An Incomplete Argument
Thanks to the folks at TPMCafe for giving all of us this chance to spend some time in self-reflection through the lens of Matt Bai's The Argument. And thank you, Matt, fellow moderator, for the topic.
The Argument is an entertaining, often insightful, and in some instances highly illuminating examination of the state of the outsider in Democratic politics today. Particularly interesting for me, since this was all new to my eyes, is his examination of the Democracy Alliance, and where all that money is, and isn't going. But this blogger is going to focus on the part she knows best. And, regarding the blogs, I found Matt's book frustratingly incomplete in two critical areas regarding the blogosphere: its narrow focus on the activist component of the blogs, leaving out the wonkosphere, and that most critical element that gave rise to the blogosphere and drove its massive and meteoric success--the failure of traditional media in our political discourse.
But let's start with the central premise of Matt's book: the Democrats lack "the big idea," and as far as the blogosphere is concerned, are more concerned with strategies and tactics--with winning--than with developing a philosophy for governing. From my perspective that's an incomplete premise to begin with, and Matt's evidence to support it is too narrow.
Just about every lefty blogger I know came to online activism because of their core belief in a traditionally liberal governing philosophy. It's best summed up by Matt Stoller in response to Jonathon Chait's thoughtful look at the blogs in TNR from a few months ago.
Basically, we're a group of people who feel very betrayed by the leadership of our country, our media, and our party. We care about ideas because bad ideas implemented tend to kill lots of innocent people, and we don't like that. We are liberal because we believe in liberal ideas, and by and large, we've been proven correct. The Iraq war was a terrible idea. Bush has been a horrible President. Running on Iraq in 2006 was a good idea. Stopping Social Security privatization was possible and necessary. A 50 state strategy made sense because a wave election was foreseeable. Don't trust the telecom companies with the internet. Let's figure out this global warming thing.We don't necessarily distinguish between politics and policy, or activism and journalism, and we don't pretend that there is an above the fray and an 'in the muck'. Most of all, we respect ideas because ideas, when implemented, have immense power. Ideas matter. Conservative ideas have affected us personally, whether it was growing up in a suburb or having no health care insurance. And to the extent that you create ideas or appropriate ideas and organize around them, you can build a new society. That's what the right did, which is why we respect the right.
That's our starting point. It's not articulated in every post, but it's the foundation of every post, the foundation of why we are doing what we are doing. It informs every action we take, every word we write. That goes for the entire left blogosphere. Which brings me to what Matt's perspective on the blogs is missing: there are a multiplicity of sites, many of which are doing some pretty heavy lifting on the ideas side of the debate. His singular focus on Markos and Jerome, admitted tacticians who consider themselves firmly in the activist camp, leaves out some of the seminal work done in the wonkosphere--work that informs our activism.
That foundation is, essentially, the common good. From an articulation of the common good expressed by Rep. Jim McDermott in an interview at Daily Kos with Armando over two years ago, to Michael Tomasky's key article, much thought has been paid in the online world to precisely how the concept of the common good, grounded in progressive politics of old, can be shaped into a governing philosophy for Democrats in the 21st century. From Tomasky's essay on this "civic republicanism" as he called it, sprung the excellent, four-part work by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin on what they call "The Politics of Definition," summed up neatly in their thesis:
Progressives need to fight for what they believe in -- and put the common good at the center of a new progressive vision -- as an essential strategy for political growth and majority building. This is no longer a wishful sentiment by out-of-power activists, but a political and electoral imperative for all concerned progressives.
Which brings me to a second, more minor quibble. This work has to be found in the foundation of the social infrastructure we have inherited from the progressives who came before us--from FDR and the New Deal, from LBJ and the Great Society. In fact, Matt chides the bloggers for their lack of historical perspective, saying "the way the netroots saw it, the more you knew about Democratic politics before 1998, the less relevant you actually were." At the same time, he repeats in his introduction here what seems to be his favorite part of the book:
As Andy Stern says eloquently in a scene from chapter nine, speaking to a roomful of wealthy donors: “You can’t stop globalization. You can’t stop trade. That debate is over. I like to say to people who want to return to the New Deal that we are now as far from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War. I don’t think Franklin Roosevelt looked back to Lincoln to decide what to do. And I don’t think we can look back to FDR.” I love that scene.
