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Convening power and direct democracy

Copenhagen Climate Change Summit: Failed by the decline of democracy?

Tuning into the Personal Democracy Forum 2010 event in Washington, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com offered a nice quote from Alexis De Tocqueville:

“In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge”

It’s certainly true that state-sponsored organisations have even less of a monopoly over the ability to combine people with any efficiency. Heiferman gave an example of Seth Godin sending a tweet urging people to use Meetup in order to discuss his work. Within days, hundreds of events were organised all over the world to do so.

John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation followed Heiferman to the podium and told us that Barack Obama deserved a good deal more credit than he was being given because he’d inherited the task of government – an idea that in itself was becoming broken thanks to the Internet.

A recent edition of BBC Radio 4′s Analysis programme – Doomed by Democracy (featuring our own Halina Ward) focused on the unwillingness of democracies to address the demands from the scientific consensus around climate change.

Mark Littlewood of the Institute for Economic Affairs argued that a good deal of the problem was down to over-spinning on the part of the scientific establishment. If they were to refrain from this, he argued, the public would be more likely to take their claims on face value. It’s an argument that entirely ignores the fact that commercial pressure groups will not limit themselves in the same way – in direct opposition to the general public interest. In a more direct democracy, the unequal ability to convene entirely undermines the notion that the quality of argument should be a deciding factor in a debate.

The Analysis programme was a bizarre one in which ‘democracy’ was taken to mean a debased variation on Direct Democracy. Here, the ability to combine (see the way that newspapers whipped up the anti road-pricing petition a few years ago) showed exactly what the challenge from those who have “knowledge of how to combine” means. It doesn’t mean that democracies are incapable of making decisions that are unpopular in the short-term.

I feel a post coming on along the lines of ‘how democracy can be saved by a rejection of direct democracy in all it’s forms’. At my current rate of posting here, though, don’t hold your breath willya?

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