Beyond parties
To state it plainly, politics is dying. It is becoming so partisan that large parts of the population can barely bring themselves to accept many of the decisions made when the opposing party to the one they favour is in power. This in turn threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the state.
And yet this hyperpartisan debate also leads to hyperparalysis where a blocking minority from one side or the other prevents anything of significance being achieved, further undermining legitimacy.
Such a system deserves to die, along with the ideologies that lie within it.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical of ideology. The idea that a rigid set of beliefs can cover the sum of human hopes and beliefs and activities has never seemed credible.
Political parties are the agents of ideologies, the means by which they have been applied. And the structures of democracy have forced people to vote for one ideology or another.
But in the longer sweep of history this rise of ideological parties will be seen more as an aberration.
So the end of all-encompassing parties spells the end of ideology in the sense that a set of policy options can no longer be imposed on one part of the population by another. Decisions on overarching issues like levels of tax and spending will still need to be aggregated out, but this result would be an aggregate of all the varying ideologies and viewpoints within an administrative region.
Top-down ideology will be replaced by something that represents the complexity of human interaction. With choice not constrained by the limits of a handful of competing ideologies, but devolved down to any individual who wants to make use of the much larger number of available options.
Parties have also empowered politicians as a class of their own separate from those they seek to govern.
As a whole, expectations of the political class seem to fall into two broad categories. There are those who want to be governed by the best and brightest, or those who think politicians should be people who seem 'just like us'. Neither of these options is entirely satisfactory, with the potential to generate politicians who are either out of touch or just not up to the job.
The changes outlined here will take power away from them, whichever category they fall into. And they offer the potential to combine the best of both models in that policy experts can design and make the case for whichever policies they want. If the outcomes are positive then their reputation will grow and individuals can opt into them as they see fit.
So genuine policy experts may find that their influence on governance is increased. But politicians may find themselves going the way of record shop assistants in the age of iTunes.
Some might mourn the death of traditional parties and express concern about the loss of the role they play in existing systems. But it is important not just to take an idealised view of the systemic role of parties but also to remember that they can be ignorant, childish, deceitful, manipulative, sleazy and corrupt. Driving a stake through their hearts would not be an entirely bad thing.
A side effect of this will be a diminution in the influence of the political commentators who currently intermediate between politicians and the public.
Commentators, whose role is already in decline, will be replaced by crowd-sourced reviews of policies from websites, by shared 'playlists' and lessons learned from the experience of those who have actually tried the many policy options.
Reform of the political system will also mean changes to institutional power relations, with potential effects on the relative importance of various administrative bodies as the public decide on their true value.
It is also interesting to note that politics and governance as they exist now require, and are based on, models of the world which inevitably, as with all models, simplify the complexities of reality.
The paradox at the heart of the ideas set out here is that virtual systems of governance driven by the diversity of citizens will be more firmly embedded in reality.
As James Surowiecki wrote, the ability to tap into this knowledge is important because "the crowd is holding nearly a complete picture of the world in its collective brain" [i].
Another effect worth considering is that if citizens are free to change their policy framework preferences at any time, does that mean occasional elections are replaced by permanent political campaigning?
The answer would appear to be that it does, although in practice that is not so different from what takes place at present. And besides which, vigorous and continuing debate is a desirable requirement for a genuinely participative state.
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