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.
…”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.”
lol. I’ll bet you Nixon’s Congress would have crafted a better health care program if that had been on the agenda. He basically gave carte blanche to his House.
Obama has internalized conservative biases it seems to me. His outlook is not New Deal.
Nixon tried and Congress shrugged.
I think you missed the point. it’s about what did happen not what could have happened
“It wasn’t about ideology so much as it was about tone.”
I believe this is correct. I wasn’t involved in the Netroots movement, having soured on leftwing politics about 1985 and never returning to the partisan fold. Didn’t mean I left my ideals behind, I just found the American left a little, um, shrill and impractical – living in southern Ohio you’re pretty much forced to pay attention to and coexist with more conservative forces. They’re your neighbors and, quite frankly, don’t always understand what motivates someone to agitate for an expanded social contract and moral inclusiveness.
By the time BHO came around, I was off the road (musician) and ripe to talk about the direction the country was headed in. Whether my neighbors realized it or not, implied in a BHO presidency was a push toward a more progressive America that should not necessarily be threatening to my white working class neighborhood while also reigning in some of the egregious national security and terror policies of Bushco. While BHO spoke to the aspirations of many on the left, so many of the lefties failed to actually listen to his policy speeches or read his platform and completely missed in the spectrum of American pols, he is certainly right of center. I had no problem canvasing my town and explaining BHO’s policies and ultimately that 2008 campaign help to network local liberals, disenchanted conservatives and progs like never before.
Ultimately, BHO’s tenure has been fine with me – shifts in American politics are ultimately incremental and after 30 years of incremental gains on the right, any movement in the other direction, complete with all the disappointments to my leftwing heart, are a welcome change. That I still have to listen to my lefty friends mutter betrayal and cry in their sleeves is a small burden to bare.
One thing a lot of people missed about Obama’s campaign is how it fit into the pre-existing Democratic Party. He had to find institutional support as well as grassroots support. He found it in an ad hoc group of folks who were not fans of the Clintons. Naturally, this included folks on the left who hated and had battled against the DLC. But that wasn’t a big or powerful enough group. Obama found the rest of his support out west, from people like Tom Daschle and Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal and Senators Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Max Baucus, Jon Tester, Amy Klobuchar, and Ben Nelson. He won endorsements from both West Virginia senators.
His coalition was therefore a combination of the most progressive folks and some of the most politically-endangered folks with the most conservative constituencies. He had to walk a middle ground to build that coalition, and that was the coalition he had to serve. He could not strike out boldly in either direction, which served him well since he was trying to be a bridge-maker and peacekeeper in his branding effort.
In any case, he would betrayed his centrist supporters and splintered the Democrats if he had come into office with an agenda that was seen as too radically to the left. As it was, his moderate agenda was painted as radical and many of his centrist supporters lost as a result.
I wonder. Maybe people saw the disaster of Bush’s last term, how it embodied everything that was worst in conservatism, How it lit up in lights the flaws and cruelty, and wondered why the hell that theory of governance was still being given credence in Washington?
My point here is that both in terms of delegates and in terms of superdelegates, Obama won by crushing Clinton in lightly-populated states in the West where her husband had lost badly. That was not only a core constituency of Obama’s success but of him being able to build enough institutional support to even launch his campaign in the first place. And he had to craft a platform and a tone that allowed those folks to say that he was less polarizing and more inclusive than Clinton, which is exactly what he did.
So, even before he took office, he was already positioned on the center-left in terms of tone, and in most respects, policy. Then he encountered the need for 60 votes in the Senate, which meant that he couldn’t abandon his promises to these Western Democrats even if he wanted to.
Yeah, the song and dance when they shafted Labor should have been a clue, however.
Well, portraying Obama’s agenda as radical was done by the Right-Wing Wurlitzer and they would have done exactly the same thing no matter what he had done. He actually went about as far right as any sane person could have done – three of his signature initiatives, after all, really were Republican ideas (tax cut stimulus, the ACA, and cap-and-trade). And, still, right-winger and centrists think he’s “far left”. If he’d pursued a truly left-wing agenda he’d have gotten the same grief from the right and suspicion from the center, but much more support from the left. He might well have not gotten anything more leftish through Congress, but it would have been better politically.
One thing that makes me hopeful for the future is that Obama’s headaches seem to have taught the Dems that they just can’t placate the right wing and there’s no point in trying. They’ve learned they get support from the left, and the biggest part of getting re-elected is keeping the left content. The media still hippie-punches (no surprise given the right wing owns them), but the pols have largely stopped.
