I’d like to respond to the Mark Douglas op-ed: Two Cheers for Partisanship

The piece summarizes the factors that have caused partisanship to persist, and responding to it provides an opportunity to present the factors that will cause partisanship to die off.

Douglas says political parties are actually “repositories of political memory”. They provide a symbiotic network comprised of, in his words, “those around us who have wisdom in particular areas to inform us. And those around us, in turn, rely on experts who have done such work before them, drawing on the wisdom of the past to fit it to our current context.” Douglas points out that this is a necessary convention, because of the sheer mass of political information that citizens and politicals alike must try to absorb.

Douglas writes “none of us - including our elected leaders - can handle the massive amounts of data associated with all the political issues of the day.”

I was thinking of the same problem when I wrote the following in America 2076:

“No single person can comprehend or have the time to pay attention to all the possible issues, or communicate with all the other interested parties regarding an issue - without some extraordinary mechanism. This extraordinary mechanism would need to organize large bodies of information and orchestrate people’s attention so it is focused on the right thing at the right time. It would also need to include a standardized vocabulary, a taxonomy, a set of processes, as well as strong information management capabilities including search and collaboration tools. Such an extraordinary mechanism did not exist during the establishment of the nation, and thus – in my current view – a number of compromises or what we might call interim solutions were necessary.”

Partisan politics and the parties that perpetuate it are just an interim solution in the long evolution of democracy. As much as we may hate it, partisanship, or something awfully similar remains a necessary part of our type of democracy until there is an innovation - an “extraordinary mechanism” - that allows human attention and input to be aggregated and allocated in a more efficient manner.

The point of Post-Partisan politics is that this “extraordinary mechanism” is currently emerging at least in its embryonic form, and that we need to actively begin using and experimenting with it, because it will most certainly be the organizing principle of future societies. If we want our democracy to be more than a marginalized irritant, with key decisions made in other realms of membership open only to selected citizens (and well beyond any form of public accountability), then we have no choice but to begin using the tools that allow us to engage citizens in mass participation and leverage our collective intelligence for more proactive and effective progress.

Google, eBay, Amazon, the Wikipedia, the Linux/Open Source movement are examples of entities who are already expert at engaging people in mass participation, and aggregating the by products of their mass participation into coherent results, and/or very complex systems, products or communities. They do this by utilizing current Internet technologies (here’s a crash course), which have the power to enable citizens and elected officials alike to participate as partners in a collaborative planning at the local and national level:
• To comprehend, organize and manage national and local agendas
• To participate more directly in governance
• To hold elected officials accountable in a more direct and effective manner
• To make better use of our collective intelligence for collaborative planning