Indeed, we can't stop globalization or trade. But we can, and most definitely should, learn from the New Deal. FDR undoubtedly studied the political lessons of Lincoln in both his political successes and his governing successes. Just because the Depression wasn't the Civil War didn't mean there weren't valuable lessons for FDR. And because globalization and international terrorism aren't the Depression and World War II doesn't mean we can't find direction from the New Deal in our approach to politics and governing today.
There are many of us who do indeed remember politics before 1998 (and many of us were even intimately involved in politics before then), and aren't so blinded by hatred of Bush and his particular brand of Republicanism to forego those lessons. And while we're keeping these ideas in mind, we're trying to find the right people to elect to further them, and, yup, that means tactics and strategy and a focus on winning.
The other critical element I believe Matt misses in his treatment of all of us on the left is the basis for the disdain he so obviously and frequently feels in his travels as a member of the traditional media. The subject is vast enough for an entire online enterprise, and certainly enough to fill an entire 300 page book. The abdication of responsibility by the traditional media in political discourse during and since the 2000 election is slightly tangential to Matt's larger point, but hugely critical to the rise of the blogosphere and to the current state of Democratic politics and what we're trying to accomplish. Matt's perspective on it would have been fascinating to see.
For me, there are a couple of telling instances in the book that reflect the troubled relationship the Democrats have had with the traditional media and the vain attempts of many in the party to find approval there. The first is what Matt most accurately describes as the absolutely vapid slogan Democrats landed on for the 2006 election, "Together, America can do better." The second is the scolding Barack Obama gave to the Daily Kos community for our intemperate language towards Patrick Leahy on the Roberts nomination.
Both instances would have done the Dean of Washington punditry proud. For what better sums up the last 20 years of David Broder's writing than "Together, American can do better," or a U.S. Senator telling his constituents that comity was more important than substance when it comes to the nomination of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? This is what a couple of decades of an American press seemingly blinded to the radical extremism of the modern day Republican party, and wedded to the too easy narrative that the Democrats are wimps, gives us; a self-fulfilling prophesy of Democratic party leaders trying to do David Broder proud. And a radical right 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court.
I certainly don't lay all of the Democrat's woes at the feet of the traditional media, nor do I hold Matt personally responsible for every ill done by the traditional media. At the same time, I don't think there's anyone in the political left who doesn't remember the skewering of Al Gore in the media in 2000 over such critical issues as his clothing choices and his sighs, and doesn't hold the traditional media just a little bit responsible for Bush and the disaster his six years in office has wrought. And don't even get me started on the press in the run-up to the Iraq War. A fuller treatment of this from Matt's perspective would have been welcome.
All of which is to say, as engaging and informative as The Argument is on many levels, it barely scratches the surface on what the netroots is and what we hope to achieve. The book encapsulates a sliver of the movement in a moment in time that is quickly slipping by; at Internet speed, any book about the blogosphere is likely to become dated between the time the author writes the last word and the book hits the shelves. In this case, obviously the book had to go to print before there was time to fully digest and discuss the 2006 election, so the landscape has already changed. But this is still a book to keep in the library, if nothing else than for the fascinating character studies and moments in time it portrays.
I know this isn't a substantive comment, but gosh, that was eloquent and covered more bases than I had or would have. Thank you.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
September 27, 2007 8:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Beautifully said, and very much more serious than any of Matt Bai's responses have been -- mainly he accuses any critic of his book of never having read it.
If it were me, I would have said the same as this post but in a much less forgiving way -- like so many in the corporate media, Matt Bai thinks that if he didn't see it or deem it worthy of having insider shmooze with, it didn't happen, didn't exist or was beneath comment.
That's the reason why he's clueless and as you say, reporting -- blinkered at that -- on a teeny window that has already passed. I'd keep it on my shelf, sure...the shelf that says "slag heap of history."
September 27, 2007 8:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks. But I disagree that Matt is blinkered--I think anyone trying to write on the blogs right now is going to face the same challenge. It's too big to cover adequately.
Seriously, the Democracy Alliance parts of the book are really illuminating and a fascinating case study on the old Will Rogers joke about Democrats. It's good stuff.
September 27, 2007 8:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah. That was extraordinary. It's hard to think of anything to add.
In particular, it just seems that what you've said about the degree of unanimity in the left blogosphere -- the degree to which anyone in the netroots would echo and sign on to what Matt Stoller and Ruy Teixeira wrote in the passages you cite -- is itself the basis for the kind of "argument" Matt is searching for. And those sentiments are certainly NOT shared by those who are on the other side; 30% of the country is infuriated by such statements, just like the Americans Matt refers to who were infuriated by the New Deal.
