Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

The hidden culprits at Columbine
Two crazy boys pulled the triggers, but lax laws put the guns in their hands.
By Jake Tapper
[12/30/99]

Try him again
Justice for the widow of a dead police officer, cut down in the prime of his life, will not be served by executing a framed man, even if he's guilty.
By Debra Dickerson
[12/29/99]

A tale of two villages
Over which small town will the first American sunrise of the 21st century shine?
By Charles Graeber
[12/24/99]

The hall of shame
From the murder to a football star's pregnant girlfriend to the retirement of four sports icons, 1999 was a bad year to be a sports fan.
By Julian Rubinstein
[12/23/99]

Jerusalem braces for Christian pilgrims
Hordes of tourists are coming to the holy city for millennial celebrations, but a clash between Orthodox and secular Jews has created a ban on Christmas in the city's kosher hotels.
By Flore de Preneuf
[12/23/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But for those of us who live in the Washington area, it's easy to see certain contradictions between the two cultures represented by .gov and .com. If the web is home to individualist geeks and would-be entrepreneurs, Washington plays host to the two-degrees-of-separation-from-real-power crowd.

Those are the folks who are just that close to this or that senator or inhabitant of the White House or well-known media personality. The shared assumption inside the Beltway is that the exercise of power through these established channels still matters -- a lot.

Maybe so. But this faith in traditional, derived power adds an almost quaint air to the nation's capital at the millennial moment. Such beliefs evaporate the further away from Washington one travels, of course, and are downright rare by the time you reach Silicon Valley, where increasing numbers of congressmen seem to be showing up these days, hands outstretched. The irony in this is that the belief that government's day is coming to a close, that a rapid transformation of society is occurring via digital networks, has been an article of faith among the digerati for years.

Even the justice department's aggressive counter-attack via the anti-trust suit against Microsoft has failed to change many minds in the wired world about government's waning power. The only difference is that now tech money flows into the lobbyist firms clustered along K Street like champagne at an election party. As a line item, you might call it "insurance."

As a direct result, however, Congress has suddenly reversed its traditional antagonism to high-tech and Internet issues (remember the Communications Decency Act?) to grant tax breaks for ecommerce and for R&D, to limit liability for stock volitility and Y2K computer failures, and to grant more job visas for immigrant workers. The war on encryption is virtually over, with the defeated National Security Agency in disarray, as Seymour Hersh documented recently in the New Yorker.

The fact that the new tech-friendly policies are furthering the development of a networked economy that undermines the traditional centralized authority of the nation-state itself is rarely mentioned. But if this era does indeed herald "the end of big government," as Bill Clinton famously noted a few years back, where will that leave Washingtonians, the custodians of the old company store?

Perhaps the biggest public policy question facing our society as the millennium turns is barely being discussed inside the United States, though it hangs over everything here just like those winter storm clouds that hover but never seem to burst, and that is: "What's the new role for government?"

In order to find a substantive discussion of this issue in the past year, you would have had to travel quite a ways beyond the Beltway -- over to the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, where near the end of November there was what was called the Third Way Conference. President Clinton was there, along with other nascent globalists like Tony Blair (Britain), who's just learned how to send e-mail; Gerhard Schroeder (Germany); Lionel Jospin (France); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil).

Clinton and Blair, bouyed at home by their robust economies, argued for a new role for government -- empowering citizens through universal education and access to technology so all can participate fully in the new economy. They consider their philosophy "progressive governance," i.e., not strictly a public sector nor a private sector option, which is to say, a Third Way.

France's Jospin worried out loud: "I see that we have a new economy but it's not going to sweep away history, it's not going to sweep away the various social groupings and it must not sweep away the nation-state. I'll accept a networked economy but I don't want a world dominated by networks, because that will be run by the private sector."

Clinton later agreed with Jospin's position: "We'll say yes to the market economy, but no to the market society." He went on to say that "what we're striving for is to replace a divided way of looking at politics and talking about our common lives with a unifying theory."

Next page | Meanwhile, back at the asylum...