Chris Bowers has finally made the announcement.
Today, after more than three years, I am stepping down as the lead writer and managing editor of MyDD. In a little more than three weeks, I will be starting a new website with Matt [Stoller] and one other partner, Mike Lux of the Huffington Post. Expect to hear more on that in the coming days.
Chris doesn’t mention the name or url of the new site. Maybe I convinced him to choose something different, so I wont drop any hints. Suffice to say, I wasn’t overwhelmed with their choice of name.
This is a move that has been a long time in coming and I’m glad to see the day has finally arrived. I’m really looking forward to their new project and I’m curious about how they are going to roll out their format and implement their ideas.
I don’t want to speak for Chris and Matt, but this comes down to ideology versus party. We needed a left-leaning majority in Congress, but now we have it. For me, the blogosphere has always been about opposition, not cheerleading. It’s in our blood. Like a shark, we can’t survive if we don’t keep moving. It’s not enough to support any kind of Democrat. There must be a purpose or a goal behind that support. Turning opposition into something constructive is not easy and the task is confounding many people in the blogging movement.
Here’s how Chris puts it.
As much as I have enjoyed writing about politics and elections from a partisan Democratic viewpoint, my political background is in the social justice movement and decidedly on the left. I want to write about more than just elections and political infrastructure, and I want to explicitly work toward building a progressive governing majority. However, to do so would be to take MyDD too far away from its longstanding purpose.
Chris just walked through the crack between blogging for party and blogging for ideology or policy. I know he is going to continue his successes in this new role.
Chris just walked through the crack between blogging for party and blogging for ideology or policy.
Seems a bit disingenuous to be so easily able to blog for what you really do not truly believe. I could not, or did these guys have a sudden epiphany to see the light? Now how can one believe anything they say?
I think they have been articulating this for a long time. I always found it odd that so many people assumed that Chris and Matt were politically attuned to Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas.
Sure, they worked together, but if you read what they were saying, it was quite different.
Things were close enough as long as we were looking at sweeping the table just to get the Senate back, but the rift opened up once that was accomplished.
When you have someone like Jerome that is pretty happy with a Harold Ford and comfortable with DLC candidates, it just isn’t easy for progressives to co-exist with that politically.
I don’t think Chris and Matt have been dishonest in the least. They’ve advocated for things that would make taking congress back possible, like running candidates in every district. But that doesn’t mean that their overriding purpose hasn’t been electing progressives all along.
I’ve tried to sell them on the ‘party within a party’ concept. This step is a step in that direction. It’s a step away from the idea that we should support anyone with a (D) in front of their name, regardless of their ideology. But that’s a new luxury that didn’t exist when we had to take the senate back and we had little input into who our candidates were.
That’s very true. Matt Stoller has really been pushing the envelope on a more progressive vision of democratic politics.
As an activist, party-building dem I find Matt to be the perfect bridge between the envelope pushing of the schoolyard bully who writes on these pages :), Steven D. and the more single-pointed and perhaps even lemming like approach of the more partisan focused bloggers.
Now what would be supercool is if they brought Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon and The Field Negro onboard as regular contributors.
Now that would be a stew. (with love to Carl Weathers)
Yea! I finally get to be the bully!
;=)
You were talking about me — right?
I’d hate to lose the “bully” title to Booman.
🙂
Maybe you should repossess some sweatshirts then. Pissing off school administrators will only land you in detention, slacker!
It was not the sum total of their beliefs … though Matt Stoller did let his anti-imperialist position come through in blogging the candidate’s positions on permanent forces in Iraq … but they both certainly did believe in the information that is the MyDD focus being made available in the progressive netroots.
So they could either:
The last option seems to be a sane approach to me.
They are not “open” debaters as we see here. They went along with the censoring BS so that only their views were allowed to be stressed on that blog, or at least someone was pulling that censoring lever much to quickly. If you went over there when Young Casey (as in anti-women’s reproductive freedoms which is a very progressive subject)was running in the PA Senate primary and you said negatives about Young Casey, you would be banned! I would NEVER stay-read-endorse any blog that did such a thing and would react vehemently to anyone that subsequently tried to defend that as a “progressive” blog site!
no one was banned for simply opposing Casey. Bowers didn’t vote for Casey in the primary and would have been ecstatic if Pennacchio had won.
I disagree, and I believe I was so banned! I stand strongly by what I said above! BTW, all this banning crap is a strong sign of weakness in the blog so called progressive movement! It is an oxymoronic activity for a so-called progressive model of anything to use censorship and banning in that model’s activity. Again, is is hypocritical and oxymoronic!
