; 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."

Where are the centrist institutions with millions of members/readers?  They don't exist, Ed, because you don't have a genuinely popular constituency.  Where are the pro-war Democrats?  They don't exist anymore.

I think Matt's generous in his replies, but not replying to the main point. It's not about whether the movement is youthful or not, whether it's legitimate or not, etc., etc. It's whether it's a movement. If it is a cool way to stay informed, and the entire Internet is, great, but so is reading the morning paper. If it's moving an agenda and getting the GOP out of office, that's different and still unproven.

I'll repeat the thrust of another comment of mine: Stoller's defenders here uniformly laud it for being different in one regard and one regard only. It's loose. It permits debate. It permits us all to argue and find our own answers.  It gets over unity. 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.

Oh, that doesn't mean I buy the response that the 1960s won for being more intellectual. We all read, and intellectual trends evolve in light of, well, evidence and intellectual debate. Marx repaid my reading in spades, but there has been life since. Deconstruction, New Historicism, gender studies, other kinds of materialism, etc., etc. Then it was crucial to point to the economic and political dimensions hidden in a history of the American revolution, say. Now it's important to see other things as well, including colonial wars across America, civil war at home, tensions over slavery, etc., etc.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

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.

So what was your point? Are you claiming that the beltway triangulators do represent the grass roots? Are you claiming that the DLC represents some silent majority that doesn't show up in polls?

Look, I'm a huge fan of Bill Clinton. I thought he did everything he could do with the deck he was dealing from. But I think that people who think that they can imitate him greatly underestimate his political acumen and his sense of the possible. Or, rather, over estimate their own. And I include Hillary in that group.

Bill Clinton was a once in a generation politician. We don't have anybody on board with his skills. What we do have is a tremendous opportunity to advance a progressive agenda that is very broadly popular, starting with universal health care. This is exactly the wrong time to be thinking about triangulation. Now is the time to move boldly.

The "grassroots" now includes not just progressives but independents. The monolithic republican government has been an advertisement for progressive values--for getting water to hurricane victims, for not engaging in imperialist wars, for providing health care to every child, for a system with real opportunity for everybody.

This would be a terrible time to sell out the party to Beltway insiders looking for their turn to put their snouts in the trough.

That is the message of the netroots.

People powered politics.

Without Ross Perot we would have had 4-6 Republican presidential terms in a row.

This is simply false. Every analysis of the 1992 and 1996 elections shows Clinton winning with or without Perot. This has been shown over and again, but people from the "netroots" continue trotting out this bit of nonsense. Bowers had it half right about how the "activist web" could be a little bit intellectually deeper or whatever he said. Half right in that he didn't go far enough. How on earth can you be so passionate about a topic, and yet ignorant about fundamental facts within that topic? It's truly frightening to me.

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.

Name the "ex-60s leftists" who are "insider Democrats" now. The ex-Goldwater Girl Hillary? Bill, who spent the war hiding out at Oxford and not inhaling rather than demonstrating? Al From? John Kerry, who spent the 60s in the Navy? Who are these "insider Democrats" who are "ex-60 leftists?" This is one of those stupid but convenient constructs of the "netroots." You people trot this idiocy out at every turn, and you don't even know what you're talking about. The leftists who define the 60s are people like Abbie Hoffman or Stokely Carmichael or Jane Fonda or her ex, Tom Hayden. These people aren't "insider anything," certainly not "insider Democrats." But their image lives on in the public's mind, and it's that image that people thought of when they voted against Democrats whenever national security became an issue. You got one (and only one) thing right: the "ex-60s leftists" are the reasons Dems lost in 1994, 2002 and 2004 (you got yet something else wrong: Dems picked up seats in Congress in 1996, 1998, and 2000, contrary to the impression left by your post. Maybe Ross Perot was running in a whole lot of congressional elections then, too).

Progressives and Pwogwessives

"In fact, I would guess that the opinion leaders (not the readership) are in Nathan Newman's age bracket, mostly in their early thirties and forties. This group was largely apolitical before becoming involved over the last eight years, but we actually belong to the 'in-between' generation."

This, linking to the man who writes: "In twenty years of organizing..."

You describe people on the left-wing of the democratic party as somehow akin to those who thought of themselves as outside it. After years of hearing liberals accused of being leftists, your response now is "Hell yeah!!"
But it wasn't true then and it's not true now.

If you want to argue that it makes more sense to work from the inside at this point that's than you should say so. Otherwise you're sounding like an arrogant idiot who's parents paid too much for college.

Movement, schmovement.

I'm doing this for several reasons. (a) it's fun. (b) Back in 2004, when I was asked to join Obsidian Wings , I really wanted to do something, anything, to change someone's mind about voting for Bush. The trouble was, I didn't actually know anyone who was planning to vote for Bush. Joining a joint liberal/conservative blog let me engage people.

