Earlier today Open Left made a post about Barack Obama and gay rights, I made this post in the comment section, essentially disagreeing. Trying not to get too tied up in specifics, the goal of their post was for some reason to argue that Barack Obama agrees with and is identical to Rick Warren on the specific subject of gay marriage, even though they may disagree on other gay rights issues. My comment attempted to respond that even given that he won't say the magic words "I support gay marriage" Obama is an ally on gay marriage in several specific objective ways, including that for example Obama supports federal recognition of same sex marriages where they exist. You can read the posts yourself if you like but the nastiest thing in my response, as far as I can tell, was the line:

Chris, Matt, this is why you have no allies: Because you throw them all away.

A couple minutes after making this post, Open Left showed me as logged out, and my ability to log back in was gone. (Attempts to log back in were met with a password error; attempts to use the "lost password" feature resulted in a new password mailed to me, which also met with a password error.) An email asking for verification as to whether I had been banned was not responded to. I am, apparently, now banned from Open Left.

I have some thoughts about this, and what I am taking away from this incident about the current state of the blogosphere in general.
Open Left is a site I've been reading literally since the day it opened, and if you're not familiar with it one of the things worth noting about it is that, like MyDD which they spawned from, they are very serious about working within rather than against the system. That is to say, Open Left's main goal as I understand it is to create transformation in America's left wing, but they want to use the existing Democratic Party structures to do it. They are opposed to the Democratic Party status quo and believe the Democratic Party, operating under the umbrella of "centrism", has largely served as a tool to service the right, but they reject third party challenges or abandoning the Democratic Party as a response to this problem; they take the tack of insisting progressives need to embrace the Democratic Party while working to change it from within.

The Open Left guys, as I understand, started out as part of what we might call the Dean Revolution and so they have been working toward this particular goal for a long, long time: Make the Democratic party dominant, and make it progressive.

And now: They've won. The Democrats have just won two wave elections in a row, and the party that has resulted is dramatically to the left of the one we started the decade with. The DLC is so discredited as a movement that they had to shut down and reform under a different name. "Progressive" is no longer a dirty word, in fact it's a word that's so desirable that it's lost all meaning from all the disparate people trying to claim it. We have just elected with an enormous mandate a President unthinkable a decade ago, both because of his background and because he is notably to the left on any number of issues of the Democratic Party status quo on the day John Kerry or even Al Gore won the nomination. In addition to the Presidency, the Democrats control both houses of Congress with margins approaching supermajority.

And Open Left's miserable.

The entire left-wing blogosphere's miserable, really. I don't need to point this out to you; you read it.

There are reasons for this. The Congress didn't use that first Democratic wave election to actually accomplish anything noticeably liberal, and some of that can be laid at the feet of leaders who will remain in power next year. The team Barack Obama has been assembling does not line up with the progressive change-the-world rhetoric he used to get elected. Overall it would be unreasonable to absolutely assume the people who we have just handed power to are going to follow through on anything we want, and as of yet we do not know if the "progressives" we just elected will be any more progressive than the DLCers who they took the party from.

At the same time it's kind of weird to see people so despairing over an administration that, technically, has not existed for even one second yet. We don't have the evidence to call Obama's administration a success yet or even anything as positive as a wash, but nor do we have anything to call it a failure. In favor of hope, we have a large number of campaign promises and a number of intended Congressional bills, some of which are just promises but some of which are things actively being lined up to be passed almost immediately after inauguration; against, we have some ambiguous cabinet picks and the assumption that everything is going to go wrong somehow. This isn't enough to draw conclusions. Entire sectors of the left blogosphere are doing that anyway.

The thing I'm considering weird here, mind you, is not people being angry at Obama. That's reasonable: Obama has, you know, done some things over the previous month, and some of these are things that people disagreed with, and anger is sort of something that happens when you disagree with someone about something they did. But what's happening here goes beyond that, and here's where things get squirrelly. It doesn't seem to be enough to disagree with Obama, or to be upset over his actions. There seems to be some kind of compulsion to not just disagree with Obama, but to make him the enemy, and maybe to make anyone who won't make Obama the enemy an enemy, too. The things that are negative about Obama have to become the defining elements of his personality, his presidency. The things that are positive about him have to be washed away, erased even if these are things that two months ago the same people were specifically arguing were reasons to select him over McCain.

Some of the people doing this just legitimately had a beef with Obama to begin with; I.E. some of these people were Clinton or Edwards supporters at some point, have never trusted Obama even if they considered him a superior alternative to McCain, and so are not doing an about face so much as an "I told you so". Others seem to be simply losing the ability to disagree with someone without hating them.

