When you get big and you have a conference in Las Vegas and make appearances on Meet the Press, the long knives come out and start looking for anything and everything they can find to reduce your influence and marginalize you. Byron York recycles the mercenary story. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post delves into your prior business dealings. You get blog entries like this one: Dear Kos, When Your Swim With Sharks, Don’t Cut Yourself, that use me, to attack you. Let’s be frank, there are sharks in the water and they are looking to do damage to Daily Kos and to drive wedges within the lefty blogosphere wherever they can.
I have no intention of playing into the hands of unscrupulous people that have our worst interests at heart. I will not air our laundry. What I will do, is define what I see as the differences between the green and the orange. When former Reagan Republican James Webb won the Democratic nomination to contest Senator George Allen’s seat, Glenn Reynold’s moronically wrote:
A reader emails: “Don’t you think it’s also bad news for the left fringe of the Democrat party? I think it shows that voters will not support the Howard Dean-Kos-fringe and it makes for interesting times as Democrats try to find a [sic] presidental candidate for 2008.” Yes, when Democrats move to the center, it’s bad news for both Republicans and the Democratic far-left
And Markos, who actually supported Webb, responded:
Like Webb, I used to be a Republican. You guys can keep talking about the “far left fringe of the Democratic Party”, but if you were intellectually honest you’d acknowledge that it doesn’t live at Daily Kos. We’re backing centrist to conservative Democrats in Virginia (Webb), Montana (Tester and Schweitzer), Kansas (Sebelius), Pennsylvania (Casey), and so on.
The caricature you guys are trying to paint simply doesn’t meet reality.
So, let’s meet reality. Markos is claiming a centrist to conservative Democratic pedigree, at least to the extent of embracing the above candidates. I was vocally opposed to Casey in the Pennsylvania primary and I didn’t lift a finger to help Tester (which was probably an error in judgment on my part). I took no position on the Virginia primary. I do not claim to represent or to reflect a centrist to conservative constituency. My goals are to utilize the tool of the blogosphere to move the center of American politics to the left, not to elect a centrist Democratic Congress with a bare majority.
Reynolds’s “Howard Dean-Kos-fringe” monikor is a mischaracterization. Howard Dean was never that far left (fringe) and Daily Kos’s editorial policy was never that far left (fringe). The only thing that might be considered fringe is the actual make-up of the Daily Kos community, which is whiter than the Democratic Party, more highly educated than the Democratic Party, more affluent then the Democratic Party, and (nonetheless) more radical than the editorial board of that site.
Daily Kos is about ‘winning’ not ideology. There is a tremendous amount of overlap between the strategies that I advocate and the strategies that are advocated at Daily Kos, MyDD, and other community websites. But, Daily Kos has a special place in the hierarchy. Daily Kos has the megaphone. And, Daily Kos is not pushing a specifically progressive agenda, although it sometimes claims that mantle.
Despite the fact that Markos has been completely consistent that he is not anti-war but anti-this-war, and despite his attacks on single-issue groups, and despite his efforts to disassociate himself from the women’s studies set, the hippies, and the conspiracy theorists, the right-wing is continually trying to paint him as a radical fringe leftist. He doesn’t want that moniker and he doesn’t deserve it. We shouldn’t allow him, and the Daily Kos community, to be painted with that brush. They want to marginalize the orange place. But the orange place is very much in the mainstream of political discourse.
That, in and of itself, is an accomplishment. Three years ago, the discourse here was considered borderline treasonous. But, let’s not kid ourselves. The discourse in this country, post 9/11, was so tilted to the right that Daily Kos becoming mainstream is only a slight self-correction. There are still acres and acres of unoccupied territory for real leftists to inhabit. While we talk about gaining a bare majority and stemming the tide of a reactionary revolution in this country, there are still the old mainstays of single-payer universal health care, support for abortion rights, affirmative action, and a smaller, less imperialistic foreign policy.
There is still room for debate outside the narrow confines of mainstream respectability. We still can discuss the discrepancies in the official line over the 9/11 commission, the likelihood that the 2004 election has stolen (through whatever combination of efforts), and so on. Daily Kos doesn’t want to be associated with such fringe arguments. But, they also have no right to narrow the parameters of acceptable debate.
My site does not seek to be respectable and it does not fear being marginalized. But, for those of you that are critical of Daily Kos for wanting these things, you are being short-sighted. Daily Kos is now a player. It’s a mainstream player. And in becoming mainstream, it must throw off its revolutionary mantle and take its power into the fray. This represents a major blow to the traditional power structures and a truly democratizing force. The seismic shift that Daily Kos’s arrival represents should never be minimized. At the same time, the tremendous energy of the Daily Kos community is now being directed towards a more traditional target. It is being focused, like a laser beam, on gaining a majority in the Senate, the House, or both.
Power is sought, but to what end? We know that the mere acquisition of power will represent a tremendous move in the correct direction. One can only imagine the consequences of John Conyers Jr. heading up the House Judiciary Committee. Yet, as power is consolidated, we see the Daily Kos community closing ranks and ejecting the more far out voices. Leverage is protected by keeping the site clean from embarrassing or overly leftist thought. There is nothing wrong with this as long as we all understand that there is something crucial that is being lost in the process.
And that little something is the alternative press. It is the realm of ideas that are easily marginalized, even if only because those ideas do not have have sufficient substantiation, or they are too caricatured. As Daily Kos becomes a true player, it also loses the ability to serve some of its prior functions.
So, what defines the differences between the orange and the green? From an editorial standpoint, the green has always had a more radical and leftist agenda. Our agenda is not necessarily any more backward looking, but it does aim to use this medium to move politics even more to the left than Daily Kos has been able to achieve. And we don’t give a damn whether the mainstream media or the wingnuts can use our more radical diarists and commentators to marginalize our message. We do not yet have anything to lose.
Sites evolve and change their natures. Daily Kos is now moving from the fringes to the mainstream, and in doing so they have moved the center to the left. But, as Daily Kos takes its pride of orange place, other sites will be there to fill the void and supply a platform for the full cacophony of modern leftist political debate.
There is no reason for the two sites to fight. They occupy, and have always occupied, different plateaus in the national discourse.
