Ross Douthat, writing in the NYTimes a week before the Massachusetts special election, managed to get past his internal Pauline Kael to read the signs…:

Brown’s race might actually end in triumph, rather than a close defeat.

…but he tripped onto two excellent points; the press’ brief fantasy that the left controlled the online world is over, and online political involvement is a very two-edged sword.

The Brown victory showed that the left’s bought-and-paid-for surge online from 2006-2008 has peaked:

But win or lose, he’s demonstrated there’s no necessary connection between online organizing and liberal politics. The Web is just like every pre-Internet political arena: ideology matters less than the level of anger at the incumbent party, and the level of enthusiasm an insurgent candidate can generate.

The left invested millions and millions buying an online presence after 2004; the right wing involvement in the blogosphere and in social media remains a pretty organic phenomenon.  And as we saw in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York, organic phenomena and passion mix pretty well.

But that’s not really new turf.  Douthat next went into perceptions:

It’s like other arenas, too, in its capacity to disappoint idealists. Indeed, it may be crueler to dreamers, because it offers an artificial sense of intimacy with politicians, without delivering any practical results. You can be Sarah Palin’s pal on Facebook, or have Barack Obama’s running-mate selection text-messaged to your cellphone. But Washington is still Washington, the legislative process is still the legislative process, and the power of an online community matters less than the power of the powerful.

Well, duh.

This is the bitter lesson many net-roots types have drawn from Obama’s first year in office. The promises of transparency have given way to the reality of backroom deal-cutting. The attempts to turn the campaign’s online community, weakly re-dubbed Organizing for America, into a permanent political force have flopped. In a recent post on the Web site Personal Democracy Forum, Micah Sifry captured the free-floating sense of anger with Obama’s governance: “The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests … sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.”

I’d say “duh”, but then I did just above, and one must not repeat oneself.

Still, we tried to warn the Obamabots about this last year; all that talk of reinventing government is the kind of thing that attracts utopians, the kind of people who think you can change human nature through sheer passion (or legislation).

But next, Douthat steers into the weeds:

If liberals are feeling disillusioned, though, their right-wing imitators [Er, no, Ross – the conservatives were here first, and we’re still better – Ed.] may be ripe for an even greater letdown. The Obama administration has at least gone some distance toward enacting an agenda that the net-roots left supports. The “right roots” activists are rallying around politicians who are promising to shrink government without offering any plausible sketch of how to do it. When Scott Brown pledges an across-the-board tax cut and sweeping deficit reduction all at once, he’s setting the conservative grass roots up for a major disappointment.

Douthat betrays his coastal media center-left myopia; just as Obama had a model for his agenda (FDR), we’ve got Reagan, who did it all; not “at once”, but it did sorta show the way.

But more importantly, Douthat’s wrong; conservatives don’t – or shouldn’t – get involved in politics to give meaning to their own lives.  And that a thin film of them might do that doesn’t change the fact that that sort of naive idealism is absolutely anathema to conservatism.  Government – even good government – is at best an enemy with whom you have a truce; at worst, it’s something to be strangled in self-defense.

If you do meet a conservative that invests themselves in politics the way Obama’s legions of naive hamsters did, please – set ’em straight.