Matt:

I'm a bit taken aback by your intepretation of what you call my "DLC critique" of the netroots as a progressive movement.

I did not challenge the "legitimacy" of the netrooots; I simply noted, as you and Chris Bowers and many other have, that the netroots can hardly claim to fully represent the "grassroots" of progressive and/or Democratic-rank-and-file political aspirations.

You go on to say that I'm "subtly implying that since we do not represent the whole of the Democratic Party, and he is the other party in this debate, he must by proxy represent the other voiceless groups in this debate." This point is pretty subtle, all right, since it never entered my mind.

The truth is that no one movement, or group, or organization fully represents the "grassroots."  All this "my constituency's bigger than yours" talk treats politics as a game of horseshoes, where "closer" matters.   It doesn't.  We're all part of a coalition trying to build a progressive majority.  Maybe Matt's part of the coalition has "millions and millions" of constituents; maybe us hated "centrists" include hundreds of elected officials who represent many millions more "constituents" who will never read blogs and who would hate the idea of themselves as part of any "progressive movement." 

It can all add up to a majority, if we want. 

Ed Kilgore 

I have never seen any convincing evidence that there has been any significant body of "centrists" in US politics during the last 30 years. And I certainly have not seen any evidence that if such a "vital center" actually exists, that the DLC represents or speaks for it in any way.

sPh

.> When those guys start finding a way to
> use it to fight back at Swift Boating, great.
> Otherwise, they can stop blaming the candidates
> who are being Swift Boated. Instead, it's
> self-righteousness, akin to being above politics
> entirely.

The fundamental problem here being that the mainstream/insider Democrats (who, without bashing the 60s people in any way, were by 2000 mainly ex-1960s-leftists) had 20 years to come up with a better response, and better method in general, and failed. Without Ross Perot we would have had 4-6 Republican presidential terms in a row. Clinton slipped in, but he triangulated away many of the gains that the 60s people worked so hard on (telecommunications? privacy rights? workers' rights?). Then the establishment Dems either couldn't or wouldn't defend him (Lieberman?) when the Radicals attacked.

I am not blaming the 1960s legacies; they accomplished a lot and what happened 1994-2004 was not entirely under their control. But their approach _failed_ post-1994 (at the latest) and they kept on trying the same thing over and over and over. I give my employees three chances to fight through a problem, but after that I tell them "try something different". The establishment Dems weren't even going to try something different in 2006 until bundles of netroots cash and the Lamont primary win woke them up to a mob heading in a different direction.

I really hate to say this (for reasons that will be obvious in a second), but you think there is no netroots? That nothing is different? That the "new movement" is phony? OK, I can see the argument for that position. Then --- /what's your plan?/ Seriously - another triangulation festival? Another candidate who works top-down with the same consultants who have been losing elections since 1980?

sPh

Thanks, John, for the reminder of a key question: is this a movement?  The "netroots" do exist, but I don't know if they constitute a political or social movement.

For my own part, until this week's discussion, I had never thought of myself as belonging to a movement.  I mean, I participate in political discussions and hang out in internet cafes (hee!).  I've even read a reasonable dose of the intellectual, hard books that informed much of the 1960s movements.  (For a history class, but still....)  I write letters to my congressfolk and vote and make an occasional donation.  I think there are a lot of things about politics that could be fixed, to make them more about governance than about politicking.  So, do I count as a "netroot"?

That leads to another question of mine.  Can there be a movement if supposed members are not consciously participating in one?  Even if I count as a "netroot," do I count as a member of a movement?

It's legitimate to say that more people are talking & thinking & commenting about politics.  But there are also more people talking & thinking & commentating about television shows, sports teams, and novels.  So how are we different from those people?  (We'd be silly to think there's no overlap, by the way.)  If the term "movement" can be used so loosely, don't those people count?

Might I suggest a couple of definitions of the center, neither of which define it as numerically large, but both as important (more in one than the other)?