I also wonder how Matt feels about the current attempts by the right to turn bastions of the netroots like MoveOn and DailyKos into code words for "far-left extremists". Doesn't this reveal a lot about the political universe in which progressives are operating at the moment? What does he feel is the appropriate response to this kind of red-baiting? Just how much attention can realistically be paid to "innovative new ideas", in such a scorched-earth political environment?
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone
September 27, 2007 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Part of what makes the book sound parochial to me is that I'd never heard of the Democracy Alliance. Ok, blame it on my narrow understanding, and note that it makes the book potentially useful to me. But it also adds to my sense that an anecdote is being used to justify some lousy policies.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
September 27, 2007 9:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ah, but that's a big part of the story--almost no one has heard of the Democracy Alliance. Here's some big money being contributed to a group that isn't at all transparent in how it functions, or that it even exists. Or existed--there's been significant movement within the DA, apparently, to open up a bit.
It's illustrative of how a lot of things work, and have worked for a long time in progressive and liberal interest groups, and that Markos and Jerome take on in Crashing the Gates. There's limited money, huge competition for it, and a carving out and defending of territory that often works at cross-purposes to a healthy, larger progressive movement.
September 27, 2007 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
You hit on one of the things that has been at the back of my mind all throughout reading the book and writing about it: we've been so busy playing defense against the New McCarthyism (with little help from national media that doesn't seem to recognize just how extreme the GOP has become) that we've barely been able to hold our own, much less come up with too much innovation in terms of messaging.
That's only a little bit of a cop-out. I don't want to make excuses for what is very often a very lame Democratic party. But it is going to take some time to recover--more time than we might have.
It's frustrating, because I think we're at a juncture that could provide another massively realigning election and most of our party leadership don't seem to be confident enough to reach out and grab it.
September 27, 2007 10:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Joan -- where's the anger? The hatred?
Didn't Markos prep you before writing this?
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
September 27, 2007 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Heh. I save my bile for the truly deserving--Lieberman, Brooks. I guess I'm one of the lesser rabid lambs among us.
September 27, 2007 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent post.
The Democratic politicians have failed to understand the sea change that has occurred in the traditional media. Not only does the Republican Party have its own media outlets (Newscorp, the Weekly Standard, etc.) but also the traditional media is choosing sides.
The actions that Dan Rather decribed as being taken by Viacom - CBS management and specifically
to derail his reporting on Bush's Air National Guard failure clearly demonstrates that there remains no neutral traditional media.David Broder sees himself as being part of the American political center, but he is in fact merely a neutered male left to occupy space on the editorial page that could go to someone with teeth. He and others like him serve the function of offering the pundits who don't want to be right-wing extremists and refuse to be Paul Krugman's a place to hand their hat. If the Republicans can't buy or co-opt pundits and journalists as they did with Judith Miller, then leaving them like feral neutered cats to occupy territory is the next best thing.
That neutered territory also becomes good safe territory for risk-averse Democratic office holders to hide out away from the political storms that the right-wing extremists have brought. Those office holders will have to be made aware that the territory they think is safe is in fact even more dangerous to them than getting out and mixing it up with the extremists. That's why the money has to be sent to Moveon.org and other outsider organizations. The real information flow in Washington is the votes that elect the politicians, and the flow of money to the challengers is the only real advance warning they get of those votes.
I said earlier that the traditional media is choosing political sides. The idea that the traditional media provides unbiased and neutral news may be nothing more than a strange market artifact of the last half century. Whatever, it is over and not coming back. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party in Washington seems to have missed the auction and by default the media is sliding over towards the right-wing extremists.
We can see some of this as outsiders not trapped in the beltway information bubble. The 2006 election was about this, and 2008 will be more so. This discussion is clarifying the situation.
September 27, 2007 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think I am slowly coming to the realization that we fool ourselves when we describe American politics as being Left-right. That implies there is a continuum, and that compromise is a possibility.
I think that Paul Berman had it right in his poorly titled book "Terror and Liberalism." The American Revolution led to the U.S. Constitution which is a highly liberal document, in that government is limited by the Rights of the people it governs and equality before the law. Those Rights, which are limitations on the power of government, are enforced by the separation of powers, the control of the Executive by Congressional laws applied using the Rule of Law, and by open, transparent government that allows the voters to know what the government is doing for us, and more important, to us.
With the conservatives we have a group openly contemptuous of Civil Rights and personal individual equality before the law and government. (Our dollars are equal. We are not.) Instead they offer us a government that has unlimited power, the power to pick people up off the street and to "disappear" them.
