Tony Schwartz.
Photo by Dan Wynn. Permission of Anton Schwartz.

Democratism supporter Anton Schwartz, super excellent Seattle and Oakland based tenor saxophonist and an old friend of mine, has been preparing a new edition of The Responsive Chord, by his father, the great media pioneer Tony Schwartz (fb). Tony Schwartz created what I believe is still the most talked about political ad of all time, LBJ’s 1964 Daisy Ad. In addition to making advertisements, Tony Schwartz was an audio documentarian and an all-around deep thinker about media.

And prescient, it turns out. Anton just sent me these paragraphs he came across from the book he’s editing. This is 1973:

Nonpaid media, such as news, and paid political media are disseminated to a vast audience, at great speed, with extraordinary efficiency. However, the flow of information is essentially in one direction. The public cannot easily feed back their opinions, suggestions, and objections. The President can at any moment reach the entire nation via television. But a member of the public cannot reach him, except through an inefficient letter or a vote once every four years. This is not a healthy situation in a participatory democracy.

Rather than condemn electronic media as corrupting forces in politics (a futile, as well as an incorrect position), I suggest that we have not yet even begun to explore the potential of electronic media in creating two-way political communication. The two-way potential of cable networks, and the current availability of telephone as a feedback line to radio or TV, establish a realistic basis for town meetings that include an entire city, state, or even the nation. Similarly, we can use two-way cable or the telephone to instantly poll vast segments of the population on important problems.

Electronic communication does not signal the end of democracy. Rather, it offers the potential of genuine democracy in a nation of over two hundred million people.

Very true, and yet it’s a potential that forty-three years later still hasn’t been realized. That’s what we’re working on here at Democratism: an approach to democratic decision making subtle and dynamic enough to expand our power beyond the range of government, to reshape society with our values.

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