The permanent nongoverning minority: the 2010 elections showed that unpredictable grassroots politics are here to stay.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

TWO WEEKS BEFORE Republicans took control of the House and eroded the Democrats' majority in the Senate, I was backstage at the Fox Business Channel watching the great libertarian host John Stossel fence with longtime Democratic political strategist and former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi. Trippi made an analogy between the Tea Party movement of 2010 and the grassroots-fed Dean insurgency of 2004. The crowd groaned in disbelief, but Trippi was right.

American politics is now at a stage where every two years the political establishment gets rocked anew by the sight of alienated citizens banding together in a decentralized manner to alter national politics in unexpected ways. There is emerging a permanent, though highly fluid, nongoverning minority of independents and disaffected party members who will unite to punish incumbents when the alienation becomes too acute to bear. Wherever you see a strong American political tradition being ignored and even flouted by both major parties, you see the kindling for the fire next time. It won't always produce the desired results for freedom-loving people, but it makes the two party system profoundly uncomfortable. That can only be a good thing.

Howard Dean, despite his national reputation as a leftist firebrand, didn't start that way. As Vermont's governor, he balanced budgets and supported gun rights. He also supported U.S. military interventions unflaggingly until Iraq.

But in 2003-04 America, especially on the left, an anti-interventionist tradition was having its face smashed into current events on a daily basis. When Dean based his campaign on opposition to the war, he tapped into passion desperate for a release. And with the emergence of the political Internet, an ignored subsection of the political spectrum--the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," as Dean called it, cribbing Ralph Nader's phrase from 2000--had at its fingertips the world's most revolutionary political organizing tool. It's no wonder that, even though Dean won only two 2004 primaries, Democrats tapped him to run their party in 2005.

What was the grassroots revolt of 2006? Some of it was Deaniac overlap: The same people who were fed up with professional Democrats' wishy-washy capitulation on war nursed a longer set of grievances about free trade, basic comportment in the battle against Republicans, and coziness with corporations. (Listing the ways exposure to the new "netroots" had changed his political outlook...