Just what we need another journal devoted to "liberal" navel gazing. Real liberal ideas have been smothered by a barrage of rightwing themes which have only seen the light of day because they get promoted by an army of paid flacks. These people exist at rightwing journals, "think tanks" and a variety of broadcast media outlets. What they have in common is that they are all paid out of the same pot of money which comes from the super wealthy and corporate elite.

The Hoover Institution and similar places wouldn't exist if it weren't for a handful of wealthy backers who try to hide their connections. The recent report over the funding of the estate tax repeal "debate" showed that only 18 super rich families were behind the decade long effort. So were their "ideas" better than those on the left? No, they just had unlimited sources of money to promote their disinformation.

The right also has no regard for facts. If they aren't useful to support their position, they just invent some that are. With no meaningful media power to oppose the propaganda we end up with WMD stories, the Laffer curve and other bogus information.

Will another self-absorbed journal make a difference in the "battle of ideas"? I don't know, but it isn't ideas that we are short of, it is access to the people. Perhaps if you were launching a major TV network with a "liberal" point of vew to counter FOX there might be some effect.

Anyway you have come to the right place. Useless debates about "ideas" are what we do best around here.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

I can agree that many of our politicians have traded their brains for pollsters, but I'm not sure that I understand which of the big ideas of the 30s through the 90s are no longer entirely relevant. Equal opportunity? Civil rights and liberties? Justice for all? Due process? Transparency in government? Democracy rather than plutocracy (or kleptocracy)? Internationalism rather than unilateralism in foreign policy? These are old ideas, and they're all of the sort that do (or once did) define the democratic party I believe in (and that also alienate--or at least seem to be toxic to--those currently in power).

Ken: when you say the public is "hearing a bunch of notes, but no music" I'm thinking that's less about the ideas themselves than about the beliefs, the worldview from which the ideas spring. Or at least a narrative that fits the ideas into a coherent pattern.

Corvid

I agree with Maureen Dowd that ideas are dangerous, but dangerous in our time in only one sense--that we're talking about "ideas" plural rather than singular.
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For the Republicans--or rather the Republicans who matter--only one idea counts, the so-called Global War on Terror. This is the solar axis of all that they do. If we hope to counter this deeply and tragically wrong idea, we need our own idea (singular).
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What's remarkable to me about so many progressives is that they fully acknowledge that global warming is real and that we must tackle the problem. But somehow it always ends up at or near the bottom of a long laundry list of "ideas." To effectively temper the devastating effects of global warming, we have to reduce our hydrocarbon emissions by 50 to 70 percent over the next 10 years or so. Anything short of that goal would be pointless. (A 70 percent reduction, in fact, would be the truly prudent number to aim at.)
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Sit and think about that for a moment. Isn't it utterly irresponsible to think or talk about any other idea with this planet-wide catastrophe staring us in the face?
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Here's my bottom line: I'll judge the seriousness of the ideas debate by the only objectively valid criterion--whether or not it addresses global warming like the planetary emergency that it is. If the right wing--with the convenient help of a few knucklehead Islamists--can scare the crap out of us for years with one 99 percent phony idea, progressives ought to be able to rally us with one true idea that will literally decide whether human civilization survives.
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But I very much doubt this will happen. In the end, the true scandal will not be the skeptics and oil companies who dismissed global warming. At least they had greed and venality as excuses. The real scandal will be those who knew better and still frittered away the last few years in which we could have done anything about the problem, lost in a many-hued rainbow miasma of fuzzy wishful thinking.

The Republican network devoted major resources to an organized, focused effort to define the words "liberal" and "Democrat" in ways calculated to turn those into dirty words. They succeeded.

No one annointed the folks who made up the right-wing Republican network to speak, officially, for the Republican party, or conservatism, or the Right.

What happened, instead, was that a group of people with a focused core agenda, and able to mobilize huge resources for a sustained effort, just went out and did that.

This wasn't just some group, this group is the super wealthy. To see how they operate read the report about the estate tax repeal effort Spending Millions to Save Billions.

Where the left thinks it is a lack of ideas or coordination, or whatever, it is really about the ability of a cabal to buy government and public opinion. Read the report and notice how few of the family names you even recognize. Or if you know their names, notice that they almost never get mentioned in the media.