In the first definition, centrists represent the swing voters in constituencies that are not solidly for one party, bloc, etc. With sufficient motivation, they will turn out and vote for a particular candidate or otherwise support a position. With less motivation, cognitive dissonance about the difficulty of choice makes them the most likely nonvoters.

Perhaps a variant of the swing "centrist" or "independent" is the voter with some significant differences with a party/candidate. These voters are less likely to cross over, but, as democratically unappealing as the prospect may be, can be motivated to stay home.

The second definition is obsolete at the present national level, where the obscenely long primary season tends to produce candidates that walk into the convention with first-ballot winning votes. Primary voting patterns often tend to encourage turnout of the true believers, so this may tend to select more extreme candidates.

Depending on the state and local structures, if a convention or caucus still has real power in candidate selection, such a group is likely to select the more centrist candidate of perceived broader appeal.

As one rather allergic to tobacco, I do not miss the literal smoke filled rooms, but, on alternate days, try to decide if brokering is or is not a useful stabilizing element. Too much stabilization means no change even on important issues, but too little may mean no change due to bickering.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Here's an interesting account of the internet from an interview with my lord and master Umberto Eco.

<>A Conversation on Information
An interview with Umberto Eco, by Patrick Coppock, February, 1995.  <>

<>It goes here and there, but I think it does a good job in hinting at the radical newness of internet discourse.  I'm not sure any of us fully appreciate the uniqueness of the form of communication we have at hand here.

<>Plato wrote about the radical difference between speaking and writing (Phaedrus).  We know that speaking to someone face to face is quite different thagt speaking by telephone. Listening to a story and reading a story are also quite different.  Oral tradition and literary traditions only remotely resemble each other.  And now we have this:

<>Disembodied voices, or rather textural representations of disembodied voices, are heard (seen?) across time and space.  Social exchanges happen, and no one understands clearly if that voice comes from another human being.  "Neoboho" might actually be a committee, after all.  There are no guarantees.  And remarkably, actual friendships are forged - which has to be an act of faith.  I don't really know, empiracally, if someone I've felt friendly towards over a span of many years is an actual human being.  Yet I don't doubt it simply because I can't imagine that a programmed response residing in the bowels of a Carnivore application could say the things my friends have said.

So can this be a "movement"?  I think so, but I have some reservations.  I think there are some constraints that come directly from our respective guts.  In a development in this collective discourse that called for action, I think many of us would call in credentials before we agreed.  If a disembodied representation of a voice suggested that I get off my ass and show up, say, a demonstration, I would want some guarantee that it was an actual human being that made the request.  

So that's where I see a limit in the idea of "movementicity".  It's a line in the sand.  Short of this, netroots can be a movement.  But is it really a movement?  But if you just confine the question of action to political solicitations, I could see that - but that doesn't necessarily arise out of netroots - there has to be the whole political machine behind the solicitation to make it credible.  I would never send ten bucks to an unknown address that is only legitimized by a disembodied voice. 

Neoboho

Let's see. So far we have the bloggers, the "dirty Hippies", and the "hated centrists" as well as hundreds of elected officials. Who else do we have potentially in the coalition?

Heh, let me just say that I haven't seen this kind of ROILING at TPMCafe since the last Israel-Lebanon war when charges of antisemitism and all CAPS posts were being hurled left and right.

I congratulate you on kicking over the anthill.

Bill Clinton was a once in a generation politician. We don't have anybody on board with his skills.

I have to say that I don't understand this argument.  There are a number of irreconcilable notions here:

• Bill Clinton was a triangulating centrist whose views and actions were not "progressive"
• He needed to be this way because of the political environment he found himself in
• He got away with this because of his awesome political skills
• Since we don't have anyone with his skills anymore, we need to move in a more progressive direction, not continue the centrism that Clinton represented.

Something here doesn't add up.  Presumably, getting elected as a Democrat requires appealing to centrist moderates as well as progressives.  Progressive politics, whatever the energy of the netroots that fuel it, is still a minority position in the country.  Wouldn't that imply that it would require MORE skill to get elected as a progressive?  If we're short on candidates as skillful as Clinton, shouldn't that mean that appealing primarily to progressives is likely a losing strategy?  What am I missing here?

