It's time to play "retro future" with the wayback machine:

anyone with a Web site and a server, a satellite transponder and about $100 million can have -- in a matter of months -- much of what the political parties have taken generations to build.

Jeff Jarvis is right, of course.

A blogger who qualifies as a human time machine by his life experience, Jeff takes us back to the mystique of Camelot, and the later McCarthy challenge of 1968:

As Bobby tried to reclaim the Kennedy aura, so does Hillary help reclaim the closest thing to Camelot this generation of Democrats will ever know: the Clinton era.

She would be the first serious woman candidate for President.

She is hated by the Republicans -- and that only helps capture the rebel spirit of the Deanites. The more the talk-show hosts scream about her, the more Democrats will be inspired to come out to support her.

Waco Hillary, the evil Marxist blamed for the kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez (timed to coincide with the Bay of Pigs AND Waco anniversary, almost gloatingly....), a woman reviled for putting condoms and syringes on Christmas trees, rumored to be bisexual, to have engaged in adultery with Vincent Foster, a supporter of every dreaded cause from the Black Panthers to abortion to gay rights -- is an old hand at inciting this rage without appearing to do anything. (Sorry, but I have lived through tons of psychological warfare, and I know talent when I see it.)

And now, she wears a new hat: "Artillery Hillary."

Surely, this will drive the right wing crazy.

But as this Treo 600-equipped blogger recognizes, there is a major new factor at work today. A quantum leap forward from 1968, a new media has emerged. It cannot be controlled by the old media, and it is now threatening the old politics:

Technology, of course, has changed politics before. Television changed the two parties, for example, but it didn't make the parties obsolete. In fact, in the day of Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, television strengthened the two-party duopoly (the economist's term for a shared monopoly), as only those two parties had the resources to use it competitively.

But the Internet doesn't reinforce the parties -- instead, it questions their very rationale. You don't need a political party to keep the ball rolling -- you can have a virtual party do it just as easily.

And that's what Howard Dean has done. Nor is Dean alone. The same forces make the evangelical right a powerful force in the Republican Party. With its TV stations, membership lists and money, it is a party waiting to happen. When Republicans of more moderate stripes express concerns about the evangelicals "taking a walk" on the party, they are recognizing that underlying reality.

The ability to have "virtual political parties" is the greatest challenge the two parties have ever faced.

The 1960s generation was the first generation to have grown up watching television, and for them it was -- and is -- all about images.

There are many more, but that's the way it was. Images were everything. Activists who knew how to manipulate the then-new media became instant celebrities, and created news wherever they went. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the Black Panthers -- all knew that getting on TV is what it's all about.

But television was by definition a big media monolith. It still is -- except the once vast power of the "image" has been largely emasculated. Some of this is because of information overload. Much of it is healthy cynicism. But a major part is that a new generation is much more distrustful of imagery -- particularly when it is used to inculcate mythology. They can better handle reality.

One of the tests used to determine whether someone is a psychopath (today the label is "sociopath") is measuring his reactions to disturbing images.

I may be wrong about this, but I suspect that yesterday's psychopath is today's normal person. In 1968, a severed head on a platter would have been considered bad taste unless it had been religious imagery. Now, it's considered funny.

And it is funny. I consider this healthy cynicism, not psychopathology. There were people who were amused by the mutilated remains of Qusay and Uday. Some of this sneering is, I believe, a reaction against the older generation's immersion in imagery.

Today, people are interested in information minus the bullshit. And once you get over the gasping and the shock and the awe, what counts is what happened, and why. Shock value just doesn't cut it.

Nor does the use of time-worn phraseology. An endless litany of hot-button expressions, often designed to invoke images, dominates the old journalism.

Just today, Senator Kerry accused Dean of "liberal fundamentalism." When in doubt, trot out a label and hurl it. Except, it won't work with the new media. If it goes too far, they might just resort to fisking (a process which makes the Old School tremble in fear -- for, while they might be able to dish it out, like LBJ they are wholly unable to take it).

The new media strikes me as about to tap into the newly emerging Third Rail of American politics: the great cynical majority. Former Clinton strategist and hired gun (much-hated for his Machiavellian insights) Dick Morris touched on this recently:

The decline of President Bush in recent polls, the surge of Howard Dean and the embrace of Schwarzenegger in California are not contradictory.

Rather, they are symptoms of the same cynical disregard for our national power elite. They must not be seen as contests between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, but as fights between insiders and outsiders -- the new polarization that is gripping America.

Newsmax Magazine, Vol. 5, Number 12 (December 2003), at 18.

But these forces are inevitable. They're destined to merge.

The outsiders are in the majority, and soon the future will be too.