THE NEW POWER LINES

The first presidential election in the digital age may have spoken volumes about the growing irrelevancy of old-line industrial politics. Even the protracted fight over Florida’s 25 electors--that is, who the next president will be--doesn’t seem to have emotionally engaged the general public. True, neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush offered a compelling choice. But something deeper seems to be going on.

Technology-driven prosperity, and its attendant problems, are not the creation of political parties but of forces that swirl well beyond the purview of political leaders. For example, few would ascribe the dramatic improvement in U.S. productivity in the 1990s to President Bill Clinton, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott or House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. That’s one reason why there may be little teeth-gnashing by the public and business leaders about the inevitable political deadlock ahead in Washington.

This relative calm may reflect an understanding that in the digital age, as opposed to the industrial, there is not much Washington can do to help the economy. The driving force behind today’s economic and social dynamics does not lie in the creation of physical assets such as railroads, ports or electrical lines, in which federal power has a role. Rather, it’s in the rapid evolution of communications, biological and other technologies, most of which take place in a highly decentralized, globalized private sector.

Yet, it would be mistake to extrapolate from this, as some conservatives do, that government, or the public realm in general, is unimportant in the digital age. Paradoxically, the freedoms unleashed by telecommunications technology, allowing people and companies unprecedented liberty to roam across the globe, make geography critical to wealth creation for any community. By recasting the imperatives of place and economics, the digital revolution diminishes Washington’s influence but provides a powerful economic spur for the reanimation of locally based institutions. As news, currency and technologies flow seamlessly and cheaply across national borders, localities and even small towns recognize the need to defend their geography against ever mounting global competition.

As a result, the new public focus across the nation will not be national “competitiveness,” as in the 1970s and 1980s, but the far different challenge of building successful communities that can compete in the Information Age. In this paradigm, the real action takes place not in Washington but much closer to home--at county seats, city councils, local boards and commissions, and perhaps most profoundly, voluntary associations, houses of worship and neighborhoods.

This renewed importance of personal and even spiritual commitment to place represents a departure from the patterns of the past century. Industrialization accelerated the growth of large, centralized institutions: corporations, trade unions and the federal government. These institutions became the chief means of both promoting economic development and ameliorating the inequalities that exist among places.

Yet, as one travels the country, it is on the local level that efforts to deal with these problems flourish and elicit the most passion. Take the Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a nonprofit public-policy group that is tackling the issues of hyper-growth and rising class and racial conflicts in the nation’s premier high-technology region. Or attempts by leaders of largely homogeneous communities in the U.S. midsection--Grand Forks, N.D., and Manning, Iowa--to build the educational, social and economic institutions needed to compete for the high-wage jobs and workers whose location preference determines regional success.

Unlike industrial-age politics, when one solution was often seen as fitting all regions, today’s approaches are customized by locale and region. Policy imperatives are wildly varied since the new geography includes central cities, struggling older suburbs, small towns and rapidly growing nerdistans on the metropolitan fringe.

Yet, all local public efforts in the digital age, whether in Silicon Valley or the Great Plains, share one trait: they depart radically from the highly partisan, interest-group warfare characteristic of national politics. In most communities, public endeavors are not driven by party politics. Instead, labor, business and neighborhood groups work on essentially shared goals for creating the conditions for Information Age success.

For example, in Manning, Iowa, a municipally owned telecommunications system was created to overcome the indifference of major phone companies. This and similar home-grown efforts cannot succeed in a contentious political climate. Shared goals are critical, as are such grass-roots efforts as Envision Utah, which confronts broader planning and environmental concerns by involving thousands of citizens in a dialogue to shape the direction and nature of future economic growth in that fast-growing region.

In urban areas, which are more likely to be fighting depopulation and disinvestments, a similar cooperative spirit is needed to stimulate economic development. One expression of this has been an explosion of merchant-financed Business Improvement Districts; nearly 1,000 such units exist throughout the country. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald suggests, districts such as New York’s Grand Central Partnership have become “trailblazers in solving such urban quality-of-life problems as aggressive panhandling, graffiti and vandalism.”

But it’s not just business driving local public campaigns. Some grass-roots efforts arise in neighborhoods where government action has proved ineffective. Here, families, often led by mothers, fight against gangs and violence. Others, like the Los Angeles Free Clinic, provide health care, employment or other support to the homeless, teenage runaways and the poor at a fraction of government’s cost.

The most widespread of the community undertakings are initiated by religion-based institutions. Not only do churches provide services to the middle class. They also are well-equipped to help the needy in ways both cost-effective and morally persuasive. In many older cities today, churches represent bulwarks for communities reeling from poverty, drugs, crime and family breakdown. In some cases, such as in parts of East Brooklyn, they have succeeded in helping revitalize blighted neighborhoods.

The emergence of a more dynamic and cooperative local politics offers the middle class an alternative to anonymity and alienation. The digital economy threatens to accelerate social decay even as it produces tools to revitalize local institutions. Chief among those tools is the World Wide Web, which can set the table for a resurgence of grass-roots activism. Community bulletin boards, including those that are regional, city or neighborhood oriented, have been among the fastest-growing elements on the Web. Surprisingly, a majority of adult users of the Internet claim that e-mail and chat rooms have actually made them more “social” rather than less. Even critics agree that the Internet may have more positive effects on linking communities than television.

As a result, we do indeed live, as urbanist Jane Jacobs suggests, in a thoroughly physical place. People who want to make a place work, whether in a big-city neighborhood or a small town, sense that they must look first to themselves and their neighbors--not to Washington or even City Hall--to solve community problems

Developing this sense of interconnectedness will prove far more important to the fate of the nation than the battle for possession of the White House among the old ideological structures of the industrial era. Today, the increasingly relevant question for communities is not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, but whether it is in tune with the new economic, technological and social challenges facing our society.