It seems to me that progressives, whether in the netroots and otherwise, are once again overestimating their strength in the country as a whole.  Worse, because of the rapid growth of the netroots (and of course the election results) they've gotten cocky and dismissive of the need to build coalitions.  Hence the continued demonization of "centrists".

It can all add up to a majority, if we want.

Yes, if we want.  But it's quite clear that this is not what progressive leaders want.  They have no use for the likes of you and me, Ed.  Hence the distortions about the DLC that would make a wingnut proud.

If Democrats are to put together a majority, it will require an alliance of the left and the center.  It ain't gonna happen as long as progressive "leaders" insist on turning off moderates.

Michaelgl

I believe that people are misunderstanding the use of the word movement and whether netroots are a movement. The netroots are an extension of the Progressive movement - and I believe they have been probably more genuine in that role than any other group over the last six decades. What the netroots accomplish is the use and development of a new and dynamic forms of information through the creative use of the internet. It is stunning to me that people cannot see this. The key to establishing a viable Progressive movement is and always has been the quality of information available, and who controls the source and the flow of information.

What the netroots do is combine the information revolution with many of the values of the Progressive movement of the 1930s. Critical to this is the idea that there is no such thing as an "expert", a person who has some form of a priori knowledge about a subject that trumps a democratic dialogue. I think when Chris Bowers made the distinction between activist and intellectual left websites he made a mistake. The actual difference is between more democratically oriented web-sites that rely less on an aura of expertise about a given problem and more on the free flow of ideas, and more "liberal" web sites which attempt to develop some voice of authority in an information stream.

You want to see a movement, go to Bolivia or Venezuela. And don't expect to see a lot of people pecking away at keyboards or trying to decide if they are "liberals" or "progressives".When Matt says he sees "a mammoth change in the culture of Capitol Hill" I can't help but wonder; if that is "massive" change what the hell is going on in Mexico? We have set our sights so low in this country we now think a non-binding resolution is some form of radical dissent.

When Spiro Agnew attacked "nattering nabobs", progressive politics was reduced to nattering less and never showing any sign of malaise.Now we have to figure out how to withdraw without saying withdraw or who to sell our "pollution credits" to.

You were right up to the last point. Clinton did what he could/did in another climate, and now we see how many unaddressed problems were left. Now we need a more progressive response, and it is possible (1) because of the huge GOP failures of the last 6+ years, (2) the magnitude of such problems as Iraq, health care, frozen mobility, gross disparities of wealth, ballooning deficits etc., and (3) the rise of a generation more interested in pragmatic solutions than ideology that is willing to engage in the political process to bring change about.

Clinton's genius was identifying policies that were both good policies and popular policies.

Sometimes, like NAFTA, they were policies progressive didn't (and don't) like. Other times they were policies that progressives didn't like, but should concede have been effective, like welfare reform.

He was courageously committed to a fiscal regime that had long term benefits, paid for it in 1994, nonetheless stuck to it and had the strongest US economy since the embargo. He followed Rubin's advice when currency crises arose, and damage was minimized.

The point is that Clinton didn't triangulate by trying to figure out what the focus groups, or, worse, Beltway consultants told him was important. What he did is he pursued effective policies that were broadly popular. That generated enormous dividends in his ability to adopt more effective policies.

People who try to imitate him try to find ways of weakening their positions to stay out of trouble. Hillary's one of those, and her health care plan was a perfect example. That doesn't work. When you combine Clinton's wonky nose with his personal charisma, you have a once in a generation politician. There was a reason the republicans hated him. He stripped them of their slogans.

Since we don't have anyone with his skills anymore, we need to move in a more progressive direction, not continue the centrism that Clinton represented.

I am certainly not making that claim. What I am saying is that there are plenty of issues that are centrist, broadly popular and are also progressive. Look at the 100 hour agenda. All of those bills are popular.

Getting out of Iraq is popular. Universal health care is popular. Reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies is popular. Stem cell research is popular. Doing something about climate change is popular.

