Month: October 2003

While Lessig and Searls accept the legitimacy of the democratic recall, some of our Emergent Democracy advocates are having a hard time with the people’s judgment.

Ross Mayfield tries to convey an untenable distinction between Emergent Democracy as an exercise of the pure of heart in contrast to the Big Money pollution that envelopes government in a capitalist economy:

Emergent Democracy should differ from Direct Democracy. Self-organization, deliberation, and citizen driven initiatives — where the constraint is equal interest of the people — is in stark contrast to modern direct democracy. Dean’s decentralized organization is in contrast to professional pertitioners.

Joi Ito beats the tom-toms in favor of grass-roots elitism as an alternative to the rule of the unwashed masses:

Emergent democracy is about leadership through giving up control, activating the people to engage through deliberation and action, and allowing emergent order to grow from the grass roots. It’s the difference between a couch potato clicking the vote button and a group of people starting their own Dean coalition group.

And Mitch Ratcliffe chimes in with some loud clucks against The Politicians:

The question in emergent democracy is how to make everyone a politician, again. In early democracies, every citizen–a narrowly defined group of patricians, in most cases–was expected to be involved. The problem we have today is that most citizens leave politics “to the professionals” and then complain that they feel alienated from the system.

This is an awfully pure and austere model, where the people have to each and every one take the time out of their busy days to study each and every issue for themselves in order to govern without representatives, or at least without paid ones.

The question that it raises following the recall is, of course, how the people — even when armed with super-fantastic blogware — can make detailed policy decisions if they can’t be trusted by the technical elite to make basic personnel decisions as we did in the recall.

And if a Dean Meetup is an example of Emergent Democracy and good, how can it be that a group of grass-roots volunteers lead by Ted Costa organizing a petition drive is bad? When Ted Costa let Darrell Issa pay some signature gatherers a pittance ($1.5M, compared to the $10M Davis spent warping the Republican primary) wasn’t that an example of leading by giving up control?

Obviously, Emergent Democracy is any process that defeats the Republican Party, whether it’s in Sacramento, Washington, or Baghdad, and the process is utterly unimportant.

UPDATE: Ratcliffe says I’ve got him all wrong. What he really wants is:

…citizens should be able to organize to address specific issues without having to embrace the top-down plans of government. That means organizing to have their own representatives on specific issues, figuring out ways to pay them (enough money flows in politics–it’s an industry) to hive off some portion of a living from being involved in one’s community.

It appears to me he’s just described the Recall. Citizens organized to address the problem of Gray Davis’ lack of honesty and leadership, and rather than relying on his top-down leadership style (“the legislature is here to implement my vision”) they replaced him with a man who represented their values. They figured out how to pay for the recall by putting their own money up, and they hired campaign consultants and attorneys to remove the barriers erected by the ACLU, the Casinos, the labor unions, and the other anti-democratic forces in California.

If you like democracy, of any kind, you have to love the recall.

Larry Lessig and Doc Searls have both come forward and very graciously acknowledged that their worst fears about the recall didn’t materialize. Lessig says:

total(ly wrong about the) recall

I was, at least. The recall provision is still stupidly crafted. But the results last night are as a democracy should be. A clear majority voted to recall the governor. And more people than supported Davis voted to elect Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He wasn’t my first choice. But it is interesting that the two top candidates “started” their life in the US in poverty. Anyone who gets as far as either did deserves our respect. And we Californians can hope that some of the benefit of the hard work and luck that has marked Mr. Schwarzenegger’s life might now pass to California.

And Doc says:

Well shit, maybe I was (and still am) wrong about “direct democracy,” California style. I guess we’ll see. Richard’s certainly right about MoveOn, which has lost the common touch, if it ever had one.

Comments on Lessig’s post indicate a deep well of hostility remains on the Left, with a “stupidity” meme replacing the “anti-democratic” meme that preceded the election. I don’t see much in the way of the VRWC hi-jacking another election except in two curious sources on the East coast, the always arrogant George Will and doddering David Broder. (via Kaus). The East Coast establishment was annoyed to have the national spotlight shining in a place where they don’t know their way around, apparently. Neither has the basic facts right. Will says:

California’s recall — a riot of millionaires masquerading as a “revolt of the people” — began with a rich conservative Republican congressman, who could think of no other way he might become governor, financing the gathering of the necessary signatures.

