Wrap-Up and Final Thoughts

In this post, I plan to offer a summary of the arguments in favor of the Type for America thesis. The goal is not to raise any new points but to highlight the major points of dispute (along with our biased opinion on them, of course). The Type for America thesis can be broken into three basic arguments:

1.) The Dean campaign changed campaigning.
2.) The change is significant, not just a novelty that can be ignored.
3.) The change will be substantive, in the sense that it is not merely new technology used by the same people in the service of the same old politics.

On Point #1, it seems that both sides agree that the Internet is more important to campaigning--specifically to fundraising, information sharing, and organization of rallies and get-out-the-vote events--now than it was before the Dean campaign. I think the main dispute is causation. Hype for America argues "it was not Howard Dean doing the changing, but simply Dean who rode the wave of technology most successfully." As we've conceded below, Dean did not invent online campaigning; John McCain and Roh Moo-Hyun of South Korea got there first. But Dean used the Internet for fundraising, conveying information, and communicating with his supporters on a scale that was unprecedented, at least in American politics. Dean proved that the Internet could propel a little-known candidate into frontrunner status, against the will (initially) of much of the party establishment. Dean's campaign certainly was not the only cause of the changes we're describing, but we believe that it was more important than any other single factor except the development of Internet technology itself.

On Point #2, Hype disputes the significance of the Internet, writing "Even if the internet did lower the barriers to participate in politics, real world factors will always be crucial. Real world resources (i.e., cash, connections, etc.) buy influence and power in the real world." At Type, we don't argue that the Internet will entirely eliminate real world factors, but we reject any notion that the Internet is merely some kind of novelty add-on to the usual business of campaigning. In 1996 and even 2000, the Internet was a novelty add-on, and candidates could afford to have a weak online presence. Thanks in large part to the example of the Dean campaign in 2004, this is no longer true. The Dean campaign has demonstrated that the Internet can be the source of millions of dollars, millions of votes, and millions of eyes to see your message, and no candidate will be able to afford to ignore it during the coming election cycles. As more people become regular Internet users, the Internet will become the "real world" in a sense.

On Point #3, Hype contends that even though the technology has changed, the nature of campaigning--particularly the participants and the outcomes--remains basically the same. As Hype puts it, "My argument is that Internet Democracy is faster, cheaper, and easier--that is to say, procedurally superior. But substantively, Internet Democracy is precisely equivalent to Pre-Internet Democracy." They add that the Internet will be dominated by an elite class (as suggested by the claim that a small number of bloggers already wield extraordinary influence in the blogosphere) and that this elite will consist of the same forces that are elite in the real world.

We have basically two responses to this: one empirical and one theoretical. The empirical response is that the Internet-empowered grassroots have had a measurable influence on politics since the 2004 campaign, at least in the Democratic Party. Dean is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, thanks partly to blogosphere support (not to mention blogosphere willingness to dig up dirt on his opponents), and many powerful Democratic politicians make direct appeals for support from the hordes of anonymous readers of Daily Kos. Of course, these are just hints of the importance of the Internet. Hype says that the real test is "whether someone will one day be able to rise from the blogosphere and rally enough support to win a national election." This could have happened with Dean in 2004; we'll have to wait until future elections to see if anyone passes this test. The theoretical response is that the Internet, by its very nature as a decentralized and low-cost medium, will necessarily loosen the grip of the traditional elites on politics. As Yochai Benkler argues, the economic structure of the Internet is fundamentally different from that of traditional mass media. It's much less costly than before for a no-name candidate to get attention. It's now possible for a group of anonymous people to find each other and work on a common political project, whether that be electing a candidate or (to use Benkler's examples) neutralizing the actions of major corporations like Sinclair and Diebold. It's possible that the traditional elites will take over in the end, of course, with the complicity of people who hear only what they want to hear. But the theoretical potential for substantive change is greatly expanded. We will see in the next few years whether this continues to become reality.

Blogs and Wikis Compared

One issue mentioned briefly in our seminar was the relative merits of blogs and wikis for presenting the issues in a debate. Our four debates have been presented in four online formats--blog, wiki, parody news site, and parody congressional testimony. Three of these are wiki-like in the sense that they lay out sets of arguments instead of carrying on an ongoing dialogue, so I'll restrict the basic comparison here to blogs and wikis.

I think the greatest strength of blogs as a forum for debate is also their greatest weakness, depending on what you're looking for. This strength/weakness is the fact that they resemble a conversation instead of a statement of position. This is a strength because, in theory, it facilitates a more in-depth discussion of the pertinent issues. You don't have to predict from the beginning exactly which issues will be important; you can let it develop based on commentary from the opposing side. This is also a weakness because it's a lot harder for an observer to follow. If you click into the middle of an ongoing blogger debate, you essentially have to start from the beginning, which involves searching through archives and clicking back and forth between two (or more) blogs. (This is slightly easier if the blogs have tags.) In contrast, on a wiki, the two opposing sides are likely to be clearly written out and organized. Generally a blog is better if you want if you want to see a back-and-forth debate and you have the patience to retrace it to the beginning and follow it, and a wiki is better if you want a more static (and probably easier-to-follow) statement of the issues.

Of course, I'm generalizing. It's possible to post arguments for two sides of a debate very clearly on a blog, and it's possible to have an ongoing dialogue on a wiki. But blogs are designed to be organized by time, whereas wikis are designed to be organized by theme. I don't think that either format is necessarily "better" for a debate; it depends on what kind of debate you want.

Comments on Peter Beinart

On October 25, 2005, Peter Beinart delivered The Theodore H. White Lecture at the JFK School of Government, followed the next day by a Seminar with a panel of speakers. Beinart was the editor of The New Republic until March 2006 and continues to write for the magazine. Some of his comments during the lecture and seminar are relevant to the Type for America thesis, so I will discuss them here.