I wish him the best of luck.
But isn’t this a tacit admission that working strictly within the party framework just won’t work?
Should be them, not him.
Maybe they don’t want that to work. Maybe it doesn’t work for them. Every election cycle has its own personality and its own requirements. 2008 is immensely different from 2004 or 2006.
CONSTRUCTIVE, POSITIVE, GUIDING criticism.
The blogosphere, in the last 2 months, has participated in the Republican-led effort to demonize Congress. We demonize the Congress because it has not done enough. They say that Congress has been too critical.
The net result is not good for Democrats. We must retain the Congress to get anything done. The Repukeliscum are trying to get it back.
The blogosphere, in the current PURITY TROLL mode, is helping the Repukeliscum accomplish Repukeliscum aims and defeat progressive ideas.
well, that theory ties into what this is all about.
I get blasted by some readers for saying that I am generally pleased with the Democratic leadership, while I am obviously disappointed in many individual Democrats that refuse to show backbone or who are just batshit crazy. But, criticizing this congress is unavoidable. As Al Sharpton said, ‘if you want to move the donkey, you have to slap the donkey’.
Does that do the Republicans work for them? Only if the donkey doesn’t move.
But, I guess I want to find a way of saying “Good job overall, but can you improve a little here.” My overall feeling (and what you seem to be saying in your note above) is that many good things are happening (I really enjoy the good ministrations of Henry Waxman – you go HENRY!!), it’s not yet perfect.
Is that what you are saying, Boo?
Or as he also said; ride this donkey as far as it will take you.
Kind of.
There is not much that is possible right now as far as policy. Anything big is probably best left for a new president, and the president is bent on vetoing most of the small stuff.
We cannot pry the Republicans to even disavow Alberto Gonazles, so we really can’t work with them constructively on the war or oversight or anything.
It’s gridlock. But it’s worse than that. They wrote a song about it.
I’ve read a few comments, both from friends and foes, that what’s needed is a coherent Democratic ideology, and so I’m glad to see these two change course. (Of course most of us have known or felt this for some time, but it’s good to see people turning to actually work on this problem).
The foe was Jonah Goldberg in an LA Times article some weeks ago, that, while it was off the mark as usual, he was somewhat right in chastising the netroots for, in his view, not having an ideology behind its anger.
I don’t recall who the friend was, but s/he made the case that the Iraq vote from a few weeks ago would’ve been easy for the Dems to hold together in opposition, had we only had a clear ideology to drive this opposition. They made the point that, whether you like it or not, everyone knows what Republicans stand for, and given this ideological backbone, they can be counted to stand together and not crumble the way Democrats traditionally do.
Is Bowers full of crap or is he full of crap. Left wing ideology is his interest? How about foreign policy and human rights activism? MyDD was distinctly censoring of diaries about the IP conflict, which for many on the Left is the core of our Middle East policy, and the source of our diminishing status in the world.
Wasnt tuned into his writing or MyDD at all, so cant agree with you from personal experience, but it sounds like the MO with these BBBs.
If he wouldnt or couldnt address it, shame on him.
How can a supposedly progressive movement not address this issue – it is deeply within the core of our ME policy, and what progressive isnt going to be appalled at a 40 year occupation and all the oppression that goes with it?
Well, if you are tethered to what the Dems do, then what else can you do but sweep sweep sweep this stain on the nation under the carpet, like the Dems always do, like criminals do – the stain’s DNA includes oodles of Dem complicity.
About MyDD:
You can quibble with the niche he carved out for himself, but he explicitly has not written from a policy perspective. In fact, he is leaving MyDD specifically because he wants to move away from just forecasting elections and writing about political strategy from a non-policy based perspective. In other words, talking about foreign policy and I/P related issues was something he didn’t feel HE could write about at MyDD. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that the diaries were not too welcoming of that kind of focus. On another point, Bowers didn’t have total control over MyDD and had to take instruction from Jerome about how to administer the site and what was appropriate for the front-page.
Perfectly put Booman, I love the shark analogy. If you can’t take you party to task in the second quarter following an election for fear of hurting their chances next time around then you’ve surrendered all power to the machine.
Well I don’t know anything about MyDD or these guys but if this:
“Chris just walked through the crack between blogging for party and blogging for ideology or policy.”
..means he is writting for America, it’s dreams, it’s principles and everything it is suppose to be to all of us…I say YAHOO!..more, more!