The Social Topography of David Brooks' Work-Culture War: a Warning to Ross and Reihan
I’ve been mordantly ruminating over David Brooks’ July 1 column. Why?
Over the past several years, the highly educated coastal rich have been engaged in a little culture war with the inland corporate rich. This is a war over values, leadership styles and social networks.
The deeper you go into this observation the more dizzying it becomes. What follows is a long consideration of how it intersects with — or collides with! — Ross’ and Reihan’s main contention about the future of conservatism in America.
Consider this gloss on what we can think of as two central components of Brooks’ observation: first, the war over social networks is over types of social networks, which generate different values — and virtues, including leadership styles. Second, culture largely determines social network type. Assuming, as I always do, that ‘social’ never means anything except ‘relational’, cultures — with the authoritative dos and don’ts that differentiate mandatory, prohibited, and optional relationships — structure relational networks embedded deeply in what I’ll lamely call ‘value orientations.’ Let’s start with the new situation Brooks describes:
Once, the wealthy were solidly Republican. But the information age rewards education with money. There are many smart high achievers who grew up in liberal suburbs around San Francisco, L.A. and New York, went to left-leaning universities like Harvard and Berkeley and took their values with them when they became investment bankers, doctors and litigators.
Political analysts now notice a gap between professionals and managers. Professionals, like lawyers and media types, tend to vote and give Democratic. Corporate managers tend to vote and give Republican. The former get their values from competitive universities and the media world; the latter get theirs from churches, management seminars and the country club.
Something very strange is afoot here: the transformation of entrepreneurship. Once, economic entrepreneurs formed small businesses which, when they grew, networked in a hub-and-spokes pattern; when they remained small, they became nodes in local, ‘communitarian’, similarly wheel-shaped networks of neighborly citizens. Both these kinds of entrepreneurs leaned significantly Republican, but they were at odds with one another, because they both dealt in material goods. Mom and Pop stayed small; Wal-Mart got big; Mom and Pop went out of business, possibly becoming Democrats in the process. What could you sell if not material goods, or services that serviced those goods? The entrepreneurial class in the GOP became, by its own success, establishmentarian, bloated, status quo. In a tragic irony, each independent businessperson who launched a successful enterprise networked along hub-and-spoke lines created hundreds of workers inimical to the conservative entrepreneurial spirit: middle managers. The working class, in other words, has been steadily shifting its bulk away from both ends of a continuum, one that reaches from the entrepreneur gone big to the communitarian small business owner. The population is now fat around the middle — middle management, that is.
Meanwhile, smart young coastal liberals who grew up with the internet were networking in web patterns, not hub-and-spokes ones. Why? The culture that produced them has greatly, when not totally, decentralized its authority. The public opinion of peers, the collective honor of prestige, and the innovation-rewarding marketplace led young coastal elites to reproduce the web-networked relational structures that produced them. Gone were the strong parents, strong localism, and strong churches that created hub-and-spokes networked ‘social’ conservatives. Reading ‘social’ as ‘relational’ allows us to identify ‘social’ conservatism for what it really is — network relationships structured inwardly around durable, central authorities, authorities stable and trusted enough to ‘conserve’ tight relationship structures. ‘Social’ liberalism, then, refers to web-networked relationship structures with dissipated or abandoned vertical links to central and superior authorities. (Thus we can clearly see the promise of liberaltarianism.)
It’s important to note that ‘social’ liberalism, as I have just described it, is much different from ‘social democratic’ liberalism, which is actually socially conservative in its network structure and features the State at the top of the vertical of authority. Liberalism in the William Jennings Bryant or Franklin D. Roosevelt vein is, indeed, a liberalism of middle management — with a few public decisionmaking elites (Big Government) at one end of the continuum and a few private decisionmaking elites (Big Business) at the other. Middle management patterns onto the communitarian social structure of ‘social democracy’, where all citizens strongly identify themselves and one another with the union of State and Commonweal. A commonwealth of shared management maintains everyone in the middle — this is the stitching pattern of the social fabric as championed by certain neo-Aristotelian ‘conservative Democrats’ of Michael Walzer’s and Christopher Lasch’s ilk.
