Garth Turner is a shameless self-promoter, but there's nothing new about that. He bills himself as a grassroots populist, but there's nothing new about that.
What's new is that the member for Halton wants to derive his legitimacy from the Internet, rather than from political party affiliation, through an interactive electronic dialogue with voters. The question, to which there is no easy answer, is whether Mr. Turner and his audience are harbingers or just a collection of cranks.
The political party as we know it coalesced in the 19th century, coincident with the arrival of new forms of communication: the telegraph and the long-distance railroad. And through the decades, parties have proved remarkably adept at absorbing and exploiting such new technologies as the telephone, television and computers.
They use these technologies to communicate with their own supporters and with the broader public, but the technologies themselves have had relatively little impact on party structures, which remain intensely hierarchical, with the ordinary party member having little influence on either policy or strategy.
Every now and then, grassroots protests appear to overthrow the party bosses in favour of new structures that truly capture the will of the membership. But that illusion eventually crumbles beneath the imperative of centralized decision-making. The old hierarchy reasserts itself.
Some people believe the Internet is changing all that. Bloggers opine, explain and dish out the dirt, contemptuous of their more cautious counterparts in the conventional media. Chat rooms and other online forums permit engaged voters to share and compare perspectives. Mr. Turner claims that many thousands of voters read and comment on his blog, from which he claims to derive a unique legitimacy.
That legitimacy is so unique that the Conservative Party kicked him out of the caucus and, yesterday, Mr. Turner announced he was resigning from the party. But Mr. Turner doesn't believe he needs a party. His constituency is not simply the voters of Halton -- it is an electronic populist movement that seeks to weaken party discipline and encourage free thinking in the House of Commons.
So, are we witnessing the birth of an Internet rebellion that will sweep away ossified party structures? Probably not so much.
First, in any populist movement, there are cranks, kooks and lonely souls. Their unhappiness has less to do with political than with personal frustration. Read the online comments to any blog, including Mr. Turner's. More than a few of the correspondents need to get out more. To that extent, Mr. Turner is simply conducting a high-tech dialogue with loners and losers.
Second, political parties are, yet again, co-opting the new technology. The various camps in the Liberal leadership race use e-mail to promote their candidate and slag their opponents. Delegates get convention updates from the Liberal Party website. Delegate selection totals were posted online. All this is just a newfangled way of running a very oldfangled exercise: a political leadership convention. Whether it's done in backrooms or by BlackBerry, wooing second-ballot support is as old as Laurier.
So, is Garth Turner a fraud and his constituency irrelevant? That's not true, either. Whatever else the Internet is, it is emphatically generational. The young navigate it with ease, but the older you get, the harder it gets to keep up. Successful politicians and successful parties must learn how to exploit the Web, because young voters -- who, in fact, are less likely to vote, and to read newspapers, and to participate in any of the institutions of political life -- are found there, and if they are to be reached, that is the medium for reaching them.
So, to repeat, there is no easy answer. Mr. Turner is the messiah of the lonely hearts, but he is also cutting edge, though what that edge is, and how well it cuts, is uncertain.
One thing is certain: Mr. Turner and the Internet were made for each other. The Web does not reward modesty.
