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:
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:
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:
(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.
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.
posted by John at 12:05 PM
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