[Let’s go back into the time machine. The following diary didn’t appear here. It appeared at Daily Kos on September 28th, 2005, with the title: On Fraudsters, Hippies, Conspiracy Theorists, Pie, and Protest Marches]
There is something going on with Daily Kos that I frankly don’t understand. For me, it started a few days after the election when an editorial decision was made to discourage speculation about possible election fraud. Not just idle speculation without any supporting facts, but almost any speculation at all. It seemed to me to be a calculated decision to avoid looking paranoid and allowing the site to be marginalized by the right. But with the Dems rolling over and the media refusing to investigate, this blog was our greatest hope to get some movement for election reform. The opportunity was lost here, and it was not picked up anywhere else either. Daily Kos cannot change the world, but it is supposed to try. When it refused and joined the chorus of the see-no-evil hear-no-evil mainstream press, I decided to start my own blog.
The next big hubbub was over Jimmy/Jeff Guckert. Kossacks were a huge part of getting to the bottom of the male prostitute in the White House scandal, and yet certain front-pagers were relentlessly dismissive of their efforts.
But the Guckert saga demonstrated the power of open source investigations. It showed what might have been accomplished if the same effort had been employed over voter fraud.
Not long after the Guckert story died down, the pie war occurred. It seemed like a deliberate effort to cull the herd by intentionally offending a sizeable portion of the community.
Next came the London bombings. Despite the many interesting questions raised about the bombings, all speculation was discouraged, a purge ensued and, despite some reinstatements, the message was sent. Once again, it appeared that the image of the site was being protected against attempts to marginalize it as whacky.
And now the people that went to Washington have been dismissed as ‘useless’, their efforts ‘mean nothing’. Hippies are “touchy-feely” and people who “visualize peace” are laughed at.
Here is my problem with this. I understand the desire to keep the site from being overrun by conspiracy theorists or being identified with the left fringe. I understand wanting to build a party that is acceptable to the grand middle.
But:
1) The idea of a big tent is being put forward by this blog. The theory is that the number one goal is to win majorities in Congress and that that will do more to protect progressive issues than running ideologically pure lost-cause candidates. In other words, if the most viable candidate is anti-abortion, pro-NRA, anti-labor, who cares? They will still vote for a Democratic speaker or majority leader. I don’t dismiss this theory out of hand. It probably applies in a few races here and there. But is it a good idea to simultaneously ask progressives to hold their nose while you insult and dismiss them as ‘women-studies types’ and hippies? A big tent is supposed to be tolerant of a lot of people you largely disagree with, not dismissive of people you largely agree with.
2) Many of the best articles and diaries written here, and certainly the most interesting ones, are about crimes, conspiracies, scandals, and things that should considered be crimes, conspiracies, scandals but the media is not covering. Or they are undercovering them. Blogs take the news and refocus it, emphasizing aspects of stories, deempasizing other aspects of stories. Community blogs (and blogs working in parallel) actually break their own news. They get the media to cover stories they have been ignoring. They nudge the mainstream media to cover things and to cover them in a different way. From Rathergate, to Guckert, to the Downing Street Minutes, we have seen conspiracies turned into common wisdom through the efforts of bloggers. If we are going to shut down conspiracy theorists we might as well go home and turn off the laptops.
3) there is an emphasis in the Kos grand strategy on effecting the media. People obsess over what other people see on their televisions and what they hear on their radios, and on what they read in their newspapers. People obsess on how to ‘frame’ arguments so that they make a better impression on the average Joe.
That is important. But there is not enough emphasis on building a community of people that embodies the values we share. I’m going to link to four diaries written by Kossack/Tribbers who went to Washington. You tell me whether their experiences meant nothing. You tell me whether this is accurate:
Media savvy will carry a movement much further than any march, regardless if it had 100,000 or 500,000 or a million people.
linkSupersoling
Boston Joe
Military Tracy
Damnit Janet
A ‘movement’, as Kos puts it, needs nourishment. It needs to move in real life, not only through electrons. Everyone reading this has already, by default, discovered the comraderie of progressive blogging. We know how this empowers us. We remember our feelings of isolation, powerlessness, and despair before we found Daily Kos. Well, Washington introduced thousands of new people to Daily Kos, Booman Tribune, My Left Wing, and several other progressive blogging communities. It connected people from these communities to each other, creating life long friendships and connections. Try doing that through C-SPAN.
And it isn’t only bloggers. Many people discovered and joined up with the various activist groups that were represented. They showed up an isolated person and they went home with new tools to work with in their communities.
If you can read Supersoling or BostonJoe’s diaries and come away thinking that the protest in Washington was useless, or counterproductive, then you just don’t get it.
We need to build a bigger party, a majority party. We can do it through smoke, mirrors, careful framing, effective spin, and a deceptively moderate agenda, or…
we can do it through creating a movement. And a movement must embody its ideals. If we try to hide our crazies in the attic we’ll never be a movement. If we focus so much on what gets seen on C-SPAN that might persuade an undecided voter that we alienate our true believers, we will never be a movement at all. We’ll just be a cynical political strategem that cares more about tricking moderates than caring about the people we started out trying to help and support.
In my opinion, this site is losing the characteristics that made it great. When no one would oppose the war and the lies, Kos stood up and opposed them. This site became a home for people that couldn’t believe what they were seeing on their televisions and reading in the New York Times. It became a community of like-minded people that supported each other in a whirlwind of insanity.
Now it is turning people away, running people down, dismissing single-issue voters, worried about what the other side might say, or the media might think. That’s a total fucking inversion of what made Daily Kos great.
With Bush polling like shit, DeLay indicted, Frist under investigation, and Rove and Libby under suspicion, is now the time to run to the middle? Is now the time to fragment our base with dismissive infighting? I don’t think so.