But Christopher Lasch reminds us forcefully of how social-democratic network structures have been so badly damaged in America: through the cult of ‘upward mobility’, and, specifically, through the transformation of higher education into a system of social accreditation. It is no longer even accurate to describe it as ‘elite’ social accreditation, for its purpose — a purpose which it cannot stop or pause, because the contemporary economy depends upon it for its survival — is to indefinitely and cumulatively expand the social ‘upper class’. Its objective is — to put it in Ross and Reihan’s terms — to massify the upper class by extending elite social networks ever-outward in an open web pattern with many nodes of moderate-at-best authority. (Thus Harvard’s trendsetting decision to put its coursework online, for instance.) The appeal of joining this ever-larger ‘upper’ class, of joining not the Country Club or Sam’s Club but the (pop) Culture Club, is what drives young liberals into entrepreneurial roles cast within network structures that penetrate, unravel, and destroy the hub-and-spokes structures of socially-democratic conservatives. This is the topography of Brooks’ “little culture war.”
A warning to Ross and Reihan, and to all those who wish to follow their generous and compelling recipes in Grand New Party, emerges clearly from that topography. The ‘middle management’ working class is, culturally speaking, structurally and dispositionally antagonistic to conservative politics — while the long tails on either side of middle management, composed of breadwinning small business entrepreneurs at one end and elite economic leaders on the other — are strongly oriented in its favor. Why? Because the individuals populating the long tails, many of whom have tight family structures inherited from cultural networks oriented vertically around authority, hold a strong, almost commanding conviction in the sacredness of property rights and material goods. They may not speak of it in this way, but it’s true: they view the world in material terms, view material goods as the durable building blocks of prosperity in a society anchored in the permanent things. And property rights — especially the right to keep what you earn and allocate it to your family, not to worse-off fellow citizens — are the legal structures that keep the authority of material goods in place.
Middle management people believe all this too — but instead of viewing property rights and material goods as things that vest in individuals with families, they view them as things that vest relationally in large collectives — in big Detroit-style firms that supply dependable pensions to middle managers, and in big New-Deal style government, which does the same. For middle managers, social democrats that they are, there’s little meaningful distinction between ‘national greatness’, usually considered a Republican trope, and ‘the great society’, usually associated with Democrats. This is why they yearn so constantly for bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake, and why in practice they veer irregularly between presidential candidates from each party. It’s also why they, as Ross and Reihan describe, are the people who can think of no one more American than Joe Lieberman and Colin Powell.
Now, it’s all well and good to seek to ‘win’ these middle managers for the Republican party. What’s disturbing — and what has provoked my lengthy rumination on the Brooks piece — is that middle managers are but one component of a culturally conservative class of voters, and the other two, vital components — entrepreneurial elites and the entrepreneurial common man — are becoming woefully endangered. The ‘little culture war’ between hub-and-spokes networks arranged vertically around authority and web networks arranged horizontally away from authority has translated in economic terms into a conflict between workers who supply material goods and workers who supply immaterial services. This isn’t the place to recite Tocqueville, Marx, and Nietzsche on why the move to immaterialist capitalism is part and parcel of ages of equality, but the cites are plenty. What matters is that Republicans will do well to win the working class only if entrepreneurs whose work involves material goods continue to exist in America in large numbers. It’s not entirely clear that this is likely.
A good fallback position, then — one which Republicans may indeed be forced into — requires a concerted effort to engage conservative cultural structures with socially liberal network structures — without destroying the former. In some ways, this is a daunting challenge. Communitarians and paleocons will recoil in horror at the prospect of enticing at least some conservatives to live more like the mass elites of the liberal coasts, with too-cool parents, loose, contingent mores, a work ethic motivated by the celebration of the shared consumption of services, and a near-total detachment from the authoritatively permanent things. But when I glance around at today’s thinking young conservatives, I often see them operating in what look suspiciously like socially liberal network structures. And yet, I recognize — or I think I do — a foundation beneath them, a ‘value orientation’ derived from still-living and still-commanding socially conservative network structures like churches and/or families with direction-giving authority. This, I wager, is the source of the attractive new ‘heterodoxy’ powering new thought on the right.
On second thought, perhaps the thrust of my argument then isn’t so much of a warning to Ross and Reihan and their fellow travelers as it is an intensification of their argument, an invitation for them to assertively be themselves, and a raising of the stakes in what by all accounts is a massive realignment of the way social relationships are structured in America.
