howard dean

Well, here’s a milestone: I’m a published author.

I’ll have to buy one. Here’s an excerpt from my chapter:

America is full of characters, freethinking individuals with the kinds of personalities that don’t necessarily fit well into blunt institutional molds like High School or Corporate Bureaucracy. A lot of us also happen to be highly capable individuals: creative, hard working, intelligent and passionate. A campaign that lets these sorts of people connect as supporters can tap deep resources unavailable to those that enforces rigid “message discipline,” that sees their would-be citizen-enthusiasts as pawns.

The genius of making empowerment the core of Dean’s candidacy, something that was explicitly made possible by the campaign’s Internet-enabled character, is that it turned the whole operation into an incubator of new leadership rather than a place for conscripts to sign up and wait for their day to be called upon to act (or more likely, to donate money). The grassroots movement growing around Dean’s candidacy was decentralized, yet connected. It was in some ways elite, yet very heterogeneous, inclusive and transparent. It was unabashedly idealistic, but also stubbornly pragmatic. It was a nationwide network of individuals grouping together in organic and ad-hoc ways to reclaim responsibility for their country.

These idea of embracing openness, pluralism, participation and interconnectedness have been part of the online culture I’d known for years, and they were definitely a part of the blogging ethic. I’d considered the political implications before as an idealistic student, but pessimistically never expected to see it happen, let alone applied directly to what I felt were the most pressing issues of the day. It was truly thrilling to see theories I believed in become practices I took part in, and to see this praxis generate results, actually working, outperforming the old ways and saving the day in one fell swoop.

It occurred to me that nobody gives a fuck what Judy Woodruff or Wolf Blitzer of even Bill O’Reilly thinks if their friend or neighbor or buddy from high school is telling them what they believe in their hearts and why, and this gave me great joy. We’d just have to scale that kind of peer network out to reach a hundred million people, and the end result would be that we’d have literally taken the country back. Easy, see?

I was participating in a campaign that had as its means and objective the repudiation of the sickly symbiotic system of politics and what remained of the Fourth Estate. We sought to replace what was with a dynamic, network-centric, meritocratic, and above all transparent and fact-based ideal of democracy. It was a deeply American, deeply moral vision. We were right, just as Candidate Dean was right in many statements deemed “gaffes” at the time. Sadly, as we would see, we were also fatally ahead of the curve.

I’m curious what the others had to say. While I had a draft of the whole book, reading that kind of material in MS Word doesn’t really work, so I didn’t do any more than skim the other essays (of which there are many).

Congratz to all the authors, and thanks to Thomas and Zephyr for editing and inviting me to participate, and to Paradigm for publishing the dang thing. There’s more information including some additional excerpts here: deaninternetbook.com.

Glenn Greenwald:

That really is why we are in the situation we confront in Iraq. Because Richard “Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise” Cohen and his ilk demonized and caricatured the Howard Deans of the world as pacifist, amateur, naive, stupid, frivolous, dangerous French hippies even though everything Dean was saying was true and prescient and everything Cohen was saying was false and idiotic. And they’re still doing that.

Atrios:

Someone finally gives Dean some props.

On a more depressing note, while hunting for something I came across this article Yglesias wrote. In May. Of 2004.

I can’t believe we’re still having the same goddamn conversation.

I strongly doubt that we’ll see much of an uptick in accountability or integrity from the existing class of media figures and political pundits. They made their career choices a while ago; they live in that other world now. However, these people will probably continue to slide ever further into irrelevance.

I think we’ll look back on the late ’90s and early 2000s as a uniquely dark time in America, in which the social discourse was dominated by a broadcast media controlled and financed by a relatively small clique of elites. This isn’t to suggest any kind of conspiracy, but rather to point out how we were (and still are) led by a small and compromised cultural bubble which was easily manipulated by a sophisticated and well-financed reactionary political movement. Add that special spice (9/11 flavors), and you can pop off a really stupid war, I suppose.

If the shoe were on the other foot — and a well organized progressive political movement was doing the influencing — President Gore might have rammed health care down everyone’s throats. We must protect ourselves from bioterrorism after all, and 50 million people who are afraid to visit a doctor because of costs makes a ripe target. Those Health Insurance cartels are objectively pro-terrorist, see?

That might have been marginally better, but it might not have worked out either, especially if it was done in that forced and propagandistic way. The point is that doing things by manipulating a small culture of social elites and stupifying the masses is a poor way to run a society. It didn’t work in Soviet Russia, it didn’t work in Imperial France, and it didn’t work in Rome or any other place either, at least not for very long.

Bigger and more diverse pools of empowered decision-makers make better decisions, and can react more effectively to changing circumstances. They’re more effective, sucka. In network-speak, it’s all about fitness. Meritocracy now!

Get it? Good. Now keep it. Let’s never let this shit happen again.