GUEST BLOG: John Stroh – says it all…
I hope one of the more experienced TDB Bloggers picks this up and uses it to light some fires elsewhere in the media. It would seem a wasted opportunity to let this study go unnoticed.
Young westerners across the world losing faith in democracy – even in New Zealand
Through a year rife with totalitarian-tinged populism and voter rebellion the world over, New Zealand has seemed relatively stable.
The legitimacy of our democratic institutions is rarely challenged. We don’t seem set to vote in a Trump-like figure, or dramatically restructure our country with a Brexit-like vote. We don’t even want a new flag.
But new research reveals our faith in democracy is faltering in a similar pattern to one seen overseas.
Possible conclusions for New Zealand:
1. Mainstream political parties in New Zealand have become employment agencies for bureaucrats with attitude
2. Callous, fascist characteristics in Minister of the Crown (most recent examples in the behaviour of Tolley, Parata and Collins) and are being mistaken for ‘strong man’ personality indicators
3. The absence of strong leadership within Labour and the Greens reinforces disdain for politics in the younger generation
4. The type of balanced personality required for credible Politics is patently absent in the NZ Parliament which promotes posturing bullshit artists at the expense of wisdom
5. While mainstream media have become commercially dependent on the Government of the day, they know they must keep the seats warm for the ‘others’ lest they risk the future livelihood of their employees – such an upstanding way of thinking for another lot of democracy stalwarts turned bureaucrats with attitude – just without the titles!
6. Education systems have improved in all the measures that don’t matter much for growing people into thoughtful human beings.
7. In the meantime the echo chambers of left wing blogs have failed in their efforts to energise democracy. Why, I am not sure, but perhaps because they lack the type of systematic political organisation that we had in the 60ies and 70ies when we were able to strategically knock off the ideas that suppressed our freedom, city by city, country by country.
I am sure there are many more patently obvious conclusions to be made from this study and it would be great to see pertinent debate on TDB and in public.
About John Stroh
Following a professional and management career with IBM in New Zealand and overseas, John owned and managed small companies in IT, niche market food exports to Japan and business consultancy. After his first wife, Annie, died in 2010, John ‘retired’ and spent several years in the remote outer Sounds. Now a Gold Card holder, he has remarried, has a husband & wife landscaping business and lives in an old farm homestead near Christchurch.
Under such weight of Imperialism democracy cannot breathe and so dies.
What this report is noticing is one form of transition pain from the industrial society to the peer-to-peer society. A process has begun in which the internet is doing to the news media what it did to the postal system. Eventually, it will do the same thing to governance; distributed decision-making that is smarter and more effective that either representative politics or market mechanisms.
Like the postal system, and radio and television, representative politics will probably never disappear completely, it will just be relegated to a niche role. The perceived “disengagement” of young people is actually a sign that they see building deep democracy as a no-brainer, so they’re not engaging with the mass media and representative politics in the first place, for the same reason they’re not engaging with writing letters on paper and posting them.
But for now there is a vacuum, because other than echoing stuff on social media, there’s no obvious way for them to do using digital tools what previous generations did with political parties and election campaigns. Ultimately, desperate efforts to convince the children of the 21st century to vote is finger-in-the-dyke stuff. That energy would be better spend theorizing and building the social systems and technology for 21st century democracy based on participating directly, not being “represented” by venal career bureaucrats.
What a positive and interesting line of thought! But it does contain an element of hope that requires thoughtful dissection. As you acknowledge in the more detailed analysis of this general topic in your most recent blog ( http://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2016/11/03/why-we-must-fight-for-independent-universities-and-academic-freedom/ ) “Whether the 21st century universities will take the traditional form of secular monasteries, where scholars gather on a physical campus to research, debate, and teach, or whether they will become distributed networks of peer-to-peer review and open teaching, I don’t know.”
Any significant change in the way that people participate in ‘politics’ requires that the ‘culture’ of those people changes also. So if universities continue to, as they have for centuries, drive changes of ‘culture’ and they are compromised by the current political system then your hypothesis that “… theorizing and building and building the social systems and technology for 21st century democracy based on participating directly, not being “represented” by venal career bureaucrat” may in turn be systemically compromised.
The conclusion may therefore be that we need to renew our efforts to rely on the current system of representative politics to change those trends in today’s political framework that compromise the future of 21st century democracy. The neo-fascist framework of power that is fast evolving in America represents a wave of cultural change with long term consequences for all of us. In a pack of huskies, the view only changes for the lead dog and our small pacific island nation is nowhere near the front of the pack.
So yes, we must we must fight for independent universities and academic freedom, but we must also do everything in our power to encourage those born this century to participate in current manifestations of democracy, lest they loose control of their culture?