I’ve had a speech Gore gave in a tab for a few weeks, and I finally got around to reading it. It’s an astute analysis of the situation. But I don’t think his call for a return to past values is going to work. The co-option of any major mode of communication by concentrated power is the norm. We don’t have enough unrest to staff a reform movement. Revolutions are led by those born to power who lose their inheritance, then lead those born without power. But sacrifice is hard, and people need strong motivation to make dramatic change. Gore qualifies as such a leader (as do many others), but the unrest isn’t there.
I don’t intend this as a statement of ultimate truth, more a skeptical prediction based on an iffy heuristic. I do however encourage responses. =)
i think i have a hard time taking much of what anyone involved in our two party system has to say very seriously. everyone stands pretty much where there constituents want them to stand and it kind of negates everything else. democrats can now attack the war, but its an opposition that wasn’t voiced by many before the fact so how much weight does it carry? hindsight is always 20/20 and all that.
(and yeah, i didn’t read it all)
It’s long, I don’t entirely blame you for not reading it. Never has everyone had time to deal with the leadership dialogue. Particularly those who have little prospect of being heard. It’s hardly a productive or uplifting use of my time. But, he was mostly talking about the structure of media, public exchange, and political discussion.
Cynical scu doesn’t think it’s that anyone really stands where constituents want them to stand, so much as standing where they want, with as few concessions as it takes to get them eleceted. (Barbara Lee being a noteworthy exception).
Many stand for self-interest. Several stand for the interests of those they know and associate with, and given the highly fragmented nature of our society and the difficulty obtaining power, it’ll go to the powerful.
I didn’t read it, but I agree with what you said… people aren’t quite oppressed enough to care yet.
Movement without the indefinite article
Some context for this speech: Gore gave these remarks at a conference called “We Media,” put on by the Media Center of the American Press Institute. He was speaking to an audience of several hundred media-heads, including many, many people who’ve taken a significant interest in the nascent ‘citizen journalism’ movement, which includes but is not limited to blogs, Wikipedia, and cameraphone images from the London tube bombings.
I imagine this speech must have been hella boring to anyone not ensconced in that particular bubble.
Furthermore, although I’m guessing this knowledge is more common, Gore debuted a new television network in August. So this speech was mostly grandstanding to an audience of a particular bent about his having democratized television. It’s couched in the language of political change and the start of democracy and all that, but really that was just a good lead-in to some old-fashioned self-promotion.
In general, this whole “past values” thing is highly dodgy to me, considering that a) democracy? Really not all that old. and b) any accounting of “past values” pretty much puts me and my kin-types right in the back of the bus, which tends to take the edge off my nostalgia.
Please also note that Gore refers to a decades-old Walter Lippman quote to describe the status of our present discourse. If it was “no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy” in Lippman’s day, then what past are we pining for again?
History repeats itself, but those patterns it ultimately chooses to reenact can only be seen in hindsight. Will the American Empire implode all Roman-style? Will it deflate, like the British? Will our failure to properly steward our resources result in a Mayan-esque depopulation? Who knows? We can find strong parallels in all these scenarios. Maybe it’ll lurch on for a while. I don’t know. Revolution just seems like so much drama. (Is this what you mean by ‘the unrest isn’t there’?)
Matt