POLITICS: The Death of Top-Down Politics?

Michael Agosta, CTSG's resident demographic data and research smart guy, responds to Micah L. Sifry's article on AlterNet, The Rise of Open-Source Politics:

I think before we pronounce this: The era of top-down politics is over.

We need to consider this: Karl Rove used "top down politics" and he kinda handed our collective backsides to us.

I agree the political landscape is dramatically changing, but what I wish the commentators would address, though, are the problems with the new landscape.

A blog full of comments...

• Doesn't produce a unified message.
• Doesn't produce movement leaders. This very problem, I'd argue, all but wiped out the anti-globalization protest movement. A "movement of movements" is anarchy not a coalition for real change in the real world and it tends not to be sustainable.
• Isn't a scientific subsample of the activist universe. What we likely see in the blogosphere is a vocal minority. Look at MoveOn's post election conference call (where the leftmost folks told 'em the number one priorities should be fighting the "stolen" election and working on a very inchoate notion of "media reform."
  

Direct Democracy damn near killed the Sierra Club, too, when 2% of the most vocal anti-immigration loons damn hijacked the entire Board of Directors.

Blogworld does give the wings a voice, but it's important to try to measure how big those wings are vis a vis the total populace. 600K members sounds great (the size of Dean's database at it's zenith) until you consider that at the eve of the Iowa primary a smidgeon under 1/2 of his online donations came from 21 very liberal counties and only managed to grab 18% of the vote on caucus day. When you subtract the curious, the bounced emails and the thousands of press folks logged on, you maybe had 450K real Deaniacs. That's roughly 4 tenths of 1 percent of the folks that ultimately cast ballots in November.