From Why We’re Polarized (Ezra Klein, 2020) pp186-7
Extreme gets noticed. Confrontational gets noticed. Moderate, conciliatory, judicious— not so much.
Here, political trends are being compounded by technological ones. I was an intern on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, which was the first to use the internet to find support-ers, organize them into a movement, and use them to finance a campaign. I was there, stunned like everyone else, when the big red thermometer tracking individual donations before the third-quarter deadline nearly reached $15 million. No one had ever done that before. And they hadn’t done it before because they couldn’t do it before. Prior to email-this was before the social media revolution, and yes, I do feel old-it was costly for campaigns to communicate with supporters, even if they had them, and difficult for supporters to donate to campaigns, even if they wanted to. Mail is expensive at the scale of millions and too slow to take advantage of a momentary outrage dominating the news cycle. But digital tools are instant, and if not costless, pretty close to it. You can ping backers constantly, track them closely, let them connect to one another in ways that deepen their connection to you.
God, we were idealistic about what it all meant. Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, published a memoir/manifesto entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Subtitle: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, which sounded more hopeful and less sinister at the time. “This was nothing less than the first shot in America’s second revolution,” Trippi wrote, “nothing less than the people taking the first step to reclaiming a system that had long ago forgotten they existed.”3 Small-donor democracy was going to save us. It would wring the corruption out of politics, permit new kinds of candidates to run and win, engage voters who’d been ignored in favor of deep-pocketed donors. It was thrilling. It was even partly true.
But we didn’t see the dark side clearly. Dean, the little-known governor of Vermont, electrified the campaign by being willing to say what too many leading Democrats wouldn’t: the Iraq war was a mistake and Bush’s presidency was a disaster. He was right. Subsequent candidates would, like Dean, find that you could raise tremendous amounts of money and excite huge crowds of people by saying the things that millions of Americans wanted said, even if the parties didn’t want their leading figures saying them. There is real value here. But it’s a channel through which racist lies and xenophobic demagoguery can travel as easily as overdue truths. The overthrow of everything, indeed.
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