Continuing my series of diaries that touch base with my February diary series, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future", I want to reflect a bit on the impact of online organizing and communication-primarily the latter. Arianna Huffington has a piece up, "The Internet and the Death of Rovian Politics", in which she argues that McCain's been done in by the new information infrastructure, which has made the old-style Rovian smear tactics increasingly difficult to pull off:
"We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told me. And YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion, is one of the causes of its demise.
Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed.
But the McCain campaign hasn't gotten the message, hence the blizzard of racist, alarmist, xenophobic, innuendo-laden accusations being splattered at Obama.
This is certainly a very big part of what's going on, even if it's not the whole story....
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| The whole story would have to also include why McCain has chosen this path, and would also take account of the fact that McCain started out doing much better than the GOP as a whole was doing against the Democratic Party. But although it may "only" be a piece of the story, it's also a piece of a much bigger story than just one single election. In this sense, it parallels the role of the Philadelphia Aurora and other partisan Democratic-Republican newspapers in the election of 1800. Although they're dodering now, and have been much less overtly partisan for a century, the political impact of newspapers has endured, in one form or another, through 50-some presidential election cycles after the one in which newspapers first came to prominance.
That certainly counts as the most important transformation in political communication and organizaiton tied to a realigning election, but it's not the only one. In 1896, William Jennings Bryan's barnstorming speaking tours and Mark Hannah's systematic tapping into businesses for political contributions to help elect William McKinley were sharp breaks with past practice.
Still, the newspaper revolution bears a lot in common with the revolution we're seeing in this cycle: it represented the rising up of people who had no authority dispensed from above-quite unlike the authority of clergy, for example, who comprised almost the entirety of public intellectuals in the civic sphere at the time. Their authority derived from the product they delivered, and it had to be defended against vigorously contrary voices operating under the same rules. The Federalist newspapers suffered in several ways from their subordinate status in the years surrounding the election of 1800, just as the wingnutosphere has suffered from being a mere adjunct of the rightwing noise machine, and the large conservative movement with all its vast infrastructure. In both cases, then and now, there is a congruence on one side between a messy, bottom-up new media and an ethos of critical thinking, and self-determination and a disjunciton on the other side between the inherently bottom-up logic of the medium and the top-down, authoritarian politics it serves.
This contradiction alone could not be decisive. So long as the authoritarian message and program appeared successful, it was difficult for the critical opposition to get a foothold. But slow progress was made until major failures on the authoritarian side provided an openming. Now that that has happened, we have entered an era of flux, in which no one can tell what the outcome will be, we can only say that the rules are changing, and they will continue to change well beyond the end of this election cycle. After all, the greatest change in the political use of radio happened after the 1932 election.
The various ways in which the Republicans were done in by the new media environment this cycle will be the stuff of PhD dissertations someday, but we on the frontlines may have our say about it first. Indeed, we already have. TPM's coverage-and pushing of-the unravelling of the Ashley Todd hoax is a case in point. (See, as a prime example, "McCain Communications Director Gave Reporters Incendiary Version Of 'Carved B' Story Before Facts Were Known" by Greg Sargent.) The coverage itself details the contradictions involved--who is hiding them, who noticing-and the ever-shifting dynamics. It' not really an accident, IMHO, that Josh Marshall is an historian by training. That sensibility is very much present in the way that TPM operates, even if it's not in your face.
Similarly, Brave New Films has played a wide-ranging role, involving itself in a broad array of issues and controversies, providing a powerful microphone, megaphone, whatever for voices that would otherwise often not be heard at all. The very recent, very quickly produced video collaboration with ACORN (my diary with the video is here) is just one of many cases in point-albeit an extremely salient one. But whatever the organizations and/or media tools used, the key component is that of an engaged, self-motivated and self-directed activist community, which almost anyone can join. Consciouness is the ultimate technology.
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