Here is how Nanette put it.
There is a huge gulf between those that want a tweak… and those that feel that what is really needed is a change. Most of the kos and kos satellite blogs – bootrib, fdl, mydd, mlw to a lesser extent, etc – and participants are tweakers. They’ve convinced themselves (especially the mydd’ers… good god) that, yes, they really can be THE progressive movement, even if their ranks are made up of primarily comfortably well off white males. Tweakers. A mile wide and an inch deep… because, as I mentioned to Stoller, when whatever burr is in their hide (war in iraq, Bush in white house, etc) is removed, the slightly discomforted will be comfortable again and go on with their lives.
There are some things to nitpick here…like what it means to be well off when your income is at the poverty level and you have no health insurance. Chris Bowers and I can tell you about how well off we are…although we certainly are not destitute or struggling to eat. But there is no point in nitpicking the larger point. When Bush is gone and the war is over (if it ever really ends), what will happen to vast majority of Kossacks and other ‘movement’ community blog consumers? The New York Times recently covered the anti-Hillary industry and concluded that it had atrophied, probably beyond repair, in the years since her husband left office. Nanette is making an excellent point when she says, “when whatever burr is in their hide (war in iraq, Bush in white house, etc) is removed, the slightly discomforted will be comfortable again and go on with their lives.”
For the majority of people involved in these blogging communities, that is probably true. But it is not true for a significant minority of the people. The Bush administration has motivated and politicized a lot of people. If the impeachment of Clinton gave birth to moveon.org, the Bush administration swelled its ranks by hundreds of thousands. The war in Iraq birthed the Dean movement, the meetup movement, the blogging community movement, and these have morphed into real-life activism all over the country. Here in Philly we can see these legacies in the Committee of Seventy, Philly for Change, Philly Against Santorum, Young Philly Politics, Drinking Liberally, the campaigns of Anne Dicker, Vern Anastasio, Tony Payton, Maria Quiñones Sanchez, and others.
It was a PhillyforChange activist, working at home from his computer, that uncovered the dirt that led to the indictment of Vince Fumo, one of the most entrenched machine politicians in this city.
This pattern started in places like Colorado and spread across the country. Here in Philly, we took over committeeperson positions all over the city and threw out a few ward leaders. Even our losses have been productive. Every mayoral candidate has come to our progressive groups seeking our support. Chakah Fattah was at pains last week to justify to Chris and me his support for gambling in the city. Other candidates are wavering in the face of a concerted progressive effort to keep this vice out of our neighborhoods and not let it become a necessary revenue source for funding our city.
Cleaning up corruption in our city, electing councilpeople and a new sheriff, fighting off gambling, ousting our bigoted Senator, electing a decent mayor, contributing to narrow Congressional victories in the suburbs…all of this and more has its roots in a totally revived progressive movement within the Democratic Party.
It’s true that the vast majority of this movement is white and that it is fairly well-off. But the movement is hardly homogenous. We are increasingly interacting with the African-American community, the hispanic community, and the Asian-American community. In fact, in this racially divided city, we are probably doing the best job of any political organization to transcend those traditional differences.
What’s more, this is no mere tweaking. We are pushing a broad-based agenda, including ethical reforms, citizen’s oversight, judicial reform, and more.
This is not a mile wide and inch deep movement. It’s still in its early stages and it does gain a lot of its oxygen from opposition to Bush and the war in Iraq. But it isn’t going away…it is just getting started and the midterms were just the first indication of its increasing influence.
If you want to know why there is such vituperative opposition to Hillary Clinton it is because her allies Chuck Schumer, Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, and Paul Begala are all so dismissive of and threatened by this movement (of which community blogging is only the most visible manifestation).
The vast majority of people in this movement consider themselves Democrats and want to work within the system to change the system. Once you are on the ground working for change, you don’t really feel the kind of prevailing pessimism that is expressed in sjct’s diary. It’s not that she doesn’t have a valid point of view. Many of us will be co-opted, or sell-out, or become what we started out trying to overturn. That’s the nature of power and politics and economic need.
But who would you rather be governed by? The old guard, or a new guard that was radicalized and politicized in opposition to our imperial invasion of Iraq?
The failure of the Iraq War has opened up a potential Liberal Renaissance that will change how this country views any number of things: imperialism, energy independence, health care, veteran’s services, fiscal policy, etc. We’ll never have the really left-wing government that many desire so long as the Constitution is unamended and dictates a two-party system. America will remain a very conservative place where neither party is likely to tack too far away from the center for very long without a correction. But we are changing where the center is. And we believe in what we are doing. And we are doing it from within the Democratic Party because it is the only way we can influence the actual power structures in this country short of civil disobedience and civil unrest.
sjct says:
The biggest fracture line in the “lefty” blogosphere is between those who still believe in The System and the few remaining voices who have to courage to say The System is fucked. You can’t beat The System by crashing into it because once you’re inside, you’re IT! You can’t sit around “Drinking Liberally,” imagining that you’re part of some “progressive movement” because that’s intellectual masturbation; you’re just diddled with your dick, throwing words and postures at a System that is laughing at you! Laughing at your impotence!
If she was here with us in the trenches I am confident that she would not see all we’re doing as ‘diddling with our dicks’.
