Contents - Index

8.1.   A Public Interest Institution is not Workable                 (Top)

We cannot know how our premises and theories will be criticized until we get into data collection and the open online debate part of this project.  If our arguments are stated clearly we should expect good constructive criticism by very astute and insightful thinkers from which we will learn and draw the appropriate conclusions.  However, it is worth the effort to anticipate some of the attacks to show that we have done our homework.  These are listed below with some brief responses.  Naturally, some of these objections may turn out to contain things that we did not see.
 
The Sloughing-off Attack
This attack says that this whole bubbling-up democracy thing is nothing but the ramblings of some wishful thinking armchair liberals.  Public interest groups have been around for a long time and at most they have been perceived by decision-makers mostly as a nuisance factor or occasionally a thorn in the side.  But, they have never approached anything like a sustained and independent source of power and but for the occasional blip that's the way it will stay.  At best the authors are making a mountain of a molehill and at worst they are creating a grossly inaccurate and perhaps deceptive picture of American politics now and in the future. At this point, our rejoinder is that if Public Interest Groups were ever only a nuisance, the Internet and online advocacy groups like Moveon have changed that forever.  If there were any doubt, it should have been dispelled when Moveon demonstrated that it could raise millions of dollars for candidates in a matter of days and when it launched its own Primary and more people voted than would vote in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries together.  No one can deny the impact of those events on the candidates and the attention of the mass media.  

Skeptics could still claim this was only a fluke brought on by the frenzy of a bunch of Bush-bashers.  If these events were not coincident with dramatic new uses of the Internet, then this claim might have some plausibility.  But, of course, they were.  We believe that if we do a thorough study of events in the last several years, particularly since the inception of Moveon during the attempted removal of President Clinton from office through impeachment, we can document a pattern of events that can only be explained by a radical revision in "politics as usual" associated with sharply increased participation enabled by the Internet and Moveon's new uses of the Internet.  Moreover, one can easily predict that other groups will emulate and build on the technology of Moveon.  This might lead one to ask why we lump all public interest groups, (including traditional ones) into this new institution?  The reason is simple.  Like Pandora's box, Internet technologies will become an inextricable part of all organizations and there is no way to turn the clock back.   
 
Can Lead a Horse to Water Argument
These critics say that "the" problem of America is that it has lost its soul and moral bearing, so it does not matter if opportunities for participation are made more available because they will not be used.  This is similar to the "declining civic culture" argument, except the blame is layed on the "secularization" of American society for all things.  Our response is that the evidence is that the country is becoming more religious rather than less and there is no evidence that people are less moral than in the good old days.

The Gross Partisanship Argument
The critique basically says that we are narrowly partisan liberals such that everything we see is colored by this ideological lens.  For example, we look at the phenomenon and see progressives wherever we look.  We should take this kind of criticism seriously and ask ourselves what would this whole phenomenon look like were we strong conservatives.  We needn't worry either because we expect that we will get the conservatives' spin on this.  
This criticism is too nebulous to respond to unless the implication is that it won't work or that we shouldn't be talking about a new political institution in the first place.

While we are at it, what is the political persuasion of public interest nets as a whole?  It certainly does appear to be liberal.  Is that a contradiction to the principle of unfettered information and the free competition of ideas?  In principle and in the long view, an institution that is supposed to represent the people should be non-partisan and non-ideological.  However, individual groups may vary greatly in this respect, with some tending to be liberal and others tending to be conservative. More importantly the overall disposition of the institution may lean one way or the other depending on what the official government and corporate interests are up to at the time.  For this reason, we might expect that with a generally reactionary government, the majority of public interest groups will "look" liberal.  Hypothetically, should the government veer sharply to the left, we might expect the majority of public interest groups to "look" conservative.  The question of whether attitudes change or whether bodies change (or both) is wide open.  It will be difficult to  subject this question to empirical research unless there is a dramatic leftward shift in the government to study.

The Blowback Argument
This argument points out that all incumbent representative and appointed officials have constituencies and that these politicos could learn to apply Moveon-type technologies to these groups and produce a stalemate or even beat public interest lobbies at their own game.  We have to do some thinking about this whole thing.  Is Dean's Presidential campaign a public interest group?  If so, will it be one were he to be elected?  My first impulse is that if the groups behind decision makers actual deliberate in the true sense of the word, then there is a good side to this.  This issue needs to be articulated.  Support groups in government have to be different in important ways from non-governmental public interest groups and the answer to the blowback phenomenon likely lies in these differences.

Techies Run Amuck
This complaint is that some people have been so dazzled by technology that they have left the real world and are somewhere in Toyland.  As one critic put it, these people couldn't recognize a ballot box if it hit them on the heads.
I suppose the implication is that the whole thing is a fantasy.  I'm afraid this ad hominem kind of attack would have to address something about the substance of our argument before we could respond.
 
The Repressive Government Critique
If critics say that the government itself in partnership with commercial interests may attempt to inhibit or control the use of the Internet, then we should respond, "Yes, our government may - and that it is the responsibility of the peoples institution to take action to stop the government or any other entity from doing so.  There is nothing in this observation that says that the Internet should not be used to expand democracy.  
 
The Neo-Realist-Status-Quo Critique
There are other more subtle kinds of attack on our assessment of the people's institution.  The general form of a familiar kind of critique is that participation of this scale is not possible and by implication it should not be tried.  We already have evidence that in fact widespread levels of participation are possible and already exist.  Moreover, since we don't know the extent to which further participation is possible, then wherever possible it should be extended.  To do otherwise is to doom the system to the status quo through self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Not the Right Venue Arguments
This criticism says that while the Internet is good for organizing people of like minds, it is not a good medium for resolving major differences and contentious disputes.  In other words, it questions how much real competition of ideas there is in these advocacy nets and therefore, how real deliberation there is.  Our response is of two kinds.  The first is that having the opportunity to participate in the selection and discussion of issues often results in seeing something in opposing positions and compromises that would otherwise not have been seen.  The second is that no is suggesting that the bubbling up process in the beginning and ending of the democratic process.  Emergent processes interface with traditional political processes, which were designed to peacefully resolve conflicting demands.
 
One Size Does Not Fit All
This complaint is that the advocacy net approach is not right for every issue, candidate, or every action group.  If the implication is that this approach should not be used, then this is a silly objection.  If it is simply the more reasonable argument that the approach may not be as far-reaching as a "new institution" implies, then it is worthy of attention.  Our response would be that there is certainly an inertia about doing things in an old way, so there will be some resistance to the new technologies.  A recent example was an observer who said that Howard Deans spectacular fund raising on the Internet might not be right for Senator Kerry, etc, etc.  This might be true if the campaigns of the others are willing to be totally indebted to large corporation donations with "business as usual."  The point of public interest advocacy is to turn this around.

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Materials

References
Bachrach, Peter, The Theory of Democratic Elitism (Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1967).
 Barber, Benjamin R., Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age
Harrison, John R., The Reactionaries: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia (Schocken  Books: New York, 1966)
Kaufman, Arnold, "Human Nature and Participatory Democracy," in Carl J. Friedrich, (Ed.),  Responsibility: Nomos III (The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1960).
Kaufman, Arnold S., The Radical Liberal The New Politics: Theory and Practice (Simon & Schuster,  New York, 1968).
Michels, Robert, Political Parties: A  Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern  Democracy (New York: Dover, 1962).
 Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (3rd ed.; New York, 1950).
Shea, John C., (Ed.), Arguments on American Politics (Brooks/Cole: Pacific Grove, California).

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