ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608270054
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
WHILE A cast of thousands dumps punditry by the truckload around the conventions just ended and about to begin, my vote for most telling analysis so far goes to an article that isn't even about the parties' political extravaganzas.
It's a report about a conference in Aspen, Colo., held earlier this month by an unconventional group called the Progress and Freedom Foundation. The conference title: "Cyberspace and the American Dream."
The author of the report is John Heilemann, a correspondent for "The Netizen," which is part of Wired magazine's political coverage distributed by e-mail on the Internet.
Heilemann quotes the head of the Progress and Freedom Foundation as suggesting: "It's hard to imagine that either of the two established parties is going to become the vehicle for the politics of the third wave.''
Well, now.
In his 1980 book, "The Third Wave," Alvin Toffler described the emerging Information Age. The First Wave of civilization corresponded with the agricultural revolution; the second, with the industrial era.
The Third Wave, said Toffler, will see thinking skills become paramount, production and decision-making decentralized, hierarchies flattened, electronic communities formed, political authority devolved, work occurring at home computers and in networks of project groups, lifestyles become more diverse, the environment cherished.
In Toffler's view, political conflict will arise less from partisan or class interests than from the clash between representatives of successive waves. "The Second Wave camp," he wrote, "still includes a majority of the nominal power-holders in our society - politicians, businessmen, union leaders, educators, the heads of the mass media."
All types well represented, of course, at this month's political conventions.
It's not that Third Wave advocates and themes are nowhere to be found in the parties. Self-described New Democrats, prominently including Bill Clinton when he ran for president in 1992, are successors to the so-called Atari Democrats who sought to ride "new ideas" into the future. Clinton has announced the era of big government is over. Vice President Al Gore, a fan of the Information Superhighway, has overseen a "Reinventing Government" initiative attuned to the Third Wave's aversion to bureaucracy.
On the Republican side, House Speaker Newt Gingrich has worked closely with the Progress and Freedom Foundation, and is a longtime apostle of Tofflerism. He took the first steps to put Congress on-line. He proposed giving laptops to impoverished children. He rightly opposed attempts to censor the Internet. Above all, he led the GOP's assault on a central government regarded by Gingrich, with some cause, as bloated and adrift in the Second Wave.
Even so, according to Heilemann, politicians' names barely came up at the conference on Cyberspace and the American Dream. After a series of workshops on computers in education, privacy and free speech on-line, and the nature of property in the digital world, one foundation executive remarked: ``We won't see any of these issues in either of the major party platforms.''
Why the disconnect between the nerds and the pols?
Part of the problem is that most politicians are still caught up in Second Wave paradigms - as if political positioning, party machines, pork barrel and payoffs were still the way to make things happen; as if big government could still call the shots in a global economy. Clinton has proved a better New Democrat campaigner than New Democrat president. And Bob Dole's effort to placate the nostalgic and authoritarian wing of his party, while trying to buy the election with tax cuts, comes across as old-fashioned pandering.
But also contributing to hip high-techers' alienation from politics is the excessive libertarianism with which many of them regard all things governmental. Many - but not all. On this subject, Heilemann quotes approvingly from a magazine piece, "Rage Against the Machine," by Los Angeles Times political writer Ronald Brownstein.
Brownstein outlines the emergence of two competing philosophies: cyber-libertarianism and techno-communitarianism. The latter, he says, "is a turbocharged version of the New Democrat agenda that surfaced in Clinton's 1992 campaign, only to sink in his presidency: downsizing and deregulation combined with targeting federal initiatives in education, training, research, infrastructure, and the reclaiming of the inner cities.
"Techno-Communitarians want ineffective federal job-training programs replaced by vouchers, not eliminated; they would rather reform public education through the creation of charter schools than issue vouchers to parents who could then opt out to private schools.
"It is, the Techno-Communitarians argue, simply naive (one of their favorite words) to expect an unregulated free market to ensure a skilled work force, adequate infrastructure, or sufficient support for basic research."
To which I would add: There are such things as a public sphere and a public good, and a portion of the people at risk of being left behind in the brave new Information Age.
Many Americans are feeling connected to neither cyberspace nor the American Dream. I wonder how relevant they're finding this month's made-for-TV political conventions.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICSby CNB