DWARF PLATEAU:

Anger Management 101: How the partnership between Dean and Gore is remaking the Democrats (JOE KLEIN, , Dec. 22, 2003, TIME)

Democratic factions tend to be sedimentary. The oldest Old Democrats are blue-collar economic populists like Dick Gephardt, who also tend to be pro-military, churchgoing and socially conservative. In the 1970s they were supplanted by radical-liberal activists, refugees from the 1960s protest marches who tended to be antiwar, antipoverty, passionate about civil rights and civil liberties and more secular than the lunch-pail crowd. Bill Clinton's New Democrat movement was an information-age reaction against the two previous generations — a free-trade, business-friendly revision of traditional Democratic economics and a socially conservative reaction to the excesses of 1960s liberalism (especially when it came to law enforcement and welfare reform).

The New-News borrow from all three factions, but they most resemble the radical liberals. They are defined by their opposition to the war. They are militant on most civil rights and civil-liberties issues, especially support for gay rights and opposition to the Patriot Act. They are overwhelmingly secular. Indeed, they seem to have replaced religion with cybercommunity; the monthly Meetup is their church. One of the strangest but most telling passages in Dean's recent stump speeches comes when he indulges in a romantic vision of 1968--a terrible year when America seemed to be falling apart but a time he remembers fondly as a moment of misty social communion. That, he says, is the America he seeks to re-create.

Unlike the original radical libs, who clashed with the blue-collar Dems, Dean has cleverly embraced Gephardt's lunch-pail populism. To do so, he had to delete Howard Dean 2.0, who was a militant New Democrat. He abandoned his support for free trade. He now opposes the New Democrat impulse to reform traditional liberal programs like old-age entitlements, public education (Dean is even skeptical about charter schools, a New Dem staple) and affirmative action. Indeed, about the only Clintonian remnant that Dean supports is fiscal conservatism. [...]

There is, however, another statistic that may put the Dean phenomenon in perspective. On Sept. 30, Dean had approximately 452,000 Internet supporters. Trippi said the goal was a million by the end of the year. Last week they had only 515,000. The New-New movement may have reached a plateau.

It would be rather shocking if more than 500,000 people recall 1968 fondly and want to recreate it. Even stranger though is the seemingly conscious decision of the Dean Democrats to base the race on those 500,000 secular cybernauts in a nation that's so unsecular.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 17, 2003 10:28 PM