The Internet is an enormously powerful tool for politics. It has the potential to connect up people with unique views spread out over the country. Ideas and interests that were divided up by location can be united via a cable modem. It also has the potential to bring in new voices into politics through the ease and low cost of the communication. There are a thousands new ways to organize and protest --blogs, listservs, on-line petitions, pay pal donation sites, congressional e-mail.
But not much has happened on that front. Examples of successful activism engineered through the blogs are few and far between.
Glenn Reynolds and NZ Bear are working to stamp out congressional pork. She smiles. That's nice, guys. Good luck with that. When you're done, please stop global warming, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the mean girls in eighth grade.
Their intentions are admirable. I guess Reynolds got all fired up about pork after Tierney wrote an op-ed on the subject a few weeks ago. Their intentions are admirable, but, but, but... Everybody hates other people's pork, but they sure love their own. Senator Pork got elected by his home district because he put in a nice rec center in their town and built that army post that employs just about everybody. Because congress is elected by the voters in the home towns and not by their party, then it is absolutely in the interest of every congressman to keep adding on fluff to every major bill and to get the most for their constituency. (Dan Drezner channels Jack Nicholson and responds to Reynolds)
Even though Reynolds is misguided, I do like a nice futile project and am keeping an eye on how this all works out.
Speaking of yelling into the wind, I am going to blog on Monday on the topic of Special Education. I've got a little group of other bloggers also blogging on this topic. Let's see how our minor effort at internet activism works out.