Nothing builds a movement like a lot of noble loses.
right a noble loss is still a loss – it makes you look weak and Americans don’t like a weak leader and definitely not a weak president.
“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.”
I’d like to see you write more about this. It was a pretty amazing transformation.
I’d rather see a nastier writer take it on. Boo is too kind and generous.
What I don’t understand is: where did everybody go? Don’t people still want to read and write informed discussions of politics and policy? I understand why people get burned out and quit, but it seems like there should always be a big supply of hopefuls cranking out interesting diaries on dKos or other open blog. But mostly I only see empty polemics, and somehow the commentary seems much less informative than it was in the past.
I have to read pages and pages on dKos or LGF to find anything informative. The best place for interesting and informative discussion is probably Balloon Juice, and that is so strange given that’s basically a snark blog. This place is good too, but the volume of interesting left-wing discussion is a tiny fraction of what it was five years. And such discussion as I see is overwhelmingly from people I’ve been reading for almost a decade. Hasn’t anybody gotten interested in left-wing politics in the past five years?
Ignorant, opinion based writings about electoral politics dominated the writings on leftie blogs either from the beginning or at the latest by early 2002. Plus personalities of candidates for political office dominated those discussions/arguments.
An astute response from Tom Allen in the Pachacutec thread:
The political/social/cultural/economic landscape in 2002 was pretty dire. With the Vichy Democrats in the minority and not appearing too distressed with their position. And what interested participants on leftie political blogs?
Rehashing and revived bashing of Nader 2000 voters. Opposing Bush’s plan to bomb the shit out of Iraq, but refusal to participate in public demonstrations because they were organized by ANSWER. Rejection of Howard Dean’s candidacy because he’d signed domestic partner legislation in Vermont. And the elevation of a political novice (and establishment Democratic Party plant) to help diffuse some of the energy from Dean’s campaign.
Maybe it’s just me. But at the very least there seemed to be more substantive stuff back them. And certainly a lot more interest in reading it.
In the end though, I’m very confident that the Netroots did make some difference in 2006 and 2008. So the last two years of Bush weren’t as bad as they might have been. And there were 60 Dem Senators for a while. Without the Netroots, I don’t think there would have be a stimulus, or the ACA, or Dodd-Frank, or maybe even Lily Ledbetter.
So maybe things could have been better, but they are certainly better now than they would have been without the Netroots. So why have people largely given up? The totally nutso behavior of the Republican House majority certainly should provide an adequate rallying point. Even more, given that we’re looking at a nontrivial chance of a potentially historical Dem trifecta in 2016, why aren’t we interested in shaping it?
IOW bloggers made the world a little bit better than it would have been without them? Sort of like the post-purchase mind games we play with ourselves to reinforce the purchase decision? Wish I could agree with you but I can’t.
With the introduction of nested comments, blog platforms had the potential to become grassroots think tanks. That’s where the conservatives and the GOP has long had a huge advantage of Democrats and liberals. Because wealthy individuals and corporations have an investment in funding them. (And throwing a few coins at the so-called liberal ones to keep them close to a neo-liberal orientation.) We knew that in 2000. And definitely by 2002. Focusing attention on electoral politics to advance the standing of Democratic politicians with no message is really like chasing one’s tail.
We neglected to begin by defining what we want from our government. From there defining how it should operate. A simple example – Want: end the war on drugs. Why? The war is more costly and destructive than legalization and adults should be allowed to choose. Libertarians would stop right there — complete drug anarchy with the market taking care of supply and individuals free. A social democrat would point out that regulating and taxing alcohol has had more pluses than minuses – and that’s with it not having been all that well designed and effectively implemented. A Marxist would mention that a few people got very wealthy off legalized alcohol and tobacco and Madison Ave did well too, but the growers and production workers remained as poor as ever. Do we need a new round of drug barons? If not, how can that structurally be avoided?
etc.
I agree that lefty think tank was a great function for blogs. And really, it still is. The long format blogs encourage is definitely the best available method for essentially open source thinktanking. And there was some of that, if much less than there should and could have been.
But I think you’re expecting finality think tanks don’t provide. Think tanks provide ideas, but it’s political processes (sensu lato, i.e. including within non-governmental organizations and discussion communities) that choose amongst them for the ones to go for.
Also, to a fair extent, the US is so far right that the destination is not such a big issue. There are almost always multiple leftward alternative solution for any problem we face functioning well in some other industrialized society. So really we mostly need mechanisms to get there more than destinations to go to. The drug war is a big exception, although we do seem to be making good progress on that. Excessive profits and power for banks is another. But mostly, just check out how they do things in Europe.
