This article is for anyone who is skeptical of Howard Dean:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/10/franke-ruta-g.htmlThe mainstream media suggest that Dean has roused the Democratic Party's base through his opposition to the Iraq War and straight-ahead criticisms of President Bush. But comments like the ones above suggest that Dean has tapped into something much deeper -- and older in American political history -- than mere Bush hatred. Irrespective of whether he ends up winning the Democratic nomination, Dean has already accomplished something valuable for liberalism: He has reconnected it to a strain of religiously inflected American history it typically ignores.
In many ways, contemporary liberalism does not reach all that far back in American history. Its emotional roots are located in 1968 -- that year of great upheaval that, for liberal baby boomers, was year one of the brave new world -- and, to a lesser extent, in 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled the bricks and mortar of the welfare state. These are liberalism's historic reference points and the grounds from which its present-day rhetoric and enthusiasms spring.
Dean, though, comes out of neither of these two traditions...
No, Dean is something altogether different. He is more a product of geography -- and his was a chosen geography, as he was born in New York City -- than ideology. The more one watches him on the stump (and watches his admirers watching him), the more it becomes apparent that he comes out of, and is reviving, a tradition of small-town, New England civic and religious fervor that is all but forgotten in American politics today. He is something the country has not seen in a very long time. He is, essentially, a *northern* evangelist.