Steady State vs. the Big Bang of Open Source

Sir Fred Hoyle (right) visited Rice University when I was there in the mid-1970s. He was an astronomer best-known  for continuing to defend the idea of a "steady state universe" despite all the evidence of a Big Bang.

A "steady state universe" assumption remains standard issue in all areas of analysis. This despite abundant evidence that change happens, that it is continuous, and that the only thing certain about tomorrow is it will be different from today.

Thus you have stock analysts saying "sell Enron" after it falls to $2, after claiming it was a "buy" at $75. Thus you have sports analysts picking the favorites, in nearly every contest. Thus entertainment analysts base their estimates of which movies will sell this year on what sold last year.

Political analysts are just as bad. Here is a perfect example.

In looking at the political blogosphere it is sheer ignorance to wear steady state blinders, as Conn Carroll does here. Faced with surveys showing only one-third (if that) of Americans like the current Administration, and even fewer like Congress, he nonetheless gives equal weight to the losing arguments of Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, who has maybe 75,000 readers, against those of Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, who runs a community with over 250,000.

Carroll compounds the mistake by calling Kos a "blogger," when that hasn't really been the case for years. Kos is running a community, not just writing for a journal as Chait is. He has institutional heft Chait has never had, and probably wouldn't want.

Worse, Carroll's spin is two years old. Chait calls Kos an extremist. Kos calls this "obvious crap" and Carroll then proceeds to take Chait's side because Kos lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you're going to analyze Democrats with Republican assumptions, the Democrats will never win. If you're going to base your view of the future on old myths, you're going to miss the story.
The story is the rise of open source politics.

The topic of Carroll's analysis is the Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary in Connecticut. Historically it has a lot in common with conservative challenges to moderate Republicans in the mid-1960s. The moderate may win but the tide is plainly going out -- the fact of the fight is evidence they will lose.

If there is an ideological component to the struggle among Democrats, it is between the "proprietary" or "industrial" view of the Washington Party, steeped in money and TV time, against the "open source" view of the Netroots, who practice self-organizing around technology and want aggressive strategies.

The Democratic Party is changing, just as the Republicans did 40 years ago. The differences in this case seem tactical, not ideological as it was with the GOP then. Yet Carroll, in order to make his steady state narrative work, insists on calling it ideological, claiming the Netroots are "ultra-leftists"  and Chait is a "moderate," when in fact their feelings on policy aren't very different at all.

A key to the Netroots challenge is the charge that the Washington Democratic party is out of touch, that it practices politics entirely on the enemy's ground, that it has become so accustomed to losing it won't do what it takes to win, namely go for the throat. The fact of that analysis is to be found in looking at traffic patterns, in readership patterns, in opinion polls, and the existance of candidates like Lamont.

Before any new political thesis can emerge, the losing assumptions of the old Anti-Thesis must be challenged. And the challenge here is one of open source politics.