But also: (c) Back during the whole Lewinsky mess, I thought: one reason people are focusing on this is that they understand it. The government could do, and has done, horrible, scandalous stuff about, say, tax policy or occupational safety: stuff that should make everyone absolutely livid. Most people don't know enough to appreciate how scandalous some of this stuff is; they read about it and their eyes glaze over. But everyone knows about married guys having sex with interns.

I wanted to do whatever I could to change this. It's something you have to do one person at a time: providing whatever bits of background might, over time, enable people to see why, say, the Bankruptcy Bill was worth getting mad about. Blogs do that.

Also (and this is probably peculiar to being on a liberal/conservative blog): I think a lot of some conservatives' motivation comes from a stereotype of liberals. For whatever reason, it's pretty hard to think this stereotype is true of me. I'm an ethicist by profession: do I really not care about values? I'm generally friendly to religion (as atheists go), though hostile to people who abuse it, and as an ex-serious Christian I can tell when people are taking the name of the Lord in vain. I am not a moral relativist. I do not hate my country. Blah blah blah. I don't have to try not to be what conservatives hate; I'm sort of the antithesis of their caricature, except for being liberal. So I thought: hey, why not?

The point is: most of this involves dialogue, and it involves both trying to change people's minds, and giving them the chance to change mine. It's about creating a more informed citizenry, in which I include making myself more informed, in the way that having to defend one's views inevitably does. I imagine other bloggers have other aims, similar in using this particular medium, with its particular strengths; undoubtedly different in a lot of respects.

But we're all in communication with one another. We all (I assume) read a certain number of other blogs. Our commenters can bring stuff to our attention, and if other people think it's important it can get a lot more play than it would have if that commenter had remained upset in isolation. It's a great tool for communicating arguments and facts, for facilitating dialogue, and for making the people who participate to any significant extent a lot more informed than they would otherwise have been.

And it makes the process of becoming informed fun, which I think is an enormous advantage.

I would never want to say that this is the only tool there is for organizing, or that everything has to work through blogs (take that, union locals and city Democratic committees and chapters of ACORN!) -- That would be nuts. I do think that it's a way of making other organizations more likely to be effective, by making people more informed about why they matter.

Blogs are a large number of efforts at achieving goals that can, I think, only be achieved in little steps: goals like having a more informed citizenry. They aren't the only way of achieving those goals, but for me, at least, they're the best I can do.

I used this quote about six months ago for a post in the Discussion Boards. It got quite a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Nevertheless, the quote is not mine and it is what it is.

"I like to complain and do nothing to make things better. I like to blame my parents generation for coming so close to social change then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media and government to deface the movement by using the Mansons and other hippie representatives as propoganda examples on how they were nothing but unpatriotic, communist, satanic, inhuman diseases. And in turn the Baby Boomers became the ultimate conforming, yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced."

--Kurt Cobain

sPh: "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?" See, you're not just attributing to me the opposite of what I said and believe; you're illustrating the problem.

I am not in favor of "triangulation." I always vote for the candidate I most want, I hate when people want Wes Clarke (much as I admire his politics) simply because his being a general means he'll win, I oppose Clinton for her centrism and compromise, etc., etc. But what I'm seeing is people who want to have it both ways.

They want a movement that's purer even than the 1960s, whatever that was. They want a candidate who doesn't just have Kerry's ADA rating (except for that vote on Iraq), but magically slugs back harder than the most concerted mainstream media campaign that the Rovians come up with. And then, when pressed as to why blogs aren't supplying it, they cheer the diversity, debate, decentralization, and ready availability of various points of view and sources of information.

That's what makes it whining -- not that it wants an end to war and universal health care, where supposedly people like me don't. It's the joy of being able to say simultaneously "all those politicians are the same, so screw 'em" and "we're not a movement." But you know, they do have something in common after all. Both translate into one thing: "we're not doing politics, just talking." Don't be surprised when the the media you despise elect the next president, and enjoy patting yourself on the back for it.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Yeah - I wonder if Josh needed some ad revenue for a new venture and told his editor to "juice things up a big"? Not that the next Citizen Josh Kane would do anything like that ;-)

sPh

Seriously, Matt, I don't care if you pretend not to know me -- but for anyone who's curious, we've emailed back and forth about the magazine I edit, The Democratic Strategist, several times. But is it too much to ask that you'd engage my arguments? Or do you have no counter-argument?

If anyone is interested in why I'm skeptical of the existing netroots data, please see this post of mine. If anyone is skeptical of why Matt Stoller skirts my and others' critiques, please ask more of him.

Hey now, you're being a little angrier than warranted here. He did kind of answer your critique... you say nobody knows how many "Netroots" there are, he points out that just saying that the base is limited does not mean, de facto, that opponents of the netroots represent the Democratic party. He does have a point there. You know, most people don't even know what a DLC is...

