Unity!

There was an enjoyable presentation on Unity08 this morning by Kira
Allmann, Ron Rapoport, and Daniel Maliniak. I wasn't sure why this
was an organization worth studying, but the authors pointed out that
this was essentially the first political party that had organized
entirely on the Internet. It had no discernable leaders to rally
around, it had no formal meetings – just a web presence. So that's
kind of interesting. Just because Unity08 failed, I think, doesn't
mean that you can't organize a party on-line. The party failed
because it was completely incoherent. It purported to be a radical
party devoted to the cause of… bipartisanship. What's more, it rested
on the idea that you could organize a party of passionate moderates,
people who barely exist. It was basically a David Broder fantasy
camp. The fact that they managed to claim roughly 200,000 members is
pretty surprising.