An Article by:

Russell Cole

Bad for Democracy is scheduled for publication in September of 2008

In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.

American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism. Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.

In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise – although thorough – counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment. As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated – those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government – had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.

With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it – which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office – has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.

Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.

However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency – an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic – that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined. We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair – where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election – with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency – which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.

As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.

Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a “Decider,” as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.

The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities – a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government – the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.

People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.

In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:

http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/theories-of-extreme-democracy/; http://www.extremedemocracy.com/.

Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.

The emergence of social knowledge – facilitated through the device of web based communications – is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.

Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect. Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.

All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy – a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities – is not only a deontological ideal – a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable – but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.

In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:

Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another. What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.

The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.

Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations – similarly to the starfish and the Apaches – cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems – or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.

The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations – or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics – possess a dual function:

Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog – a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public – in order to coordinate their activities. Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection – those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards – we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.

As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites – which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm – following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.

However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms – the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity – the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.

Russell Cole

Tags: activism, constitution, decentralization, democracy, executive powers, government, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, sociology, sociology web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, self-governance, Social Change, Sociology, activism, executive powers
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As the Populist Party of America grows in size, we are faced with some challenging obstacles and difficult decisions to make regarding the future of the Party: i.e., What type of structure should be given to the Populist Party of America? Should we strive for a strong national organization? Or, contrarily, should we stress decentralization, choosing to focus on the development of state and local parties without any overbearing emphasis placed upon the integration of the various pockets of Populist America into a monolithic formation? Thus far, I have been exposed to two contrasting visions for the future organization of the Party, as it continues to grow in size.

There is an argument that maintains the necessity of an organization to possess some kind of integrated structure, which would include members who would participate in planning and problem solving. This managerial core would contribute to the development of different actionable plans that could later be introduced to the membership at large, providing some options that have already been delineated, from which the membership might select to adopt and implement as a Party platform. This proposal calling for the Party to possess a kernel, consisting of more active members, who would be inclined to offer centralized planning for the Party as a whole, stands in stark opposition to the other conception for the appropriate structuring of the Party, as it continues to expand.

This proposed design for the Party - which stands in opposition to proposals for centralization - would not provide for an organization with a centralized nervous system. Alternatively, the Party would be allowed to proliferated along lateral dimensions while failing to create an integrated hierarchy of offices.

To relate this ideology of decentralized politic to contemporary sociological literature, the jargon that has come into fashion, as a result of the studies upon the Informational Economy, which were initiated by Manuel Castells, uses the reference, Networked Politics, to designate instances of decentralized patterns of political praxis.

This new form of political mobilization often transcends the geographical boundaries imposed by states and governments. Furthermore, Networked Politics are understood as a by-product of what has been termed by Castells as Informationalism, which simply designates the technological paradigm underlying the expansion of Internet communicative infrastructures. However, the type of sociopolitical opposition that is formed through the networking of diverse agents and groups via the communication channels provided for by the Web - despite the transnational character of these network configurations - fails to negate the embodiment of geographical locality and the coalescence of interests among advocates who reside in physical proximity to one another; thus, allowing for embodied interaction.

This condition, where localized concerns are situated and understood in the context of larger geo-economic and geopolitical social forces, has been referenced under the neologism, glocalization. This concept fits in well with the social theoretical framework that has been introduced by Castells, who discards with the global democracy thesis propounded by Habermas and Rorty - which was founded upon the notion of a cosmopolitan culture - in favor of an understanding of the globalizing trends, facilitated by Informationalism, where multiculturalism will be preserved; only such cultural differences will become circumspect within a global forum of manifold cultural identities, who will participate in a world representational space in order to express their uniqueness as well as discover the peculiar attributes of others.

It is here, in the conception of glocalization, that I propose as a guiding post serving as an indication for the appropriate trajectory in which Populist America should transverse, as the Party enters into its future stages of development, as it continues to grow larger.

