December 24, 2003
Crowd inflation
TCS has an article on the Dean campaign's Internet support. The author, Arnold Kling, argues that Howard Dean's current success is far more about the lack of a viable alternative than, as the Internet left would have you believe, a national grassroots campaign. The metaphor he uses is the presence of the "Cha-Cha Slide" at Bar Mitzvahs: no one actually thinks that the "Slide" is connected in any way with Jewish culture, but the "Macarena" is out like leisure suits, and there's a certain faction of the Bar Mitzvah crowd that likes a silly dance. In the same way, no one actually thinks that Howard Dean represents a widespread and coherent political force, but hell, the radical left needs something to support. Kling argues that it is "affluent, college-educated, angry liberals" who created the Dean campaign out of a desperate need for a candidate instead of Dean cementing existing grassroots support behind a viable candidacy.
I think there's something else going on that Kling has either missed or elected not to discuss. The Internet is an incredible tool for allowing people of unified interest but widely disparate social and geographic settings to find each other and communicate, even organize. But this can easily deceive the participants in this newfound cyber-community into thinking that 1) there are a lot of people like them, and 2) they make up a much larger percentage of the population than they actually do. I think exactly this has happened with the "affluent, college-educated, angry liberals". Firstly, they're the demographic most likely to use the Internet, and use it for purposes not directly related to searching for NASCAR results. Secondly, they hate Bush. A lot. And thirdly, if the posturing of the Dean campaign is any indication as to how these people think and feel, they don't realize that they only comprise maybe 10% of the country at best. Only about 1/3 goes to college at all, and though that third tends to lean a good deal to the left (say 2/3 of them), I'd say only 1/3 hates Bush with any sense of passion.
This is, admittedly, a lot of people, perhaps as many as 50 million. But there are almost 300 million people in the country. You can't win an election with 50 million votes. You don't even come close to playing the party politics game. 50 million core supporters would be a fantastic showing for a third-party candidate, but not the Democratic front-runner. The Internet's siren song has convinced these people that they are in the company of the majority, when really I'd say that they're only talking to themselves.