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

These are good distinctions. We often forget that most people are not politically oriented. There is a large disaffected group who are in the "middle" only because they don't like the solutions on offer from either of the parties. There are also people who consider themselves independent but pretty consistently vote with one party, although they don't feel it goes far enough, or in quite the right direction. It is just much better than the other one.

Matt believes that he is where the majority is because of polling on issues like the war, health care etc. Ed believes there is a large group, possibly a majority, who are more conservative because that is true in the area he comes from. But I'd suggest to Ed that the default position for many of these folks is isolationism, and dissatisfaction with Iraq is bringing that out. Also, as we have seen while many of these folks are socially conservative, they aren't necesarily big fans of the go-it-alone, dog-eat-dog (unless you are very well-connected) kind of economic policy espoused by the GOP and business Dems.

But Ed is right that if we are going to win a governing majority, we all need to hang together as much as possible.

Matt:

I think we're talking past each other here. Politics isn't just about "institutions" with organized "constituencies;" it's about winning elections and governing.

The "popular constituency" for "centrism" (I don't like the term, so maybe we could substitute "Clintonism") is and always has been plain, persuadable voters who won't march, won't contribute to political campaigns, won't staff phone banks, and won't think of themselves as members of a "movement."

Now you can certainly contend that a more engaged, active, self-conscious, ideological citizenry is good for democracy, and that a progressive politics in which such activists play a broader role will have more integrity and staying power. But in the end, in our system, a vote's a vote; you don't get bonus points for passion or commitment. And in the end, organized constituencies matter only if their passion is communicable to others.

Large, organized progressive constituencies have always been there, long before the netroots (that's essentially the point of Nathan Newman's post). In the 80s, when Dems were regularly losing presidential elections by big margins, Labor was stronger than it is today, and even antiwar sentiment--as captured in the Nuclear Freeze movement--was quite vibrant, passionate, and, as measured in "organized constituency" terms, large and visible.

There's no question the netroots represent a new, inexpensive, decentralized, and above all rapid way to build and rebuild such progressive constituencies, but I doubt we're ever going to reach the point when such constituencies represent anything like the majority of the electorate necessary for progressive change.

I'd love to be wrong about that. But in the context of this small discussion, you ought to at least acknowledge the risk that I'm not.

Ed Kilgore

=== The "popular constituency" for "centrism" (I don't like the term, so maybe we could substitute "Clintonism") is and always has been plain, persuadable voters who won't march, won't contribute to political campaigns, won't staff phone banks, and won't think of themselves as members of a "movement." ===

My take on what has happened since 1994 is that the Radicals who control the Republican Party theorizied that the block you describe didn't have any strong affiliation one way or the other, but that they would consistently vote with the political party that offered the strongest and most emotionally-appealing narrative regardless of what a disinterested economist or game-theorist might consider their "actual" interests. And I think the Radicals also concluded that for all the talk of 'hating politics', this unconnected block would see compromise and center-finding behaviour as weakness and turn against it.

Hence not only the succession of more outspokenly Radical candidates culminating in Bush/Cheney, but the intense concerted efforts to convince the media, the American people, and the Democrats themselves that it was the Democrats' responsibility and place in life to be the middle-of-the-road, compromising, bipartisans. Once key Democrats (and I am thinking Lieberman here) started down that road on their own, the Radicals only had to fire off some even more extreme candidates, sit back, and laugh as the Dems self-destructed.

Right at this instant 80% of the American public is pissed off about Iraq and worried about health care. What is the Democratic Party going to do about that and how is it going to go about it?

sPh

Ed,

I used to be exactly what you described; I was born in 1971, went through my adolescence in the Reagan years in extremely Republican central PA and absorbed all the ideas of small-government libertarianism and such without being engaged enough to see the realities behind and underneath. I voted by person, not by party and considered myself a free-thinking, independent voter who had gradually drifted a bit to the left after a combination of experience and education.

I'm now much more of a hard-left partisan as a result of a combination of horrifically, cynically bad governance by the Bush administration and a genuine belief that are better ways of doing things. I've also come to believe that despite my general, bred-in distrust of a lot of government solutions that unfettered corporations represent a far greater threat to democracy. Government is the only effective tool we have at our disposal, and so that's what we need to engage.

The problem? Much of your electoral philosophy denies that people like me exist. Going after swing voters as swing voters is like constantly pursuing a string of one-night stands. Sure, you get a notch on the belt and an occasional win, but it doesn't mean anything in the long run. The politics reflect this desire in their superficiality and leaves a voter with a bitter aftertaste, so they're less likely to stick with you in the long-term, and if they do, it's only because there's nothing better around.

Matt's, and the general movement's, approach is not just to go after swing voters, but to make them swing voters no longer. You can't build a long-term governing coalition on swing voters any more than you can build a good, solid house on quicksand. Those coalitions can only be formed when the ideas underneath are solid enough to support everything on top.