Reading ‘social’ as ‘relational’ allows us to identify ‘social’ conservatism for what it really is — network relationships structured inwardly around durable, central authorities, authorities stable and trusted enough to ‘conserve’ tight relationship structures. ‘Social’ liberalism, then, refers to web-networked relationship structures with dissipated or abandoned vertical links to central and superior authorities.
Your definition of “social liberalism” seems to ascribe characteristics to liberalism that more accurately describe libertarianism. The ideology you have labelled “social democratic liberalism” more accurately describes liberalism as it actually manifests in our political system. I think this is more than a semantic quibble. You may suppose or hope that an upcoming generation of political liberals are dispositionally libertarian in their outlook, but the institutions liberalism depends upon for political survival, such as ASCME and the Soros Network, mandate that liberalism will remain forever statist and structured vertically under Big Government.
— aldo · Jul 11, 06:27 PM · #
Very interesting. If you want to develop this further, you need to work with a phrase other than “middle management.” As far as I read it, MM is someone who isn’t an owner of capital or isn’t a knowledge worker. That’s a pretty broad category, at least 95% of which wouldn’t self-identify as management. (Empirically it is problematic, as, among those with < 90% of household income, people who identify as management have much better earnings growth than those who don’t.) It also has a sneery grad school quality to it. Also:
“The appeal of joining this ever-larger ‘upper’ class…within network structures that penetrate, unravel, and destroy the hub-and-spokes structures of socially-democratic conservatives.”
Google (and Harvard putting its coursework online) is responsible for the decline of Ford, and manufacturing more generally? The social character of manufacturing? That’s one way to look at it.
— Mike · Jul 11, 07:13 PM · #
This is a great post. Let me throw a few comments out there…
You mention that “A good fallback position…requires a concerted effort to engage conservative cultural structures with socially liberal network structures.” I’m surprised conservative candidates for political office don’t rally around this idea more often.
For example, if I were running for a national office, I would make it one of my central themes to engage the private sector in allowing more Flex Time employment, remote employment, and/or “home days.” There are an overwhelming number of companies nowadays that require employees to sit around in cubicles and stare at computer screens all day, when they easily could be doing the same task from their home, allowing them more time to monitor their daily lives (kids, errands, etc…) and cut down on gas costs and commuting time.
I theorize that most American businesses are committed to management orthodoxy and it is this exact same phenomenon that is bogging down the conservative movement in this country. Some conservatives cannot embrace the socially liberally network structures of 2008 in any meaningful sense because they are afraid that it will break down their conservative structures of the past. Remote employment is a perfect example: it allows individuals (a conservative ideal) the freedom (another conservative ideal) to structure their work around their lives (this engages the cultural conservative structure), instead of committing to a work-before-life orthodoxy (the middle managment influence). Yet most middle-managers oppose this employment option because they feel it will create gaps in the authoritarian hierarchy of modern business bureacracy, draining them of power and authority in the process.
I think this is why you see conservative philosophy changing with the rise of the blogoshpere and the “flat-world” economy. Many people have been able to develop (or disseminate) their conservative philosphical and vocational views outside of communitatian structures (like churches and manufacturing factories) and within the socially liberal networks of today’s age (like political blogs). In the latter world, the central authoritarian axis is the individual. Cultural communitarians are not accepting of this (you used the term “antagonistic” which is perfect) because it runs counter to their orthodoxy.
— mattc · Jul 11, 07:14 PM · #
Please excuse the verbosity, but I want to refine my previous comment a little. You have described a scenario in which traditional Republican interests have remained in hub-and-spokes networks that have, through their very success, created a new class of workers who view Republican politics as inimical to their interests, while “(smart young coastal) liberals” have meanwhile abandoned the hub-and-spokes networking model altogether in favor of web-patterned networks.
I think your choice of wording here is a clue to the logic error you make further along. In our current poltical system the opposite of Republican is Democrat, not liberal.
I believe that young people across the political spectrum are more disposed toward web-based networks. (In your last paragrpah you aknowledge that even young conservatives are operating in this way). Those who are more comfortable with free markets will continue to identify with Republicans, while those who are more comfortable with government will continue to identify with Democrats.
The question then is how will the trend away from hub-and-spokes networking and toward web-based networking manifest itself in real-world politics. This is where I was going with my previous comment. I believe that the GOP has in its DNA the theoretical possibility of re-orienting itself to allow the new paradigm to express in its politics, while the Democratic party is institutionally bound to vertical Big Government politics.