[Future installment: the concretization of glocalization in the praxes of Populist America]

Russell Cole

Tags: centralization, communications, community, decentralization, Global, government, National, politics, populist party, populist party america, Populist Party organizational structure, Social Change, society, third parties
Categories: Commentary, National, Global, Society, Populist Party, government, Decentralization, Politics, Third Parties, Social Change
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Defining Web 2.0

The emergence of Web 2.0 has attracted negative commentary by people who do not entirely understand what Web 2.0 is and, consequently, what it entails. Admittedly, there is some truth to the relationship inferred to exist between Web 2.0 and the quantum increases in bandwidth that are primarily being created through the investments of ISP’s. However, the bandwidth improvements are only a requisite for Web 2.0, and they do not constitute one of its defining characteristics. Furthermore, as long as Net Neutrality is maintained, we need not consume ourselves with issues related to the loss of the marginal degree of egalitarianism that current embodies the distribution of bandwidth - which currently provides some measures to ensure that high-speed connections are obtainable to large amounts of the population.

This is not to say that more does not need to be done to improve accessibility of high-speed Internet connections for all segments of the population. Certainly, there exists a gap between the strata in American society who can afford broadband and those who lack private access to this resource. Additionally, and perhaps more pressingly, due to inequalities in education and so forth, there exists vast discrepancies in the distribution of the cultural capital necessary for a social agent to advantageously deploy the communicative technologies engendered by the Information Age and the institutionalization of the Internet. These matters deserve the utmost attention and concern. However, the inequalities stated above do not qualify as potential polemics against Web 2.0, because Web 2.0, itself, certainly does not constitute an antecedent to a present or potential system of stratification, defining the resources available to differing segments of the population.

Web 2.0 is a paradigmatic shift whose inception is rooted in the original innovations of open source software designers who detected patterns emerging in the social activities comprising the software projects in which they were engaged. Communicative inventions, such as the Wiki, which were originally innovated in order to open source programming communities to work more efficiently, were appropriated toward considerations that extended beyond software programming and onto social knowledge production in general.

Web 2.0 involves a flattening of the traditional vertical structures creating a hierarchy of privileges for producing various forms of Truth. Academic knowledge is quickly becoming something not determined by an oligarchy within its respective disciplines. Additionally, technological truth - which can be understood as knowledge that provides a legitimate and marketable product, serviceable to the needs of end-user - is becoming a province not monopolized by dominant corporations. Indeed, the social classifications that have defined the resources available to individuals, assuming various positions in these systems of stratification, are becoming fuzzy, and, in all likelihood, will dissolve and discontinue to inhibit or facilitate Truth-production by individuals and collectivities.

To use the economic sphere of society as an example, the traditional boundaries between manufacturers, distributors, and consumers have blurred. All parties involved in this new configuration of development and distributive practices possess the ability to assume different capacities in the relationships between and among identities within the market. Although, it pains me considerably, there is a semblance of truth to the conditions predicted in the “Army of Davids.”

However, this does not entail – necessarily - the extension of a form of rationalization, hypothesized by early theorists who had detected the changing state of modern societies as they transitioned into a post-industrial state. Increasingly, the type of intellectual work in Technocracy occurs in a state where labors are detached from material conditions, leading to a result where contributions to products are no longer reducible to tangible materials. Consequently, the value of labor defies estimation, according to traditional parameters, which might calculate the value of work according to the labor hours consumed in the production a particular commodity that has value in the market.

Knowledge consumers have been equipped with the necessary serviceable objects needed to transform the informational content provided on servers for all of the public to peruse into forms that reflect their own aesthetics and experiences. Once again, the traditional roles assumed among the many, who have been existentially constrained until now within the social compound of the consumer identity, are no longer as rigid as they were previously. The end-user can now assume the role of a provider, and vice versa. The primary dynamic determining what inventions will take hold is the receptivity to the idea and its manifestation by an inclusionary public of counterparts. I hesitate to use the term, peers, due to its incorporation into the vocabulary of the academy, used by this exclusionary institution to describe its own practices.

