February 21, 2005, 11.17pm • 145 comments » • 3,459 Views

IDS offers Deaniac vision for the Right

I’ve had what some might call the questionable honour of interviewing the last three Conservative party leaders. Iain Duncan Smith, I found, was particularly scary. Even though he was only a shadow health and social security minister at the time, he cut an authoritative gait and wore an intimidating stare.

But, writing in this morning’s Guardian, Duncan Smith has turned into an adovcate for blogging as the medium for political change.

Or, more accurately, for change on the Right. Because, while you thought Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic candidature campaign, engineered by Joe Trippi, meant it was the Left revolutionising politics and fundraising using socialising technologies, IDS has spied an opportunity for the other side. Indeed, after reading how the Eason Jordon scandal followed Rathergate, he’s turned into the kind of blogophile we’ve now come to know and love, prophesying the end of the media as we know it (and I feel fine):-

Karl Rove, the man George Bush described as the architect of his re-election, recently said that the dominance of America’s mainstream media is coming to an end. And Rove credits the Davids of the blogosphere for the humbling of the old media Goliaths. After decades of centralisation, Rove believes that the national conversation is being democratised.

Mainstream TV can no longer say what it wants without fear of correction. Online diaries, written by teachers, soldiers and numerous other people with real knowledge of subjects, are fact-checking ill-informed broadcasters. The bloggers have already toppled two of American TV’s biggest names.

It sounds as though IDS is incredibly plugged in. Clearly clued up, he even notes with insight how there is an opportunity for the Tories to push their message by routing around the mainstream mass media:-

Although it was a Googler who discovered that Tony Blair’s second Iraq dossier had lifted extensive material from a PhD student’s research, Britain hasn’t yet had much experience of electronic campaigning. But the blogosphere will become a force in Britain, and it could ignite many new forces of conservatism. The internet’s automatic level playing field gives conservatives opportunities that mainstream media have often denied them.

And he feels like the only authority figure truly getting to grips with the issue on this side of the pond:-

They will expose the lazy journalists who reduce every important public policy issue to how it affects opinion-poll ratings. Tired of being spoon-fed their politics, British voters will soon be calling virtual town hall meetings, and they will take a serious look at the messenger as well as the message. It’s going to be very rough.

Sadly, I’m confused by his assessment of the recent epoch in citizen media-centric online political communication:-

You would also expect this electronic revolution to be good for the Democrats, but the American left’s relationship with the internet has been disastrous … Dean energised an unrepresentative group of voters with a stridently anti-war message.

As I remember it, the Dean For America movement was not just about raising campaign cash, but also about connecting people around the US agitated enough to want to get together and talk about effecting change.

The American Left’s relationship with the internet has been far from disastrous. The Left has been the first to use the new online media with such revolutionary zeal. Indeed, without the coalescence brought forth by Trippi’s Dean campaign - which was fractured after his failure but never completely lost - would John Kerry have even mobilised the Democratic vote in the so-so numbers he did? Without MoveOn.org, would progressives around the US feel their dissent had been at all worth it?

An alternative vision for digital political connections also came today, in Mark Ward’s piece for BBC News, interviewing Tom Steinberg of FaxYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com fame on his new project WriteToThem.com.