Mark Schmitt paints a big tent two-party picture where issue oriented constituencies are able to effectively organize and compete by virtue of Clay Shirky’s lowered transactions costs.
The use of constituencies rather than parties is telling. The American political system’s implementation of Montesqueian separation of powers provides a durable, but extremely rigid political system by pitting institutions against each other (gridlock). The US system also uses a single member district plurality / winner-takes-all voting system that promotes two-party entrenchment. This balanced, if unwieldy, system tends to constrain American political thought within a well defined sphere of ideals or political realities (one of the reasons for the dearth of great political thought from within one of the modern world’s earliest democracies). What’s not clear is if Mark’s take is a sin of ommission–the result of an American cultural tendency to assume an immutable democratic process–or a nuanced understanding of realpolitik (in a domestic political connotation).
I’m left wondering, perhaps naively, whether lower transaction costs in the political sphere have resulted in a tsunami (party and process change) which we just aren’t aware of because we are in the relatively deep, open water the system, process and cultural bias provide; or whether we’ll just see wildly spectacular, but relatively unremarkable surface waves (issue constituencies emerging within the big-tent, two-party system). Technology has so far failed to deliver easier participation in actual democratic action (voting), but is successfully connecting people and values in social networks with which they can influence rather than act. The question is how empowering are these networks and just how much change can they exact? Will they be subsumed by the existing modus operandi, or fundamentally change the system?