The editor of The New Republic suggested the other day that "the new liberal political culture emerging on the Internet" looks a lot like the McGovernite revolution that descended on the Democratic Party in 1972. In a lecture at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Peter Beinart said the mostly young Internet activists are clearly taking over the party.

If so, this would be the first ray of sunshine for conservatives and Republicans in almost a year. The McGovern movement severely damaged the party, pushing it toward four presidential defeats in five tries, until Bill Clinton won by dragging the party back to the center in 1992. If the Internet people had prevailed in 2004, Howard Dean would have won the nomination and then been buried in an enormous landslide, just like George McGovern.
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The McGovern reform commission and the people who changed the party in 1972 wrought lasting damage, and not just to Democrats: They helped mightily to create the modern split between red America and blue America. Many members of disfavored groups -- Catholics, Southerners and much of the white working class and lower-middle class -- decamped for the Republican Party, while the Democrats emerged more clearly visible as the party of well-off liberals, the poor, identity and grievance groups, secularists and the cultural elite. A second coming of McGovernite guerrillas wouldn't do much to improve that image.