And as far as I am concerned, "popular" = "centrist."

We don't need to tiptoe around. We don't need to hide in foxholes. Democratic policies are popular policies. There's no need to triangulate now. There will be in the future, perhaps, but not at this moment in time.

In fact, what's going on here is that Ed and his ilk are trying to characterize policies that are not broadly popular, but serve the interests of corporations and capital holders as "centrist." It's "centrist" to support CAFTA (yes, NAFTA good, CAFTA bad). It's "centrist" to support Big Pharma. It's "centrist "to turn to the moneyed interests that still do all too much running of Washington.

the rise of a generation more interested in pragmatic solutions than ideology that is willing to engage in the political process to bring change about

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Progressive politics, whatever the energy of the netroots that fuel it, is still a minority position in the country.

Really...

On what issues? 

The war? Health care? Energy independence? Corruption?  Torture? Wiretapping?

Even, if I dare...abortion? 

Dissent Protects Democracy.

L Boom:

I guess this is a good example of how brief and poorly articulated blog comments, by me in this case, naturally create misunderstandings. I would never, ever, suggest that Democrats ignore the "base" or "deny" the existence of people like you.

All I'm saying is that people like you aren't enough. The endless and interminable and redundant message of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has been that we have to project a vision and agenda that does not repudiate the base, but expands it by taking the views, perceptions and fears of swing voters seriously.

My own fear, and forgive me if I am inaccurately attributing this point of view to you personally, has been that some "base activist" Democrats think of swing voters as essentially stupid or cognitively confused (the latter being the distinctively destructive contribution of Lackoffian Democrats, an elite, DC-based movement if ever there was one). I'm not interested in harnessing the Democratic Party to a "one-night stand" with swing voters; I'm interested in expanding the family. But you probably can't do that if you simply insist that swing voters ought to think like you do, or that their views are essentially illegitimate.

In that connection, let me raise an issue that I should have addressed earlier in this thread: the growing belief of many Left Netroots people that the dramatic change of public opinion on Iraq shows that hanging tough with your progressive opinions is the right way to eventually create a majority. I don't know about you, LBoom, but if you originally opposed the war in Iraq, let me say you were right and I was wrong (though I was like Josh Marshall in considering the whole thing a very close call). But in the Wrong Camp, you have to include, in addition to politicians like John Edwards who are now considered avatars of the Progressive Left, a majority of the American people. And I would hope that most originally antiwar Democrats didn't take that position because they calculated that the war would go wrong and help elect a Democratic Congress in 2006, but simply because they thought it was the right thing to do.

The undoubted importance of Iraq in 2006, and the natural exuberance associated with the realization that antiwar Democrats were right from the start, may be misleading some progressives into thinking that they are going to prevail on every other contentious issue, simply by refusing to compromise. That would be a big mistake. Beyond Iraq, there is an enormous list of issues, from the Patriot Act abuses to single-payer health care to cultural issues to globalization to taxes and the basic size and function of government (I could go on) where "base progressive" opinion is still out of line with majority opinion.

So the idea that the best way to build a progressive majority is to refuse to "date" swing voters, in the fear that we might wind up in a "one-night stand" that will betray our true loyalties, is in my opinion, way off.  Bush and company have given us a once-in-a-generation opporunity to expand the progressive Democratic base; we need to seize it, instead of demanding that swing voters realize their idiocy and come on board without invitation.   

=== Clinton's genius was identifying policies that were both good policies and popular policies.

Sometimes, like NAFTA, they were policies progressive didn't (and don't) like. ===

Sometimes, like telecommunications, media ownership, and personal privacy, these were policies the progressives didn't like - and the progressives turned out to be correct. The problem is I hear very little discussion from the pro-Clinton camps of this category.

sPh

Does Lakoff himself count? Because his basic argument is that people are sheep who are highly manipulable by frames. In some sense, believing Lakoff's thesis requires you to believe voters are stupid.