The idea of the Unitary Executive is a codification of what they believe, and something less Constitutional and less Liberal is unimaginable. When Yoo wrote the document, the White House acted on it, but kept it secret. This runs counter to the critical idea of transparent government.
In fact they implement their vision of the anti-Liberal America in as much government secrecy as they can arrange. This, probably more than oil, is what they needed the war for. It replaces the Cold War as justification for shifting control of the government to the Executive and hiding its actions behind "National Security."
These are not the actions of a group who are defending the American Constitution. Instead they are gutting it.
That leaves America with two competing visions of what America is and is to become. One vision was written into the Constitution and was fought over during the Civil War. The other is the current conservative government and has Yoo's vision of the "Unitary Executive" as one of its founding documents.
Is there really any room left to compromise with the conservatives? Doesn't that make the right-wing left-wing political continuum a dangerous fiction?
September 27, 2007 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
The central element of Democratic Party politics is not our self-important media but pimp-consultants, originally lawyer-lobbyists but, since 1994, mostly auto-didact ad-men, policy-peddlers, pollsters, and race-hustlers.
They are essentially intermediaries who have wrecked the party in the course of peddling gimmicks and pretty faces to government concession-holders, mafiya capitalists, and private-equity commissars.
This is hardly new, although the scope and scale of it on the Georgetown Plantations today has been vastly expanded since the end of the Great, World, and Cold Wars by the "strong dollar" bubble.
So, for instance, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or AIPAC are now each more important in Washington or, for that matter, Houston, today, than say the Republican Party of Harris County or the Democratic Party of Texas.
What is missing are what the Young Foundation in London calls "Parties for the Public Good". These would be instruments of political formation, mobilization, discipline, and action, as well as what was notionally "responsible, two-party," not coalition, government.
In a previous era, parties also provided a well regulated militia, dating services, choral singing, and other personal or collective benefit, especially for men and women of military or child-bearing age as well as for patriotic middle-class families, as distinct from, say, for a predatory rentier class with its clerical factors and precious heirs.
Instead of parties today, we have the cringing-liberal Democrats' "Permanent Campaign" and the chicken-hawk Republicans' "politics as war".
That sucks, and the blogosphere is awakening to what is wrong.
But, for a lack of cryptographic provsion for "digital identity" in the TCP/IP stack, for "micropayments" in in the money supply, and the fact that Robert's Rules cannot be implemented on a pornography distribution system, the blogosphere has only barely begun to contribute to re-building strong, competitive parties.
So, the GOP is now a dangerous cult, but the Democtratic Party is still a corrupt and ineffectual whorehouse.
In the US Senate, Joe LIEBERMAN leads the majority, chicken-hawk "War Party", as distinct from say Jim WEBB or Chuck HEGEL. In the House, Steny HOYER rules the nearly unanimous Pork Party or, in fact, a frat-house of aging gas-bags and juvenile spokes-models seeking better gigs from their pimp-consultants.
What we have here is the disgusting "lifestyle" politics of lifetime office-squatters and "post-constitutional" government that should have "finned" with the "siecle".
I am a loyal, lifelong, Democratic ward-heeler.
But, I am in a seriously bad mood. My oldest son leaves for his second tour in Iraq next week. The mercs have state-of-the art German machine-pistols and people shooting at him have the very latest Russian heavy machine-guns. He will be a moving target in a clapped-out dune-buggy with the latest model of Lee-Enfield musketry thanks to generations of Democratic committee-barons, lately Dick DURBIN and John MURTHA, who have preserved Admiral MAHAN's navy and General McCLELLAN's Army only bigger and brighter with less tooth and more tail than ever plus Brazilian rank-inflation.
And, of course, we are paying for all sides of the civil war in question the Fourth Generation warfare in prospect.
Thankfully, no pimp-consultants or bond-lawyers have been killed in this latest war of sheer vanity -- an insult to the morality and proficiency of imperialists everwhere.
Congress has increased the level of whining since 2006, but nothing has been cut and nobody has been punished for a war both parties are pretending is not lost and no party has any notion of a purpose for other than preservation of its members' vanity and Blazing Saddles jobs or, more importantly, retirement benefits.
But, retribution and more will come soon enough, if "New Direction" remains just another empty slogan of corrupt, cowardly, utterly ineffectual "Hold Harmless!" and "Jes' He'p Ever'body!" -- ever cornpone but still politically-correct Democrats.
