Does the Internet Change Politics?
Does the Internet Change Politics?
Does the Web Change Politics? Michael Walzer Responds
THERE HAS been a lot of talk recently about the effects of the internet on political participation. I want to begin a discussion of those effects by describing the forms of political participation before the age of the internet—so that someone else can write about the changes wrought by the new technology. I also want to play the skeptic and express some doubts about the magnitude and significance of those changes.
Knocking on doors, one of the oldest forms of electoral politics, played a major role in the Obama campaign. Perhaps the people who knocked were recruited via the internet, though the ones I know signed up at the local Obama headquarters and worked out of Obama headquarters in the cities to which they were sent. The headquarters were bustling; and, though there were a lot of computers in the room, the bustle seemed familiar from long ago.
“Familiar from long ago” may, curiously, be what’s new here (and maybe all that is new). Let me tell a story. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, I was the co-chair of a group called the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on Vietnam. We campaigned against the war by knocking on doors, organizing block meetings, sending out speakers, and circulating petitions. We also went to the ward and precinct meetings of the Democratic Party and pretty much took over the party in Cambridge—we actually sent a couple of our people to the 1968 party convention. That was local politics long ago. We were only able to take over because the ward and precinct organizations were already in radical decline. Soon they were gone. I don’t know if they disappeared everywhere, but they ceased to be a focus for local politicking. I suspect that they won’t come back.
But there certainly was a lot more local liveliness in the last election, a lot more people politically engaged, than we have seen in a long time. (Or had this already happened on the right, with the mobilization of evangelical Christians in 2000 and 2004?) I wonder if this renaissance of local politics owes something to the internet—and if so, what precisely? Or was it just that so many people believed that this election was really important?
And will the renaissance, if that’s what it is, continue? Local politics in the old days was continuous; the ward and precinct organizations were busy even between elections. What will be the afterlife of the 2008 Obama mobilization? The late November runoff election for Senator in Georgia, where, within three weeks, the turnout fell by a third, raises questions about its robustness.
Let me suggest a list of the forms of political activity in the old days—not a short list, but also not exhaustive—and invite some comparative research on the new technologies.
1) Ward and precinct politics, with party leaders dispensing patronage, bidding for votes, organizing meetings and rallies at election time, sending delegates to state and national conventions. All this is gone. Should it be replaced?
2) National campaigns, as they were before the age of primaries and before the age of television, with candidates bargaining for the support of the party faithful and the local leaders, with real battles at the conventions, and with campaigns that depended heavily on the local organizations (as Kennedy in 1960 still depended on the Chicago “machine”). Television and the internet make for celebrity politics and top-down control of the campaign: even when the locals are mobilized, they can no longer run the show.
3) The speeches of the candidates, which were once more important than sound-bites or TV debates, certainly more important than speeches are today. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, recently brought out in a new book, consisted mostly of long speeches, widely reprinted in newspapers around the country and apparently read by many people. How long will people stick with a televised speech? How complicated a text will they read on the internet? More generally, what kind of an attention span does good politics require?
4) Activity in the streets—demonstrations, marches, rallies, bonfires, occasional riots—were available not only to the established parties but also to social movements of many different sorts, focused on many different issues: abolition, prohibition, women’s suffrage, socialism, anti-immigration, single tax. Remember the march of the unemployed in the 1930s. Will we see anything like that again if we slide into a real depression? Marching and demonstrating are important contemporary forms of political activity, though we didn’t see much of either here in the United States from the early 1970s until the pro-immigration marches a year or so ago. In India after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, there were “spontaneous” demonstrations in many cities protesting the government’s unpreparedness. They spread, says the New York Times, through the internet. But surely there are other ways of generating or coordinating activities across space. In 1960, after the sit-ins at segregated Woolworth lunch counters in North Carolina, northern Woolworth stores were picketed in many cities—the idea spread by telephone and, believe it or not, by US mail. The internet has, no doubt, an accelerating effect, but it doesn’t seem to be (it hasn’t yet been) transformative.
5) The pamphlet—cheap to publish, easy to pass around—was a crucial form of communication for social movements. I suppose people actually read pamphlets in the old days, but they seem to have disappeared today. Is the blog an adequate replacement? The required attention span is certainly shorter. At Dissent magazine, we have published a few pamphlets; they are very hard to circulate. U.S. mail is too expensive; you need the local hands that parties and movements used to have.
6) Volunteers knocking on doors. This is face-to-face contact; it has been partly replaced by the phone call, voice-to-voice contact, unless the phone call is automated, which is depressingly common. The Obama campaign preferred to avoid automation and to rely on volunteers. But they weren’t often talking to neighbors. My sense is that most of the people canvassing in, say, Philadelphia, didn’t live in Philadelphia. So will be there be lasting local effects from their canvassing?
7) Petitions and letter-writing campaigns. These were often sponsored by single-issue organizations, but they are also a way of mobilizing party or movement supporters and, if you can produce a tide of names or a tide of letters, a way of demonstrating strength. Certainly e-mail can produce a tide of names, so the internet amplifies as well as accelerates these kinds of demonstrations. On the other hand, the older ways of collecting names and getting people to write letters, by asking them one by one, may evoke a stronger commitment from the people asked.
8) Fundraising. This is one of the most critical forms of political activity, which enables many of the other forms, though it is important to stress that in the old days before television, politics was a lot less expensive than it is today. If you have local organizations and if you can recruit large numbers of volunteers, you don’t need a lot of money. Still you always need some, and you always want more.
So how do you get it? In modern democratic politics, it is very important to be able to say that you get it from a large number of ordinary men and women, each giving a small amount. In the old days, local organizations ran bake sales and raffles—participatory fundraising; today people are lobbied for small contributions mostly by mail and by e-mail. Being able to get that kind of money is a big advantage, and here, apparently, the internet has made a difference (certainly, the bake sales are gone). But I would like to see a statistical study of where the Obama money came from—mail solicitations vs. e-mail solicitations.
You also get money, more money, from the very rich or from the people who control corporate resources, and you get that money by begging for it in person–and, probably, by offering something in return. What gets offered is the subject of much politically motivated accusation and denial. You might say that accusations and denials about fundraising are one of the forms of political activity.
9) Scut work. A lot of what I have already described—knocking on doors, making phone calls—could be called scut work, but I also want to include stuffing envelopes, cleaning the campaign headquarters, sitting at the literature table at meetings, leafleting in the streets, driving voters to the polls, and so on. This is unpaid labor, mostly done by the very young and the very old. The ability to recruit people to do the routine chores of politics is a crucial sign of organizational strength. Does the internet help find these people? The truth is that there have always been people doing political scut work. In the context of a campaign or a movement, it is, despite its name, exciting to do.
That’s my list. I have asked at several points whether the internet makes a difference, and I have also, implicitly, asked whether, if it does, this is a difference for the better. My own skepticism is apparent, but it is the skepticism of an old-timer. I am eager to hear from some new-timers.
Michael Walzer is co-editor.
