Juan Cole of the University of Michigan knows more than what he talks about.
He talks about the Middle East, but I think he has also internalized the hunger in America for a new Political Thesis, and the open source process being used to create it.
Recently he discussed the attacks on Markos Moulitsas by the right wing. And he understood the importance, not just of cyberspace, but of Kos' role within his own site, in what's going on:
Kos and his community, in short, are at the center of a discourse revolution. Now persons making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year can be read by hundreds of thousands of readers with no mediation from media moguls. The old joke had been that anyone can own a newspaper, it only takes a million dollars (a really old joke, since it would take much more).
The lack of choke points in cyberspace means that people like Kos can't just be fired. How then to shut them up? Why, you attempt to ruin their reputation, as a way of scaring off readers and supporters. This technique, as Billmon points out, does not usually work very well in cyberspace itself, though it can be effective if the blogger moves into a bricks and mortar institutional environment where big money and chokeholds work again. A political party is such an environment.
As he didn't have to explain, a University is another such environment.
The point is that Cole is asking the right questions, as is Kos, and being vilified for even asking.
Another person doing that is Howard Dean. At the same conference where Barack Obama made his own gaffe, Dean gave a speech
in which he said "we're entering the 60s again." Well, actually we've
been in the 60s for some time, but what he was identifying, correctly,
was the coming generational crisis.
Naturally, the right immediately tried to discredit him. The Republican response was ""Howard Dean's political perspective is derived from a 1960s counterculture view of the world."
Well, bullshit.
This is precisely the kind of argument that was used by Humphrey-era
Democrats (and reporters) against the New Right in 1966. They were
identified with Hoover just as Dean is being identified now with
Eugene McCarthy. The Right Wing Noise Machine not only lacks answers, it
doesn't even know the question, just as the Johnson's Great Society had no clue how to
deal with the problems of the 1960s, even though it ruled all three
branches of government.
The reaction from Right Blogistan, which depends upon an open source process to be heard, was more nuanced. Sister Toldjah admitted he "made a few good points." Ankle-Biting Pundits complained more about how he said it than what he said. Others, like Blue Crab Boulevard and Ace of Spades just went off on their own patchouli-smoke fantasies.
My argument with Dean is a minor point about the way in which he is seeking this new
Thesis. The Washington Party is using the wrong technology platform,
quite deliberately. It's using a simple blogging platform when a Community Network Service platform is needed. It is making the same mistakes that Republicans
like Jerry Ford made 40 years ago, looking at the future in the
rear-view technology mirror. Ford courted newspapers when TV was the thing. Dean's mistake is much smaller.
On the issues, and on the principles behind those issues, however, Dean
is absolutely 100% right. We have reached a turning point in our
history, where the old game of "enemies" must give way to a new Thesis
based on consensus, and where the old cycle of greed, of silos, must
give way to a new Thesis of sharing the basic code in order to
stimulate growth.
Just because Howard Dean doesn't read this blog doesn't mean he's not moving in the right direction.
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