Deanism

David Brooks has a great opinion piece entitled href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/opinion/5brooks.html?th"> A Short Histo...

David Brooks has a great opinion piece entitled
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/opinion/5brooks.html?th">
A Short History of Deanism which describes the same process that
Simon
Rosenberg,
a one time-contender for DNC chair, fervently advocated. That would be the
gradual takeover of the Democratic Party by its radical wing through a process
of creeping elitism. Here's David Brooks:

Since the 1960's there has been a breakdown in the machinery that allowed
Americans to work together across class and other divisions. The educated
class has come to dominate, and the issues of interest to that class
overshadow issues of interest to the less educated and less well off. But the
two major parties were affected unequally. The Republican coalition still
contains some cross-class associations, like the N.R.A. and the evangelical
churches, which connect corporate elites to the middle classes. The
Democratic
coalition has fewer organizations like that. Its elite - the urban and
university-town elite - has less contact with the less educated. ...

Howard Dean, in his fervent antiwar phase, mobilized new networks of small
donors, and these donors have quickly become the money base of the party.
Whereas Al Gore raised only about $50 million from individuals in 2000, John
Kerry raised $225 million, including $87 million over the Internet
alone. Many
of these new donors are highly educated. The biggest groups of donors to the
Dean and Kerry campaigns were employees of the University of California,
Harvard, Stanford, Time Warner, Microsoft and so on. ...

They tend to be to the left of the country, especially on social and
security issues. They may not agree with Michael Moore on
everything, but many
enjoyed "Fahrenheit 9/11." Perhaps they are among the
hundreds of thousands of
daily visitors to Daily Kos and other blogs that savage Democrats who violate
party orthodoxy. Many Republicans are mystified as to why the Democrats,
having lost another election, are about to name Howard Dean as party chairman
and have allowed Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy to emerge unchallenged as the
loudest foreign policy voices.

The answer, as Mickey Kaus observes in Slate, is that the party is
following the money.

If David Brooks observed the trend, Simon Rosenberg worked to make it real.
In a New York Times article entitled
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25DEMOCRATS.html?ex=1248494400&en=13ada638bbe542f0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt">
"Wiring the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" on
Rosenberg's site, a vision
of new Democratic Party is presented which not so coincidentally resembles what
Brooks was describing. Written before the November US Presidential
elections, it
described efforts by Democratic Party activists to create a counter-version of
the Great Right Wing Conspiracy.

In March of this year, Rappaport convened a meeting of wealthy
Democrats at
a Silicon Valley hotel so that they, too, could see Stein's presentation.
Similar gatherings were already under way in Washington and New York, where
the meetings included two of the most generous billionaires in the Democratic
universe -- the financier George Soros and Peter Lewis, an Ohio insurance
tycoon -- as well as Soros's son and Lewis's son. ... The plan is to gather
investors from each city -- perhaps in one big meeting early next year -- and
create a kind of venture-capital pipeline that would funnel money into a new
political movement, working independently of the existing Democratic
establishment. ...

Into this vacuum rushes money -- and already it is creating an
entirely new
kind of independent force in American politics. Led by Soros and Lewis,
Democratic donors will, by November, have contributed as much as $150 million
to a handful of outside groups -- America Coming Together,
the Media
Fund, MoveOn.org -- that are going online, door to door and on the
airways in an effort to defeat Bush. These groups aren't loyal to any one
candidate, and they don't plan to disband after the election; instead, they
expect to yield immense influence over the party's future, at the very moment
when the power of some traditional Democratic interest groups, like the once
mighty manufacturing unions, is clearly on the wane. ...

The electoral defeat of John Kerry probably accelerated rather than retarded
the process. He was proof, or so it could be said, that Democratic centrist
politics was no longer competitive. With Kerry out on first, it was
natural that
the Deans should step up to the plate, whatever their RBI. The loss of the blue
collar wing of the Democratic Party, regarded by Brooks as a political
liability, was viewed as lightening ship by the New Democrats; a slimming down
to make them both harder-hitting and more agile. One thing that Brooks fails to
discuss is why Deanism should necessarily be confined to American borders. Its
natural constituency is the cosmopolitan elite for whom a passport is a fashion
accessory. Recently, the Guardian led a campaign by

European celebrities to tell voters that they should elect John Kerry. When
they did not, one
href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=227010">
European newspaper asked "How can 59,054,087 people be so
DUMB?" 
Deanism knows no bounds.

Brooks notes that 'eliti-zation' has affected both political parties because
its roots lie in the breakdown of community life over the decades, the
difference being a matter of degree. As he so eloquently put it:

As you may recall, Ralph Kramden was a member of the Raccoon Lodge in
"The Honeymooners." ... But as Prof. Theda Skocpol of
Harvard has
demonstrated, these fraternal associations lost members in the 1960's.
Instead, groups like NOW, Naral and the Heritage Foundation emerged as the
important associations in American life.

Important yes; but fraternal, no.

Update

A reader writes to say that although Dean may be a disaster for the
Democrats, the process of which he is a part is likely to make the party
healthier in the long run.

Almost every human endeavor that I am aware of holds to a few truths:

• Open and honest debate leads to “truth” with greater certainty than any
  closed-room politics.


• Trial and error leads to knowledge and experience.


• Decentralized power and decisionmaking is more efficient, in the long
  term, than any centralized system.

The Dems are possibly, right now, experiencing the "pain before the gain."
A Dean chair might well be a disaster, but fundamentally, this does not
matter. The process has changed. The process has gone from political bargains
to the scientific method. Truth will be revealed. Errors will be corrected.

That might well prove to be true, although it doesn't address the
observations of Brooks. But then, who knows? The nice thing about history is
that it happens eventually.