Logical fallacies in action: We have lots of choices now, so political parties will wither on the vine!

That sounds pretty silly, but it’s the suggestion that Matt Bai makes in his New York Times Magazine piece on the death of the 527 group called America Coming Together (ACT):

ACT represented the first serious challenge to the industrial-age structure of the modern political party. Before [George] Soros and [Peter] Lewis plunked down all that cash for ACT, liberal donors had assumed that their only avenue into the political system was through supporting the party and its candidates…

ACT helped to usher us into the post-party world. We are now confronting a period in which the power and the innovation in American politics will reside not in some party headquarters on Capitol Hill but in a decentralized network of grass-roots groups, donors and Internet impresarios, all of whom seem to be increasingly entwined with one another. There’s peril in this trend — it would seem to favor millionaires over workers, and ideologues over pragmatists — but it was probably inevitable. Everywhere else in American life, after all, we see evidence of what the Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, in his 2000 book, ”The Next Deal,” presciently identified as “the Choice Generation”… Was it really reasonable, then, to expect the same top-down system that has governed American politics since the time of Martin Van Buren to somehow survive the revolution intact? In the end, ACT’s contribution was to act as a bridge from the last political moment to the next, hastening the chaotic process of democratization — even without the capital ”D” that its founders would have preferred.

But as Mike Tofias put it in an email to me, this is probably wrong:

I agree that the future is in the networks, but I am not sure how you read 2004 and
say the party is dead. If anything the rise and fall of ACT and Dean’s takeover of
the DNC suggests that parties are still the political vehicle of choice. Anything else
is probably just a fly-by-night outfit.

In short: Yes, you can create your own 527. Yes, parties will increasingly work in alliance with a decentralized network of independent groups, and the power of those groups could pull the parties further away from the center. No, that doesn’t mean parties are going away or will be replaced by independent groups or anything like that. Mike’s right — if parties are outmoded, why did Dean jump from his own group (Democracy for America) to take control of the Democratic Party?

Another problem with Bai’s article is the simplistic notion that parties have been “top-down” since Van Buren and are now being “democratized.” The Democrats were largely paralyzed by the divide between northern and southern Democrats for decades, and later operated more as a loose coalition of interest groups than anything else. Also, the relatively unified Republican caucus in Congress is largely a creation of Newt Gingrich and only dates back to the late 1980s/early 1990s. Over the long term, the level of control that parties exert over their members has varied for a whole series of reasons.

In the end, it’s not at all clear that the advent of the “Choice Generation” is going to reduce “top-down” party influence. If anything, we’ve seen a trend in the opposite direction, with both parties trying to practice a more parliamentary style of politics in which internally unified parties deliver coordinated messages to the electorate. This is especially true on the Republican side, where independent groups follow the dictates of Karl Rove rather than battling him for control of the GOP. The party lives!

(For more on the Internet politics bubble, see this post, which also includes links to a number of past posts on the subject.)