The aspects, which Web 2.0 instantiates, are better illuminated through a concrete exemplar, which is provided below. This representation comes from a Webpage belonging to a site currently under development by the Populist Party of America:

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Exposing Constitutional Violations by Congress

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This is a page from a site that remains in the sandbox. Nevertheless, it continues to be useful as an exemplar of Web 2.0 designs. What is of significance are the direct links for entering the URL into social bookmarking services; a form of social knowledge construction, where the contents of the Internet are discovered and indexed according to the collaborative efforts of a Plebeian, inclusionary public, providing for a search application that generates, according to most, more relevant results than traditional syntactically structured search engines. Although social bookmarking sites continue to rely upon keyword searches, one can expect that these services will become more sophisticated as the Semantic Web begins to take hold. Regardless of their current dependence upon conventional search engine mechanics, the tags entered by contributors are more accurate and detailed, creating a social knowledge forum that continues to grow and continues to increase the relevancy of the results generated from searches. Additionally, there is another dynamic operative within these types of forums, people do not enter into the servers data base any site that they happen to run across. Rather, there is a process of selectivity based upon aesthetics and tested utility. Therefore, results generated from queries conduct in the API’s belonging to Web 2.0 services produce results generated from processes entirely different from the syntactical operations deployed by conventional search engines. The selectivity of links directed toward contents - assumed to possess the highest degrees of relevancy - are a result of organic processes.

The processes - collectively forming what is tantamount to a chaotic system – are not reproducible by the syntactically structured operations embedded in the search engines provided by servers such as Google or MSN. Although the engines, such as Google’s search, can index vastly more contents belonging to domains and their pages - an accomplishment achieved through the deployment of spiders that transverse the links directing the spider to additional contents - it is unlikely that these engines will ever acquire the capacity to retrieve results that are as relevant as those produced by social search engines.

Another salient aspect to the Webpage represented above are the RSS links located on the bottom of the page. RSS in another feature of Web 2.0 that allows for the real time update of content modifications. XML meta-tags are fed through a syndication that is often rendered using an Internet browser or, sometimes, standalone applications. These feeds contain citations of links that allow for an end-user to access a page that he or she infers to have content of interest from the descriptions in the meta-tags. It should be pointed out, once again, the functionality engendered by Really Simple Syndication is considered an instance of Web 2.0; a conclusion based upon its role as a Web component. Additionally, RSS is not comprised of static content, which is an attribute associated with most of Internet 1.0. This consideration brings into the forefront a marked difference between the two paradigms: Web 2.0 is comprised of servers displaying content not authored by the service provider in way that allows for only the original form of the media assuming a static state. Instead, Web 2.0 usually designates electronic media that is in a constant state of flux, typically expansion, most often integration with content initially provided by other servers, and collaboration among the members of the inclusionary public that care to contribute to its refinement, augmentation, and extensibility, which translates into magnified functionality.

The open source project known as WordPress presents an embodiment of all of the aforementioned attributes. Wordpress is a weblog programming project that allows for a community of programmers to add to the extent of its extensibility, rendering it, in a sense, limitless. Some of the ethics preemptive in the Wordpress ethos are parsimony, which allows for the easy comprehension of the programming; thus, facilitating its continued expansion by a diversely trained and aesthetically disposed community of peers; (this pretentious textual contrivance is intended to signified the conventional term, peer, with a modified sense that conveys an entirely voluntary and inclusionary public of counterparts); a distinction that has significance when juxtaposed with the sense peer acquires within the context of discourse emanating from the academy. Also, the Wordpress project is keenly aware of aesthetics. This illuminates another thematic quality that is pervasive within the culture of Web 2.0. Utility and aesthetics are not discontinuous properties. Rather, the two competing spheres of considerations find themselves fused into a unified type of praxis that emphasizes functionality and aesthetics through a single modality of expression. The synthetic conglomeration of intellectual considerations is no longer a dichotomy of competing concerns that requires the partial negation of one to accommodate the other. Instead, the product exists as one in the same, where aesthetics fall under the scope of pragmatics; a conceptualization of design that is congruent with definitions put forth by those responsible for the inception of the philosophy.

