Whoever is telling Obama to cut himself off from the netroots is doing him a great disservice.
But then, it’s consistent with how elected Democratic officials have been treating us since they regained control of the House and Senate in 2006. No funding cuts for Iraq. Caving on telecom immunity and FISA. Signing off on $400 million dollars for Bush’s black ops in Iran to do God knows what. Condemning Moveon.org for the General Betrayus ad. Failing to pursue investigations and subpoenas. Taking impeachment off the table. The list is endless.
I’ve always felt we had to work from within the Democratic Party to achieve a liberal/progressive agenda. The reasons are many. The current political system is rigged to favor a two party system since there is no proportional representation. And the current parties have had over 100 years to cement their position, making it difficult for third parties to arise, much less gain enough adherents to challenge in a winner take all system. Not since the 1850’s has the political system been in a state where third parties could effectively organize to challenge the existing political system, and that was a special circumstance.
The third party movements we have seen in the 20th century have either floundered after a short period (think of the Socialists of the Fin de siècle era, and the Dixiecrats of the late 40’s) or they have been focused on individual personalities and could not survive after that individual left the political arena (George Wallace and Ross Perot, e.g.). Then there was the Green Party and its embrace of Ralph Nader. Not a great track record, to be sure.
However, I wonder if it is time for Progressives to think of organizing our own party. Not one that would compete on the Presidential stage yet, but one that that fights for seats in Congress. We already have a “Progressive Caucus” but it has largely been ineffective because the party establishment is determined to favor and pander to conservative Democrats. Perhaps that is the correct strategy for the “Democratic Party” as a whole (though I doubt it), but it certainly isn’t useful to those of us who wish to see a progressive agenda implemented.
In that regard, the Democratic party has been as much our enemy as the Republicans. For what difference does it make if the same policies are promoted and others denied enactment, regardless of who is in power? The current structure of the Democrats make them peculiarly susceptible to a conservative, or more precisely, a corporatist, bias when it comes to actually taking bold measures to deal with the myriad issues confronting this country. The concern isn’t over whether progressive solutions will be given a chance to be enacted into law, the problem is that the only solutions being offered are either deeply radical (and failed) conservative approaches, or less radical but still conservative and very modest proposals from the supposed “liberal” party. After all, who among the Democrats is proposing anything truly progressive when it comes to the global warming, or health care, or our relationships in the Middle East? Yes, we have a few champions here and there, but their inclusion in the “Big Tent” of the Democratic Party marginalizes them and by extension those of us who would see their ideas become the basis for the actual platform of the Democratic Party, the one to which more than lip service is paid.
Howard Dean and now Obama have shown us that politicians can get out from under the traditional corporate and large donor funding of political campaigns, but they have been unable to take the next step, which is to combine that “people power” with an agenda that represents the needs and desires of the people who are providing those millions of small donations. They have only taken advantage of this movement, rather than led it to where we want to go.
It is too late to organize a “third way” for these elections. For better or worse (and probably the latter) we are stuck with the current paradigm where the rhetorical differences between the candidates offered to us by the two major parties is often far larger than the policy differences (or what those politicians are willing to vote for and against once elected, regardless of their ideology or policy preferences). However, at some point soon we in the blogosphere and the netroots in general need to consider whether our best interests can be served using this antiquated political machinery, or if we should be mobilizing ourselves to create a new party to function as the vessel for our ideas, our values and our policy proposals.