Jog any memories?
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end….
I’m still waiting for the frogmarch photo of Rove in the FrogPond denizen pose. But it’s getting so Rove is more and more irrelevant after predicting the 2012 victory of Mittens….after he had already lost.
Found it odd that after projecting wins for Democrats in 2002 and 2004 (and naysayers (aka astute poll readers and observers) were told that they were naive and stupid and they should STFU), they similarly failed to read GWB immediate crash after the 2004 election. Projecting a DEM takeover of the House and Senate (with possibly 60 seats in the latter) was as easy as projecting the 2004 GOP gains.
Often feels like a Democratic Party booster club instead of an honest and sober assessment of US politics, culture, and economics.
…and DK has been in stasis, circling the drain, pretty much ever since.
I will occasionally find interesting investigative stuff amongst the diaries. But otherwise, I don’t learn anything, nor is most of it particularly entertaining or even well-written. it’s been ages since DK’s front page political analysis read like anything other than party loyalists’ daily spin. The back-patting and the comment threads are just depressing.
In 2004, DK was important because it was a strong and pioneering voice, saying things you wouldn’t hear elsewhere. Now, I get 30 press releases a day regurgitating the same material, and there’s way too many talented and insightful writers and readers out there – present company included – for DK to be much more than an afterthought.
So much lost potential.
The next big hubbub was over Jimmy/Jeff Guckert. Kossacks were a huge part of getting to the bottom of the male prostitute in the White House scandal, and yet certain front-pagers were relentlessly dismissive of their efforts.
But the Guckert saga demonstrated the power of open source investigations. It showed what might have been accomplished if the same effort had been employed over voter fraud.
Not long after the Guckert story died down, the pie war occurred. It seemed like a deliberate effort to cull the herd by intentionally offending a sizeable portion of the community.
And who was proved right in the end on this? Hmmmm!!!!
Okay, who?
Me, for one.
AG
The DFH’s. The ones who were derided as conspiracy theorists at the time.
I joined that site in 2003, but 99% of my DKos diaries were written long after 2005, and most of those were subpar gonzo-ripoff underperformance art. I pretty much had that place figured out by about 2007 and responded in kind.
However, I’m vaguely embarrassed that I got so wrapped up in all that stuff in the first place. It definitely didn’t lead me to real activism, because I’m not an activist and not interested in being one. I did notice as well that I got more conservative as I tuned out.
Now, I was extremely liberal before and I still feel that way, but over the last 5 years I’ve definitely fallen to the right of where the most progressive bloggers do their thing–or at least I feel like other people would say so based on the fact that I still voted Obama in 2012 (instead of sitting out or 3rd partying it).
I’ve sworn off reading comments on almost every blog or news site now, with the exception of this place and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic blog. I simply don’t care about what random commenters think anymore.
So I guess I am become the classical version of idiotes. I’ve been swallowed whole over the last decade by life, social media and the marketing industry (which pays my bills) and I’ve become okay with that. If that means I’m not (or never really was) a progressive, then, well, I’m okay with that.
I’m certainly okay with cringing at the things I barfed up on the web between 2003 and 2010. It wasn’t all wasted time, but I certainly feel better off without it.
Dkos.
Old news.
Failed blog.
Nice try.
Money made, though.
Just as it’s always been.
Knowledge is a finite substance. Dispersed ever wider, it becomes useless. Centrist. Kneejerk.
Learn from that example.
Stay thirsty.
Stay hungry.
Stay lean.
Stay awake.
Stay strong.
The new becomes the old very quickly these days.
Bet on it.
Dkos.
Yawn.
AG
You give me a party.
I’ll give you a movement.
And I’ll pound you into the ground like a tentpeg.
Don’t take my word for it.
Take two-term President Howard Dean’s word for it.
That movement compelled me to go the first Yearlykos in 2006. Those were certainly different days, with lots of interesting efforts being made by humble cheeto-eating bloggers sitting around in their pajamas. But what had been cutting edge has now become mainstream, with some of those pioneers now part of traditional media outlets. Others are gone entirely. Now dkos feels like a Democratic-leaning Facebook. And those conventions are giant cheer rallies.
I joined in late summer 2006. I got the skull and crossbones some years later speaking some I/P truth. You know you are infested with ziobots when Mondoweiss is too radical for you! And kos’ hysterical reaction diary just a couple of days ago to Ray Pensador’s well balanced efforts (The Reason They Lie) speaks worlds about the Kos Kingdom.
And you are right about the election integrity angle. That should be job one for democrats.
I must be a real wuss — took a decade for the dKos trollbots to kick me out of there.
I read dKos way back when it was still based on Movable Type and the only writers were Markos and his personally chosen co-bloggers (Steve Gilliard and Billmon I think?). It was pretty great back then. The move to Scoop and the addition of diaries, which Markos expected to take the blog to a higher level, was instead the beginning of the end. It went from a place with bloggers and commenters to a hierarchical snakepit with an unearned sense of its own importance.
I was already pretty much gone by the time of the pie wars. I never understood what that was about. If anybody has a free minute to summarize it (preferably as free from editorial comment as possible), I’d be very happy to piece that together finally.
The place maxxed out after the 2006 election cycle, where good work was done after absorbing the lessons of the 2004 fiasco.
Then the usual happened. Leaders trusted the wrong people, scum floated to the surface, and the next thing you know the place had been taken over by thugs and sadists with outsized egos but undersized abilities.
A dozen years ago the place had promise and people projected their desires on it like they later projected the same onto a scrappy kid from Chicago. Disenchantment was inevitable.
By now it’s a total freak show of paranoid conspiracy addicts and wannabe radicals who talk tough but are afraid of their own shadows.