Political Democracy is Finished (Marshall McLuhan)

You’ll notice that political governance has become increasingly impossible. The destruction of representative democracy became evident every since Barack Obama came into office and Mitch McConnell stated his goal for the next four years was to keep Obama from getting re-elected. Sure enough Obama was reduced to trying to govern through presidential edict.

Donald Trump demonstrates little of no passion for governing through the usual methods, has almost no interest in working with Congress. We would like to think the elected representatives in the Senate and House will have more impact under future presidents.

Marshall McLuhan’s statement below—made in a Playboy interview from 1969—argues that the electronic environment, “the new tribal society,” brings an end to “political democracy as we know it.”

By the way, did you notice newsman Bob Schieffer’s book “Overload”? He discusses the overwhelming impact of the new media environment on our understanding of the daily news. Haven’t read the book. I wonder if the name McLuhan ever enters into the discussion. Bob, a little late to the party, but he did pick a good subject.

Political Democracy as we know it is finished

(Marshall McLuhan in 1969 Playboy interview)

Playboy: If personal freedom will still exist—although restriced by certain consensual taboos—in this new tribal world, what about the political system most closely associated with individual freedom: democracy. Will it, too, survive the transition to your global village?

McLuhan: No, it will not. The day of presidential democracy as we know it today is finished. Let me stress again that individual freedom will not be submerged in the new tribal society but it will certainly assume different and more complex dimensions. The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture—a hot box in a cool world—and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and thus would consider the casting of a “private” ballot in a shrouded polling booth, a ludicrous anachronism. The TV networks computers by “projecting” a victor in a Presidential race while the polls are still open, have already rendered the traditional electoral process obsolescent.

Elections made irrelevant-- by the digital age

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)