “prevented any serious consideration of the merits of direct as opposed to representative governance.”
That’s the basis for his claims for the internet. Online voting and other digital innovations can, he says, overcome the practical obstacles that rendered participatory democracy unviable and thus make possible America’s return to a high-tech version of Jeffersonian village meetings.
In reality, the dispute between advocates of representative and participatory models of democracy was never merely technical.
As Raymond Williams argues in his classic Keywords, “democracy” was initially used in polite society as a term of approbation. It was understood as mob rule, a form of society in which the masses oppressed their betters. That was why, for instance, Burke described “perfect democracy” as “the most shameless thing in the world.”
The notion of “representative democracy” was explicitly intended as an alternative. It triumphed in the US and elsewhere, not because it was more practical, but because the elites saw it as more palatable to a direct democracy that they feared and hated.
Yet, as Williams says, both meanings of “democracy” remained important throughout the great social struggles that dominated the long 20th century. In particular, the older idea of “democracy” as a participatory form of popular power was championed by socialists, social democrats and the labour movement in general, even as liberals (and, often, conservatives) defended “democracy” as representation – essentially, the primacy of parliament and politicians.
That history illuminates the failure of Morris’s predictions.
On the one hand, the primacy of the market in the economic and social developments falling under the rubric of the fourth industrial revolution necessarily predispose elites to what we might call a managerial version of representative democracy – a system in which politicians see their first and foremost responsibility as ensuring voters don’t interfere with “sound economic management”. To quote Dunlop again, “the idea that collective human action and decision making could work for the common good [is] not only discredited, [it] is recast as evil, a slippery slope to totalitarianism, the road to serfdom.”
On the other hand, the organisations that, throughout the 20th century, enabled some form of participatory democracy have been increasingly marginalised, if not totally destroyed.
In a recent piece for the Guardian, Peter Lewis argues that “the fundamentals of capitalism (the rules of market power, patents, contracts, bankruptcy and monopolies) have been rewritten over the past 30 years for the benefit of the very, very rich.”
Crucially, Lewis links that process to the decline of collective organisation. He provides statistics showing declining density in a wide range of bodies: trade unions, political parties, sports clubs, religious congregations, parents’ groups and so on.
“[I]n every category,” he writes, “there are more people who had previously been a member than are members now.”
The decrease in unionism is partly a consequence of a conscious campaign by employers, who have often used new technology to break or diminish union power. But Lewis suggests that a more general reshaping of industrial and social life has made participatory organisation seem less viable.
After all, most commentators writing on the so-called fourth industrial revolution see workplace insecurity as a fundamental part of the new economy. In their chapter in Gideon Rose’s collection The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Nicolas Colin and Bruno Palier write that “most of the workforce will have to switch jobs relatively often and face temporary unemployment in between … In the 21st century, stable, long-term employment with a single employer will no longer be the norm, and unemployment or underemployment will no longer be a rare or exceptional situation.”
Colin and Palier acknowledge the “dread or shame” that most people feel about intermittent work but breezily dismiss that as “attitudinal baggage from the old economy”.
Lewis, however, spells out the consequences for the traditional model of public life: “Half of all respondents say they don’t have the time to spare outside home and work duties. More than one third say irregular hours mean they can’t commit to organisations. These inhibiters – reduced job security and longer workers’ hours – are part of the vicious cycle of the reduced power of working people to actively pursue their interests. The responses also pick up a sense of inevitability in the decline of countervailing power – with nearly a half saying they just aren’t joiners, even while they accept the decline in groups is not a positive development.”
The organisational weakness of the masses has left voters, as Lewis says, unable “to demand their interests be recognised [in a balance against] the demands of capital”.
Meanwhile, we’ve seen a significant transfer of wealth and power to those at the top of society.
In their contribution to the Rose book, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andre McAfee explain: “In 2014, the richest 1% held 48% of the world’s total wealth. In part this increased unevenness reflects growing inequality in wages and other forms of compensation. Automation and digitisation are less likely to replace all forms of labour than to rearrange, perhaps radically, the rewards for skills, talent and luck. It is not hard to see how this would lead to an even greater concentration of wealth, and with it, power.”
These are not circumstances conducive to participatory democracy.
In 2001, Morris argued that the kinds of engagement made possible by the internet would necessarily influence political outcomes.
“Voters know they are being consulted,” he wrote, “know how they voted, become engaged in the decision, and will vent their anger at any of their elected representatives who ignore their wishes.”
The problem is that voters lack the organisations through which such anger was traditionally expressed.
As a result, the venting has taken very different forms.
Morris offered his own site, Vote.com, as a prefiguration of an emerging online, participatory culture.
“Each day,” he explained, “Vote.com posts a new national political issue and invites its users to log on and vote. Several times each week, the site posts referendum topics on issues in each of the 50 states. On the nonpolitical side, Vote.com offers issues each week for consideration in sports, entertainment, business, technology, health, travel, gay issues, family, environment, and travel.”
In 2016, many of us would shudder at the prospect of yet another online poll, recognising the kinds of surveys Morris lauds as, at best, meaningless and, more likely, an attempt by the site owner to harvest personal data. Indeed, the internet’s troll culture developed, at least in part, as a response to the inane “participation” offered by online marketers. Urged to participate in a poll that’s obviously merely as a publicity stunt, a generation of digital natives vote to christen a research vessel Boaty McBoatface, thus exerting – even if only momentarily – a power that they were never meant to possess.
In some ways, Morris’s central point retains its validity. To appreciate the utility of the internet as a democratic tool, one need only make a historical comparison. In New South Wales, adult white men gained the right to vote in 1858. That was only 17 years after the end of convict transportation. Those early polls took place in an far-off colony, thousands of kilometres from the developed nations, with a poorly-educated electorate deriving its knowledge about the world from a small number of locally-produced newspapers – and then whatever information had trickled in through the latest boat arrivals.
By contrast, the internet facilitates instantaneous worldwide communication and provides almost universal access to a vast compendium of human knowledge. As Morris says, it provides a technical solution to all the traditional difficulties of democracy, allowing ordinary people the means and information to express their preferences with an ease unimaginable to earlier generations.
But democracy isn’t simply a matter of choice. It’s also a matter of power – and, at the moment, voters have very little of that.