The Electronic Republic by Lawrence Grossman What Comes Next by James P Pinkerton
McCarraher, Eugene
ELITIST CYBERBABBLE The Electronic Republic Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age Lawrence Grossman Viking, $2435,290 pp. What Comes Next The End oi Big Government and the New Paradigm...
...A former assistant in the Bush administration, Pinkerton is jokey where Grossman is earnest: he likens Bush to Prufrock, "walking on the beach, pondering his peach-till the voters woke him, and he drowned...
...Populism has always been an elastic term, encompassing farmers fighting the railroads and suburbanites imploring billionaires like Ross Perot to buy their government...
...With our fax machines and on-line services, we will make our laws as easily and directly as we order silverware from QVC...
...A visionary discourse of technological democracy and laissez-faire capitalism describes the future...
...The vaunted "democracy" of postindustrial business is nothing more than the newest fad in managerial ideol-ogy...
...To combat this, Pinkerton proposes a "New Paradigm" of government to replace New Deal-Great Society liberalism...
...Sometimes, his hypocrisy gets the better of him, as when he laments that Bush "dissed vision...
...Pinkerton urges us to plunge into what Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, and other futurists have called the Third Wave economy of information and services...
...Given the fact that two-thirds of eligible voters did not vote in the last congressional election, "populism" is probably a misnomer...
...Jobs will become automated out of existence, capital will slosh across national boundaries and global financial markets, and the privileged will retreat from public services into a commodified and quasi-feudalized realm of education, transportation, and communication...
...Alarmed by the nation's widening class and racial divisions, Pinkerton imagines a bleak "Cyber future" straight out of William Gibson's "cyberpunk" fictional blend of high technology, corporate conspiracy, and paranoia...
...Good: "privatization" (though the erosion of public services and spirit figure prominently in the cyberpunk dystopias) and "federalism" (relying on the wisdom of the states and localities...
...Its premium on "flexibility" in technology and skill means greater instability for workers and greater power for the professional-managerial class...
...The more visionary Republicans are promising a brave new democratic world of communications technologies...
...It seems much easier to whine about high taxes and demoralizing wel-fare checks than to question the Pentagon's ravenous appetite for the public treasury...
...Even though, at this writing, the much-heralded "Republican Revolution" appears to have stalled, the GOP has engineered a remarkable transformation in the nation's political culture...
...Convinced that calls for term limits, lower taxes, and balanced budgets constitute a revival of "populism," Grossman argues in The Electronic Republic that the new technologies give the people "a seat of their own at the table of political power...
...For instance, one of the significant elements in the New Deal-cold war order was the military-industrial complex-a central component of the post-Depression political economy about which Pinkerton has nothing to say...
...Welcome to the free-wheeling callousness of Corporate Hip...
...Postmodern capitalism," he argues, has democratized the corporation...
...Yet his antidote for corporate power includes little more than antitrust enforcement, a public telecommunications trust fund, and the old liberal bromide of education-none of which seems feasible or attractive in the current political climate...
...He shows symptoms of technobabble, classifying historical periods in the terms of computer programs: "bureaucrat," "americrat," ad nauseam...
...Eugene McCarraher teaches humanities at Villanova University...
...What Comes Next The End oi Big Government and the New Paradigm Ahead James P. Pinkerton Hyperion, $24.95,404 pp...
...When even the Democratic president announces that "the era of big government is over," one can be sure that we have bid adieu to the New Deal ancien regime...
...But in Pinkerton's manifesto, as well as in the discourse of Republican freshmen and countless business gurus, they serve as Newspeak for an aggressively accumulative and culturally libertarian generation of managers and professionals...
...Still, Pinkerton seems a user-friendly member of the Republican intelligensia...
...Grossman's book signals the demise of the gray-flanneled liberalism that reigned among many corporate cultural professionals for a generation after World War II, and compelled the nation to confront poverty, racism, and military madness...
...Pinkerton's own paper, New York Newsday, expired from the pressures exerted by just these forces...
...He recoils from racism and homophobia, and deftly maps the fissures in the Republican landscape, charting both the fault line between "culturalists" (Pat Robertson) and "economists" (Jack Kemp) and the generational crevice between "regulars" (Bob Dole) and "movement" types (Gingrich...
...Eugene McCarraher You say you want a revolution...
...Since these same malefactors are already absorbing the latest technological advances, Grossman fears that "the information superhighway will not be a freeway but an automated private road...
...Indeed, like his Third Wave cohorts, Pinkerton is better at demonizing government than at understanding its relationship to the economy after World War II...
...Besides, Grossman himself reminds us that the mainstream media "are an integral part of the national and international corporate community...
...Thus, contrary to Grossman, Kevin Phillips, and other acolytes of the folk, "populism" is not necessarily anti-elitist: Rush Limbaugh's bellowing sounds siren-sweet to corporate ears, while Perot (a representative populist in Grossman's view) embodies the technocrat as tribune...
...By contrast, in What Comes Next James P. Pinkerton exemplifies the new species in American political culture: the rock 'n' roll Republican...
...Democracy by talk-radio and electronic bulletin board spells the end of bureaucratic government benevolence, so the theory states...
...So in one crucial respect Pinkerton does articulate a "new paradigm...
...This emerging political culture perplexes Lawrence Grossman, a former president of both NBC News and PBS as well as the current president of Horizons Cable Network...
...A New Left language of radical democracy has become part of a vocabulary of postindustrial elites who yoke the desire for freedom to the authority of experts and the unpredictable coercions of the marketplace...
...Every buzzword usually considered the rhetorical property of the politically correct-choice, diversity, empowerment, decentralization-makes a cameo appearance...
...businesses now desire the "maximum feasible participation" of their employees...
...Yet his "new" paradigm bears an uncanny resemblance to Goldwater Republicanism...
...Moreover, Pinkerton distorts the changing face of corporate capitalism...
...Bad: the "government-political complex" and the twin horrors of "rote redistributing" and "ministerial mandating" (the creeping socialism argument, easily refuted by a glance at the distribution of wealth...
...Really...
...Modern capitalism features, among other delights, temporary employment, automated production technology, and the globalization of markets in labor and capital...
...Americans, Pinkerton warns, will be subjected to a marketplace whose vectors they will neither see nor understand...
...How the growing number of part-time, low-wage workers will pay their way in this Privatopia, Pinkerton never tells us...
Vol. 123 • June 1996 • No. 11
