What if Samuel Adams tried to start the Revolution by blogging?

Summary: What is the point of individuals publishing about politics and geopolitics on the internet? These writings — seen as a collective project — tell us much about the current state of the Republic. This post looks at the internet (of which the FM website project is a microcosm) as a mirror of America and draws some useful conclusions. This concludes with the question in the title.

Contents

1. Surveying the scene.
2. An alternative path to reform.
3. Results so far.
4. Reflections on failure.
5. Other posts on this series.
6. For More Information.

(1)  Surveying the scene

Some, like Mish (Mike Shedlock) at Global Economic Trends and Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism have built profitable websites providing information to communities on the Right and Left respectively.  Perhaps the most successful of these is law professor Glenn Reynolds, who has built a mass audience as the Instapundit. Some bloggers have transition to successful careers, building  their audiences into businessess (e.g, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein). Many academics (e.g., economist Brad Delong and attorney Eugene Volokh) write as a natural extension of their professional work. There are thousands of other websites doing variations of these on a smaller scale.

These are tremendous accomplishments. However, what is the service they provide? They provide entertainment and catharsis for the outer party plus self-expression for the authors. The outer party is politically impotent, but likes to believe themselves otherwise. So they write posts or comments, consume information (becoming well-informed). In effect they become fans cheering and booing political actors.

These websites — posts and comments — seldom point to ways for direct political action, beyond voting or (rarely) contacting elected officials. It’s no longer in many (most?) American’s world view that we have responsibility for the actions of our government, which would mandate our involvement — or even that we have the power to run America, which would imply political action as a personal priority for each of us.

Typology for our time: the bourgeois (in the Marxist sense of the property-owning class, the 5% who own 60% of America; details here), the inner party (the leadership class), the outer party (the managers and professionals), the proles (other workers, including the underclass).

(2)  An alternative path to reform, one that might work

Problem recognition is the most difficult step. After 3 years of writing I hit upon what I believe is the clearest formulation of our problem, which I published on July 4, 2006: Forecast: Death of the American Constitution. It’s passionately if not well-written (I’ve learned much since then), but imo still the most valuable post of the 3,106 on the FM website.

But what’s the cure? I grappled with this question for years, slowly realizing that providing information was futile. It’s the Ann Landers’ fallacy. E.g., the numbers of unwed births would drop if young girls in the underclass were told about birth control methods (Ann, they know more about sex than you do).

Finally I stumbled upon a useful path, and in 2009 re-envisioning the FM website as an instrument, however small, to help Americans become politically powerful again — working to retake the reins of America. It’s not a partisan project, as I urge everyone to become active. Liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. Together our collective action will get America back on track.

But I still had no idea, right or wrong, as to the underlying cause of the problem. On New Year’s eve in 2011 I stumbled upon a useful perspective (in response to a comment, as has happened very often):

One of the constants in the comments about American politics is preemptive surrender. We don’t try to use the Constitutional machinery because we’re confident that doing so would be in vain. It’s an ideal excuse for our lazy and feckless generation, betraying the generations of work by our ancestors.

Self-government is neither fast nor easy. When we again step onto that road we might not see the eventual victory; it might lie too far in the distance. But it’s there.

In May 1764 Samuel Adams took his first steps to end British rule in America (see here for details). That same year in Boston the first of the Committees of Correspondence was formed, one of the major tools of the revolution. The Revolution ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

In 1774 Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush founded America’s first anti-slavery society. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868. The government-sponsored oppression of Blacks ended with the great Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

While diagnosis is a step forward, it gave no clue to effective treatment. My breakthrough came in October 2012.

IMO today we are {in terms of political reform} where the Revolution was in the early 1760s. Their response was to form the Committees of Correspondence.

These groups spent a decade laying the political foundation for the revolution.  They prepared answers to the vital questions.  Why was change needed?  Change towards what goal?  And they built the basic machinery: organizing, collecting petitions, developing leaders, fund-raising, etc.

We have the same need; perhaps the same solution will work.  We have hundreds of groups, dozens of coalitions — mostly special interest groups — and thousands of websites. Today they are either apolitical or focused on influencing the two major parties (on a local, State, or national level).  This is similar to the late colonial times. They were able to knit their groups into a larger whole; we should be able to do so as well.

(3)  Results so far

For the past 30 months I’ve attempted to on a small scale help set up something like the Committees — people of varying ideologies interested in political reform. I’ve reached out to other people via personal contact, email, tweets, and comments on websites. I’ve had zero success (nicely complementing my total failure at local political work).

During the years of attempting diagnosis of the Republic’s illness the most frequently requested topic was about specific recommendations for cures. What can we do? I had written several posts about this, but was told these were inadequate. After October 2012 I began to write frequently about this, about the details of organizing political reform.  Now there are almost 5 dozen such posts. They are among the least popular posts (i.e., few readers).

The reaction to my posts during these 30 months — posts totaling roughly a million words — reveals the problem. The comments show the problem even more clearly. The overwhelming majority of comments deny that success is possible. So far as I can tell, we have already made the mental and spiritual change from citizens to subjects. Telling Americans how they can work to fix America is like anti-matter. Americans close their eyes and run the other way.

This was my greatest fear, first expressed in as a cautionary note in an otherwise cheerful 2007 post:

To see where this leads, read Christian Meier’s great biography Caesar.  He describes how the Roman people grew tired of governing themselves, perhaps finding the burden too great to bear. Inevitably, strong men came forward to take this load from the people’s backs.  People who will not govern themselves have no right to complain about the decisions of the elites who rule them.

(4)  Reflections on failure

So this project has failed. I have exhausted my ideas. I described this to one of the brightest people I know, Steve Randy Waldman (writes at Interfluidity), who immediately went to the heart of the issue: “What if instead of forming the Committees of Correspondence, Samuel Adams had become a blogger?”

There probably would have been no revolution. We’d be swearing allegiance to the Queen, eating kidneys for breakfast, and playing soccer and cricket instead of football and baseball. I’d live in Californiashire. For details see this letter from the Queen to us.

More seriously, there is no core constituency for political change.

(5) Other posts in this series

2. What if the Founders’ generation read the news as we do?
3. Samuel Adams started the Revolution because he didn’t have Twitter.

(6)  For More Information

I strongly recommend reading Christian Meier’s great biography Caesar. It’s an inspiring history about the incredible deeds of a great man, but also the story about the decline of a great people. Today’s America is often compared to late imperial Rome, which I consider absurd. It’s seldom compared to late Republican Rome, imo because that analogy is both accurate in many ways and so quite disturbing.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about the decay of the Second Republic (built on the Constitution), and those about ways to reform America — paths to a new politics.

Always remember: revitalization is an inherent capacity of the human soul, the Founders’ machinery remains idle but still powerful, and we are powerful when we act together.