Thus, no matter how decentralized and web-based these smart young coastal liberals may be in their personal tastes the only menu choice the Democratic party can offer them is what you call “social democratic liberalism,” while the GOP could jettison the religious right (whose influence is declining anyway) and offer these “social liberals” a home. The middle management types will be very comfortable in the Democratic party.
— aldo · Jul 11, 07:40 PM · #
These comments are sharp and good, and I’ll respond in kind in due time, but for now I just want to throw this log on the fire by way of reference.
— James · Jul 12, 03:59 AM · #
Congrats on a great, great article. I think you have zeroed in on universities as the meme generators of modern times in the US. What you have yet to notice is there recent collapse as place-based entities. That is, they are all trying to be globalized. It has led to a dissolution of identity and their students are no longer of an ilk—even business schools no longer turn out the sort of MBA that gave us the mobile, aggressive advocate of creative destruction that has led to America the Strip Mall. A follow question might be…what are universities becoming in the US? I think it remains deeply unanswered.
— Ryan · Jul 12, 09:47 PM · #
So right. Aldo, for the reasons you describe I went out of my way to note the convergence point in liberaltarianism, which is possibly the most rancid notion of all time. Yet I am not really sure which vector, in which direction, is worse. Would I rather live in Conservative Hell (A), in which prostitution is institutionalized according to the Whim of the Open Market, or in Conservative Hell (B), in which prostitutes are fed an endless supply of food stamp-comped Cheetos to make sure they don’t die skinny and in public? The answers are opaque. Ross and Reihan make what appears to be (not done with book yet) a persuasive play to (Andrew’s term) “bribe” the working classes (what a shocker: in anything but the shortest of short runs, as Karl Rove has learned, the non-propertied classes always need to be bought off, in cash). That seems to suggest that liberal institutionalism is a better bet for conservatives than libertarian ‘institutionalism’, aka the spontaneous ever-publicizing order of the ever-expanding web. My great hope is that, at some level of heroism, libertarians can be persuaded in open court not to degenerate repeatedly into filthy orgy apologists, on the one hand, and filthy Rawls apologists, on the other. If libertarians could assure me a future without justice as fairness or justice as orgasm, I’d vote for Bob Barr, or something.
SO — re-reading your refined, second comment, the main problem is that unplugging totally from the hub-and-spokes network arrayed around direction-giving, interdict-issuing authority (“jettisoning” it) is probably completely fatal to conservatism, not least because it involves jettisoning any serious attachment by individuals, families, and groups to the MATERIAL particularity of, well, blood and soil, and also the things that make craftsmen and mom and pop stores and family dinners and everything Matt Crawford and John Schwenkler praise possible. My greatest hope is that the internet is actually not ruining all these things, and that our disembodied digital robots of the ‘tubes can be mastered benignly so as to afford our lives the possibility of materially particular flourishing. So you can see why the outro to Wall-E was so enchanting.
Mike: Right! How about “nonpropertyholding people in the material goods business”? Maybe not as catchy. Unfortunately I am a sneery grad student, so falling back on Middle Management, with all its low-grade stigma, is probably inevitable. But you’re quite right about the social character of manufacturing. Marxism only went big because working in a factory is unnatural and sucks: all these intimate strangers. A warning to freemarketeers.
Mattc: agreed.
Ryan: universities are becoming compartmentalized, disembodied nightmare social accrediting institutions designed to trick kids into being so traumatized by the sexual state of nature that they take it to be real nature, a flesh jungle in which the only way to bring meaning to your life is to make money in the competitive trivial-experience-platform-producing market. Universities today are designed around the idea that everyone should always continue to find Sex in the City to be the philosopher’s mirror of nature. Jeepers!
— James · Jul 15, 12:42 AM · #
James,
You’re shooting off ideas like a Roman Candle. I have thoughts on all of them, but I want to go back to the premises of your essay. The essay sets off as political antipodes Republicans, who network in hub-and-spokes patterns and (social) liberals, who network in web-like patterns. I think this is an analytically weak distinction for two reasons. First, it might cause the reader to infer that the two different networking modes correlate with political partisan identification. In fact, the Democratic party (which is the true political antipode to the Republican party) itself operates on a hub-and-spokes network pattern, which you label “social democratic liberalism.” You correctly noted that social democratic liberalism is actually socially conservative in its network structure and features the State at the top of the vertical of authority. Furthermore, you admitted observing young social conservatives operating in what look suspiciously like socially liberal network structures. I believe that the trend toward web-patterned network structures is generational, not partisan.