The US has become like a South American oligarchy without even noticing it. We keep thinking we are doing something wrong, but really we are just being outspent by those who control the levers of power.

I recently posted an essay on this site about how few of the goals of the left have gotten implemented over the past 50 years. Most enjoy wide public support, so the ideas are accepted. It is a failure to have a functional democracy that is preventing progress.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

It is entirely possible that our side will always be outspent.

What follows from that, though, even if true? That we throw up our hands and conclude matters are hopeless?

If we are likely always to be outspent, it seems to me that makes it all the more critical that a core group of the shakers and movers on our side undertake a coordinated, organized effort that pools resources to get the best use out of them.

As our ideas are generally more popular with the public it may be that through a well coordinated effort we can overcome the money resource disparity, at least to the point where we have a better chance of making more elections more about our ideas, and our brand as defined much more by us instead of them, versus theirs.

I don't see any viable alternative to undertaking the effort. Not that that effort is sufficient for success--but it is necessary, it seems to me.

I doubt many citizen participants here feel as though they have any ability to initiate or facilitate the type of effort that is so clearly needed. That sense of powerlessness and hopelessness comes through in the tone of many, many posts here.

By my observation, most ideologies evolve from a set of knee-jerk reactions to the world around them, which the knee-jerker than tries to codify into a consistent set of principles that he tries to adhere to inerringly, even if they send him off a cliff.

I think this is the last thing Democrats need - a handful of loose preference elevated to the status of religion. A worthy preference for economic fairness becomes another call for the workers controlling the means of production, or something.

I also think there is a misreading here of what drove the success of conservativism. I don't think it was conservative ideology. The public never bought the supply-side math, or had as much hatred of taxation as the conservatives did.

Instead, I would argue that where the conservatives demolished Democrats was on three issues: leadership, "family values", and security.

That isn't to say that policy is unimportant. I love Clinton to pieces for his policy wonkery, and endless experimentation to figure out what worked and cut that which didn't. I am fully on board for any Democratic effort along those lines. But thats inside baseball stuff for policy wonks. From the public perspective, I think they only matter as proxies for the issues that the public *does* care about. The specifics of Clinton's welfare reform initiative weren't what got him elected (hell, he didn't have any in 1992), but that his promise to "end welfare as we know it" signalled that he was in sync with the public's view that the old welfare system had a corrupting influence on important values like a work ethic, stable families, and individual responsibility. It wasn't the COPS program that got him elected, but his support for the death penalty was a proxy that helped convince the public he saw crime levels as more important than the rights of criminals.

This isn't to say that the Democrats need to imitate conservatives on gay marriage and the like. But I fear the public perception of a lot of Democrats right now is that they are weak-kneed moral relativists who will sit around dithering rather than acting on what the public sees as important problems. And I don't think they are completely wrong. My take is that what sunk Kerry wasn't the Swift-boating per se, but that his general response to that and the entire campaign tended to feed into the far more accurate Republican presentation of him as a vacillator at a time when leadership was needed.

*That* is where Democrats need to work. Policy wonkery is important, but it doesn't get you elected. Ideology, as we are seeing now, is dangerous, perverting the interpretation of reality to fit the ideology. We don't want to emulate the conservatives in that regard.

Wish I could read Chait's piece. Maybe I am regurgitating his points.

rdf, you wrote: "DailyKos is having more impact than all the opinion journals combined on the left, and even breeding a new generation of commentators."

Perhaps so.

What, in your view, does the new generation of commentators (as opposed to activists who are doing outreach and/or mobilizing people to do particular things) do that makes them effective, beyond posting on DKos and/or creating their own blogs? Do you believe DKos and these spinoff pro-Dem blogsites directly influence public attitudes? Are the people who go there mostly people who agree with the points of view reflected there? Do you believe there is a greater or lesser spread of opinion on Kos than here? How is the tenor of "discussion" there different from here?

Questions aren't rhetorical--I think you're very smart and well informed. Just trying to understand a bit better your "theory of action"/"theory of change" on this.

The world had changed to such a degree that the answers of the 1930’s, 1960’s, and even 1990’s no longer were entirely relevant today. Candidates have given up their brains to the pollsters, who asked the public what they wanted and gave it back to them in bite-sized chunks. After a while, the public began to see through this – and tune it all out.