And Broder agrees:

The misguided effort to convert the broadly shared public discontent with economic stagnation and political gridlock into a recall effort against Democratic Gov. Gray Davis was made possible only because Republican Rep. Darrell Issa pumped almost $2 million of his own fortune into a commercial signature-collection campaign.

In point of fact, the recall was initiated by Ted Costa, a Sacramento small government gadfly who’s anything but rich. Darrell Issa’s money – about a dime per voter – sped up the process, but it would’ve happened anyway. The only thing worse than a fool is an arrogant fool.

Doc calls me out on a question about the End-to-End stuff by Grant Henninger, to wit:

As long as the underlying protocols on the net are open and all servers accept packets of information from all other servers, the higher order protocols can be proprietary without breaking end-to-end.

My argument about this is that the important principles in Internet design are open standards and any-to-any connectivity, not the end-to-end structure of control in a certain version of the core protocols*. So as long as the datalinks and packet links are willing and able to move data from anyone to anyone, it doesn’t matter whether they do retransmissions, billing, and flow control solely at the end points or at each individual hop. For A/V applications, it’s necessary to do these things hop-to-hop instead of end-to-end, so the Internet will inevitably move to that kind of architecture as it becomes more of an A/V network and less of an e-mail network.

This is progress and we should embrace it.

It probably is true that the Internet would have had a slower ramp if it had been hop-to-hop in the old days, because that kind of architecture is more demanding of routers than the simplistic architecture, but technology has improved and we can now use the net – or soon use the net – for more interesting things.

*this sentence revised for clarity

Matt Welch likes a little Marc Cooper piece on the people’s revolt called Dissonance: Jonestown for Democrats. Here’s a cute part:

If you think it odd that Schwarzenegger and the California Republican Party should be able to effortlessly assume the posture of populist slayers of special interests, then you are normal. But if you can’t figure out that it’s Gray Davis’ coin-operated administration and the liberals’ refusal to divorce themselves from it that allows such a comic-opera, then you’re, to be polite, na?ve.

And this is from a liberal.

It looks like the Wesley Clark campaign may be over before it started. Read this from the Draft Clark blog:

By the time you read these words, the bell will be tolling for Wesley Clark’s candidacy. It will be clear across the country that the campaign of Wesley Clark is nothing more than the Gore campaign with a better candidate – this will mean that activists, the people who can create a field organization that can win Iowa and New Hampshire, will know that this campaign is nothing more than a media creation.

Clark was Hillary’s best hope. What will she do now that he’s blown up?

Sheila Kuehl is a California state senator from Santa Monica, representing the seat formerly held by Tom Hayden. She’s an especially virulent hater of heterosexual men, the leader in writing the nastiest of all the laws in the nation on child support, alimony (for life), gender-based custody, domestic violence, and anything else she can use as a weapon. Before coming to Sacramento as an office-holder, she was a law professor at Loyola and a child TV star, playing Zelda Gilroy in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (of which she wasn’t one). Sheila kicked off her first campaign with a high-profile press conference manufacturing the myth that tons of women get beat up on Superbowl Sunday by fans of the winning team.

When Pete Wilson was governor, most of her bills were promptly vetoed, so she made extra-nice with Gray as soon as he announced on the theory that a man with so few evident principles would be a perfect foil for her toxic agenda. And sure enough, Gray never vetoed a one of her bills, and followed her advice on vetoing those she didn’t like, such as Rod Wright’s bill letting men falsely identified as the fathers of children off the child support hook.

She’s pissed about Gray’s humiliating defeat, knowing Arnie’s gonna send her back to the veto pound, so she unloaded to Daniel Weintraub about her feelings on the election last night:

KUEHL: I am really sad. I’m more angry than anything. And I haven’t even started thinking about what the Senate will need to do in order to save the state.

