THE THIRD WAVE
Specialized demands flood in to legislatures and bureau-cracies through every crack, with every mailbag and messenger, over the transom and under the door. This tremendous pile-up of demands leaves no time for deliberation. Furthermore, because society is changing at an accelerating pace and a decision delayed may be far worse than no decision at all, everyone demands instant response. Congress, as a result, is kept so busy, according to Representative N. Y. Mineta, a California Democrat, that “guys meet each other coming and going. It doesn’t allow for a coherent train of thought”
Circumstances differ from country to country, but what does not differ is the revolutionary challenge posed by the Third Wave to obsolete Second Wave institutions—too slow to keep up with the pace of change and too undifferentiated to cope with the new levels of social and political diversity. Designed for a much slower and simpler society, our institutions are swamped and out of synch. Nor can this challenge be met by merely tinkering with the rules. For it strikes at that most basic assumption of Second Wave political theory: the concept of representation.
Thus the rise of diversity means that, although our political systems are theoretically founded on majority rule, it may be impossible to form a majority even on issues crucial to survival. In turn, this collapse of consensus means that more and more governments are minority governments, based on shifting and uncertain coalitions.
The missing majority makes a mockery of standard democratic rhetoric. It forces us to question whether, under the convergence of speed and diversity, any constituency can ever be “represented.” In a mass industrial society, when people and their needs were fairly uniform and basic, consensus was an attainable goal. In a de- massified society, we not only lack national purpose, we also lack regional, statewide, or city-wide purpose. The diversity in any congressional district or parliamentary constituency, whether in France or Japan or Sweden, is so great that its “representative” cannot legitimately claim to speak for a consensus. He or she cannot represent the general will for the simple reason that there is none.What, then, happens to the very notion of “representative democracy”?
To ask this question is not to attack democracy. (We shall shortly see how the Third Wave opens the way to an enriched and enlarged democracy.) But it makes one fact inescapably plain: not only our Second Wave institutions but the very assumptions on which they were based are obsolete.
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