Blogging about the DC Dems relationship to the Connecticut Senatorial primary fight, Jane Hamsher over at Firedoglake recalls an exchange she had at yKos with Senate Minority Leader Reid:
I told him we weren’t unsympathetic to his situation — we weren’t the Club for Growth going after Lincoln Chafee. I might not like Ben Nelson’s politics but we mostly leave him alone for a reason, taking him down would assuredly deliver the seat to a Republican.
When I read a passage like this, I immediately think, why aren’t you a Club for Growth of the left? And if you aren’t prepared to join one, why haven’t others put one together?
As y’all probably know, I’m a Green. And being a Green is, in some important senses, a pretty hopeless position to be in. Our national party often seems directionless. We have some terrific state parties. But in my state of Oklahoma, ballot access laws make it very difficult for us to get anywhere.
But, for better or for worse, my reasons for joining the Greens in the 1990s remain true today: the Democratic Party seems settled into a center-right position on issue after issues, and progressive Democrats (let alone so-called progressive Democrats) seem ok about that. Since I cannot imagine the Democratic Party doing the right thing on countless important issues (healtcare, law and order, war and peace, and so forth), and since there seems to be no pressure on it to change, even from those who might want it to, the enormous longshot that is third party politics still seems a better bet that going back to Tweedle-Dee ’cause they’re better than Tweedle-Dum.
Which brings me back to the subject of this diary. Why not a Club for Growth of the Left? Although movement conservatives has long worked within the Republican Party, they have also been more independent from that party than, say, the left of the blogosphere is from the Democratic Party. Back when there used to be actual moderate and liberal Republicans, the right frequently targetted them. Liberal Republican Senator Charles Percy from Illinois was defeated by Paul Simon (of the bowtie) in 1984 in part because conservative California entrepreneur Michael Goland spent a then record $1.1 million to defeat Percy. And Joe Lieberman himself defeated incumbent liberal Republican Lowell Weicker in 1988 with help from a political action committee founded by William F. Buckley. And make no mistake about it, Percy and Weicker’s crimes were not the lack of party loyalty, but their positions on the issues.
The Club for Growth thus is part of an old tradition of conservative activism within the Republican Party. And though they’ve often failed in their primary battles against moderate GOPers like Specter and Chafee, have they paid any price for their failures? I’d say even when they fail to win elections they’ve managed to reign in whatever indepedence such “moderate” Senators ever had.
But on the left the opposite is the case. While Republicans proclaim Reagan’s famous 11th Commandment (“Thou shall not speak ill of your fellow Republican”), they honor it in the breach. It was Reagan himself who mounted a primary challenge to a sitting Republican president in 1976, of course. Meanwhile, the so-called left of the blogosphere is slavishly attached to the Democrats. Sure the netroots gripe a lot. But at the end of the day, Lieberman is singled out as the only Democrat in the House or the Senate who deserves a primary challenge…and his sins are carefully described as questions of partisanship, not policy or ideology.
Moreover, the Democratic netroots are proud of this attachment to their party. Chris Bowers’ and Matt Stoller’s extremely thorough 2005 report on the left of the blogosphere, The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere, lists the lefts greater partisan attachment as one of its chief advantages over the right of the blogosphere, which they correctly note is less institutionally attached to the GOP. I couldn’t disagree more.
(Interestingly, when I tried to disagree over on dKos at the time the report came out I was yelled at for not appreciating all the fine work that Bowers and Stoller had put into the report. On the contrary, I appreciate their work tremendously. I think they have the facts entirely correct on this issue. I just disagree with their conclusions.)
So I guess, I’m left with the question with which I started: why are progressive bloggers so scared of working against conservative Democrats? Why do they trust a party that lets them down over and over again more than conservatives trust a party that, comparatively speaking, delivers the goods?
Very well said. Sadly, it’s going to take further losses until people learn, and ’06 and ’08 are going to look A LOT like ’04 and the CA primaries looked.
It doesn’t pay to vote against your values.
