The speed of political change is generational. 
But how long is that?
In many important ways it is growing longer, because we’re living longer. That’s why John Kerry failed. He could be swift-boated only because enough people from the Vietnam era were still around, and active, to cause political knees to jerk. (Pictured is David Broder, still working as a columnist, a veteran of the Korean conflict.)
This surprised Democrats. After all, it was then 36 years after 1968, and the height of the Vietnam war. But their candidate was of that time, so were too-many of the voters.
Late in the 1968 campaign Hubert Humphrey tried to rally the troops of the New Deal and, it seemed, he almost pulled it off. This was 36 years after the New Deal, the same distance in time as Kerry was from his generational election in 2004. Humphrey failed because, by 1968, the concerns of 1932 were irrelevant, as Kerry thought 1968 was irrelevant to 2004. We age more slowly, thus political change occurs more slowly.
But if that’s the case, perhaps 2008 will be more like 2004 than we imagine. Many people from the 1960s will still be around then. Republicans, and the press expects with them, that the past can still control the future.
What changes that equation is the medium you’re now reading. Conservatives had to build their institutions slowly, out of public view, over many years, brick-by-brick, in the 1960s. It cost a ton of money. But the Internet allows this entire infrastructure to be built quickly, inexpensively, and (surprisingly) completely.
The Internet, in political terms, allows the future to disassociate itself from the past, at low cost.
Most reporters still don’t understand this. Most expect the knees to keep jerking, because in their experience they have always jerked. Most reporters live in the moment, in the eternal today (they think), but in fact most live in the recent past, always extrapolating the last tick of the trend into tomorrow morning and calling this "foresight."
Where the Internet has been failing — where the liberal blogosphere
has been failing — is that it, too, has been living in the eternal
now. The philosophical underpinnings which conservatives in the 1960s
built so painstakingly, brick-by-emotional brick — simply don’t exist.
Yet, open source politics intuits that necessary philosophical
basis. The idea is nascent — there won’t be a book until I can find a
publisher — but most of those in Left Blogistan intuit that Internet
issues are vital, and that an open source sensibility can be key to
understanding what must be done going forward.
That’s the importance of
the Net Neutrality issue, not whether it’s won, lost or drawn, but that
it works to force people into thinking about what’s precious to them, and causing them to fight for it.
That’s how real change happens. It takes long thought, and hard
work, on new subjects. New philosophical and moral ground must be
plowed, new approaches must be discovered, new alliances must be
forged. Even though the speed of political change is naturally
generational, it doesn’t happen by itself.
It needs a little push. Which the Internet provides. Which I’m trying to provide here. Which you’re providing by reading this.