Much of Europe did very well implementing broader and more effective economic social programs than the US did in the last century — and they got started with that a decade after the US did. However, they were also economically in tatters when they began their big pushes. The three major impediments in this country were race, religion and states rights (along with the size of this country). However, European countries made big mistakes in trying to spread out the wealth to their poorer neighbors.
You may be thinking too far inside the current box as to the relationship between think tanks and political action. This is a relatively recent structure and almost exclusively a creation of oligarchs and the GOP. Before our universities served as “think tanks.” Problem for the haves is that led to the New Deal. Good public policies that advanced the general welfare. So, they set up their foundations and simultaneously began depreciation universities. Not to craft good public policies but how to sell policies to the public that destroyed the New Deal and benefited the wealthy.
Glass-Steagall (part of the New Deal) protected all Americans from banker predation and removed the individual risk and worry that their bank could fail and they would lose their savings. What ordinary American would want to get rid of that? Well, none actually. We were never exactly told that it was to be taken away. All we heard is that banking regulation needed a bit of updating and Americans would earn more on their savings and investments and insurance policies would cost less if they were all under one roof. Americans are always suckers for “you’ll earn more and X will cost less.” Particularly appealing when X is insurance which Americans know they need but hate anyway.
Liberal public policies sell themselves if 1) they’re properly constructed to benefit the whole and 2) the program can be articulated simply and clearly enough that 60% of the population can understand without much effort.
Once did an experiment with young adult students that weren’t well educated and of average intelligence on the issue of progressive income taxation versus the intuitively fair sounding flat tax. They liked the latter. A five minute presentation was all it took for them to appreciate that progressive taxation is fairer. Not so many ordinary people even know that everybody pays the same rate within the same income tax bracket.
Universal Healthcare is broadly supported in this country, but the public has never been given the opportunity to weigh in on the overall system choices available to get from here to there. They don’t know that UHC exists in other countries with the same or a lesser amount of public dollars and a small fraction of employer and individual dollars that were being spent in this country. That the people in countries with UHC live longer and have lower infant mortality rates. And the latter hasn’t been improving even though a third of all births are paid for by Medicaid. etc.
Meant to add that for all the hype about Americans being given choices, most of that choice is at best window dressing or designed to confuse or bamboozle them. Do we really need or even want to have to choose among twenty or thirty different insurance companies for affordable and adequate health insurance coverage?
The ACA roll-out highlighted an interesting difference between Maryland and Virginia. In VA bariatric surgery coverage is only available by an additional rider which increases the individual policy cost to approximately $1,400/month. Those policies without the rider cost approximately the same at those in Maryland or maybe an insignificant number of dollars less. By statute, Maryland policies are required to cover bariatic surgery. Consumers in neither state didn’t weigh in on this. We Americans tend to endorse policies that punish those that we view as responsible for their poor choices, such as eating habits that lead to obesity and the need for bariatric surgery. However, if we know excluding that coverage doesn’t reduce our health insurance costs and forces a small number of people to suffer needlessly, we are kind enough to say that including the coverage is okay.
Interesting note on the differences between the two states. I wonder if Maryland’s somewhat clunky version of “all-payer” has something to do with it.
And yes the notion had always been sold on “choice,” because Americans know best. And this will inevitably lead to competition and lower prices and better services. Not sure if you saw Mark Ames’ latest on libertarian magazine Reason, which was pumping ways to outright trick and fool people into arriving to libertarianism (which they see as more marketing than anything else). I mean it’s always been clear that’s how they operate, but I’d never seen their little guidebook written down right there in the open.
Which brings us back to “choice”. Ah yes, you liberals and your patronizing views of “knowing best” for me has Ben a good marketing ploy hasn’t it? The thing is they don’t believe in choice whatsoever, certainly not in the sense that it actually makes a difference, or if they’re poor and therefore losers. When’s the last time you saw a libertarian arguing for cash transfers rather than monitoring every little part of what poor people do with THEIR money? Milton Friedman, maybe, but that was also before he became an insufferable ideologue and ignored his own economics. Anything else is always about making this a moral guide: the poor must suffer otherwise they won’t learn to not be poor.