You pose an interesting question: “Why are progressive bloggers so scared of working against conservative Democrats?” Maybe “scared” isn’t the correct verb…
Could it be that there is a “personality difference” between the far right and the far left that accounts for the difference? Those on the far left might be less given to aggressiveness and vituperation – this would explain why screaming head talk radio is largely a phenomenon of the right, while we pursue a more “intellectually nuanced” conversation in blogspace. And that, in turn, might be based on a difference in worldview between the gray shades of the left and the black-and-white of the right?
Could our tendency to look for common ground rather than declare war make us less successful in the political arena? Do some of us just not have the stomach for the gamesmanship needed to play political hardball successfully? Are we too idealistic for our own good? Heck, StevenD was telling us this morning we couldn’t even wish death on Ann Coulter (for crying out loud!) without sinking to the Republicans’ level. How many diaries sunk into oblivion on this site without a comment because the reflexive reaction here is to shun a wingeresque diary rather than get in the poster’s face? How many troll ratings have you given out? Heck, how many 3’s or 2’s? And that in the safety of an anonymous, free, convenient comment space: and these are the folks going to take on the DLC wing of the party?
Fortunately for us, my “take” on how the universe works is that those who are “evil” sow the seeds of their own eventual destruction.
We may well be hobbits, who only see the ring of power as good for parlor tricks. In the short term that is our weakness, but perhaps in the long term is our strength. But how to tap into that strength and focus it – aye, there’s the rub…
Rightwing “think tanks” are funded by big business which wants an intellectual cover for their self-serving economic policies. Since what conclusions they are supposed to find have already been decided in advance (by those paying the bills) they are not hampered by having to connect with reality.
There are some good “liberal” think tanks. One I like is the Levy Economics Institute: http://www.levy.org/
With the media in the hands of the same groups that fund the rightwing think tanks those who don’t follow the ideology don’t get any notice.
The greens might also be interested in the works of Herman Daly. A good summary is this short article:
Steady-state Economics
With due respect to the nicely stated (and somewhat congratulatory statements) above about how nice the left wing/progressives are, I disagree strongly.
Though I’m not a fan of James Carville, I think he spoke the truth when he said that people need to remember that the Democratic party is largely a group of special interests. Now, I’m not trying to set off a discussion about Democrats vs. various groups to the left of wherever self-identified Dems are in fact liberal or progressive. Compared to the Republicans, they are, as I’m thinking of them here. My point, rather, is that we, just like the Right Wing, have many single issue groups. Some of these, like Greens, are more cohesive than others. Some will not vote for a candidate who does not make health coverage a (if not the) central issue of his/her campaign. Some will support only candidates who are pro-choice, while others don’t care a fig for that issue compared to others. We clearly have people sitting in Congress who support the Iraq war, yet many people on the left see the war as the central issue that progressives / Dems should be opposing.
I do think the Repubs have been much much better at sticking to Reagan’s principle of not speaking ill of other co-partyists. They are better at taking the long view that we are, on the whole.
Although I am not advocating getting in bed with the Devil, as the Repubs have done by joining the interests to those of the religious right and the corporate raiders, we do have some lessons to learn.
One of them is that we do need the equivalent of the Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute. . . etc. We do have some of these things, e.g. Center for American Progress, etc. However fewer “liberal” think tanks seem quite so intent on political change as the CFG – The Center for American Progress being an exception.
And it should all be about getting progressives elected.
I am so glad you are bringing this up. One of my biggest beefs is that MoveOn is not using our progressive mailing list to its fullest. With 3 million members, you would think they’d be flexing their muscles a little bit more in terms of funding 2 or 3 key races each cycle. Instead, they dilute themselves down via wishy-washy email after wishy-washy email.
I wish I controlled the list. I’d mirror what the NRA did so successfully by picking on a handful of Congress-critters, and putting fear into the rest of them.
Could you imagine if together as MoveOn members we raised $8 million for Ned Lamont? It would be one hell of a statement.