The American Spectator

Another Perspective

(Page 3 of 3)

That was the aggravated, dismissive assessment shared with me privately this summer by a high-level campaign official of one of the other challengers. The obtuseness and bias from this otherwise brilliant strategist reminded me of an evening in 1985, when I walked out of the shop of my friendly typesetter for what would be the last time.

"Who the heck is going to want to [do the work of laying out on the computer] their own page layouts?" the soon-to-be-broke owner had asked, mocking and minimizing the importance of the arrival of Aldus (now Adobe) PageMaker. Some people just don't want to see the steamroller coming.

Howard Dean's campaign is no fad -- and his success has changed the dynamic of politics forever. By exploiting the new communications realities to re-invent how political parties organize, raise money, and persuade, the Dean campaign has redefined who has the power and the leverage.

You know you're on a roll when the Doonesbury cartoon does an affectionate send-up on your activities. Within weeks of their inception, the Howard Dean coffee klatch's were certified as an American institution by the country's most politically aware hand drawn characters. With all their directness, warmth, intimacy and "realness," these hundreds if not thousands of in-home gatherings were the ultimate manifestation of cyber-technology.

No direct mail ever created a coffee klatch. The spectacular achievement of Dean was to use the Internet as precisely not the top down model of electioneering -- with television, direct mail and rallies. Rather, people communicate both horizontally and vertically, participating in the inside baseball dialog of the day to day national campaign in matters of scheduling, fundraising, and issues, while at the same time organizing and empowering locally. In pre-Internet terms, it is as if you were to (a) receive direct mail that you in effect solicited by telepathically defining yourself as interested (b) ripped the mailer into twenty pieces (c) watched each piece grow into a complete piece and then (d) sent it to twenty neighbors how had telepathically indicated their interest in receiving such material, and then, amazingly (e) invited these strangers into your home!. By these conventional electioneering standards, Dean has performed voodoo, and done it well.

The Dean campaign is form and substance. No matter what happens with the campaign, human bonds have been made locally and nationally. A de facto political party now exists that can, after 2004, take on another candidate or another issue.

p> The New American Crowd br> America is a land of ideas, not blood ties. Rather than perpetuate tribal loyalties, our greatness has stemmed from our ability to form and grow communities of common spiritual and moral purpose. And so, while the rest of the world may use technology to propel and accelerate anarchy, here it is has been harnessed to promote our communitarian impulse. /p>

Communal alienation and resultant secularism is generally accepted to have begun post World War II, when America left its crowded cities to populate the suburbs. Of course, the communitarian impulse still remained, manifesting itself sporadically if pathetically in events like Woodstock and the development of "gated communities." Now that people can once again regroup to socialize and grow with people who share their values, we may well be living at the end parenthesis of this period of American community estrangement.

And even though the Dean Campaign is nominally the "more extreme" wing of the Democratic Party, watch how the process of e-politics actually becomes over time a profoundly moderating force. When people identify with a community as opposed to an interest group, they become more trusting, and place consensus ahead of their own personal agenda. The minority extremes that drove the antiwar, "choice", and miscellaneous rights agendas ultimately are ill-served by a nation that talks and relates to each other.

This is all happening very quickly. In the early nineties, American Demographics magazine discussed how there would emerge a new kind of connectivity between computers that would profoundly change the way we live, work, and socialize. The editors were dead right, of course, but the article never used the term "Internet" -- it was simply not in the lexicon, even amongst the most sophisticated social observers.

p>Dad was right. Crowds are still bad -- and technology will make some of them more lethal. But here in America, people are assembling in a manner that the Founding Fathers never dreamed possible, but in a dynamic that emulates their original principles of participatory representative democracy. Who would have thunk that it would take the Palm Pilot to come along and enable America to begin recovering her soul? br> /p>

topics:
Television, Religion, Environment, Founding Fathers, Iraq, Israel