The GOP may wink out first. But, as long as there is a rentier class, there will be a Whig party or what the DNC/DCCC seeks to restore, a Whig, aka "Jim Crow", coalition.
But, when those Whigs in one party or both have done their worst, there will be at least attmpted civil war or revolution before republican democracy gives up the ghost.
::JRBehrman
September 27, 2007 11:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for this:
I think it is also good to remember that many of the progressive ideas we associate with the New Deal weren't new at all. They were populist ideas that had been kicking around for quite some time, born out of experience (most often the experience of people held in as low or even lower repute than today's bloggers and netroots) rather than in Think Tanks. It was only the desperation of the elites of that era, born from their own failures, that provided an opportunity for putting those ideas into practice.
There's a real reluctance, today as there probably was in that earlier time, to allow that economic populism -- the rough voice of experience -- has any legitimate place in the on-going political "argument." Populism, it is assumed, is always and only reactionary, resistent to change, unrealistic in its demands, and naive in its understanding and expectations of the modern economy. And politicians who would represent populist concerns are only pandering.
What we are told is that globalization changes everything, and working and middle class Americans must be more adaptable, flexible and willing to embrace risk. But what is meant is that, rather than agitating for mechanisms and institutions that can help them get more from new economic realities, working and middle class people have to learn to accept less.
Frankly, I think it is naive to assume that working people don't understand, perhaps better than many more affluent Americans, that our capitalist economic system -- not only today but ALWAYS -- requires flexibility, adaptability and a willingness to risk. And not just "risk" as our affluent elite usually mean it -- disposable income "risked" in the stock market or other investments -- but more substantial kinds of risk. The risk involved in putting life and health on the line in difficult but necessary work. The risk involved in leaving everything you've known and loved behind to seek possible, but not guaranteed, opportunities among strangers. The risk (and trust) involved in devoting years of time, talent, energy, expertise and sweat to someone else's bottom line.
Globalization is just a new wrinkle in an old state of affairs. There's nothing new in capitalism's creative destruction, the stresses it places on communities, the demands it makes on individuals, or the requirement it places on us to come together to create institutions that help us find opportunities in the destruction, and creative ways to deal with the stresses and demands.
But as the electronic media and professional consultant industry began to dominate our political discourse in recent decades, union halls began to disappear, etc., etc., opportunties for coming together became more rare, and the variety of voices that could participate in our political dialogue became more limited. Many, many people were left feeling voiceless, isolated and unrepresented.
Now, opportunties to connect created by the internet are beginning to change that.
I wish journalists like Bai, and more of our political class, in and out of office, had a better appreciation, than they seem to, for not only how positive, but how absolutely necessary (for the health of our nation), that is.
September 27, 2007 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting and eloquent piece. I read Matt's book and the reason Andy Stern was my hero in it is that the govt programs of the New Deal and Great Society were largely govt bureaucracies designed to combat large corporate bureaucracies. I say this as a liberal who believes that govt can be a positive force in people's lives and has nothing against govt.
However, I do not believe the largely one size fits all govt of the 1930s and 1960s works well in a plug and play world of the 21st century. One of my frustrations continues to be that the Democratic Party is not adopting its ideas to the less structured world that technology such as the Internet has brought.
One of the first Presidential campaigns I worked on was Gary Hart's in 1984 and I was attracted to him because he was an innovative thinker who believed in an activist govt but thought about adapting it to a changing world. He was a flawed man but truly a visionary. Who is adapting that role today? I don't see anyone and it worries me.
September 28, 2007 7:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's no "big money" contributed to the Democracy Alliance. The DA budget is a relatively small amount of money that only pays for conferences, staff, etc. The large sums associated with DA are simply the sum of grants by individual donors (like me) to DA-recommended organizations that they choose to support. And, for most DA partners, the DA is only one of many ways that they find groups and choose what to support.
Of course it is true that there is limited money, and competition for that money. But it is not DA that holds the pursestrings. It is the individual donors. You are right to say that this is how things have always worked. Any nonprofit organization ultimately has to rely on persuading donors to support it.
DA has influence with (and value to) its partners to the extent that it can help them identify gaps in the infrastructure that are particularly deserving of funding. I also think it's an important way to get funding for activities that are not "sexy"---some kinds of things are easy to sell to donors, others are harder to explain or sell, but just as important. But its only tool for funding those groups is persuasion, just the same way that any group seeks funding directly from donors.
September 29, 2007 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink