fling93 loves fishies

Why Dean Stumbled

Well, I guess I was premature about Dean and, unfortunately, the decline of the two-party system (well, that’s why I had a question-mark in the title). In hindsight, Ehrlich’s application of Coase’s theory to the political parties was too simplistic in that political parties are much more than just information gathering organizations. The parties themselves actually wield a good deal of power regardless of how much information they gather.

I should mention that I had planned to revisit the topic after reading a more realistic explanation by Michael Tomasky in American Prospect, which I found via a comment by NYCO on the DailyKos post I originally linked. There’s no talk of changes to the system, merely analyzing what Dean has done to the party:

If one thinks of the Democratic Party as rebuilding itself after its disastrous 1980s, then Dean—or more appropriately, “Deanism”—is a new and potentially more powerful stage of the rebuilding process. Clinton rebuilt… the superstructure. Dean is rebuilding the base. “If Clinton modernized the message,” says Simon Rosenberg…, “then Dean is rebuilding the party. In the ’90s party, it was, ‘Write us a big check.’ Regular people were left out of that equation. Now, through new technology, we’re getting them back in.”

There’s a tricky thing about this rebuilding stage, though: It excludes party insiders. It has nothing to do with Washington. It’s no wonder that Democratic insiders, so accustomed to having complete ownership of a process like a party primary campaign, should dislike Dean and even fear him: He has stolen the process right out of their hands. He is not “of” them in any way, shape or form. In fact, his accumulating successes merely serve to emphasize their irrelevance to this rebuilding stage.

Of course, it’s clear now that party insiders (like Kerry) still maintain a good deal of power and relevance within the parties.

Julian Sanchez has an excellent post-mortem of the Dean bubble at Reason:

As Howard Dean’s impassioned tango with the Democratic electorate becomes an awkward pratfall, torrents of bits are flowing with speculation about how his vaunted legions of online disciples failed to deliver. Dean, it turned out, had more Friendsters than friends.

It’s too early to count Dean out, of course, but in light of the high expectations the former Vermont governor set, he appears to be imploding spectacularly.

He goes on to refute the two popular explanations for Dean’s apparent sudden flameout (read the whole article for more on that — no, he doesn’t talk about the infamous Iowa concession speech and the proliferation of remixes around the Internet, but it obviously had nothing to do with why he lost Iowa in the first place). Instead, his conclusion is that the problem was with Dean’s “smart mob” base:

And this, perhaps, is the problem—from the perspective of politicians, anyway—with campaigning by smart mob. Politics is a top down business. The old metaphor of the “political machine” is in this sense quite apt: It evokes a vast clockwork mechanism, perhaps composed of many cogs and gears, but governed in the end by a few hands at the levers of control.

The organism—reigning metaphor for online social networks—lacks such convenient levers. Dean’s network comprises not just his own site, rife with comments, but sites like DeanSpace, which were autonomous, not run by the campaign. In politics, that’s a bug, not a feature.

As in the examples cited above, autonomous communities are, if anything, too open to dissent—they may tip, shifting their allegiance to a new savior.

And of course, another thing about a base of people who spend most of their time behind their computers is that they’re very ill-suited for the door-to-door politicking required in Iowa and New Hampshire (but not the rest of the primary, which is why it’s too early to count him out just yet).

Anyway, I can’t leave out Julian’s conclusion:

Or, as Shirky hints, they may become ends in themselves. Many pundits get antsy when local volunteerism increases: People are supposed to be petitioning the national government to do their good deeds for them, dammit—they’re apt to get distracted from that noble goal if they’re solving their local problems themselves. Dean Meetups famously became social events, giving rise to those charges of insularity. But the real problem for the candidate may have been, not that his orange-hatted devotees seemed too cultish to appeal to the mainstream, but that the bottom-up, networked structure showed many that local, interpersonal engagement is more satisfying than national politics. If that’s so, Dean’s strategic failure may one day be seen as a blessing.

Perhaps it will, but it also means the Internet is probably not likely to bring down the two-party system. That means, to remove the polarized nature of our political process, it will unfortunately probably require reforming of our plurality electoral process — reform that the powerful political parties will fight tooth and nail.

More on that later.