Democracy in action jolts Bull Moose screw loose?

Funny thing about Pattern Language. Those who profit from the old patterns--constructs which may have once been new and ushered in by them--are shocked!, shocked! to find there's unbidden transition going on. Exhibits K through W:

This is no exaggeration: The soul of the Democratic Party — and possibly the future of civility in American politics — is on the line in the Aug. 8 Senate primary in Connecticut. - Mort Kondracke (Roll Call sorry, sub needed)

The Connecticut race is not just about Joe, but about the long-term political health of the Democrats. And this vile swiftboating of Joe could long plague the donkey. - by Marshall Wittmann

Interesting parallel hyperbole and metaphor. Kondracke's a lost cause. A skin-deep liberal forever consigned to the dinner tables of McLean and Georgetown as Roger Ailes's Bell Jar Democrat.

But Marshall's a DLC guy, ex-Republican orthodox and one is to assume, knowledgeable about a "third way."

The DLC. You know, those "centrists" of the Democratic Party who are sposed to know how to win over "heartland" voters and get the median of the American psyche. (Yeah, the ones who took credit for Clinton's accession when his true appeal derived from his own innate tuning fork.) Trouble is, the DLC brand of salvation tends to the same managerial-speak and inert number fetish that haunts its opposites in the land of office politics. In Marshall's recent post cursing the darkness, I was reminded of something else I'd been noodling recently in terms of grander strategy and bigger fights

In War Through the Ages, Lynn Montross compares Clausewitz with his contemporary, Antoine Henri Jomini, one of Napoleon’s officers and a notable strategist, "Jomini produced a system of war, Clausewitz a philosophy. The one [Jomini's] has been outdated by new weapons, the other still influences the strategy behind those weapons." Link

Yeah. Jomini was a technician, facile with squeezing the last drop of utility out of the mature system as it was, but poor at imagining and anticipating the possibilities and redundancies that the future might bring. Clausewitz had ideas, not technique. I'm sure he wouldn't care much about my paraphrasing his ideas but the parallels beg it.

I'll bore you no more except to share this email I sent to Marshall:

Marshall,

Just read your "Liberalism of Fools" post.

Consider something for a moment. Your analogy kind of fits. Kind of. Humphrey got a raw deal and a poor hearing. But he got stuck in the jaws of a democratic party (and a country) at odds with itself. How did that come to pass?

Well, leaders of all stripes, of which HHH was undoubtedly one, failed to reconcile the late 60s version of what you are seeing in the mid-2000s. The system had changed. The leaders didn't. Norman Rockwell was replaced by George Lois. Hearst, by Halberstam, Arnett and Rather. And all these new replacements and their newfound instruments to commiunicate ran slap-bang into the unreality of all the brochure copy about American Ideals they'd' been fed. And they could say so and did. My friend, I don't know where you stood in 1968-9, but where you and all the rest of us stand now is in exactly that middle passsage of generational change where we come to see that Mom, Dad, Uncle Frank, HHH, or Joe Lieberman's choices weren't, after all, completely just for the good of the kids.

The noise factor and vitriol is NO different from 1969, no different from what you found in any corner bar in Reading PA or Del Rio TX. Marshall, you act as if people and their angry responses to politicians they consider idologically vagrant have changed. No. The difference is, now you can hear them, in all their non-Emily Post-aproved glory. And what are they doing? The same thing most folk with a new tape recorder or new fangled word processor did. They're making a lot of discordant and rude noises that don't follow "the rules." 80% is mess and hackery, the ill-formed output of frustrated people. So they rely on crude approximations of their feelings. They resort to expletives. And to cheap, simplistic short-handism like "Swift-Boat" as a verb.

But you know what? All this new tech and new info? It's become, since 1969, too much to sort through for our overloaded brains. So we revert to the only filter that still works: feeling, visceral response; tribe and it's code. Higher brain function is a luxury in this environment. Reptile brain measures of Feed, Fight, Fiight and Food are driving. And yeah, that's one of the reasons Ds are so flummoxed by a population that yawns over their shopping lists of facts and white papers.

"A few republicans denounced"? Maybe so, but it's a statistically insignificant sample. The lines were drawn. The lines were clear. You and Joe have both crossed them, countless times now. You just did it again, broke the code, by taking collective visceral revulsion at Kerry's pummeling and using it as a cheap metaphor for Lieberman's plight, aimed squarely at your most potentially loyal warriors. Heavy users and early adopters are unique and temperamental. You don't whip them, you undersand and anticipate and co-opt.

Marshall, I'm an ad and marketing strategy guy. I helped Mark with Virginians for Warner. And Tim too. You know what that is, right? Virginians for (*) is shorthand; it's what we do here in VA to give cover to wayward Republicans who don't like their Guy or Girl. Guess what? They too are jonesing for a party that doesn't pretend to piety, certitude and entitlement.

We've got a country here whose collected reptile brain is screaming that something's amiss. America is stuck in its adolescent "can't be told anything" stage, and many Americans think its time to progress to the next developmental phase. The future has no context, it's leaders say the equivalent of "groovy," old frends turn out to believe things that revolt you, up is down, yadda yadda. The people who don't get or want to acknowldge that they get this are crystalized by Joe, his emblematic sense of entitlement, his lack of critical self-regard and his bony finger. Joe may be a nice guy. But he's the wrong guy because he looks backward and down only.

The plague you're worried about? My friend, it's no mystery and it's not a plague. It's the natural unfolding of things. Einstein had it right. "The significant problems that we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." Nor, it should be obvious, by solely the same people

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Mark