And then that leads me to where I truly see “choice” in the sense that it matters. Contrary to these idiots and their own patronization of the poor and middle classes, I don’t argue what’s best for people. In fact I think in general they know what’s best for them. It’s why when you lay out information in a clear and clarifying manner — rather than insidious libertarian trickery — the common sense arrival is on “the se medical coverage for everyone”. Or any other issue for that matter, except for maybe the debt ceiling (which is also confusing for a layperson to see that it’s not increasing debt to raise it). More democracy and true choice, and the people will choose the socialist measures by and large. But that’s why we only offer window dressing choice and not true choice.
I avoid libertarian claptrap as much as possible; so prefer not to subject myself to anything at Reason. Their version of utopia ignores the fundamental aspects of real human beings.
Both political parties obfuscate and lie. That contributes to the large portion of the public disengaging from politics because on some level they get that they’re just pawns in some game they don’t understand.
It was interesting back in 2002 and early 2003 to see that a majority of the public wasn’t sold on invading Iraq. Had there been but one person with a large enough megaphone to be heard to scream “bollocks” wrt to Wolfowitz’s claim that the war would only cost $20 billion and would be paid for out of Iraq’s oil revenues and done the same back of the envelope calculation that I did at that time and come up with a minimum figure of $120 billion if we got in and out quickly, would that have tipped the balance of public opinion away from invading? And if Bush went ahead with his folly and Democrats nominated someone that had opposed the war and pounded Bush on a war that by then had cost several hundred billion dollars, would Bush have been re-elected?
Well of course they do to a certain degree. But I am more talking about their plan to get liberals to be or agree with libertarians. They know their ideology on the surface makes zero sense and is terrible for the average person, and the only way to get people to “agree” is to purposefully trick you into believing it. Conservative ideology, while also harmful, can make a certain amount of sense at face value and doesn’t necessarily have to involve outright trickery. I wasn’t talking about parties so much as ideology itself.
On the surface libertarian ideology is extremely appealing. Only loses its shine if one thinks a single public policy issue through the libertarian lens. Their motto should be: freedom (don’t think)
Yes, generally, those choices are either false or part of a wasteful zero-sum game to extract money from other people. If an insurance choice is about treatment, no person is qualified to make it; plan choices involve simultaneous choices about complex incompletely-studied treatments of hundreds of conditions where the risk of getting each isn’t well known either. It takes a team of dozens of experts to manage the amount of information to make even a vaguely well-informed choice.
If the choice is just about deductibles and co-pays, then it’s just a game where you’re trying to push costs onto the insurance company and the insurance company is trying to push costs on you (with the insurance company having a huge advantage). There’s no net benefit for society, just waste from the conflict.
Hypothetically the government insurance company could pay the team of dozens of experts to compile the information into something a person could actually manage, like cost per year of quality-adjusted life saved. But they don’t, and I’m not expecting them to. And even for that people would have to be trained to make risk assessments properly; it’s a hard problem and people generally don’t make economically efficient decisions even when they’re possible; they follow various heuristic rules. IMO this is because adequate information for an economically efficient choice is only rarely available in the real world; we pretty much automatically follow heuristic rules because it’s the only option we have.
Kos silences any really divergent opinion.
Yes, I think that’s a lot of the problem at dKos. The format quashes controversy, so people don’t need facts, so people don’t use facts. So we end up with a lot of “Boner is a loser” fluff, which is kind of true, but not entirely, and gets old in a hurry. And dKos was to a substantial extent the incubator for the other blogs, so there’s no farm team.
I think some of these folks truly have forgotten how bad things were in 2002-03. In particular, they do not remember how little influence progressive thought had on the public debate. The acceptable window of opinion available to most of America (as opposed to the politically active, like Jerome) was from the center-right to the wacko right.
The Netroots provided the base to fight against that. It has helped to create and elevate voices that otherwise would not be present in the national debate. Without the Netroots, I don’t think you have of the following:
All of these and more have fed off of each other and off of the Netroots. They have helped push the national debate back towards the left, even among those who have never read any blogs. I know this to be the case – I hear coworkers, who read no blogs at all, making arguments today that I read on Netroots blogs six months ago. The arguments are filtering out into the general public, and that is the key victory the Netroots have achieved.
Because of this, I think the Netroots have played a role in all of the following:
I’m not saying that the Netroots are solely responsible for any of these, and I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like to have seen even more progress. But the seeds of the Netroots were planted a decade ago, and have borne fruit.
Does anyone seriously think that, without the Netroots leading the vanguard over the past decade, the GOP would have gotten the scorn it has for the government shutdown? Our voices wouldn’t have even been heard among the chattering classes, let alone listened to.
