SPENGLER Electoral politics as mass
suicide: Howard Dean
Ever wonder
where all the dot.comers went after the Internet bubble
popped? Enough of them have migrated from cyberspace to
DeanSpace - that is what Howard Dean's campaign calls it
- to overwhelm the candidates of the Democratic party's
traditional constituencies.
America's last presidential
election gave the popular vote to the Democratics
and the Electoral College vote to the Republicans,
by margins that tested the limits of measurability.
Now it seems all but certain that the Democrats
will field a candidate almost certain to lose, and
by an unthinkably wide margin. If not as individuals,
then as a political entity, the Democratic Party
is engaged in a form of mass suicide reminiscent of
Stone Age peoples who have the misfortune to encounter
a modern world to which they cannot adequately adapt.
In a rational game, both political parties would
converge on the political center in order to maximize
their likelihood of victory, as George W Bush and Al
Gore did in 2000. Rational calculation in American
politics, though, has succumbed to existential despair.
At risk in this case is techno-Utopian youth culture,
which exhibits the same self-destructive urges that
characterize hopeless ill-situated primitive cultures.
Existential despair persuades primitive peoples, such as
the Guarani tribe of Brazil and the U'wa people of
Colombia, to choose death en masse in the face of the
extinction of their culture (Live and let die, April 13,
2002).
Of the roughly 6,000 languages now
spoken, two or three become extinct each week. America's
young information specialists have more spending power
and personal freedom than any generation in history, and
suffer more ennui and frustration than their forebears.
Break the old bonds of traditional society and men will
seek a substitute.
For two generations, young
Americans have learned that religion, morals and gender
are a matter of personal caprice, and that finding
pleasure in one's own idiosyncrasies is the object of
existence. Visualize the world as an enormous fair in
which pleasure-seekers can seek out kindred spirits at
light-speed, and you have the techno-Utopian concept of
the Internet. It is all quite silly; the fact that
intelligent people work themselves up over such a thing
gauges the spiritual misery of the standard-bearers of
American popular culture.
We are accustomed to
hearing the policies of Zimbabwe' s Robert Mugabe or
Palestinian Yasser Arafat characterized as suicidal, but
Howard Dean provides just as compelling an example.
Dean's advisers utter inanities about the Internet long
since discredited in the stock market, but still
incandescent in politics. Dean's campaign manager, Joe
Trippi, previously consulted for Internet companies and
employs a trio of "Internet theorists". By tapping
individuals online, the Dean campaign has raised over
US$25 million, slightly less than half of what the Bush
campaign has brought in, but enough to crush the other
Democratic candidates. That should be no surprise. The
Internet bubble embodied the hopes and dreams of
millions of technologically adept, affluent young
Americans. Even after the crash, enough of the dream is
left to launch Dean (however briefly) into orbit.
It seems like a dim memory, but only two years
ago intelligent people still thought that a new global
enlightenment was fermenting in the Petrie dish of
cyberspace. "Underlying the generous valuations of
technology stock was a futuristic vision of a world of
mental insects drawn helplessly to the cyberspheric
beacon, and plunging into the flames of a globalized
youth culture," I wrote shortly before the attacks on
the World Trade Center (Internet stocks and the failure of youth
culture,” August 31, 2001). "The collapse of
the Internet bubble has a broader cultural and political
significance: It informs us that the slimy tide of
popular culture which spews out of American commercial
media and washes over the world will not erode the
bedrock of the old cultures that preceded it."
A
Dean campaign office, observed New York Times journalist
Samantha Shapiro last December 7, "looks a lot like a
dotcom start-up from the mid-90s: preternaturally
pale-skinned young men, crazy hours and slightly
messianic rhetoric. The men take turns sleeping in an
easy chair with torn upholstery and appear to subsist
almost entirely on donated food." Shapiro tells the
marvelous story of a freelance technology consultant
jilted by his intended bride who found a new purpose in
life and a new love interest in the Dean campaign. This
story, she observes, "is actually one of the more
conventional at the Dean headquarters; he arrived with a
paying job that he had secured in advance." Numerous
other staffers quit their jobs, sold their homes and
turned up in Burlington in search of salvation. The
volunteers, many of them unemployed dot.com survivors,
"are overseen, loosely, by Zephyr Teachout, 32, the
campaign's director of Internet organizing", Shapiro's
report continues. "Because she runs Dean's web effort,
Teachout finds herself keeping company mostly with the
21-and-under set ... Teachout, sitting at the very edge
of her seat, tells me that 'the revolution', as she
calls it, has three phases; the first is Howard Dean
himself, the second is Meetup.com and the third is the
software that [the staffers] work with: Get Local,
DeanLink, DeanSpace.
"DeanSpace," Teachout says,
"is the revolution." Dean's techno-Utopians, to be sure,
have no more chance of success in politics than they did
in business. No matter; like the Guarani or U'wa, the
dot.com tribe does not wish to adjust to the world as it
exists, because it will find nothing acceptable there.
America will continue to fall back on more traditional
beliefs and institutions, to the continuing chagrin of
Utopians everywhere.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
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Jan 13, 2004
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