A Thoroughly Modern GOP

Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein does a 'greatest flubs' rundown of the modern Republican party when it comes to just about anything having to do with zeros and ones, pixels and/or power cords. There most likely aren't any revelations therein for most of us about just how, where, and when the GOP has bungled when it comes to integrating the networked worldview into the modern Republican party. There's "John McCain is aware of the Internet" (a classic from a PdF conference gone by -- register now for PdF '09!) to referencing Facebook with a the preposition in front to the RNC coming down hard on former e-director Mike Turk for getting made fun of by "The Note," of all things. Of course, it didn't necessarily have to turn out this way. Bush-Cheney 2000 did some pretty innovative things both online and on the data back end -- identifying prospective voters and using supporters to make the sale on the GOP ticket to people they knew in real life. McCain himself wasn't all that shabby on the early Internet back then himself. So it wasn't as if where things stand in 2008 is the natural order of things. If wasn't obvious even a few years ago that you would today pretty reliably get a snicker out of even the most casual political observer by using the words "Republican" and "Internet" in close proximity.

But the pertinent question today is whether the GOP can overcome what is, by general admission, a pretty sizable deficit when it comes to the modern Internet.

It's naturally tempting to take a look at what the other major American political party's base did when it found itself irrelevant enough to the momentous decisions happening in Washington that it was about as useful to shout in the wind as to attempt to participate in the formal legislative process. The netroots rose up, circa 2003, based on a vehement and surprisingly unified position on the major political question of the day (the Iraq war), found their position mirrored in a fresh-voice major candidate (Howard Dean), and then reclaimed a larger purpose by spidering out from that base of strength. Maybe that's how Republicans will get their groove back. Maybe that's exactly the story we'll tell when we look back at the recent tea parties as the start of the re-emergence of a vibrant political party. Indeed, the argument is often made that, as one smart Democratic activist says in Stein's piece, "Eventually, some of them [on the right] are going to crack the code." Perhaps cracking that code means issuing a carbon copy of much of what the left has been able to succeed in when it comes to the web, particularly the 2.0 variety. There would be no shame in that.

But there's a question of whether, to put it gently, the GOP is really modern enough to crack the 21st century Internet medium. Can a party that has arguably never broken from the Bill Buckley vision of itself as "standing athwart history, yelling stop" -- a law-and-order premise fueled by the idea that human nature, without proper tend, threatened to run amok -- embrace a decentralized, grassroots-based, we're-all-in-this-together view of the world? (You can certainly argue that at least the past two Republican presidencies didn't exactly hold very tightly to that conservative mindset, but you won't get much of an argument on that in concerned circles on the right.) How realistic is it to expect a party that has a very soft spot for the self-reliant individualist (think Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and the "What Would John Galt?" signs seen at tea party rallies) that hearkens back to an American West that has long since passed to really "crack the code" of the entirely interlinked and thoroughly networked modern world?

It seems a timely question to ask considering that last week we saw people talked about as the future of the Republican party dressed up in Revolutionary War gear and re-enacting a two-century-old event.