Poor Amstacher. That brand of sobriety is so 1995.
Back then the young conservatives owned cool. There was Laura Ingraham on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in her leopard print miniskirt, the vixen of the counter-counterculture. David Brock with a martini in hand and Ann Coulter in her preteen-size pants were up late every night drinking and smoking and listening to the soundtrack of "Pulp Fiction" and bragging about how much fun they were having. Meanwhile, the left could only stomp in its rope sandals and whine, what about us?
Talk to young lefty activists now and they sound like Ingraham did then, like the fresh-out-of-Stanford, newly minted millionaire Silicon Valley executives did in the '90s: Whatever they're wearing is the thing to be wearing; whatever they're doing on Friday night is the thing to be doing. They're happy, doubt-free, and the world can come to them.
"We have one thing they don't have," says Asad Raza, an NYU grad student and a member of Downtown for Democracy, a political action committee of artists and the tastemakers for the protest crowd. "We have a monopoly on downtown cool and hipsterism, and that's one thing that's not co-optable."
It would be the '60s counterculture all over again, except it's not.
"We don't fetishize being countercultural," says Eli Pariser, the 23-year-old founder of MoveOn. "We believe the values that drive our movement are at the core of mainstream American culture."
Every new group has a publicist and a marketing strategy. They run, in swing states, beautiful ads made by hip designers. Their leaders embrace the advertising industry -- many of them work there. "It's not an anxiety," says Raza. "We want to be co-opted by mainstream media."
Todd Gitlin, author of "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage," volunteers with young activists at a get-out-the-vote project in Pennsylvania. He considers this new version of the counterculture an improvement on the old.
"They are ferocious and dedicated and they think they're involved in something momentous," says Gitlin. "At the same time they have no illusions that they're on the cusp of a revolution. They don't have any reckless heroes; they don't think salvation is around the next drug bend. They're not transforming anyone's life. They're just defending a way of life they're rather devoted to."
Leon Wieseltier, cultural critic and literary editor of the New Republic, is less impressed. "They have this strange notion that one can be profoundly alienated and be the main event at the same time," he says. "They don't really have the stomach for marginality.
"What they practice is not exactly politics. It's a frenzy of emotion, of self-love, of self-congratulation in which you pay tribute to yourself and all the things you believe and all the people like yourself who believe in all the things that you believe."
Stirring Up the Electorate
One of the biggest debate parties in New York had to be at Crobar, a club that usually has house-music parties with big-name DJs. This night, the Friday night of the second presidential debate, it was holding a party hosted by Air America Radio and the Nation magazine.
The place had all the trappings of the club scene: disco balls, a glowing bar, girls in killer heels and a woman who looked like Uma Thurman supine on a red velvet settee, reading palms.
The whole party focused on a massive screen projecting the debate. This was not Georgetown, and yet the only ones who looked slightly bored were the bartenders.
Up in the balcony, along the stairs, down in the mosh pit, a mixed crowd packed in -- media people, MoveOn members, young kids with piercings and Mohawks, middle-aged couples just out of work. Occasionally the mood turned frat-ish and profane -- "Go to hell," someone would yell, or "Shove it." Whenever the camera cut to Bush making one of those pinched expressions, the crowd went wild.
