Daily Ramblings:
Your Old Road Is Rapidly Agin' ...02/26/2005 09:15:08 pm
Can't help but like this column by former British
Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, in the Guardian (from
Feb 19, but I just discovered it): Bloggers Will Rescue The [UK] Right.
He first describes how the democratization of
information through the internet has affected the
American political scene:
Mainstream TV can no longer say
what it wants without fear of correction. Online
diaries, written by teachers, soldiers and
numerous other people with real knowledge of
subjects, are fact-checking ill-informed
broadcasters. The bloggers have already toppled
two of American TV's biggest names.
...
This is just one of the ways in which the
internet has strengthened the American right.
Last year's Bush-Cheney campaign used information
technology to build the largest ever volunteer
political army. Visitors to GeorgeWBush.com were
invited to join email lists that offered regular
information on everything from gun ownership to
school prayer. The Bush campaign collected 7.5
million email addresses and amassed 1.4 million
volunteers.
You would also expect this
electronic revolution to be good for the
Democrats, but the American left's
relationship with the internet has been
disastrous. The internet has sunk a
knife into Bill Clinton's moderate Democratic
party. Mainstream business people were Clinton's
principal funders, simultaneously approving and
driving his centrism. But the Democrats' new
paymasters are the 600,000 computer users who, in
2004, supported Howard Dean's bid for his party's
presidential nomination. Dean energised an
unrepresentative group of voters with a
stridently anti-war message. Electronic money
powered Dean's campaign, and all of the other
contenders for the Democratic crown soon pandered
to his base.
The Democrats' problem has only
worsened since. The dailykos.com site of a
Democratic consultant gets 500,000 hits a day.
That site's memorial to four American contractors
murdered in Iraq was "screw them".
Hatefulness also pours out of the popular
websites of Michael Moore and MoveOn.org.
He goes on to say how this growing phenomenon will
yet change politics in Britain also, and how the
"metropolitan elites" should be shaking in
their boots. I do hope he's right.
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