For example: I got banned from Open Left this morning. I got banned from Open Left for, at least as a proximate cause, attempting to argue that on gay marriage Barack Obama is further left than an evangelical preacher-- not so to speak, literally that was the question at hand. I didn't try to specifically argue Obama's position on gay marriage as a good or right one; I wouldn't have, since I think Obama, who prefers "separate but equal" civil unions to real marriage, is wrong on gay marriage. I just tried to argue there are ways in which he is not our enemy on the specific issue of gay marriage, in response to a post which seemed to me to be willfully ignoring specific things he's doing right on the issue just in order to help sharpen the anger on something he had done wrong.

This is where significant [though not, to my mind, representative] blocks of the left blogosphere are going: it is literally unacceptable to attempt to promote reconciliation between a person and a man they voted for for President barely a month before. (And this particular incident happened on a site which not only endorsed Obama in the primary but a site where, as I understand, you could also conceivably get banned for rejecting the Democratic party and going Nader; so you're not allowed to oppose Barack Obama, but you're not allowed to support him either, or maybe you can support him but only as long as you agree not to like him? I don't know.)

Here's what I think's happening here.

This, I think, is the problem: The left does not know how to win. It is a completely foreign feeling to us. We do not know what we'd do if we ever caught the roadrunner. Similarly, the idea of allies are foreign to us. We don't know how to work with allies; we've never had anything but enemies. Allies are not things that work with you toward a common goal. Allies are those things that stab you in the back.

Moreover, we have gotten some very strange neuroses from the long period during which we've lost at everything. Like, for quite a lot of years, the Democrats have been a long procession of people who've given lip service to groups like progressives, but never follow through on actual policy. Everybody's noticed this. Nobody likes this. But we've also become, to some extent, dependent on that lip service. Since it's all we've had for so long it's what we've learned to respond to in politicians.

So what happens if we ever get allies? People who aren't part of the movement, who aren't us so to speak, but do have common goals with us and intend to work on them. Well, obviously we'd work on those common goals with them. But what happens when the goals diverge, as is inevitably going to happen at some point? What do you do with allies that disagree with you? I don't think we really know. But we do know what to do with enemies: you attack them. One thing we could do is assume that the disagreement is in fact the allies stabbing us in the back, and attack them back for it. And if we're going to attack them, we have to turn them into enemies.

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Why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because we don't know what Barack Obama is going to do. Barack Obama is, somewhere between "on occasion" and "always", going to get things wrong. And when that happens, we need something in place to pressure him back into doing the right thing. In fact, given that Obama, although he's committed himself to trying to move the center leftward, also has committed himself to appeasing that center, Obama can't function without this outside pressure dragging the Overton window where he wants it.

I am not sure this is something we have right now. What we have are a bunch of people who are trying to establish Obama as the Enemy. At times I'm not sure how this is meant to improve his behavior. You can't pressure someone who you have nothing in common with; if you try to start with the premise you disagree with someone on everything, then you have no grounds on which to bring them into agreement. Someone without common ground isn't someone you influence, it's someone you defeat. Sometimes there are people you really don't have common ground with, and the only thing you can do is try to defeat them. But a lot of us have stopped looking for common ground at all, even among our allies, and now we're trying to defeat the exact people who we very badly need to achieve our goals.

What we've wound up with isn't pressure, just undirected anger. An amazing amount of the response to Obama's recent actions has come with no remedy, stated or implied, attached (though this has varied from commentator to commentator). The obvious remedy in any of these cases would be "stop doing the thing that upset me"; but some of these actions being responded to are either essentially symbolic or unwinnable battles, and while symbolism can matter and unwinnable battles are sometimes worth fighting just to say you tried, neither of these things are worth it if opportunities to actually have some meaningful influence are in the process falling through the cracks. For example, Obama stood up today and said that he is a fierce advocate of equality for gays and lesbians. We have the opportunity to send back the message, "prove it". Instead the message we are sending back at the moment is "no you're not".

I think it is possible to pressure Barack Obama without specifically being his enemy. It's not exactly necessary, but it's something that should be tried. And if on the other hand we are going to have to approach Obama from an adversarial standpoint, and maybe we <i>are</i> going to have to do this, then we at least need to have some clear idea of what our goals are in attacking him-- what effect we expect those attacks to have, and based on what common goals we think those effects might happen.

I realize this is all kind of abstract. I do have specific opinions concerning how and within what limitations these sorts of things relate to gay marriage and Rick Warren, which aren't really getting expressed here because this post is already too long; and because the post itself came about because, well, I got kicked out of the discussion where we were talking about Rick Warren and gay marriage. But that's the problem in the first place-- we're not willing to listen enough, even within our own side, for these kinds of discussions to even meaningfully take place. We've got some section of the progressive movement which is not only unwilling to listen to our enemies, but also unwilling to listen to allies who are willing to listen to our enemies, plus apparently allies who are willing to listen to those allies who are willing to listen to our enemies. What the hell? Where can we even go from there?