Social Knowledge Production

When I first stumbled onto the communicative capacities of the Web when engaged in a bizarre circumstance with a corrupt University, which was attempting to conceal its
negligence, so not to lose a tremendously large grant, I made the precipitous prediction that the Internet and the Blogosphere would dislodge the disciplinarian monopoly of knowledge production. Publicity was no longer the sole propriety of the elevated statuses in society who had acquired the necessary prestige symbols to endow their speech-acts with the property of Truth, or, at the very minimum, the privilege to be subjected to the dialogical mechanisms that adjudicated which externalized speech-acts would be accepted as
objectivity. I saw in this very medium of communication a possibility of circumventing the established institutions of gate-keepers who effectively passed judgment on what discursive contributions would enter into the textual domains that embody the stature of the academy. I went so far as to predict the slow demise of the academy altogether; at least in the sense of the Social Sciences.

The prophecy I was bold enough to render at the time remains in a state of limbo with competing forces vying to shape the communicative possibilities of the Internet in a fashion that either engenders or preserves their vest interests. Undoubtedly, the controversy over the deregulation of Net Neutrality is a part of this conflict. Those who have the material means will be in a position that grants them access to a larger audience, and consumers of the higher strata of services will enjoy content inaccessible to the plebeian class of the
populace. The distribution of the cultural capital will be configured to reflect preexisting inequalities in society, and the hope of democracy once fostered by the Internet will be loss.

We must not lose heart, however, become the verdict is yet to be announced with respect to the future of Information Technology in society. Subversive discourse still finds a home on the Internet, and, indeed, has provided spheres of communication that are robust and argumentative. The Green Party, for instance, and, more particularly, the Green Alliance have formed online chat forums that possess ongoing dialogue covering various concerns, all of which are germane to the Red-Green current of political discourse. What is troubling, however, is the absence of any clear translation from Internet based communication and dialogue and political mobilization. Of course, groups, such as MoveOn.org have built influential advocacy groups with a progressive agenda. Yet, I find this unsatisfactory because it is roughly a top-to-bottom organization, where decisions are rendered by elites in the organization, and, subsequently, the masses who participate in these movements are left with the option of contributing money or signing worthless petitions. A more extreme
example, which is, in fact, laughable, are the Internet mass mailings made by the Democratic Party, conducted under the pretenses of Grass-roots, which only solicit contributions from the members of this robust grass-roots movement.

Other forms of social-knowledge production offer a more penetrating glimpse into the democratic possibilities of the Web. The Wikipedia is the most popular and salient exemplar of this type of deliberative, egalitarian knowledge-building. The are no requisites with
regards to status, which might prohibit one from participating in the generation of contents possessed by the Wikipedia server. In other words, unlike traditional disciplinarian forms of knowledge, there are no status symbols that one must acquire to be considered a legitimate contributor to the particular discourse both forming and emanating from a disciplinary matrix. Knowledge in this sense is democratic and any member of the Demos who possesses the discursive skill need to captivate an audience - regardless of his or her social strata outside of the public sphere of dialogue - can effectively persuade the mob to embrace policies according positions articulated in his sophistries.

For the Athenian form of democracy to persist, civic egalitarianism had to cherished and safe-guarded from potentially corrupting influences. The constant fear of a faction acquiring a disproportionate amount of power was a real concern and precipitated the manifestation of institutions where public servants were selected by lottery as opposed to status symbols that might be conflated with elitism. This is not to say that the Athenians did not have elites, but the term, elite, had a different sense in juxtaposition to the meaning it often acquires during its contemporary usage. An elite, according to the Athenians, was an individual who demonstrated exceptional skills in a variety of contexts. Nonetheless, an elite was not someone who was defined by his or her position of power. In other words, the classification, elite, did not translate into political privilege. Elitism was related to the stylization that defined one’s character, not to a position of power that might be procured by a citizen belonging to the Polis.

Russell Cole

For more work on this subject visit the

Sociology of Web 2.0

Tags: democracy, direct democracy, extreme democracy, midwest alliance populist america, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, sociology, sociology web 2.0, web 2.0, web 2.0 democracy
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, Russell Cole's Blog, Web 2.0, Extreme Democracy, Sociology
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