Click On Democracy by Grant Reeher

Author:Grant Reeher [STEVE DAVIS, LARRY ELIN, AND GRANT REEHER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2012-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

The People's Campaign

Though dedicated to action and anchored in discourse, the left-leaning political coalition known as the People's Campaign and the attendant stories of Keith Joseph and Kristina Bas supply a telling example of the Internet's value in building and sustaining communities of belief. The People's Campaign formed around two common purposes—the challenge to the established political order in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the reliance on authentic, broad-based democratic political participation within the coalition. Bas's and Joseph's activities in the People's Campaign were informed by deeply held beliefs, which were in turn catalyzed and sustained by political action. Members of the coalition disagreed on some matters of philosophy and tactics—as the left is wont to do—but they remained connected through the basic concept and practice of democracy. In their case the Internet was woven into traditional local political organizing, and this organizing extended to those who were less well-off.

However, the Internet's role in the People's Campaign also suggests two deep challenges to effectively using the Internet to build social capital, which we have discussed in earlier chapters. First, the electronic discussions at times threatened to be only that: disgruntled individuals airing their gripes and exorcising their political demons. Second, the digital divide dogged the organizers. As Joseph trenchantly observes, the Internet inverts the political problem posed by traditional mass media: On one hand, representatives of the poor can easily place their point of view in the new medium, but the poor themselves have difficulty accessing it. On the other hand, the Internet did allow the coalition to discover and connect with a similar group in Florida and also helped the coalition to sustain itself after the local election, which it lost decisively.

In November 2000 twenty-eight-year-old house painter Keith Joseph ran for city council in New Brunswick, New Jersey, along with two other unlikely candidates in that hardscrabble college town on the Raritan River. Tired of watching the same political machine win election after election, usually unopposed and, in their view, always unresponsive to the working poor, Joseph and others formed their own political party. They used traditional forms of neighborhood canvassing, public events, raucous meetings, and the Internet to organize, communicate, and recruit. In the process, they formed an archetype of the community of belief. Existing partly online and partly face-to-face, the grassroots political movement labored through the pains of birth, growth, adulthood, and ultimately defeat, then lived on in cyberspace many months after its loss at the polls.

PHOTO 6.2A Keith Joseph

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