I am not sure how to define “dudebro” and I think it is factually inaccurate to say that the progressive blogosphere initially supported Edwards (it was split), but I still enjoyed this.
I was one of those Edwards supporters through much of 2008 who thought Clinton and Obama were too “conservative” and when I finally decided I couldn’t stand Hamsher and Greenwald and Stoller and Sirota and so on it was largely for literary reasons more than political ones. But it’s been seeming to me for a while now that if you are finding yourself opposed to
it may be that, as Professor Marx might say, you’re not as leftist as you think you are.
“Partisan progressives had the right to say “I told you so,” about the hopelessness of dealing with Republicans in good faith.”
I’m not sure of that. I’ll never buy Obama as naive idealist. What we’ve seen out of Republicans lockstep obstruction I don’t think can be compared to any point in the history of the country. This is unprecedented.
I continue to believe that Obama realized there are three sides in any political negotiation: your side, their side, and the people watching. I don’t know if he initially thought the Republican party would negotiate with him reasonably, but I do think that after the third or fourth rebuff, he continued to make overtures so that everybody could see he was doing it. It doesn’t really cost him anything to get his offers slapped down by Republicans.
Here’s a current example of the educational (and hilarious!) perspective the Netroots has brought to a wide audience:
What If POLITICO Had Covered the Civil War?
Playbook, Emancipation Day Edition
BY MICHAEL SCHAFFER @michaelschaffer
…FIRST LOOK: Explosive ELIHU B. WOODINGTON pamphlet chronicling backbiting and unchivalrousnes in Lincoln cabinet. Excerpt today in Washington Periodic Miscellany. BOMBSHELL: Wm. Seward once mocked E.M. Stanton with comic doggerel! Blind quote: “This is what happens when you elect an untested one-term Congressman. Permitting White House rivalries is no way to proceed in this hamlet.” PARLOUR GAME BEGINS: Who are Woodington’s sources? Pamphlet goes on sale Tuesday for 5 cents; the lovely Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer hosts book party to-night.
…NOT-SO-GREAT EMANCIPATOR: “Lincoln Proclamation Stirs Controversy,” by Jethraux VandeHei: “Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was bound to rile opponents who already viewed the president as high-handed and arbitrary… Senior White House officials assert that Lincoln has the authority to free slaves under the Constitution’s war-making provision. But Congressional Democrats have vowed to hold hearings, which could put border-state Republicans in an awkward position…. Lincoln is risking his presidency and his reputation on the uncertain notion that future generations will eventually appreciate the end of slavery.”
WEST-WING MINDMELD: This shows a direct, decisive president, something that will improve Lincoln’s ability to get his agenda through Congress
FORMER GEN.-IN-CHIEF GEORGE MCCLELLAN, on MORNING JEHOSEPHAT: “Lincoln has flip-flopped once again on emancipation…. Washington politicians are doing an end run around the Constitution… I think we need less polarization and divisiveness during a civil war. A leader needs to stand up to extremists and reach out across the aisle. Lincoln has not led.” 1864 TEA LEAVES: “I am not ruling anything out, but I’m not ruling anything in.”
PLAY-BOOK FACTS OF LIFE: If the president can convince the public that he emancipated slaves simply to preserve the union, the story will blow over. If it emerges that he actually issued the proclamation because he believes involuntary bondage is an immoral affront to human dignity, we could be looking at months of hearings.
FLASHBACK: “I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” -Lincoln, IL-SEN debate, 1858…
The tone of Obama was about getting stuff done in planned incremental movements. That isn’t popular among the folks that would rather hear a fist pumping, red meat speech from their pols than see disproportionate hospital share funds diverted to Medicaid.
I saw way to many leftist blogs in the last 6 years who never got the key formative forces in Obama’s life. And the pity was they didn’t seem to care to. Obama’s performance in the 2008 campaign wasn’t enough to interest them in learning about him either. They only needed enough to stay half a step ahead of the publishing cycle.
I wasn’t reading political blogs at the time the Netroots started. I saw enough later to conclude that many were “legends in their own minds”.
There is more than a demographic insight in that statement. I stated in the diary about Jerome Armstrong that the progressive movement doesn’t understand popular movements. The split between those who understand popular movements on the left and those who “believe in institutions” is endemic to progressive politics. And progressive politics wins when those folks are fighting creatively.
