Netocracy

Wired:Last week, the record was broken for the most money raised for a US presidential candidate in one day. In a still-crowded race, the honour went to Ron Paul, a trailing Republican candidate whose polling shows him with about 1 per cent - 3 per cent of the primary vote, far behind favourites such as Rudy Giuliani's 27-30 per cent, writes Danny O'Brien.

Paul pulled in $4.2 million in less than 24 hours. Amazingly, the donation spike was not organised by his campaign, but by grassroots supporters teaming up among themselves to create their own sprint.

The reason such a background figure could make so much money is, of course, the internet. The net has swung the economics of politics away from large institutional donors to hundreds of thousands of individual supporters and is changing the nature and tone of these traditionally expensive and cash-oriented presidential elections.

While broadening the camp of possible candidates would seems to be a positive matter in US politics, European politicians might want to view these developments with some caution. If online donations have helped to mitigate the influence of big money in the United States, they may well destabilise European politics, which has for so long been free of the taint of any money at all.

Ron Paul is a strangely appealing character for internet-driven politics. While most of the noise about the "netroots" - the coinage describe online political organising - comes from America's left, Paul probably has a valid claim to come from the real heartland of net politics: libertarianism.

The internet has always skewed towards this diehard philosophy of personal liberty.

The first avid net users - independent-minded technologists, science fiction fans and futurists, enthusiasts of alternative politics - often self-identified as libertarian ("with a small l") and that bias has lived on even to today.

However as a candidate who boldly stands on an anti-war platform, Paul has also captured another constituency: young voters disillusioned with both the stridency of the pro- war Republicans and the moderation of the centrist Democrats.

Even as a Republican candidate, Paul has stands and donation-runs at anti-war protests and grudging respect on the left of the US political spectrum. His old-fashioned, almost romantic stance - isolationist, pro-civil liberties, anti-government - appeals to independents on both sides, although only in small numbers.

Those numbers don't have to be big though to allow him to campaign big online. In fact, it rather helps. I remember tracking the incipient Howard Dean campaign in 2004 and noting the excitement that Dean fans felt when they finally met someone else who believed in the same minority candidate as them that drove that candidate's amazing netroots enthusiasm.

Dean's campaign floundered the moment it hit the real voting majorities, which he never successfully targeted. There's every indication that Paul will hit the same wall (his polling numbers barely show when Republican primary voters are polled).

In the meantime, though, he has gathered to his coffers funds that most front-runners drool over and supporters who can magically pop up in any election discussion online in enough numbers to, if not hijack, then at least frame the debate to their own satisfaction.

The internet clamouring for Paul has its downside for his image, too. Voters have received hundreds of unofficial spam boasting about his prowess; neo-Nazi groups have expressed support on the web and over-enthusiastic hackers for Paul have cheated on online polls to the point where some have a "Ron Paul" option just to attract the fake votes (which they then discard.)

The big question is though: how well does this bode for democracy? Perhaps in the money-takes-all US election, the sudden rise of (heavily funded) people power is a breath of fresh air.

More than 37,000 people gave Paul his $4 million, an average of $100 or so a person. Smashing fundraising records is in the reach of most small groups and most individuals. Institutional donors can no longer hope to own a candidate.

What about a tyrannous minority owning a candidate? It's easy to complain about corporate money interfering with democracy: it's a bit harder to claim that a few thousand middle-class voters might disrupt it. However 37,000 donors in an electorate of 200 million is no more representative than corporate interests.

What happens when such individual donation power comes - if it comes - to Europe? Our political parties owe their unassailable position not only to the nature of electoral systems or the institutional expertise of established parties, they also thrive on being the only recipients of donations.

What happens when a third party - or even a charismatic individual politician - begins to be able to pull in the same large amounts of cash from the rank and file as the old dependables?

The inspiration for Paul's fundraiser was the imagery of November 5th: the day that the rebel Guy Fawkes attempted to burn down the Houses of Parliament in London. Before we applaud the entrance of the "little guy" into the political fundraising process, perhaps we should ponder that ambiguous image.