Thinking voters are dumb is dumb, whether one's talking about netroots voters, New Dem voters, or swing voters.

As the netroots is fond of arguing, it's not about what people call themselves. Few people call themselves centrists, but any honest read of the public opinion data (or of post-war history) will show "in-play" Americans as being moderate (more left-leaning than not on economic policy, more conservative than not on values issues, more nationalist and hawkish than pacifist and internationalist on national security). It will also show that self-id'ed liberals need in-play Americans more than self-id'ed conservatives do. Sometimes we get enough thanks to outside events (the war), though Kerry didn't despite winning something like 60% of Independents. Clintonites -- I hope this descriptor catches on -- argue that consistently getting them is necessary for a durable Dem majority and that getting them requires something other than the wish list that EVERYONE HERE shares.

OK, I was a bit hyperbolic there, but Lakoff's thesis absolutely is that people have conflicting frames (nurturant parent vs. strict father, if I recall) and that political success for Dems essentially comes down to triggering the synapses that emphasize the nuturant parent frame. Positions are in essence wholly malleable (at least enough of them, and at least malleable enough). So with the right language, we can manipulate voters.

You can fancy the argument up, but it doesn't give much credit to voters, the intrinsicality of their particular values, or their capacity for reasoning.

true 'dat, as the kids probably no longer are saying. But in defense of the netroots, New Dems make a similar (incorrect) claim that Perot handed Clinton the election to show that even a relative moderate Democrat like Clinton can't win without outside help from a spoiler (or without incumbency).

So, you're pretty much splitting hairs between the two positions. (I'll leave aside what you consider a progressive and where you've come up with these positions..."total immediate withdrawal" is a bit of an exaggeration...)

But even by your standards, progressives and centrists are pretty close in ideas. And, in other words, the progressive position is hardly a small minority.

Dissent Protects Democracy.

Ed,

I think there are two fundamental issues here that need to be addressed.

The first is that, from my own experience of it as a media consumer of various forms, much of the philosophy of the DLC seems, for lack of a better word, passive. By this, I mean that it operates based on the assumption that candidates cannot change voters' minds on big issues, so they're reduced to mind-reading and presenting a shell game of focus-group proven issues. When you've renounced your own ability to change people's minds on big issues, you've acknowledged the emptiness of your own core ideals. This acknowledgement is implicit in arguing that a particular set of issues is "scary" to American voters because you're not embracing anything you think is good, only running from what you think is bad.

In order to build a real movement, you need to change people's fundamental ideas about how things operate. If you can bring them around on just one issue, resistance on other issues will be softer because you've already proven both your good ideas and your capability and competence in making them happen.

Very few Americans see our health care systems as being in anything short of a crisis situation. I see it that way because I'm currently uninsured and can't afford to pay $75 for a doctor's appointment for the privilege of paying $20 for an Albuterol prescription for my asthma. My very Republican parents are equally convinced that the system is screwed up because my father had to sell his small business because he couldn't afford to offer his employees health insurance anymore.

If enough Democrats can get elected to overhaul the health care system and turn it into something that works well for everyone, they'll have at least a generation of unquestioned political dominance. Easier said than done, of course, but it won't be done at all unless you're willing to stand down resistance and convince people that your ideas are good.

The second issue is loosely related to the first. If you can't define yourself by a strong, clear stance on an important, controversial issue, you have to define yourself another way. In the case of the DLC, unfortunately, it seems that the preferred way to define themselves is necessarily antagonistic towards the netroots. This is a profoundly self-destructive means of self-definition and lies at the heart of the netroots' accusations of triangulation.

At the root of it, the technique is to establish the middle by clearly defining both the right and the left in extreme terms as unacceptable, then setting themselves up as the only acceptable alternative to these bad extremes. What this amounts to in practice is using the language of the right (who are currently self-destructing and therefore not a palatable alternative) to define the left in the worst possible terms, then hope people come to the middle because the left and the right are both crazy and the DLC/Center is quietly, competently moderate.

