In today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Patrick McIlheran discusses the role the Internet is playing in altering the political landscape of the country.
He writes:
So at least 5,000 people rallied on Milwaukee's lakefront last weekend around the idea that in the Age of Obama, our governments' costs and ambitions are getting out of hand.
Naturally, rage and hatred ensued.
Though not from the ralliers. "These are extremist elements pulling together, distinct vocal minorities that frankly don't believe in this country," the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Mike Tate, told a reporter. He said the throng of generally peaceful people was eager to cut off others' health care and foul the waters. "They fundamentally don't understand how the American government, economy and capitalism work," he said.
Oh, my, Mr. Tate. Finished? No: On Tuesday, the chairman of the state's ruling party followed up with a fund-raising e-mail repeating the rant and comparing the crowd to historical baddies. "From the red-baiting McCarthyites to the Know-Nothings and the KKK, we have seen this story unfold many times in the past. Fueled by ignorance, racism and intolerance . . . ."
Blah-dee-blah. All I saw were the video and pictures; all I heard was what our reporter told me. It didn't seem like a lakefront of hate-crazed people, not when they're smiling in photos and carrying signs reading, "Granny Is Not Shovel Ready."
Why would such grannies in flag-motif sweatshirts so unhinge Tate? Why did Jimmy Carter earlier say such people's worries are racist?
Perhaps because of the tales "progressives" long have told themselves about the rest of us: That Americans, especially conservatives, are always on the edge of violence, that conservatives especially have nothing about which they can legitimately protest. "There are no victims on the right: That's their worldview," Michelle Malkin, conservative pundit and rally headliner, told me beforehand.
If conservatives have no good reason to protest, then thousands of them waving signs must be sinister. Admittedly, it is odd. Non-liberals usually don't march. They're too busy living life. What has changed?
Facebook, says Malkin. Twitter. The Internet. Online social media and sprouting Web sites are more than frivolity; they are a new means of informing and organizing people. It makes all the difference, she says.
McIlheran is right.
The new media have changed everything.
If you're online, you can be a community organizer.
Social and political movements no longer need to begin with a small group of individuals meeting face-to-face in someone's living room or a classroom or a church basement or on a street corner.
They blossom in a virtual reality.
The technology is so powerful. There's so much potential, and it belongs to everyone.
No wonder the Leftists are threatened. They owned the community organizing business, but their monopoly is no more.
Conservatives have a means to connect and organize and communicate -- in an instant.
The Leftists, like Mike Tate, can't handle that new reality.
McIlheran explains that technology, the means, and concern over the country's direction, the motive, have come together to create a movement that has caused the libs to flip out.
...The new synergy apparently has freaked progressives. Now you hear Tom Brokaw complaining about Internet-broken stories. Congressmen whine about town-hall flash crowds. The left says we need a controlled, regulated discourse.
From a controlled, regulated public, of course, in which "extremist elements" don't rally - or even do a lot of talking, as the president said, until they're properly lectured up.
Sorry. The crowds at rallies and town halls actually do believe in this country and know exactly how American government works, or is supposed to: The public and its discourse are free. It's the government whose powers are to be controlled and regulated. Some other extremist elements suggested this about 230 years ago and wrote a Constitution to that effect. They never heard of Facebook, but I'm pretty sure they'd understand what's going on.
The era of Obama is an era of change, but it's not all going the way the libs had planned.
Now they're whining because in spite of having the presidency and both houses of Congress and the mainstream media, their power is not invincible.
They don't have control over the individual; and, thanks to technology, the individual has never wielded so much power and reach.
America is a great country. YES WE CAN!
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