- York, Byron.
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.
New York: Crown Forum, 2005.
ISBN 1-4000-8238-2.
-
The 2004 presidential election in the United States was heralded as
the coming of age of “new media”: Internet-based activism such as
MoveOn, targeted voter contact like America Coming Together,
political Weblogs, the Air America talk radio network, and
politically-motivated films such as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
9/11 and Robert Greenwald's Uncovered and
Outfoxed. Yet, in the end, despite impressive (in fact
unprecedented) fund-raising, membership numbers, and audience
figures, the thoroughly conventional Bush campaign won the election,
performing better in essentially every way compared to the 2000
results. This book explores what went wrong with the “new politics”
revolution, and contains lessons that go well beyond the domain of
politics and the borders of the United States.
The many-to-many mass medium which is the Internet provides a
means for those with common interests to find one another,
organise, and communicate unconstrained by time and distance.
MoveOn, for example, managed so sign up 2.5 million members,
and this huge number and giddy rate of growth persuaded those
involved that they had tapped into a majority which could be
mobilised to not only win, but as one of the MoveOn founders
said not long before the election, “Yeah, we're going to win by
a landslide” (p. 45). But while 2.5 million members is
an impressive number, it is quite small compared to the approximately
120 million people who voted in the presidential election. That
electorate is made up of about 15 million hard-core liberals
and about the same number of uncompromising conservatives. The
remaining 90 million are about evenly divided in leaning one
direction or another, but are open to persuasion.
The Internet and the other new media appear to have provided
a way for committed believers to connect with one another, ending
up in an echo chamber where they came to believe that everybody
shared their views. The approximately USD 200 million
that went into these efforts was spent, in effect, preaching
to the choir—reaching people whose minds were already made up.
Outreach to swing voters was ineffective because if you're in
a community which believes that anybody who disagrees is insane or
brainwashed, it's difficult to persuade the undecided. Also, the
closed communication loop of believers pushes rhetoric to the
extremes, which alienates those in the middle.
Although the innovations in the 2004 campaign had negligible
electoral success, they did shift the political
landscape away from traditional party organisations to an
auxiliary media-savvy network funded by wealthy donors. The
consequences of this will doubtless influence U.S. politics in
the future. The author, White House correspondent for
National Review, writes from a conservative standpoint but
had excellent access to the organisations about which he
writes in the run-up to the election and provides an
inside view of the new politics in the making. You have to
take the author's research on faith, however, as there is not
a single source citation in the book. The book's title was
inspired by a 2001
Slate
article,
“Wanted: A
Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy”; there is no suggestion
of the existence of a conspiracy in a legal sense.
August 2005 