If you want to sustain a movement and coalition with the netroots, it's incredibly counterproductive to constantly point to people who are ostensibly on your side then tick off reasons why they're a bunch of boobs like radicalism, elitism, lack of intellectual depth, whatever. At best, it looks like electoral sleight-of-hand.

The netroots can be a wild, passionate, cacophonic place, but you can't doubt that there are real people behind it with very strong convictions who are willing to stand by them.

The cult of "centrism" and "bipartisanship" seems much more like an empty shell that must constantly deflect attention away from itself and towards the "unacceptable extremes" because there's just not much inside. It's like the Tin Man if he never got his heart at the end.

Kudos for turning an olive branch into a slur against me!

Of course we don't ALL individually have the same political preferences. My point is that there is only a tiny difference between what the netroots wants and what New Dems want. Universal health care? Check. Stronger safety net? Check. A rational foreign policy? Check. Ed and Atrios have posted on this. Differences are strategic more than substantive--we don't think the netroots (or any progressive movement) amounts to a majority, and so we think it's tougher to get what we want than you do. (Generalizing again, I know.)

But you go, cscs!

Ooops. I read your comment incorrectly. By "everyone" I took it as just us liberal TPMCafe netroots troublemakers.

You're right. I'm wrong. I do apologize.  

Dissent Protects Democracy.

People don't vote based on Venn diagrams - even their own. IMHO a tipping point model is far closer to the mark.

sPh

Not that I agree with him, I DON'T.  But the game he is playing is checking for those people who line up on the same side on ALL of these issues.  Disagree (or have no clearly formed opinion) on any and you are a "centrist", "moderate", or "swing voter."

This, of course, is nonsense.  As far as I can tell, there are exactly ZERO centrists or moderates in the US.  Swing voting is made up mostly of people who typically vote their perceived short term economic interest (easily manipulated).  Only in times of crisis (the 2006 election), do they vote for other reasons.  The other group of swing voters are the apathetic who have no clearly formed political views and respond to emotional appeals.  Neither of these groups qualify as either moderates or centrists.  The one group consists of extreme egocentric pragmatists.  If we were to talk about this behavior honestly, people may not think so highly of it.  The other group consists of the uninformed.

People who agree with progressives on most issues, but not all, are progressives who have some non-progressive views.

Another interesting OPINION.

But I have to disagree with one assertion here: I don't think that if one disagrees with (or has no opinion on) one of the polling questions that they must be a centrist, moderate, or swing voter.

They could also be conservative.

And the "game" I'm playing is called "empiricism in service of persuasion". It's sadly not a very popular game on either side of the netroots/New Dem debate.

Well, we disagree on what Lakoff's all about (esp the centrality of the strict father/nurturant parent model). I've read Elephant but not Moral Politics, so perhaps he gets into more detail there -- he must given the sizes of the 2 books!

I'm not against "messaging" (wouldn't that be against persuasion?). I just think Lakoff (or perhaps just many of his most fervent acolytes?) makes persuasion out to be easier than it is. His work provides a convenient alternative to the difficult dance of building a majority while staying true to core progressive values, by implying there is little need for compromises. I suppose that's what my disagreement with many of the commenters is all about.

That may be true. But looking at where people poll on those issues, it's hard for me to understand how someone can say the viewpoints shared among liberals are completely out of the mainstream.

And no one supports "on-demand" abortion...that's a very loaded term, isn't it? 

Dissent Protects Democracy.

Empiricism can only answer empirical questions.  No amount of so called empiricism tells you how to label a person of mixed views.  So, the game you are playing is "begging the question."

You want to require a person to hold pure views to be a progressive, that might exclude a fair number of regulars at TPMCafe (otherwise, why is there so much debate?). I have pointed out that it is more reasonable to recognize that person by their DOMINANT point of view and acknowledge that some of their views are inconsistent.  I will add that some views simply don't have a clear liberal/conservative dimension. (For example there are plenty of liberals who prefer rural or suburban living, while every city has its share of conservatives.)

