Competition has long been a feature of politics, but the situation has become crazy. You have seen it, heard it on TV, listened to your friends express intense opinions about politics and wondered where is it all heading? Carl Bernstein appeared on the Sunday morning cable talk shows last weekend and called the extreme divide between right and left a "Cold Civil War." Something has changed. Hard to say exactly and what it is... but the songwriter Bob Dylan saw it coming: "Because something is happening here and you don't know what it is-- do you Mr. Jones?" (Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965)
Barack Obama's 2008 election was immediately followed by Mitch McConnell promising to do everything possible to prevent the president's re-election. Sour grapes? Perhaps. But look what's followed Donald Trump's election, albeit by electoral college. More bitterness, resentment, hatred. And George W. Bush did not exactly enter office with a great mandate. That one went to the Supreme Court to be settled in a highly controversial decision-- hanging chads and the whole bit.
The handwriting is on the wall.... elections are becoming irrelevant. The winners no longer gain the support of the opposing party and we have a continual war, a conflict never resolved by election results. We might blame the bitter partisanship between right and left as the cause of the chaos. Donald Trump's unorthodox victory and pugnacious personality may seem like an exception to the rule. Think again. These changes are not a one-off problem, or something that will never happen again. Gridlock is here to stay, the result of a new, instant electronic environment.
Amazingly, Marshall McLuhan predicted the downfall of the ballot box. He spells out word-for-word in his Playboy interview of 1969. McLuhan correctly anticipated the changes imposed by technology would bring sweeping changes, including an end to representative democracy as we know it. And be prepared for far greater changes:
"We must understand that a totally new society is coming into being, one that rejects all our old values, conditioned responses, attitudes and institutions."
Marshall McLuhan died in 1980-- long before the bitter animosity of today's political contests had appeared on the scene. He attributes the change to technology, the end of the mechanical age and the rise of the digital age. The electronic world we presently inhabit has no patience for the old system of the ballot box, and the acceptance of election results with a clear outcome delineating winners and losers. The media environment has changed and everything else with it. Here is McLuhan's single paragraph of explanation-- so much more profound and helpful than tonight's discussion on CNN or Fox.
"In our software world of instant electronic communications movement, politics is shifting from the old pattern of political representation by electoral delegation to a new form of spontaneous and instantaneous communal involvement in all areas of decision-making. In a tribal all-at-once culture the idea of the "public" as a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way, like interchangeable mechanical cogs in a production line, is supplanted by mass society in which everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus. The election as we know it today will be meaningless in such a society."
Playboy interview (March 1969)
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