TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DEMOCRACY
In Second Wave societies, voting to determine the popular will provided an important source of feedback for the ruling elites. When conditions for one reason or another became in tolerable for the majority, and 51 percent of the voters registered their pain, the elites could, at a minimum, shift parties, alter policies, or make s0nie other accommodation.
Even m yesterday’s iflass society, however, the 51 percent principle was a decidedly blunt, purely quantitative instrument. Voting to determine the majority tells us nothing about the quality of people’s views. It can tell us how many people, at a given moment, want X, but not how badly they want it. Above all, it tells us oothing about what they would be willing to trade off for X—crucial information in a society made up of many minorities.
Nor does it signal us when a minority feels so threatened, or attaches such life-and-death significance to a single issue, that its views should perhaps receive more than ordinary weight.
In a mass society these well-known weaknesses of majority rule were tolerated because, among other things, most minorities lacked strategic power to disrupt the system. In today’s finely wired society, in tvhich all of us are members of minority groups, that is no longer true.
For a de-massified Third Wave society the feedback systems of the industrial p^st are entirely too crude. Thus we will have to use voting, and the polls, in a radically new way.
Instead of seeking simpleminded yes-or-no votes, we need to identify potential tradeoffs with questions like: “If I give up my position on abortion* will you give up yours on defense spending or nucleaf power?” or “If I agree to a small additional tax on my personal income next year, to be earmarked for your project, what will you offer in return?”
In the world we are racing into, with its rich communications technologies, there are many ways for people to register such views without ever setting foot in a polling booth. And there are also ways, as v^e shall see in a moment, to feed these into the political decision- making process.
We may also want to de-rig our voting laws to eliminate anti-minority biases. There are many ways to do this. One quite conventional method would be to adopt some variant of cumulative voting, as used by many corporations today to protect the rights of minofity stockholders. Such methods allow voters to register not tf»ly their preferences but the intensity and rank order of their choices.
We shall almost certainly have to discard our obsolete party structures, designed for a slowly changing world of mass movements and mass merchandising, and invent tern-porary modular parties that service changing configurations of minorities—plug-in/plug-out parties of the future.
We may need to appoint “diplomats” or “ambassadors” whose job is not to mediate between countries but between minorities within each country. We may have to create quasi-political institutions to help minorities—whether professional, ethnic, sexual, regional, recreational, or religious—to form and break alliances more quickly and easily.
We may, for instance, need to provide arenas in which different minorities, on a rotating, perhaps even random basis, are brought together to trade problems, negotiate deals, and resolve disputes. If doctors, motorcyclists, computer programmers, Seventh-Day Adventists and Gray Panthers were brought together, with assistance from facilitators trained in issue clarification, priority setting, and dispute resolution, sur-‘ prising and constructive alliances might be formed.
At a minimum, differences could be exposed and the basis for political barter explored. Such measures will not (and should not) eliminate all conflict. But they can elevate social and political strife to a more intelligent, potentially construe-tive level—especially if they are linked to long-range goal setting.
Today the very complexity of issues inherently provides a greater variety of bargainable points. Yet the political system is not structured to take advantage of this fact Potential alliances and trades go unnoticed—thus unnecessarily raising; tensions between groups while further straining and overloading existing political institutions.
Finally, we may well need to empower minorities to regulate more of their own affairs, and encourage them to formulate long-range goals. We might, for example, help the people in a specific neighborhood, in a well-defined subculture, or in an ethnic group, to set up their own youth courts under the supervision of the state, disciplining their own young people rather than relying on the state to do so. Such institutions would build community and identity, and contribute to law and order, while relieving the overburdened government institutions of unnecessary work.
We may, however, find it necessary to go far beyond such reformist measures. To strengthen minority representation in a political system designed for a de-massified society, we may even eventually have to elect at least some of our officials in the oldest way of all: by drawing lots. Thus some people have seriously suggested choosing members of the legislature or parliament of the future the way we choose jury members or armies today.
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