DW: Save the state from what?

KUEHL: From ignorance. This guy has no idea how to run a state. One of two things will happen. He’ll have his own ideas and no way to carry them out. I mean he has already proposed three things that the governor cannot do. He wants to roll back the car tax on his own by fiat, which he can t do. He wants to tax the Indians, which he can’t do. He doesn’t know anything about running the state. So either he will propose a lot of stuff he can’t do and we’ll have to govern, or he’ll be pretty well manipulated by people who have an agenda, very much the way I think the president of the United States has been handled by people who are really telling him how to do these things. In which case we may have to counteract things that are worse than things he proposed on his own. His handlers will probably be more conservative than he is, or in the Republican Party line. Convince him he’ll bring businesses back to the state by cutting more benefits to workers, by unraveling anti-discrimination statutes which they call job killers.

Here you see Sheila’s arrogance in full bloom, but I’ve seen it worse — the way to piss her off is to suggest there might be something she doesn’t know. She turned red and shouted at Jackie Goldberg’s brother Art in a hearing once just because he said that some of the poor are men, too. Art’s a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the ’60s, a guy who runs a law center for poor people, and a proponent of the Rod Wright bill mentioned above. Art’s offense, according to Sheila, was suggesting the legislators who opposed his bill were “dumb as a post”. His sister is Jackie Goldberg, one of Sheila’s bosom buddies in the Lesbian Caucus.

Sheila’s my negative barometer, so the fact that she sees dark days ahead convinces me that the California recovery is right around the corner. Well, that and some of the e-mail I’m getting from employers in California today. Ha.

(Incidentally, Oregon gets 25% off the top of Indian casino revenues. It’s not impossible.)

Your final numbers on the landslide are at the Secretary of State’s place.

A lot of good stuff has been written about this already, by Dan Weintraub, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Roger Simon, Matt Welch and others, so I’ll just hit the high points:

1. The voters tossed Davis out on his can and replaced him with an ass-grabbing, movie-making bodybuilder with an accent because they figured Arnie couldn’t do any worse. Davis failed to deliver as governor because he has no leadership and no balls, and we know Arnie has an abundance of both — the LA Times proved it.

2. Davis wasn’t the real problem — the entrenched ultra-left wing of the Democratic Party, the Willie Brown/John Burton Frisco machine and the Berman/Waxman LA machine are the real problem — but he wasn’t strong enough to stand up to these machines and face them down. Arnie, in the people’s judgment, is better equipped to do that.

3. The crocodile tears that were especially moist on the blogs of the self-styled technical elite about the “un-democratic” nature of the recall were shot to pieces. The recall succeeded dramatically, and Arnie got more votes than Davis even after sharing his with 134 other candidates. They won’t admit it, but they were wrong, wrong, dead wrong and couldn’t have been more wrong. Was anything more sad than the MoveOn.org campaign?

4. It’s a new day for the California Republican Party, and possibly for the national one, but Arnie and Bush could hardly be more different ideologically; one’s conservative on fiscal issues but liberal socially, and the other is the reverse. But they’re both real men and that may, at the end of the day, mean more than their policies.

5. The LA Times is out of touch with California. Thinking that their last-minute sleazy hit would swing voter sentiment against Arnie was a classic mistake of the Politically Correct smug and arrogant class. Blogs and other forms of New Media have made their style of persuasion transparent and obsolete. Voters are not the oh-so-sensitive soft New Males and Aggressive Women that news rooms seem to be full of these days; they’re more like bloggers.

I think this is going to be a good thing for the Sunny South, but they’re in a deep hole and it’s going to take a lot of digging to get out of it.

Drudge:

EARLY AFTERNOON EXIT POLLS SHOW 57% VOTE ‘YES’ FOR RECALL, CAMPAIGN SOURCES TELL DRUDGE REPORT, 47% FOR SCHWARZENEGGER, 34% FOR BUSTAMANTE, 12% MCCLINTOCK… DEVELOPING…

A majority for Arnie is within reach. Imagine that.

Roger L. Simon is voting for Arnie, for the right reasons.