by publius
Early last week, President Obama – somewhat out of the blue – said quite bluntly that he supported net neutrality. Policy-wise, that’s great. But it’s also sort of amazing that net neutrality has come this far.
Think about it – net neutrality has no well-funded lobby. There are literally legions of savvy industry lobbyists fighting against it. And it’s not clear whether the issue has any obvious political benefits with the public-at-large. From a public choice perspective, net neutrality should be dead. But there was Obama last week, saying very good things.
And there’s a larger story here. What’s interesting about the fight for net neutrality – or “openness” – is that it will illustrate whether things like organizing and grassroots pressure actually work. I think they do – and I think that the progress on Internet openness is a testament to those efforts. But the jury’s still out on that.
But more broadly, we’re seeing many of these same questions in the fight over the larger Democratic agenda. Indeed, what’s most interesting – and exciting – about the fight for things like health care reform and cap and trade is that they potentially challenge the more depressing predictions of public choice theory. In other words, these major reforms would (if enacted) challenge the notion that democracies are primarily controlled by narrow interest groups.
Before I go on, I know that public choice theory covers an enormous range of ideas and camps, etc. So for purposes of this post, I’m referring to the idea that intensely-committed minorities run the show in majoritarian democracies. Conor Friedersdorf captured the idea quite well a few days ago (though his post is making a somewhat different point overall):
That’s basically the idea of public choice I’m using here. And he could be right. I hope he’s not, but it’s a powerful critique that progressives shouldn’t ignore. What’s promising, though, is that the ambition and content of the Democratic agenda gives some hope to the non-skeptics (for now, anyway).