“What looks like a gang fight is really a shift in power away from the pooh-bahs who used to make decisions behind closed doors, to a broader coalition of Americans,” Matt Kibbe, head of FreedomWorks, told ABC News.
Kibbe was talking about the internecine Republican struggle over whether or not to attempt to defund Obamacare, but he might as well have been talking about the death of the newspaper business and the rise of Twitter — or any other of the numerous cultural changes taking place in America today.
Whether it’s big Hollywood, big news, big religion, or big political parties, our institutions are becoming weaker and weaker as individuals gain more and more power. This, of course is both good and bad. It’s a double-edged sword. And that’s exactly what Nicco Mele’s new book, The End of Big: How The Internet Makes David The New Goliath is all about.
As a technophile who served as webmaster of Howard Dean’s pioneering online campaign in 2004, you might expect Mele to be a tech utopian who would welcome any new technology with open arms. Instead, Mele is sounding the alarm about the destruction of old institutions. Granted, he believes that some old institutions deserve to die (“creative destruction”), but he also warns that “we can’t fetishize technology and say ‘to hell with our institutions’ without suffering terrible consequences.” This, of course, is a conservative instinct. So what brought about this change? “I started to have children,” Mele explained to me during a recent conversation, “and watching what’s happening starts to raise some serious questions.”
Mele’s book isn’t just about political institutions. But considering the GOP is clearly in the midst of what is (at best) soul searching and reordering — or (at worst) a chaotic Whig-like implosion — Mele’s thoughts on the benefits of yesterday’s strong political parties (where bosses sorted things out in smoke-filled rooms) might ring especially true today:
“Although inarguably elitist, the parties (and the old-boy system that comprised them) made sure candidates for major office deserved to be leaders — that they possessed some essential mettle or fitness for office. Bad apples aside, most of the party rank and file evinced a strong sense of morality and social responsibility born of a class-based mentality — quite a shift from what we see today.”
He continues,
[B]y today’s low standards, it seems in general to have produced leaders who for the most part were basically competent, knowledgeable, civic-minded, and capable of taking a longer-term view. Comparing the old system to what we have now, the journalist Elizabeth Drew, a longtime observer of American politics, puts it this way: ‘The quality of the politicians has gone down. Now I’m not nostalgic for the old days, because in some ways it was too cozy, it was less open, there was much less opportunity for minorities and women. But you had more people who were grounded on the issues, thought about the national issues.'”
This is not to say that we should go back to the days where party bosses did all the vetting. But it is to say that the utopian notion that a sort of individualistic direct democracy where everyone is in charge (and thus, no one is in charge) is far from perfect.
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You can listen to my full conversation with author Nicco Mele streaming here, or download the podcast on iTunes.