In my opinion the reason why Democrats are running on fumes is because the answers of previous decades ARE relevant today. The party used to stand with family farmers - a large segment of their base. Now it stands next to agribusiness and expects to play both sides of the fence. The party used to stand with labor / unions. But it has done little to control the steady erosion of labor's influence in the country - exacerbated by Clinton's sell out push for NAFTA.

Democrats have screwed themselves by relying on the support of people they are acting against. Sure, the Republicans do this better than anyone - but if both sides are now wholly owned subsidiaries of AT&T - then the Republicans have the edge. They will let me keep my gun. They don't want to save the whales. They'll put retarded people on death row. They show no mercy. Simply put - they are the "tough guys" (tough guise) and this has a lot more appeal to people who drink, smoke and fight.

You want the Dems to stop running on fumes? Stop the likes of Lieberman from having any say within the party and eradicate the cancerous tumors known as the Democratic Leadership Council, House New Democrat Coalition, Senate New Democrat Coalition,New Democrat Network PAC.Progressive Policy Institute, and The Third Way Foundation.

This is true up to a point.  But it does not explain how progressive ideals went from the dominant ideology to one that is struggling for relevance.

Second, the biggest biases in our electoral system are the ones that are hardest to fix, such as the disproportionate weight given to small, rural states in the Senate and the Electoral College.  Amending the constitution on this stuff isn't going to happen any time soon.  So "fixing the ballot box" may have some marginal effect, but it will leave the most important structural issues unchanged.

In any case, my understanding of what really fueled the rise of conservatism as a political force was has much less to do with the cockamamie ideas they come up with and much more to do with long-term shifts in the population.  This stuff has been talked about for decades now - the flipping of the South from solid Dem to solid GOP and the simultaneous shift in population towards the sunbelt; the rise of the culture wars; foreign policy threats and the different responses of the two parties.  All these are factors.

It's important to remember that the single most popular idea that the Republicans have come up with in the last 25 years - cutting taxes - is (a) not a "new idea" and (b) simply old-fashioned banana republic populism given a shiny pseudo-intellectual new coat of paint.  Supply-side economics is simply not taken seriously by real economists.  All the other "new ideas" are either unpopular or have never been implemented.

What distinguishes Republicans from Democrats is pretty simple.  Republicans on the whole try to appeal to the average American.  Regardless of how much their actual policies are oriented towards the wealthy, their politics is geared towards average families.  When an average white middle class family hears Democrats talk about affirmative action, I believe, Democrats lose not because those people are racists.  They lose because it demonstrates to that family that Democrats care more about that issue than other issues that are relevant to them.  The same is true of gay rights.  Gay rights are a loser issue to run on.  Not because people are homophobic - although obviously many are - but because it is simply an irrelevant issue to most people.  I would argue that's why the Democratic refrain about GOP tax cuts - that they benefit mostly the top 1% of earners - never caught on.  Tax cut fairness simply didn't resonate with most people.  The fact that they themselves got a tax cut, even a small one, mattered more.  It's just another example of how Republicans are geniuses at exploiting these issues to paint a picture of Democrats as out of touch with the concerns of average families.

So sure, let's come up with all kinds of great ideas.  But I am far more concerned with how Democrats can get past their image as unconcerned with average families.  But let's not assume that the GOP has picked the lock to the American electorate because their ideas are so great.  That's crap.

When Bill Buckley founded the National Review conservatives was seen as a marginal ideological. After November 1964 conservatism wa thought to be virtually nonexistent in America. Yes some very rich people, inlcuding Richard Mellon Scaife, began to mobilize. However doesn't explain how conservative ideas became not marginal but truism which wewre used to drive the word liberalism out of decent political discussion?

There are two aspects of a need for ideas. There is at the meta-level something like what Francis Fukyama discusses in the "End of History." Ideas that shap and color peoples views of material events. Bernard Bailyn in the "Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" discusses similar types of ideas to explain why the Colonists and the British understood British policy in such diametrically opposed ways.

There is also the need for policy ideas. Not just "national healthcae" or raise the minimum wage, but full blown policy ideas that are consistent with the meta-ideas. These ideas need to be put before the public, argued for defended. Who really answers the myriad of rightwingers who fanout on TV or on the Op-Ed pages?

