This project began as so many good things do, over a cup of coffee. Our conversation wandered to talking about new social media tools like blogs and social networking sites and their important role in fostering an explosion of public participation in and around the national political campaigns. We started wondering when we might see the rise of similar public energies and optimism about government and governing. For it’s clear we’re living in a new age, where millions of people can participate directly in governance and policy making, not just in ratifying the results on Election Day.
The Internet is putting individual voters, and networks of activists, in positions that used to be the sole reserve of professionals. Today anyone can be a reporter, a fundraiser or a community organizer; all it takes is an Internet connection and a compelling message. And so we wondered: as the Internet revolution hits the institutions of American democracy, how might it change things for the better?
Dana Perino, the White House Press Secretary, summed up the typical response of government officials accustomed to shutting citizens out of governance when she responded to a question from a reporter earlier this year about the Iraq war by saying, “You had input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.” In other words, the people had their say at the election booth (a vote that may or may not have been recorded and counted accurately, by the way) and now it’s our turn to run the country as we see fit, away from the watchful, interfering eye of citizens. As we have seen, this kind of thinking and behavior is dangerous for Americans and for American democracy.
On January 21, 2009, a new tenant will occupy the Oval Office, and that person will be wise to continue to build on the public input and participation that helped to put them there. Returning to business as usual will be an enormous missed opportunity for both the new president and the American public.
America’s wonderful, messy experiment with a republican form of democracy is a work in progress, an unfolding story of astonishing possibilities and periodic disappointment. The storyline of this new century is the yawning chasm between the passion that Americans, particularly young people, have for a fair and just society, with the reality of near permanent incumbency for elected officials and a gridlocked political system.
Voting is our most visible political activity; it’s easy to see and measure, but it’s only a small part of the spectrum of political activities that form the backbone of our democracy. Political campaigns have begun to use an array of social media tools to connect with potential voters, but there are far greater uses for these tools beyond campaigns and elections. Social media and broad, enthusiastic participation together can profoundly affect governance and policy development, who runs for office and how, the communications between elected officials and citizens beyond elections, and the loosening of the death grip of moneyed, interests on politics and policies.
This jarring juxtaposition of our political reality against the potential for great political change is vividly revealed in the awful uses of technology (e.g., touch-screen voting machines or microtargeting of voters by what beer they buy) versus wonderful uses of technology (e.g., cell phones used to mobilize voters or live-blogging of political events that engage thousands of people in direct conversation with candidates). Rebooting America is dedicated to understanding these differences and providing a vision of how we can realize our collective hope for a better future.
We invited a variety of interesting, creative thinkers spanning the political spectrum and the generational divide, and from a variety of different professional perspectives, to write essays for this anthology. We also posted a general call for essays at the Personal Democracy Forum website, and three of those submissions are included in this volume.
The essays are naturally as varied as the participants. They range from revisiting the need for checks and balances within government and between the government and its citizenry, to a radical reinterpretation of the public’s “right to know,” to the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation to shape public policy. These essays confirmed our optimistic sense that the political system is due for substantive changes. Undoubtedly there are many more voices and thinkers whom we failed to engage, and we apologize for those oversights. It is our hope that Rebooting America will continue as a living document online, and to that end we are publishing all of the essays at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com and inviting public comment on (and off) the site.
We hope that, you, our readers and participants, will help to jump-start conversations about increasing citizen participation in governance, opening the doors of government wider and making the walls see-through, and unleashing our collective creativity to help solve technical problems and break through long-standing entrenchments.
Our future does not have to be a continuation of the past or the present. We can create a new and better course—we just need to imagine it first.
—Allison Fine
—Micah L. Sifry
—Andrew Rasiej
—Josh Levy