Second, setting Republicans against social liberals misses what I believe is the true political division in this country. Since the 1960’s social liberals have found a home in the Democratic party and social conservatives have found a home in the Republican party, but I don’t believe that there is any institutional reason why this must remain an immutable fact. The true political division, which is immutable for institutional reasons that are independent of ideology, is between the government sector and the private sector. The government sector includes the public employee unions, which are the core of the modern Democratic party, but it also includes trial lawyers, university professors, and a host of superficially private-sector enterprises and non-profit organizations which are dependent for their survival upon government grants and earmarks. (It may also include “National Greatness Republicans like McCain). So, we currently have on one side a coation between the government sector and social liberals, and on the other a coalition between the small business entrepeneurial class and social conservatives. The former coalition is is reinforced by the transition of many social liberal movements into interest/identity groups which have been bought off with government largesse. The latter coalition is weakened according to your analysis, by the success of the entrepeneurs in creating a new “middle management” class that has less vested interest in resisting the encroachment of the state and weaker ties to the local business hub-and-spoke networks.
I think that it is too late for us to attempt to recreate a hub-and-spokes coalition around what you describe as serious attachment by individuals, families, and groups to the MATERIAL particularity of, well, blood and soil, and also the things that make craftsmen and mom and pop stores and family dinners and everything Matt Crawford and John Schwenkler praise possible. My sense is that this America is gone forever. The only way for the private-sector coalition in which I place myself as a libertarian to resist the further encroachment of the government coalition is to try to attract social liberals by making the case that their goals might be more effectively achieved by market-based means. It sounds lame even as I type it, but I really don’t think that there will be enough hub-and-spoke commonality in the future to make communitarian approaches possible without government coercion.
— aldo · Jul 15, 06:20 PM · #
Okay. I agree with your first paragraph, especially because I tried in the original post to lay out basically what you suggest. So I agree with the beginning of your second graf, until you get to the part about the nonideological ‘real’ division between the public/governmental and private sector. My trouble is that I don’t recognize a ‘governmental’ sector as an analytical category because I deny that there must be (and in our case, is) “a” government, or that any governing body, including township, county, and state, is The State. The main genius of Federalism is in destroying ‘governmentality’ as a monolith and breaking up the public/private distinction in contingent, plural, and shifting ways. So I might support ‘the private sector’ very strongly at the federal level but kind of lazily and incompletely at the city level. This gives libertarians fits because they think people have a right to keep their businesses open as long as customers do or would come to them, whereas I couldn’t care less if some inefficient and primitive town council decides that businesses shall close at 6 pm. (for whatever reason). I get more annoyed as a matter of principle when this time moves up toward, say, the absurd and unreasonable 12 pm., and on balance I’d prefer to live somewhere within 15 or so miles of an area where stores are always or often open.
Also I agree Bygone America is gone at the national level, but I only really want it to be present at at least some appealing and viable regional and local levels anyway. And I’d argue that this is all conservatives have typically ever wanted anyway, until cultural conservatives decided they had to nationalize and politicize themselves in order to fight off the crazy hippies and crusading Great Society types. But if you think a town council or a state legislature is just as much The State as a federal or national government, then you will by definition see ‘government coercion enforcing communitarianism’ wherever you look. Basically what I think we need is to train ourselves to operate ‘responsibly’ in web-networked environments. To the extent that libertarians think that ‘responsibly’ is just a stupid holdover of nostalgic and wrongheaded commitments to discredited, arbitrary, and disenchanted hub-and-spokes structures, I refrain from libertarianism. But I am enough of a libertarian to think that the argument about how amok to let libertarians run is one that has to be had at the level of culture, not national politics — while recognizing that this schema itself won’t work unless you permit at least some local regional variation in the marginal political regulation of lifestyles broadly understood (24 hr. convenience stores, Wal-Marts, leather bars, etc. etc.).
— James · Jul 15, 11:27 PM · #
As I see it, the moribundity of federalism in both politics and public opinion means that “Government” is a monolith, and aldo’s dichotomy holds more water than James admits. We’ve squandered our federalist birthright, and the federal government has become The State for most people’s purposes. Only insiders bother caring about sub-federal government anymore. And even among them, once you get into the nuts and bolts of non-national governance, you discover how much state and local activity revolves around federal inducements and penalties. I’m thinking here of state officials that spend all their time deciding how best to spend or attract federal matching funds, for instance.
