Democracy, if we can keep it this time

Via Kos, this is excellent:

Rather than removing money from politics, the internet changes what money can buy in politics. It allows people to organize themselves, and makes it much easier to communicate compelling messages among large numbers of people without a lot of capital. Now you'd think that the people who wanted campaign finance limits (known as 'reformers') would look at the internet and say 'Awesome, this helps solve our problem!' But they didn't. Instead, they have held tight to their bias against participation. They think that restricting the ability of Americans to participate in the political system is the only way to check the power of wealthy interests. Actually, they have it backwards. Regulation not only won't help, it once again raises the barrier to participation and thus recreates the worst aspects of a mass media 'limited bandwidth politics'. In reformer-land, in order to participate in internet politics you'd need to lawyer up and do things only rich people can afford. This is precisely what they should be fighting against, not promoting.

The first point, about changing what money does in politics, is crucial. Political money is only "bad" in so far as the influence it has is "bad;" structural problems with campaign finance have hitherto created a situation in which political donating was the realm of the rich, and therefore undemocratic results were to be expected in correlation with increased funding, every dollar representing an increase in the schism between monied donors and the rest of us. In that world, the little guy gets screwed so long as anybody can give those big-dollar donations.

But we live in a land of participatory, distributed campaigning now, perhaps Politics 2.0. The old model of the elite controlling things through their exclusive lock on meaningful campaign contributions is dying, and in its place we are building a system in which real impact on political decision-making may be made by many small voices in concert. Our influence will only increase as our fundraising prowess stirs up more primaries and other highly annoying battles that once would not have been fought. We have the power to demand responsiveness of our leaders, as we have become a real threat. It is this change that the so-called reformers are reacting to, as this upset in the status quo has worried their monied masters.

I think what needs to happen for us to cease power and hold it is for us to demonstrate that we are capable of sustaining the political process ourselves, to show politicians that they can give up the old, unfair, corrupting methods of campaign finance for our people-powered version. I don't think that anybody in Washington really wants to be a corporate tool, they just have to be to survive.