America’s two political parties may not realise it yet, but in their current form they are nearing obsolescence. As technological advancements continue to bring more and better tools for communication, citizens are increasingly empowered to come together in common purpose and reject the current political system that seems designed by the two parties to keep us apart.
There was a time when to have any hope of winning office a candidate needed to run within either the Republican or Democratic party. To come from one of the major parties meant that a candidate inherited a dedicated donor base and an organisational base as well.
The 2004 presidential campaign proved that those days are nearing an end – and it is the ability of hundreds of thousands using the internet to connect with each other that makes it so.
I think that’s right — see here and here — but I also think that the ability of the Internet to mobilize the kinds of “boots on the ground” that it takes to win elections is yet to be shown. I’ve visited the Hamilton Jordan / Gerald Rafshoon Unity ’08 site and while I like the idea, I found the execution somewhat unappealing. I’m not sure why, exactly, and it may just be that the website itself has a prepackaged, off-the-shelf feel to it.
But if you examine the two big political parties as businesses, their key advantages are informational and social: Informational, in terms of their ability to coordinate people and money, and social, in terms of being able to cultivate and make use of people’s loyalties to the group on constructive ways. The former seem to me to have been undermined by technology, and the latter seem to me to have been undermined by the parties themselves.