“Building a brand” means that Obama’s campaign actions were framed as marketing for a specific electoral campaign and not as building a movemental base. It was framed as electing Obama, not as a victory for the progressive movement. Ronald Reagan ran as the symbolic head of the conservative movement taking over the Republican Party. Obama ran as a Democratic candidate for President. What a lot progressives wanted in 2008 was of Obama to run as the symbolic head of a progressive movement taking over the Democratic Party from the Democratic Leadership Council establishment that had driven it into the ground. (That’s generally the way that narrative was expressed.) And they expected that the Obama for America grassroots movement would transform into the local vehicle for asserting progressive power and keeping movemental continuity between elections. When they were allowed to die on the vine until the next election, a lot of folks felt used, disillusioned. Just like the disappointment that OFA was not used to increase turnout and reduce the crossover voting in North Carolina in 2012.
For a lot of progressives, OFA now looks like astroturfing for a candidate with no real political movement or institutional building behind it.
And these folks were very disappointed that the Obama political folks were not more supportive of their efforts to punish Democrats who voted against Obama’s initiatives over and over again. And very angry over being called out and insulted for supporting the public option loudly. And the implicit complaint was “Why doesn’t President Obama support the progressive parts of the ‘bipartisan’ programs he is pushing through Congress?” And the conclusion too many of them reached was “Because he doesn’t believe in those items as policy enough to push them.”
There are outside (movemental) strategies, inside (institutional) strategies, and inside-outside (networking/coalition) strategies. The power-that-be have excellent inside-outside strategies and they play hardball inside institutions (and often with their external institutions and astroturf movements to gain control of information flows and policy. Both the “establishment” and “anti-establishment” parts of the progressive movement are blind to this three-way political ecology. And it is this blindness to the fact that they need each other that keeps them from effectively moving policy and the policy frame.
For progressives to succeed, that means that the anti-establishment folks are going to have to learn how complicated institutional change is in something as large as the federal government (not to mention the interrelationships among all local, state, and federal governmental institutions). But it is their job to keep the popular heat on policies and governing principles. The establishment folks are going to have to learn that the elites governing US institutions these days tend to be greedy, stupid, or both and that to succeed professionally you are expected to also be greedy, stupid, or both. But the establishment folks are needed to explain how the system works and what is currently going on behind the PR smokescreen. Those who can move back and forth need to understand that they are the most vulnerable because they are the first targets of those who do not want change. But they are needed in order to inform the establishment folks of what is going on outside the managed bureaucratic information bubble, and they are needed to accept the risks to inform the public of information that other insiders are too scared to talk about.
The Netroots is only beginning to understand this information ecology. The powers that be can buy all three of these roles.
The future of democracy in America depends on ordinary people being able to understand these roles and use them to move policy outside the influence of money.
That is a more difficult conceptual task than Ian Welsh’s inventing an ideology. How does the progressive movement win with people power over against the powers that be’s money power? How does authentic democratic decision-making actually get institutionalized? Or is it the case that the moment it is institutionalized it needs to be broken up again to avoid elite capture?
These are fundamental issues that people are on all sides of and taking much too personally. (Aside from the fact that the consequences of policy affect people personally.)
Interesting that you say that in light of the fact that in 2005 then-Senator Obama put his toe in the water of the netroots and published a diary at Daily Kos titled Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party. He was pretty unceremoniously run out of town and never looked back.
I didn’t see it at the time but I’ve since gone back and the read the diary a few years ago and reading again now, I still think most of that diary is wrong.
The part of the diary that is right, is that talking about what the Republicans really are turns off parts of the country. Of course now the GOP has thrown it’s insanity, idiocy and cruelty into the faces of the entire country for 5 years so they are ready to listen.
I basically don’t see how anyone can believe in American institutions these days. I don’t understand people who don’t want to transform most of them.
But I take issue with the political organization. Many of the state parties have once again gone backwards since Obama was elected. Leadership was sacrificed in order that there not be any competing power centers with Obama and Obama’s organization did not pick up the slack for many years.
Progressives now have zero power in Congress.
This represents a striking deterioration from 2006-2008, when progressives had zero power in Congress.
But to see the big change, you have to go back before Newt’s victory in the 1994 mid-terms, back to a veritable golden age when progressives had zero power in Congress.
Not true. Progressives killed the Summers nomination for the Fed. Not an enormous amount of power, but some.
Wall Street hated him too.
Progressives jumped up and down and cheered because they were able to engineer the replacement of the retiring Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank with the serving Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Provided she can get through the Senate.
Red letter day, that.
Anyone else remember the Bill KIllers? I sure do. And I especially remember Al Giordano’s epic rejoinder:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3694/we-have-met-corporation-and-it-us
In fact, I take it to be my political manifesto.