The Free View - weblog of a presidential candidate

There's a site called The Blogging of the President: 2004, where a bunch of folks who are obsessed with blogging and obsessed with politics get it on, so to speak. I've been peeking in there now and then, since I'm at least an 80% match with that crowd, and certainly fascinated by the revolution in media and society that underlies the major current Internet trends (which I would say are blogging and political organizing).

The BOP site is good stuff -- these folks are fanatics, but in a good way. They're like a big lab of scientists, studying themselves and their fellow scientists. Except the science is blogging and politics.

In this post there by Ezra Klein from just after Howard Dean's Iowa plunge, he talks about how the Dean phenomenon wasn't about Dean, per se-- how it was more about the movement than it was about the candidate. (A point I agree wholeheartedly with, by the way.) Then, in the comments area, I found something that made me want to reply. Following is that reply. You can see the full context here-- my comment is currently near the bottom. The comment I'm replying to is a long ways above. (It's hard to point directly to it.)

First, a curious aside: One of the people behind The Blogging of the President is a man named Stirling Newberry-- he's actually the guy who I reply to below. Well, back in May of 1997 I launched a discussion at Salon.com's TableTalk discussion area titled "Lance M. Brown for President -- Year 2008 ????"-- and Stirling Newberry was one of the folks who joined in the discussion. He pounded on me back then-- calling me an imbecile, etc. He had the sort of visceral reaction that some folks have when they hear "libertarian". I can't get into describing that more now, but it's kinda funny to bump into Stirling Newberry again, all these years later. And to know that we will probably interact, to some extent, into the future.

Anyway, here's my post from over there. It's primarily about why the voter revolution which is brewing will not find effective release through the Bipartisan political process.

Stirling said:

I pointed this out in an August interview in Salon.com and made the observation that the internet wants to move to "Open Source Politics" (pace blog of the same name) where everything is manipulable and the basics of politics - including law and policy, as well as message and organization - are open.

Dean empowered people, but he did not enable them to be producers of the political idea.

No candidate of the two major parties can honestly offer to do this. Open source politics -- an actual living, net-enabled Democracy-in-action -- is only going to be possible (or desirable) in the context of a green-libertarian revolution, for lack of a better term. That is to say, co-emergent trends: one a libertarian "get government out of the way" uprising, and the other an exercising of peaceful sociopolitical power-- one that skips past the governing bodies, and puts the process of (directly) creating change into the hands of the people.

For instance, take drilling in ANWR.

The current process is: the enabled masses (the MoveOns, the netizens, etc) use their power to mob the elected officials into doing their bidding (protecting ANWR from drilling).

The new process will be: the enabled masses use their power to mob the drillers (oil companies, etc.) into doing their bidding (staying out of ANWR). In this case, the elected official (optionally) serves as a leader, communicating with her constituents about the issue, and facilitating their action.

That's the way the revolution that is trying to emerge through the blogs and the Deans and MoveOns will be able to come closest to the vision that all three imply (or state outright): namely, "taking the country back" from the powers that be.

The alternative -- fully merging the fluid, instant-action e-revolution with the power of government force -- would create a dangerous sort of "tyranny of the flash mob". The ascendant e-Left might find that delectable for the time being, but it could turn against them (or anyone else) at the whim of a given organized mass. There's a reason the U.S. was not set up as a pure democracy.

This does have to do with Dean's campaign, by the way. I started by saying that no candidate of the two major parties would be able to enable people in the way Stirling discussed. The Iowa screech thing seems to me to be a fracture between Dean's populist revolution, and the CW punditocracy. In a real populist revolution, Dean's behavior was not all that outrageous. He was rallying the troops after a discouraging battle loss. However, the establishment is treating Dean like he grew a second head or something. And Dean took the hit, basically apologizing for being too excited by his own revolution-- too enthusiastic for the thousands of people who had poured their hearts out for months in Iowa for him. He should have fully defended his enthusiasm, but he backed off of it instead.

I knew, once the Dean movement began to rise, that at some point it would come into crashing conflict with the needs of the bipartisan political process. It's very similar to McCain, who also softened his approach to suit the major party establishment. And like McCain, Dean will probably not break away from the party and run as an Independent, because in his heart he believes the party is more important (or maybe just more powerful?) than the revolution. And the party ultimately agrees with that premise, preferring stability and the known over revolution and the unknown.