If I stop and think about the institutions that shape us, though, my first thoughts are not about the public/private distinction or network topology: I go straight to scale. Gigantism is the plague of both government and market. Choosing whether to entrust one’s interests with a hypertrophied federal government or an equally overgrown corporation is no choice at all. If we hope to see the variegated, responsible polis that James describes, we need to shrink both our government (governments, if you prefer) and our aggregations of capital.
— Matt Frost · Jul 16, 03:05 AM · #
The horror, the horror. Exterminate all the brutes! If you, Matt, are right — and this is also a line that Schwenkler has tried to tie around my neck — then America is in Hobbes-land, and Hobbes-land is the inescapable hell that Europe has never been able to, um, well, escape. But what keeps pushing me away from that doomsday depression is what seems to be the factual evidence: Americans, still, push very strongly away from enthusiastically Statist ideologies, especially Statist ideologies that pair up with Volkish ideologies. Still, nobody really wants to turn America into a Heideggerian/Wagnerian Bavarian Redoubt. We are all still pretty mobile people with feverish little preoccupations, and I continue to side with Lawler on the issue of soft despotism’s unfulfilled ‘promise’.
In a lot of ways, we are more stranded individuals than ever before. My hub-and-spokes networks arrayed around vertical relations with authority may crumble for a lot of people who are (or should remain!) completely unable to take full libertarian advantage of ‘emancipated’, un- or anti-authoritarian web networks. The libertarians may see this as an inspiration to push the social envelope, but the fact is that in a fiercely competitive physical and emotional social market, there will always be a lot of losers. So the goal becomes democratizing aristocratic pleasures such that the ‘losers’ can enjoy them at the trivialized and domesticated diluted strength that can keep their behavior marginally productive and thinly predictable. This program — basically a libertarian version of a guilt complex — surveys the Rawlsitarian crossroads.
Which is repugnant enough that I hold out hope at shrinking our governments and our corporate persons. Why? Not because of peak oil or divine dictate, although who knows, right, but because the goods of citizenship — of self-rule at a scale chosen by citizens in their shared sovereignty — are what MacIntyre calls ‘internal’ goods, goods good in and of themselves, and with massive instrumental side benefits besides. So the gauntlet thrown down before my position is that citizenship is becoming, or has become, obsolete — in as long enough a term as is necessary to more or less outlast, outplay, and outperform (note those actorly verbs!) free republics these days. Precisely what Russia, China, Singapore, and the Gulf States are out to prove…! The horror…!
— James · Jul 16, 04:10 AM · #
James,
If I understand you correctly, you are envisioning a communitarian-utopian political model that seems to be inspired by a romanticized or nostalgic idea of Bygone America. As a thought exercise there is nothing wrong with this. You mention Rawls a lot, so I’m sure you’re also familiar with Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which explored the same philosophical territory as a thought exercise from a libertarian natural rights viewpoint.
Back in the real world of America in 2008 the LAT yesterday proclaimed the death of the free market on the front page, and the NYT reported that Congress wants federal agencies to use Title IX to force gender equality in science. These are just two examples from a single day of how the sphere of government has been constantly expanding, and the private sphere has been contracting, for a half century now.
You fret that America may be in a Hobbesian dystopia. It seems to me that if we are headed toward a dystopia it is clearly Orwellian, not Hobbesian. I cannot hope to flesh this out in a blog comment, but I have alluded to institutional reasons why we are locked into an Orwellian death-spiral. I believe that before we begin thinking of smaller political schemas, the more exigent questions that we must address are how to push back against the powerful and inter-connected institutions which threaten to expand government to the point that it asphyxiates the private sphere.
This is not to dismiss your analysis out of hand. I think that you are on to something very important regarding the paradigm shift from hub-and-spokes to web-based networking. The Democratic (statist) party is locked by these same institutional structures into a rigid, vertical hub-and-spokes model which may be unappealing to younger generations. This may be a point of weakness that could be exploited. In order to do this, though, the Republicans must pressure cultural conservatives to give up attempts to legislate their own religiously-based morality on a national level, otherwise the Republican party will never be seen as a viable alternative to subscribers of the new paradigm.
— aldo · Jul 17, 07:02 PM · #