The "armies of the disaffected" and the need to reform representative democracy.

Halstead and Lind talk about the armies of the disaffected as the new mainstream of American politics:

For good or bad, the Information Age has changed the nature of American democracy. In most high-profile matters, the public is no longer a passive bystander —its voice is heard through almost instantaneous public opinion polls, focus groups, and various public interest organizations. As Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans discovered in the mid-1990s, those who veer from the new center pay the price, as Mr. Gingrich did with his political life. America's silent majority is no longer so silent.

These armies of disaffected, independent-minded voters, together with a large number of centrist Republicans and Democrats, are neither conservative nor liberal in the traditional sense. Polls show there are majorities of Americans who are socially tolerant yet supportive of law and order, fiscally conservative yet accepting of government intervention to ensure economic fairness and security, committed to racial unity yet skeptical of race-based affirmative action, concerned about the strenght of our economy yet equally concerned about the health of our environment, and deeply committed to both electoral and educational reform. Needless to say, Americans who share all these views do not feel at home in either of today's major parties.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 216).

This is also a contemporary trend that is happening elsewhere. Many American analysts tend to be quite inward-looking, assuming that most social trends they notice in the US are either unique or perhaps even the direct consequence of some sort of mythical American creativity. In reality, societies are evolving in a similar manner here and there. There are, of course, different stages of development from place to place, but once two countries reach a given state of development they experience similar social, political and economic trends. It's the labeling that may be different —and that, incidentally, may also lead to some confusions about the uniqueness of the underlying phenomenons. Here in Europe, political analysts are more prone to refer to these armies of the disaffected as non-partisan or even new middle class. Yet, the reality they are referring to is about the same: individuals who are less prone to see things through the ideologically charged visions of yesteryear, centered on a pragmatic approach to the problems that prizes the search for solutions rather than the discovery of all-encompassing systems of thought and, above all, more difficult to predict when it comes to their voting patterns. The situation, then, is pretty similar on this other side of the Atlantic, which also makes our challenges about the same: how to adapt our political institutions (i.e., representative democracy) to live up to these new expectations generated by the information society and a more educated, more sophisticated population. We need to reform democracy to adapt to these changes, and so far there are few radically innovative proposals in this regard that I am aware of. Halstead and Lind are no exception to this either.