Net or no Net, the odds are against the Libertarian Party, or any other third party being the vehicle for a new politics. Hostile state electoral rules and pervasive media skepticism almost assure defeat. Besides, even if elected, a third-party president, unaccompanied by a supporting wave of third-party congressmembers, would be even more thwarted than Bill Clinton.
Predictor: Kinney, Jay
Prediction, in context:For a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Jay Kinney, publisher and editor of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, writes: ”Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on libertarians, pointing out their sizeable presence on the Net. Still, Net or no Net, the odds are against the Libertarian Party, or any other third party being the vehicle for a new politics. Hostile state electoral rules and pervasive media skepticism almost assure defeat. Besides, even if elected, a third-party president, unaccompanied by a supporting wave of third-party congressmembers, would be even more thwarted than Bill Clinton … When Wired informally e-mailed a cross section of participants in the budding digital culture, no clear-cut political identity emerged. ‘Liberal,’ ‘progressive,’ ‘libertarian,’ ‘anarchist,’ and ‘conservative’ all scored between 10 percent and 17 percent as self-applied labels. And a sizable chunk came up with intriguing if indecipherable oxymorons: ‘progressive conservative’; ‘virtual populist’; ‘market-oriented progressive’; and the ever-popular ‘anarcho-emergentist republican.'”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: Democracy
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: ‘Anarcho-Emergentist-Republicans’: Is There a New Politics Emerging in the Net/Cyberspace/Digital Culture?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/netpolitics_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney