The Internet is a leveling force. It diffuses power and empowers new competitors to challenge old arrangements.
Elite newspapers and magazines, for instance, dominate their markets partly because it costs so much to build conventional hard-copy competitors. But the Internet has allowed thousands of new voices to find audiences at little cost for a panoramic assortment of news and opinions in Web logs and online magazines.
Some of the same effect is already evident in politics. Once it took years of heavy spending on direct mail and other recruitment methods to build a national membership organization; MoveOn.org, the online liberal advocacy group, acquired half a million names -- with virtually no investment -- just months after posting an Internet petition opposing President Clinton's impeachment in 1998.
MoveOn, and groups like it on the left and right, chisel at the power of the major political parties by providing an alternative source of campaign funds and volunteers. But otherwise, the two parties that have defined American political life since the 1850s have been largely immune from the centrifugal current of the Internet era.
Joe Trippi, a principal architect of Howard Dean's breakthrough Internet strategy in the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign, is one of many analysts who believe that may soon change. The Internet, he says, could ignite a serious third-party presidential bid in 2008.
"This is a very disruptive technology," says Trippi. "And it is going to be very destabilizing to the political establishment of both parties."
The Internet could allow an independent candidate to more easily identify an audience and financial base, just as it has allowed blogs like the liberal Daily Kos or conservative InstaPundit to find a community of like-minded readers. More precisely, the Internet has allowed readers to find those blogs. And because the audience mostly finds the product, rather than the other way around, the cost of entering the market is radically reduced.
Trippi believes an independent presidential candidate who struck a chord could organize support through the Internet just as inexpensively. "Somebody could come along and raise $200 million and have 600,000 people on the streets working for them without any party structure in the blink of an eye," he says.
It might not be quite that simple. But the two parties are pursuing strategies that create an opening in the center of the electorate, even as the Internet makes it easier for a new competitor to fill it.
