Pachacutec writes a much more measured and accurate post-mortem of the Netroots movement than Jerome Armstrong managed to do. But he’s still hung up on the idea that Barack Obama had contempt for the Netroots, didn’t need us, actively attacked us, and sucked all the organizing power out of us. So much of this is about pride. A lot of people in the Netroots worked hard to build infrastructure and organizations only to look up and see that Obama had created the best political organization in our lifetimes without their help. And they resented not being a part of it. Some of the ListServs I belonged to back in those days were non-stop bitchfests from organizers and opinion leaders (the “professional left”) who felt disrespected and unneeded. They interpreted it as contempt, but the truth was that Obama was building a brand that didn’t have much use for the most vituperative voices on the left. It wasn’t about ideology so much as it was about tone.
Obama offered the promise of a post-partisan kind of politics, which many partisans took to be a rebuke. If you have read The Audacity of Hope, which is itself a major branding effort, you can make your own decision about the degree to which Obama sincerely believed in the possibility of a post-partisan political world versus the degree to which he was tapping into something that people were longing for in a savvy and successful effort to win the nomination and the presidency. I believe it was a mix, with some measure of sincerely aspirational naivety definitely involved. His strategy worked like a charm from an electoral point of view, but set him up for a rude awakening when he actually took office in the midst of an epic economic collapse. Partisan progressives had the right to say “I told you so,” about the hopelessness of dealing with Republicans in good faith. But they didn’t have the right to say “I told you so” about the effectiveness of his campaign messaging. Obama had won, and won with enough coattails to enact the most progressive agenda in his first two years that this country had seen since the height of Lyndon Johnson’s powers in 1965-66.
Pachacutec is correct about the limitations of the Netroots, both financially and demographically, but he hasn’t identified the most important failing. The Netroots split into Establishment and Anti-Establishment factions as soon as Barack Obama was elected and started naming his cabinet and chief of staff. This was partially a natural thing that is just in the nature of the left. Some people believed in American institutions and wanted to seize control of them, and some people didn’t believe in American institutions and wanted to transform them. For the latter group, the financial crisis was an opportunity to nationalize the banks and the health care fight was a chance to snuff the medical insurance industry out of existence. And they immediately moved from an anti-Bush posture to an anti-Obama posture. I respect the people who felt morally or intellectually compelled to go that route, but they chose to write themselves out of the progressive Establishment. They didn’t have the right to expect jobs or that their strident criticisms would be welcomed. And they never had the right to speak for all progressives. The vast, vast majority of progressives wanted to support the new president, and still do.
Ironically, Paracutec doesn’t seem to realize the implications of the following:
Progressive blog audiences mostly reached more educated white boomers, and, with some exceptions, more men than women. Progressive blog audiences geographically reached all over the US, but their very dispersion made it difficult to get anything going on the ground where people of like mind could coordinate together. That limited audience reach and growth that could translate into coalition building and political power.
It’s true, as Ian hints, that our white boomer audiences were still mostly people who believed in institutions. They grew up that way. They were collectively shocked at the direction of the country and the corruption of media and government in the Bush years, but they were not radicals. They still believed in these institutions. Most wanted reform, not fundamental systemic change. They still listened to a lot of NPR.
That the Netroots audience was filled with mostly male well-educated white boomers who believed in American institutions meant that they were a natural fit for Obama’s presidency, which is why most of them supported him and continue to support him. But the progressive movement is dominated by younger people and people of color and unionized workers, many of whom are not all that well educated. These groups have been, in the main, substantially more supportive of the president than the Netroots audience. The Anti-Establishment wing of the progressive movement is influential but vanishingly small when compared to the overall American electorate. They are so suspicious and contemptuous of power that they run away from it even as, in many cases, they resent not being offered a place within the system.
This group was an important part of the Netroots movement, but they were always a minority within it. And the portion of the shunned Anti-Establishment wing that moved from supporting Hillary Clinton to being holier-than-thou progressives? Those folks are just hucksters.
Progressives now have more power in Congress than at any time in most of our lives, and I don’t see that as a failure for the Netroots.
