There's been a lot of comment today about how a lot of the argument for Dean is about style, and not policy from people advocating ABB support for Kerry. I want to address this, because I think that argument is fundamentally missing a point.
In my reading of American history, one of the greatest tragedies of Post WWII America is our move to an "expert culture" that led us to trust greater and greater power to trained experts, rather than to the American people. In a way, it makes sense...shouldn't people who have studied a particular issue deeply be making decisions about that issue for us? On the other hand, the result was a severely diminished sense of what we could accomplish as citizen-participants in democracy. Historian Lary May has done really excellent work on this transition in his works on Will Rogers and the movies of the 1930s and his work on early Cold War Hollywood. He observes that popular movie plots in the 1930s rarely ended in violence, but frequently ended with people working within the system to right a wrong. As people began to feel disempowered, it was harder to imagine solutions to major problems working within the system, and violence became the crucial way that problems were resolved on screen. We moved from "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to film noir very quickly as the culture shifted.
I think it's possible that this was a necessary shift, or at least felt like a necessary shift to deal with the Cold War. The sudden emergence of a global geo-political minefield and the introduction of a vast array of new technologies was probably pretty overwhelming to citizen-participants during that time. They had to defer to experts, and hand over some of the power that was rightfully theirs. As we turned to therapists to help us understand our personal world, scientists to help us understand our physical world, economists and political analysts to help us understand politics, we gave up a little bit of our voice in the process.
Part of what was radical about the 1960s counterculture was that it did not defer to these experts. The Port Huron Statement and a lot of subsequent work from that time was dedicated to building a new kind of democracy that was more open, more participation driven. Teach-ins were radical because they empowered people to question the experts on Vietnam. This was important and brave - it was scary to be asked, "Who do you think you are?" when you challenged the experts. It also met extreme resistance from the powerful elite, who liked their newfound power very much, thanks.
The promise of the Internet and dot-com boom, then, was that information exchange was never going to be the same. Even advertisers picked this up, showing that with sites like e-trade, we didn't have to be at the mercy of the Wall Street elites anymore. The Internet was a little slow to rise to this promise in a meaningful way, but it's starting to happen. Sites like dKos are great examples of ways that we, as citizen-participants in democracy are not at the mercy of experts any longer to make meaningful political decisions about very tough issues.
Now, I have a knee-jerk reaction to any argument condemning elites, mostly because of the Rush Limbaugh and company railing on academic elites that is largely out of spite and lacking substance. The fact remains, though, that if any kind of elite - academic, political, financial, or otherwise - is coopting the power of people by making decisions that should rightly be made by we the people, something is wrong. The Limbaugh rhetoric worked because it did speak to some kind of truth, though in a dishonest way (how many historians actually imagine that they shape democracy in a meaningful way by biasing their textbooks and lectures? It's a little ridiculous)
So here's the point. The reason I supported Howard Dean had little to do with his policy, at least in the sense that people usually mean - the checklist of issues that are important to me (the war, guns, choice, healthcare, education, jobs, etc.) didn't land me solidly in any candidate's camp. However, Dean's policy of open discussion and participation, of allowing the campaign to be shaped by the participants, spoke to me on a very deep level. Some people are tempted to write this off as "style", but I beg to differ. I think it might be the most important issue of the campaign. I think Clark people felt the same way in the Draft Clark movement. The blog is not style. The blog is a transformative shift in democracy that Dean had the courage to embrace.
The Cold War is over, communication tools have greatly improved, and we're now seeing the democratic promise that we all hoped the Internet could bring. There's institutional resistance to change, from some candidates more than others. Individual healthcare proposals will be chewed up and spit out by Congress - the difference between Kerry and Edwards and Dean is insubstantial on these issues, in terms of real world impact. However, ending the "expert culture" of the Cold War is a change that some candidates are willing to make, and others are not. I'll continue to support groups and candidates who believe in open, transparent government and a strong role for we the people.
It makes sense that there's a disproportionate number of dKos posters who supported Dean - the things that draw us here, I suspect, are not that different from the things that drew us to Dean. It also makes sense that Deaniacs have an aversion to Kerry. He exudes elitism of the worst kind, even if he gets most of the policy stuff right (albeit with endless caveats and reflection).
So when you write off Dean arguments as arguments about "style", keep in mind that Dean's "style" really was what would have made a difference in the White House. I don't need someone who talks like Dean, or dresses like Dean. I need somebody who listens like Dean. I think Edwards might get this message. I don't think Kerry ever will.
Who do I think I am? I'm an American citizen, and we collectively know better than Bush when it's time to send our troops into harm's way. We collectively know better than Kerry, or Edwards, or Dean how to run this country. This "style" is not unimportant. It's the most crucial issue facing our democracy.