It’s over for 20th Century Democracy.

Democracy can claim to be the best form of government by virtue of what it prevents rather than what it produces. The Hitlers and Stalins and Pol Pots of this world cannot tolerate it. The oil-rich sheikdoms pay petrodollars to keep it at bay. African kleptocrats, like Robert Mugabe, tear it down if they cannot pervert it. The Junta in Myanmar prefers to see its citizens die rather than risk the entry of aid workers than might even smell of democracy.

Democracy has a freeing power. It legitimizes opposition and gives it a voice that is not so easy to drown out. Once installed it is difficult to destroy.

Nevertheless, in much of the free world, democracy has been subverted, derailed and replaced by a form of plutocracy. In many countries big business has sunk its hooks into government and now pulls many of the strings of legislation. There is a rational edge to this, because it ensures that the expertise of big business can be leveraged by government and its concerns are known. However, big business has a tendency to corrupt, given half a chance, and when it holds the reins of power, it writes its own “contracts of behavior” and makes its own laws against the interests of the citizenry. Democracy is circumvented.

This is what happened in the US, particularly in the past 8 years:

Government of the people, for the plutocrats, by the plutocrats.

We have witnessed the tearing down of firewalls in environmental protection, in the financial sector, in the energy sector. The vested interests have sung the same song in every corner of the nation. The lobbyists have written the legislation and the voters have been ignored or kept in the dark. The decency of America, and the constitution itself, have been compromised - by Guantanamo, by military outsourcing and by officially sanctioned torture.

This malleable form of 20th century democracy, is coming to an end, and rightly so.

The Obama Factor

It is fairly clear that, barring “an October surprise”, Barack Obama will be the next president of the United State. Those with strong political views, who are backing him, may have particular goals in mind for his term (or terms) of office. However, it is fairly clear that whatever Obama’s cherished goals are, a great deal of his administration’s time is going to be devoted to the repair work that now needs to be done; to damaged social structures, to a damaged economy, to a damaged foreign policy and to an ecologically damaged world.

Only when he moves beyond these urgent tasks will it be clear where exactly Obama lies on the broad spectrum from liberal to conservative that is used to define political color in the US. We can fervently hope that Obama’s presidency, should it come to pass, will find its place in the history books as one that resonates with the ideals of the founding fathers and the spirit of America.

But in one very important way - it may not matter too much:

The Obama campaign has already broken the democratic mold.

The captive US voter has acquired a “get out of jail free” card and because of that, it’s over for the plutocracy - not just in this election, but for quite a time. The point I’m making here is not about Obama. Obama may be terrible news for the plutocracy or he may not - we’ll see. This is about the control of the democratic process both in the US and, by infection, everywhere else.

In a democracy, if you have a specific political agenda, you have two choices:

  1. Persuade the electorate to support your agenda through honest argument.
  2. Game the system and maneuver the electorate into voting for you.

The problem with the first of these two tactics is that it rarely succeeds when it is directly opposed by the second. The majority of voters do not “consider the facts” and determine who to vote for. The majority have a long term allegiance to one political party or another and they support that party with the same loyalty that they support their favorite sports team.

In a democracy, the independent voters determine the election results. Political triumphs are achieved by influencing such voters. The problem is that, in the modern capitalistic economy, it has become impossible to get an effective message to them without sufficient funding. Elections are bought, not by bribing the voters, but by heavy investments in advertising, marketing and data mining.

The game changers

Several trends have come together to make the current election different to all that preceded it. This is the first presidential election since the founding of YouTube and YouTube makes a difference. It’s pretty much impossible to censor YouTube - and the audience figures for some of the political videos on YouTube exceed the figures for most prime time television. (The Obama Girl video and the Will.i.am “Yes we can” video have attracted audiences above 7 million.) As for cable news - YouTube blows it away.

You cannot buy time on YouTube - it’s impartial. The YouTube audience is self-selected. YouTube destroyed the political career of Virginia Republican Senator George Allen with a single video clip. It severely damaged both Hillary Clinton (Bosnia comments) and Obama (ranting pastor). It will undoubtedly feature heavily in the November election.

For the plutocrats, this is a major political game changer. The media barons are losing their power to influence people because Internet media in general, not just YouTube, is self-selecting:

The Internet provides a freedom of the press that is far more difficult to influence or pervert than the mainstream media.

This is also the first election since the onset of Web 2.0. - by which I mean the proliferation of social networks including; MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Track the prevalence of Obama-related comment on any of these social networking sites and the presence of his political organization dwarfs that of his competition (whether you see that as Hillary Clinton or John McCain.) The advantage that this confers is twofold.

  1. It constitutes effective word of mouth advertising to a demographic that can vote.
  2. It enables the fast assembly of n effective political organization “on the ground”.

The second of these points is the important one. Obama has been able to issue real-time calls for volunteer assistance at short notice in a way that none of his competitors have. The social networks have created a virtual political organization for him, that can be made real very quickly. Think of the old political structures as “bricks and mortar” operations and the new ones as “dot com.” The telling differences are in cost and speed. What Obama has done, others can do.

The Internet makes it possible to create effective political organizations very quickly.

Finally, the force of financial influence is brought under control by the Internet. In politics Obama’s campaign has established the power of the microdonor. Big business may be able to engineer some large donations through its “channels”, but the need for secrecy and US electoral law, which demands transparency, limits this.

Because of the Internet, Obama turned out to be the wealthiest of the candidates in terms of supporter funding, although personally, he was probably the poorest of them all. The need for a candidate to be wealthy has diminished. Obama’s campaign received donations from over 1,500,000 US citizens, most of whom gave just a few dollars at a time. Obama, it turns out, had the ability to raise more money than the rest of the candidates put together.

So this is the final game-changing point:

Politically, the Internet has ushered in the age of the microdonor and from here on, the microdonor is in control.

Insofar as money controls the outcome of US elections, it is now the microdonor, who is buying this election.