Unless the language has a clear rule (and there is no rule book to check), the solution here is a choice (confused realist empiricists are generally unable to understand the nature of choice in language), NOT a matter of collecting more and more evidence.  NO amount of evidence will solve the problem, BECAUSE, in the end, someone must DECIDE.  The decision I have recommended is MORE REASONABLE than the one you have recommended. 

Well I wouldn't necessarily call the differences "splitting hairs". The differences are significant. And that's just on the issues you mentioned. On other issues the differences are much more profound: the role of US military power, the proper place of unions, corporate regulation etc. That's where the sparks fly.

.> Are you using "tipping point" as in
> mathematical catastrophe theory?

Exactly. I was going to write a longer post including that concept, but I just ran down on this discussion - it is fairly clear to me that the Dem insiders {who like to think of themselves as their 1972 outsider versions} aren't going to listen to anything the rabble have to say. They had better hope that Hillary wins.

But anyway, my observation is this: the dominant theory is that there is a fairly large group of centrist voters, and that they can be convinced, "taken", and held - the analogy being to a military force taking and occupying ground, or to a city annexing and developing property. In any case, a defined area that can be captured and made part of the polity.

Whereas it appears to me that there is a group of undecided voters, but rather than a plot of ground they more resemble a ball on a mountain peak: the old "unstable equilibrium" problem from calculus. It is true that they aren't committed to any political party, and that they claim to hate both parties and to hate politics. But rather than being won over, they vibrate back and forth until shortly before each significant election (typically 2-3 weeks, although it seemed to happen earlier in 2006); then they suddenly roll one way or the other. The result being a sudden catastrophic avalanche of votes in an unknown direction.

I further observe that the direction of the roll is governed more by the dominant cultural and media narrative and who is winning the reality show of politics than by any ice-cold utility maximization process. Contrary to Mr. Kilgore I _don't_ think that this makes the sudden-rollers stupid; in fact as I get older I take the theories on the limits of human knowledge far more seriously than I did as a scientifically-trained 20-something. But I do think that the DLC approach of pandering and triangulating is absolutely devestating to the Demcrats, because it has absolutely zero chance of pulling the ball down in their direction and quite a strong chance of doing the opposite. And that the idea that there is a "vital center" just waiting to be captured by Democrats, if /only/ they could act a bit more like Republicans, is dangerous nonsense.

But hey, what do I know: I don't work in Washington DC.

sPh

hey, you're the decider. what can i say. i like the reality-based community.

and for the record, i'm pretty sure nothing i've written on tpmcafe amounts to a recommendation for strategy. i've just tried to clarify why new dems are wary about going too far too fast and to suggest that we use evidence instead of echo-chamber-buttressed intuition in coming up with strategy.

i'll maintain these are absolutely empirical questions -- what do people call themselves? why? how stable are their preferences? how malleable? how important is ideology in determining voting decisions? does this importance change over time? are people even paying attention to candidate positions? etc., etc., etc., etc.

That's rich. What I've done is to say, I have defined the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in this specific way (didn't have space to lay out the details, but I'm happy to send my analysis to whomever wants it--email me at swinship-at-gmail-dot-com). Agree or disagree with it. By this definition, I stated what the evidence shows about the American ideological distribution in 2004. It's for others to judge whether my methods are valid--agree or disagree. It *is* an empirical assertion based (necessarily) on a specific operationalization of "liberal/conservative".

What you've done is to say, I believe X. You can't do any empirical analysis without making assumptions or operationalizing "liberal/conservative". Therefore, don't even bother, and debate should only revolve around how well one can argue one's (purely speculative) point of view.

Frankly, I don't care how impressive your rhetorical skills are or what your philosophical underpinnings are. If you can't give me a reason to think your philosophical views are consistent with evidence, then your philosophical underpinnings are no better than those of someone who thinks that the US is run by 5 CEOs in a smokey room somewhere.

Well, considering that he started with a Venn diagram-based argument but didn't bother to provide even the most basic information showing how his universe of discussion was closed, are you surprised?

sPh

This is politics, where, venn the wheel squeaks, it gets the Euler.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*