Finally liberals, or progressive or socialists need to have confidence that there are others who share their ideas, and there is an outlet for them, a place to debate them. It is not yet clear that the DailyKos, bloggers in general, aren't more like what happened after the advent of print. The voicelss gained a voice. It changed Western culture. It is not at all clear that the artisans gained more political power. Blogs seem to be places where the angry and the disaffectd complain about those with power.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

One thing that seems to be working in favor of the left blogs is that many of the most popular bloggers are just regular folks who are fueled by outrage. Markos is the perfect example, but he is starting to get criticized by his fans for getting to close too the electoral process. He continues to deny this.

Others like bonddad and Jerome a Paris on dKos are business people who write on their areas of expertise. They are "authentic" and thus listened too. They have careers away from politics and they seem unlikely to switch professions. Pundits, on the other hand, are always shifting between academia, media and political jobs. This makes everything they say slightly suspect - are they just angling for their next job?

The impact can be seen, so far, in two ways. One, the regular media is starting to react to what is said on blogs (both to challenge their remarks and to try and dismiss their effectiveness). Two, politicians are starting to interact with the blogosphere. Kos had visitors to his recent conference as well as postings on his site by several congress members.

Josh has had a similar effect with invited bloggers.

A good place to keep track of the power of the online media and the reactions of the traditional sectors is on the blog site buzzmachine.com. Jeff Jarvis, the owner, is a critic of newspapers and broadcast for "not getting it" and posts examples of what he thinks they are doing right and wrong. When, and if, this movement starts to impact the electoral process itself is the $64 question.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

You are all barking up the wrong trees. Democrats won both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. Vote counters decided otherwise. When are enough Americans going to realize, publicize and do something about voter fraud so widespread that we have an illigitimate President/Vice President.

According to Robert Kennedy Jr, we already have a person who is not the legitimate president of the US. (see Kennedy's 11,000 word, 200 footnote report)

Touch screen electronic voting machines and optical scanners are both corruptible. Insist on paper ballots and hand counting. Electronic voting machines can be programmed to record a vote for one candidate and give a paper receipt or print out showing a vote for the other candidate.

“In the worst case scenario, the architectural weaknesses incorporated in these voting terminals allow a sophisticated attacker to develop an ˜offense in depth' approach in which each compromised layer will also become the guardian against cleanup efforts in the other layers. This kind of deep attack is extremely persistent and it is noteworthy that the layers can conceal the contamination very effectively should the attacker wish that. A quite natural strategy in these types of situations is to penetrate, modify and make everything look normal."
excerpt from article in truth@freepress.org

rdf

I agree with you that "left blogs is that many of tthe most popular bloggers are just regular folks who are fueled by outrage." However, what is the outrage about? Is it outrage over the evil and incompetence of Bush and his administration? Or is it an outrage at the relatively marginal position of views?

Listening to the Kos get together in Las Vegas on C-SPAN and reading blogs almost daily I am increasingly struck by how out of the political mainstream many bloggers are. This does not mean they are not sincere or correct but only they are largely irrelevant when it comes to persuading Americans on policy positions.

I would be curious what you believe fuels the outrage you highlight and also whether you believe the outrage is changing votes or at least ideas?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Dan wrote: "This does not mean they are not sincere or correct but only they are largely irrelevant when it comes to persuading Americans on policy positions."

You didn't ask me...but I'll offer my 2 cents' anyway.

It is difficult to say how much influence blogs have had, relative to other factors, on the views of Americans on policy positions. But views from the blogosphere which are critical of the conduct of the Iraq war, and that of the Bush Administration generally, are not fringe views. Rather, these are the mainstream views in the country at this point.

And the strong majorities who hold these views *are* marginalized at the moment because their views are not being followed by the political leadership in the country. It is the political leadership of the country which is out of touch with what most of the public wants now.

Glad you're pressing for clarity.

With these posts on ideas I found myself remembering Forster's "The Machine Stops". The main character's mother is an indolent occupant of an apartment but uses an Internet-like system to talk with others. She more than once says that she was so pleased to have had an "idea" which she promptly shared with her circle. The resonance in the story is how empty her life is.

One wants to paraphrase the Army slogan: "Ideas are like assholes; everybody has one and they all stink."

Can we substitute "plan", or maybe "model", or how about the right word--"Policy."