Continuing the rumination over network-centricity, Micah Sifry has a piece in The Nation about how the grassroots-driven organization of Howard Dean’s campaign is rippling out into American political organizing.
This suggests that worrying about the lack of a strong center may not matter, as emergent self-activating and self-organizing people may find equally valid ways to knit themselves together. And the bottom-up Dean experience may have taught a whole cohort of activists that politics is more satisfying when you’re in the driver’s seat.
I wish “The Deaning of America” (as Sifry calls it) was as easy and as evident as he makes it sound. But still it’s progress. I think, just maybe, we’re going in the right direction. And I don’t often feel like that.