The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Joe Trippi wrote a book about it. And if you have any interest at all in undersanding how the internet affects our democracy, you should read it.

Today, another article surfaced on Truthout.com, with a slightly different name: The Revolution Is Not Being Televised. The article is mostly based on the Lamont campaign for Senate in Connecticut, but it has bigger, more exciting implications:

"If Lexington-Concord was "the shot heard round the world" - the moment where a festering series of local rebellions became a Rebellion - then the Lamont campaigners on the ground and on the Internet are among the minutemen and Committees of Correspondence of this next American Revolution. But a message needs a messenger, and in the vast number of words written on the subject of Internet politics, this fundamental point is neglected. Partly it is because large traditional media outlets, protecting their economic interests, and right-wing-backed media outlets, pursuing their partisan advantage with typical disregard of the truth, have a desire to paint the entire enterprise as "far left protest politics." They want everyone to see hippies burning college offices and papier mâché puppets.

The reality is rather much the reverse: the people who have made best use of the Internet as a tool for political change are not exclusively on the left. In fact, the right wing has its Internet arm, which is tightly vertically integrated - anonymous right-wing operatives create fake news, such as the recent selectively edited clip that tried to imply that Congressman Dingell supported Hezbollah, then low level right-wing bloggers scream about it, then the well financed Michelle Malkins of this world pick it up, and finally it is funneled into the flagship of right-wing media, the Washington Times. If it is a pro-war stink, the Washington Post can be relied to take it up as well.

This, however, merely integrates the Internet into the old media stream, and the old tightly controlled message politics of broadcast. A campaign is a few people in a room coming up with slogans, and a large number of shills repeating them, hoping they will catch fire. The Lamont campaign is not driven by this same dynamic. It is tightly controlled within itself, but it does not tightly control the messages that surround the candidate. A fact which the flailing Lieberman campaign attempted to use to create a fake controversy.

In short, too few people have understood that the reason the message of a different kind of citizenship that creates a new politics has awaited messengers is because there are too many entrenched interests busy smearing any messenger who manages to rise to the forefront. This does not change the basic reality - the new politics has consistently selected politicians of a particular type, with a particular personality. The type is not the true outsider who comes in with completely radical notions about the system but, instead, the intellectual maverick who has risen within the system and who has succeeded by "thinking outside the box."

The article ends with this kicker:

"While there have been occasional articles about this new class of political player, as with the nature of the new kind of candidate, there has been a vast void of understanding as to what makes them successful in this new political environment. As with the candidates they support, the crucial quality is the ability to understand where the present political environment has reached a point of gridlock, and then the ability to leverage the very pressure that has brought about stalemate to burst out in a lateral direction with great, and unexpected, force. It is a pressure that journalists like Christopher Lydon, with decades in and covering politics, could feel and smell, but which the major outlets at first denied, and now decry, being dragged kicking and screaming into a world where politics is a conversation, and not an ad campaign.

That, then, is the real lesson of the Revolution of '06: namely, that it was there all along, and it is merely being unleashed this year to create its first wave of victories in electoral politics in the US. It has awaited messengers to carry its message, and with each passing battle, it grows more immune to the deceptive smear-driven attacks from the mass media world. These messengers are not starry-eyed dreamers, but instead people who began in the system as it is, and have crossed the aisle based on an intimate understanding of the failures of the old system. They have gathered around them a new breed of political operative on the Internet, and have made more effective an old breed that had been pushed aside by the old politics of the airwaves. This politics has faith in a different world, it values different kinds of politicians, and it is developing an increasingly cohesive political philosophy,

And while in 2004 this politics merely made a splash, in 2006, it has already won elections. But don't tell anyone, because the old politics still believes that if it isn't on television, it doesn't exist."

Do I get an AMEN on this?