Mobile-home owners organize to fight for county zoning changes. Farmers battle power transmission lines. Retired people mobilize against school taxes. Feminists, Chicanes, M rip miners, and anti-strip miners organize, as do single l>u rents and anti-porn crusaders. A midwest magazine even icports formation of an organization of “gay Nazis”—an embarrassment, no doubt, to both the heterosexual Nazis and lie Gay Liberation Movement
Simultaneously, national mass organizations are having trouble holding together. Says a participant at a conference of voluntary organizations, “Local churches are not following the national lead any more.” A labor expert reports that instead of a single unified political drive by the AFL-CIO, affiliated unions are increasingly mounting their own campaigns for their own ends.
The electorate is not merely breaking into splinters. The splinter groups themselves are increasingly transitory, springing up, dying out, turning over more and more rapidly, and forming a yeasty, hard-to-analyzeflux. “In Canada,” says one government official, “we now assume the life-span of the new voluntary organizations will be six to eight months. There are more groups and they are more ephemeral.” In this way, acceleration and diversity combine to create a totally new kind of body politic.
These same developments also sweep into oblivion our notions about political coalitions, alliances, or united fronts. In a Second Wave society a political leader could glue together half a dozen major blocs, as Roosevelt did in 1932, and expect the resulting coalition to remain locked in position for many years. Today it is necessary to plug together hundreds, even thousands, of tiny, short-lived special interest groups, and the coalition itself will prove short-lived as well. It may cleave together just long enough to elect a president, then break apart again the day after election, leaving him without a base of support for his programs.
This de-massification of political life, reflecting all the deep trends we have discussed in technology, production, communications, and culture, further devastates the politicians’ ability to make vital decisions. Accustomed to juggling a few well-organized and clearly organized constituencies, they suddenly find themselves besieged. On all sides, countless new constituencies, fluidly organized, demand simultaneous attention to real but narrow and unfamiliar needs.
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