canvassing, phone banks, visibility at parades are just part of the campaign. The heart of it is the outreach to personal networks. Every person has some sort of personal network. The personal line of influence, wearing a political T shirt to your doggie play group, for example, does much more than the best canvassing operation can hope to.

But you need a functional local Dem committee to take advantage of that sort of personal network. Howard Dean has done wonders to resusitate local Dem committees.

What, exactly does it mean to do politics in "walkable neighborhoods and public spaces"? It sounds lovely, but I don't think it means anything at all (which is the way Stoller usually strikes me) - it's nothing I've ever experienced, and I'm getting old.

In the cities I've lived in, they hold political rallies at some large facility, like an arena, usually in the heart of downtown where hardly anybody lives and nobody can walk to easily, except from the parking structure.

Authoritarian messaging worked well in walkable urban Munich beer halls too. I'm not a fan of suburbs, but I don't see any sense in this.

On the other hand, social networks are everywhere: family, cow-orkers, unions, churches, outdoor activity clubs, garden clubs, the corner tavern and all kinds of other things. And those are the places where opinions (and identities) are expressed and formed and where retail politics goes on, IMO.

All of those cut across any geographical distinctions like city, suburb, small town, and rural. In fact they're more grouped (albeit loosely) by class, which of course doesn't exist in the US.

But, I think it has much more to do with the fact that the internet has increasingly become the 'public' square.

I think this idea may have been more true a few decades ago, but I'm not sure it means much of anything, anymore. That said, urban areas do tend to be better for the proper maintenance of the public sector, which has all but disappeared in some areas of the country.

the whole "authoritarian message" thing is quite a leap in logic -- which is just a nice way of saying that as usual, Stoller is talking out his ass.

Stoller doesn't really seem to understand the suburbs (or his understanding is like Obama's understanding of 'white, working class' voters -- right out of a textbook). Suburbs, especially 'inner ring' suburbs, are not islands of individual isolation (and thus ripe for authoritarianism) -- people know their neighbors, and talk to them. (McMansion suburbs are different, but most suburbanites don't live in McMansions).

Indeed, there is probably as much if not more "isolation" among urbanites than suburbanites -- especially in more affluent areas. (who else remembers Kitty Genovese?)

In my career as a design professional, involved with learning, teaching, and practicing “the city”, I’ve come to understand that city form responds to, as well as shapes, political affairs. Design and development follow beliefs of the era that makes them, and they, in their turn, influence what comes after. There also comes a time when the existing physical paradigm requires major revision. That is our position now with the American tradition of the car-accessed small town and city suburb. How did we get to this point? Here is one tale:

The small, architect-designed company town where I grew up was planned in the English garden city tradition, with winding streets of suburban houses, but also with a defined ‘downtown’ area which contained the major shops and public facilities such as the library. This model worked, at the time, because most women were at home with their children during the day, while the men went off to work at the company. There was little crime and a lot of activity in the neighborhood: children roamed freely and people knew their neighbors. Doors were unlocked, and participation in local, state, and national politics followed naturally from knowing people and from “belonging to”, not just “working for”, a company that seemed to give to the town as much as it profited. Moreover, most people were middle class and either worked for the company or ran shops and services for those who did.

Political discussions were a vibrant part of company gossip all year, all over town. Children were immersed in political debate in every type of organization and in every public meeting place. There was as much group pride and sense of participation in local, state, and national affairs as in the local affairs of business. On every level people cherished their influence on the course of affairs.

In my town, this idyllic picture of an integrated political and social arena began to change in the 1970’s. A seemingly unconnected series of political and economic forces conspired to take away the local political network the town had enjoyed. The change came slowly and started with a relocation of many town businesses to a town periphery mall. Then the company withdrew its involvement from everyday affairs for fear of liability. Civil rights for women and people of color gradually drained the suburban houses of their daytime occupants leaving them vulnerable to crime. Without much option of daycare, children were “home alone” after school without supervision or direction.

Meanwhile, the population of the town soared. People became strangers, finding common interests became uncommon. And against this background of town change was the constant pressure of inflation. Everything the citizen needed to do cost more and more, and for most people, wage rises did not keep pace.

For the townspeople of this one small town in America, life had become much harder. And so it was that in the atmosphere of physical and moral uncertainty, the town majority voted for Reagan in 1980. He reminded people of what they had lost, and he promised to restore their loss. Of course, that didn’t happen. Though many could not see it at the time, his trickle-down market-led economics was the opposite of what might have worked.

Grassroots America, in its post-war form, was destroyed by companies (and governments) that disinvested from personalized, local responsibilities in favor of a depersonalized list of consumers and shareholders, disinvested from arrangements that would directly benefit everyday life in towns and cities and instead invested in empty-in-itself profit. Across the nation, small towns and city suburbs alike were losing the social content that had given meaning to their substance. Participatory democracy eroded as the social structure of the towns and cities fell apart.

The goal of PB.2? Not to put the postwar Humpty-Dumpty together again, but to forge a new green city and a new green politics for a growing sense of common blog-citizenry...

because I couldn't get past the idea that online communities were held out as the example of the contra to 'authoritarian messaging'.

The past 12 months have been an abject lesson in the authoritarian messaging of the internet, and nowhere more so than from the Obamacans.

Seems to me authoritarian messaging works best 1) in an authoritarian structure; and 2) among people who yearn for someone to tell them how to think and act.

In the real world, the first is probably more important, except out with your neighbors and coworkers, you're more likely to run into opinions that are not lockstep with yours, and you have to occasionally make your case f2f. Rudeness and acting like an ass don't persuade people, they just make people think you're an ass.

Online, the opportunities to pal around with only those who agree with you (aside from an occasional troll-bombing trip to dissident sites) are rampant. In other words, #2 is the opportunity for authoritarian tendencies to flourish without counterpoint.

We need to start debunking the continuing myth that the internet is somehow a de facto egalitarian utopia; it has great potential but in the end is like any 'space', real or virtual -- it is what the people in it make it. Otherwise, no need for PB2.0.