In short, Beinart comes close to agreeing with the Type for America thesis. He argues that the Dean campaign caused a profound change in the nature of campaigning. He does not agree, however, that the change is permanent, nor does he believe that it is good. As background, I should mention that Beinart's relationship with the leading figures in the liberal blogosphere is not entirely friendly. His article "A Fighting Faith", arguing that liberalism has not taken a strong enough stand against America's enemies in the post-9/11 era, was not received well at Daily Kos. (On the other hand, the Daily Kos site proudly displays a quotation from Beinart praising the new book by bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, so the hostility obviously isn't too serious.)

Beinart has this to say about the changes generated by the Dean campaign in 2004:

. . . Howard Dean experienced this meteoric rise and, like in 1972, it wasn't only because of war, it was because of war and a change in the way campaigns were run. This time it wasn't because of changes in the party rules, it was because of the Internet. The Internet did for Howard Dean what the change in party rules between 1968 and 1972 had done for George McGovern: it created a huge opportunity for a grassroots, decentralized, activist campaign to run against party insiders and to rewrite the rules of presidential politics. And I think it's clearly done that. Howard Dean lost the battle for the nomination, but he's won the war, or he's at least winning the war, for the soul of the Democratic Party. When party insiders tried to put their candidates, earlier this year, in as head of the Democratic Party, they were defeated by this surge of new Internet activists, many of them, like Daily Kos, the Web site, or Mydd.com, or Moveon.org, with close ties to the Dean campaign.

On the surface, this is an emphatic endorsement of the Type thesis. But there are two important qualifications. First, Beinart may agree that things have changed, but not that they have changed "forever." He speaks elsewhere in his lecture of a "pendulum" shifting and of "cycles," implying that just as control of the Democratic Party shifted from the McGovern "outsiders" in 1972 to the DLC "insiders" in 1992, things may shift once again from the blogging "outsiders" back to the insiders. On this point, I'm not sure I agree. Although I'll readily admit that I'm not as well-versed in the history of the Democratic Party as Beinart, it seems to me that the Internet represents more of a fundamental change in the structure of communication. Party rules can be changed, as they were in 1972, but they can be changed back to give more power to the insiders. The Internet cannot be changed back so easily. It's a decentralized medium that makes political participation easier for the average person. It also makes easier for "outsider" candidates to attract attention, organize, and raise money, simply by eliminating most of the costs of communication. As Hype for America would surely point out, it's possible that the "insiders" will figure out a way to control this new medium with their superior resources, especially if the "Babel objection" turns out to have force. Nonetheless, I doubt that it will be easy to reverse the Internet-induced changes that Beinart describes.

The second and more important qualification is that Beinart does not think that the changes in campaigning wrought by the Dean campaign are good--at least, good for the Democratic Party. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that liberal bloggers are a hyper-idealistic crowd, Beinart argues that they are obsessed with tactics to a fault:

What's striking to me about this new generation that you're seeing emerging on the Internet is how focused they are on tactics, how focused they are on process, how quickly they assume that what's good for the Democratic Party is what's good for liberalism. . . . The achievement, I think, of the Clinton and the DLC generation was, in fact, to think about first principles, to think about the relationships between state and civil society, to think about the ability of the market to achieve traditional, liberal ends. . . . The bloggers are helping to create a journalistic culture with too much focus on what will help Democrats win, too much interest in the short-term. And it's producing cramped, small-bore, predictable, and perhaps worst of all, dull political writing.

This depiction reverses the average liberal blogger's self-image. Based on my reading of liberal blogs, it seems that most of them see themselves as the visionaries who are standing up for principles while the DLC is obsessed with focus groups, polls, and triangulation. I think there's some truth in Beinart's observation about the tactical focus of the liberal blogosphere, however. There is sort of a "winning is everything" attitude that pervades much of the dialogue. I attribute this, at least in part, to the fact that Democrats have spent half a decade with very little power in the national government, which tends to generate an obsession with winning control above all else. The conservative blogosphere can afford to spend more time talking about policy, because there's some chance that the ideas they discuss will be implemented in the short term. In short, I'd argue that Beinart's observations might not reflect anything inherent in post-Dean campaigning as opposed to pre-Dean campaigning, but it might reflect instead the current political climate.

John Leo, one of Beinart's fellow panel members, made the point more emphatically:

There are a lot of bloggers on the left, but there's nobody like Beinart on the liberal blogs, and I like Josh Marshall a bit, but most of them seem, I don't know, brain dead. The [author of the] Daily Kos--I checked in with him yesterday, and he used the term "wingbat" nine times in the first four paragraphs. . . . The party is being taken over by a new youth cult, whose names you don't know, and who have no new ideas. I think this should concern us.

(I'm assuming he means "wingnut," which is the preferred insult of choice among liberal bloggers to describe conservatives; conservative bloggers use "moonbat" to describe liberals, so Leo's term looks like a conflation of the two.) Anyway, he has a point; many bloggers focus on anger and insults toward the other side. (The Washington Post had an article about this, although I think it is a bit of a caricature.) This kind of anger tends to draw an audience, which perhaps explains why some of the most popular bloggers aren't very policy-focused. Still, to the extent that Beinart and Leo argue that Dean-induced developments in political communcation are a net negative, I disagree. Although there is more "noise," this is an inevitable side-effect of giving more people a noticeable role in the political process. Ultimately, I think that the effect of the Internet, and the Dean campaign's use of it for campaigning, will be to enrich the political marketplace of ideas and provide ways for ordinary people to feel like they have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. Even if this also requires giving a soapbox to angry people with no ideas except hatred of wingnuts/moonbats, I think the price is worth it.