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If a revolution is about a figurehead, it's doomed to fail from the beginning. Only the status quo can be held in place by a figurehead.
In the same way, the problems with Dean's revolution were never about Dean, as some here have claimed. Any of his "gaffes" were only gaffes because people decided they were. Dean can stand any one of his gaffes against Kerry's, or Reagan's, or Bush 1.0's, or Bush 2.0's, or Nixon's and win in a landslide.
The problem with Dean's revolution was, and still is, many Americans. Trippi expressed it well - many like the idea of reform when hearing about it on the stump, but they're still afraid of it when it comes time to vote.
Why? Because they just don't want to think too much or take real responsibility for anything.
This isn't a slam, it's just what many of my fellow countrypeople have shown me about themselves. A true revolution carries with it a responsibility to decide what one wants and what is going to have to do to get it. It requires that a person take off their rose-colored blinders and clearly assess the opposition. It absolutely requires that a person looks into themselves and honestly confronts what is there that has been coopted and complicit with the jailers, and to expend an enormous amount of time and energy to change it. It also requires that one fully accepts the possibility that their standard may fall in battle without anyone else picking it up. Staring down the primal fear of being vulnerable and outnumbered for standing apart from the crowd when it is necessary for survival. And just dealing with the fear of living down a mistake.
Unfortunately, many Americans are showing themselves to be unwilling to confront these challenges when they define their (non)support for their candidate in terms of abstractions like "electability" and popularity-contest rationalizations like "There's just something about him/her I just (don't) like.". What those comments amount to is an abdication of personal and collective responsibility. Responsible people may disagree, but will always have practical reasons for their disagreement. People abdicate responsibility because they're afraid of disagreement. Even a principle like "ABB" can be secretly unprincipled if it's done out of a tactical fear of disunity. A fear of disunity cannot be a solid basis for unity.
I firmly believe that democracy can never be killed, it can only commit suicide. How it commits suicide is by voting itself out of existence. People first vote democracy out of existence by devaluing the individual for membership in the majority, any majority, and rationalize it with pseudo-individualistic rhetoric. When the value of individuals is reduced to pseudo-individualistic rhetoric in a society, "one person" becomes an abstraction, and "one person, one vote" becomes meaningless.
In other words, fascists can't kill democracy - only the majority can. And increasingly more Americans are clearly having serious misgivings about, and in some cases out-and-out hostility toward, real democracy. They're afraid of it, and it makes them think too much.
I believe Dean has been facing a lot of primal fears (especially over the last couple of months with the scarlet-letter campaign against him), and maybe what he has discovered has led him to believe that he isn't the man for the time at this time. But as he said all during his campaign, the only power of the Dean phenomenon is us, his supporters. That means that it's the threat of what our power is capable of that has been given the scarlet-letter treatment by the media, not Dean himself. That also means that that power isn't done yet if most Americans still aren't afraid of "thinking too much" and being responsible - in a defensible, practical fashion - for their own vote. If they are, that power is already dead as far as America is concerned.
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