It would be easier to understand Jerome Armstrong’s argument if he wrote in English because I don’t know what he means by “I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time” or “I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign.” The premise of his word salad is that the Netroots movement somehow failed. And I don’t really see it that way.
I think we were an organization that came together organically to achieve certain limited aims that we all pretty much agreed about, and that the movement splintered once those goals were accomplished because it turned out there were things we didn’t agree about.
There were technological and economic reasons that the Netroots didn’t endure as a united force into the Obama Era, too, and I’d say that our primary failure in that regard was an inability to realize that advertising wasn’t the right model. Obama showed the way with his army of small donors. If we had insisted on and worked collectively to build an army of subscribers who were willing to sign up to pay for free content, we might have been able to thrive economically enough to have actual political pull. But we directed our donors to give more to political candidates than ourselves. And then the advertising dried up. The users grew accustomed to free content and even learned to filter out our advertising so that our own most loyal readers were denying us revenue. But there were progressive values at play that hampered our vision. We weren’t doing it for the money, and our readers would have been suspicious of our motives if we had tried both to profit handsomely and assign ourselves as political leaders directing their money with prudence and wisdom.
But, back to Jerome’s argument, I just find it bizarre to be lectured by a man who first came to my attention as Mark Warner’s agent to the blogosphere. I like Mark Warner and think he is a good man and a decent senator. But I would never confuse him with a progressive. And then Jerome jumped on the Clinton bandwagon, which may have seemed like a solid career move, but it wasn’t where most progressives were going. And then he bailed out to work on Gary Johnson’s libertarian campaign for president, which was definitely a move out of the DLC camp, but a move that traded agreement on some issues like the Drug War and surveillance for disagreement about just about everything else in the progressive playbook.
I have never thought of Jerome as a progressive, and insofar as he immersed himself in the progressive backlash against Obama’s presidency, which was led by Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, I think he excommunicated himself from about 90% of progressives in this country.
It’s telling that he still resents Barack Obama for not coming to him with his hat in his hand.
It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.
According to his own telling, he moved from Edwards to Clinton not because of any policy differences but because Obama didn’t seem accountable to the Netroots Movement. I saw that complaint from the consultant class a lot around that time, and it always struck me that these people expected Obama to pander to them and offer them jobs. I would have liked that, too, but I never resented Obama for not needing me. I’m not sure what the Politico resentment is about in this context, but I don’t like the sound of “identity-politics cult” because it sounds an awful lot like he’s arguing that people only liked Obama because he was black.
I do know that he definitely lost me when he argued that the Netroots met its demise when it went all-in for Bill Halter’s primary challenge against Blanche Lincoln. I think everyone was frustrated with Blanche Lincoln, but by the time the decision was made to put chips into Bill Halter’s campaign, the progressive movement had been split into one giant camp that wanted to make ObamaCare work and one tiny camp that wanted to keep fighting over the public option long after it was dead.
As I see it, the Netroots arose in reaction to the push for war in Iraq. People who had been forced to scream impotently at their television sets suddenly found like-minded people in online forums and were given the ability to publish their ideas. We discovered that there was a huge population of people who could see the con that was going on and the role the traditional media was playing in pushing that con. We could see how complicit the Democratic Party had become, but also how beaten down they had become. They didn’t have the political courage to challenge the lies or the craziness of the Bush administration. It became our mission to tell the truth that wasn’t being reported on the cable news and the newspapers. It became our mission, first to prevent the war, then to tell the truth about it, and then to end it. That was the core of the mission. It spread into everything else the Bush administration and the congressional Republicans were doing.
After John Kerry failed to defeat Bush, we began to really get organized for the 2006 midterms, and we won that battle very decisively. Then (most of us) geared up to defeat the candidate in the Democratic primary who had authorized the war. We were successful in that, too. That was what we were built to do. That was what almost all of us agreed about. Yes, there were progressives who supported Clinton, some of them quite enthusiastically. And not all of them thought of the Obama supporters as an “identity-politics cult.” But online progressives preferred Obama in large numbers, and the offline progressives were even more emphatic in their preference for him.
What happened next is that progressives split up, with some still primarily concerned with continuing to take the fight to the Republicans and working to make Obama’s presidency as successful as possible, and others deciding to continue their fight in an anti-Establishment mode.
That the Netroots didn’t endure as a politically united force doesn’t mean that it wasn’t one of the most successful political movements in the last forty years.
When the movement got started, there were few progressives in the Senate. Off the top of my head, they were limited to Russ Feingold, Barbara Mikulski, and Tom Harkin. Today, we have Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono and Tom Udall and Al Franken and Martin Heinrich and Jeff Merkley. We don’t have to deal with Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson anymore.
And if you want to talk identity politics for a moment, we not only elected the first black president, but we got two women (one, a Latina) on the Supreme Court, the first black Attorney General, the first second black U.N. ambassador, and now the first black Secretary of Homeland Security.
The gay rights movement has had one giant success after another during the Obama Era, and tens of millions have been or will be helped by the health care reforms. I’m not going to list all the things that have been accomplished, nor will I try to imagine what would have been accomplished if the Republicans hadn’t decided to use scorched-earth tactics of obstruction.
All I know is that the Netroots changed the trajectory of American politics for the better, changed the Democratic Party for the better, and changed the media for the better. We have nothing to be ashamed about. We should actually get a lot more credit than we do.
Lastly, I don’t think I’ve said much of anything critical of Edward Snowden and I have no idea what Jerome means when he says that I defended bailing out the banks. I supported avoiding a complete collapse of the financial sector and defended on a limited basis how Tim Geithner handled TARP, although I began calling for his resignation at some point in Obama’s first term. In any case, I don’t feel the need to defend myself against charges I don’t even understand.
