What is the argument for a Progressive governing majority?
Wed Aug 22, 2007 at 09:35:16 AM PDT
A book was recently published called The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (buy at Amazon.com or find a local retailer) by Matt Bai, a journalist that recently has been writing for The New York Times Magazine. I finished reading it recently and I wanted to invite all of you to discuss the central question, and I'd hope you will consider reading it as well.
One of the many things that made this an enjoyable read is the fact that this book documents our shared political history. There are certainly some familiar names in the book, but at the edges of the story are all of us, the activists participating in this people-powered movement.
Make the jump to see an excerpt of what I'm talking about:
The insiders at The Palm didn't know, as they ate and drank and filled out their ballots, that they were no longer the only ones who had access to the media's precious exit polls. In a small apartment some four hundred miles away in Burlington, Vermont, Jerome Armstrong was staring at two side-by-side computer screens on the desk in his living room. Few people at the Palm had ever heard of Jerome, but in the Democratic Party's new and growing universe of online activists, he was, at forty, already a legend, the man who had pioneered the political blog and spawned a movement of liberal imitators. Online, where respect was hard to come by, they sometimes called him "Blogfather." Early in 2004, Jerome had moved to Burlington to work for Howard Dean, drawn by his assault on the party's equivocating Washington establishment. Jerome had invented, as he went along, the brand new business of online politics.
No, as his wife, Shashi, and his four-year-old son, Taj, played on the floor nearby, Jerome heard the sound of an instant message alert, and a bunch of numbers popped up on his screen. The executives at MSNBC, in their endless quest to be cool, had hired a few young, unknown bloggers to provide online commentary as election day unfolded. Those bloggers had been sitting in the network's Seacaucus, New Jersey, studio when the first wave of secret exit polls rolled in. And, of course, one of them had quickly sent the data to the Blogfather in Burlington.
Jerome groped for a pen and started copying down the numbers. He smiled. Fuck yeah was his first response. Then he looked closer. Kerry was leading by 18 points in Minnesota and 9 points in Wisconsin. That was insane. The polling had to be off. On the blogs, though, you didn't stop to evaluate information--you passed it on and corrected later. Jerome did a quick cut-and-paste, added a few lines of context, and hit the send key.
He grabbed his cell phone and called Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, known throughout the blogosphere as "Kos," and Duncan Black, who went by the name "Atrios." Seconds later, they added links to Jerome's blog, MyDD.com, on their sites. Laughing, Jerome watched the spike in traffic as a thousand blog followers flocked to his site. Yahoo News soon posted a story announcing that Jerome had somehow gotten hold of the numbers, adding its own link. Within an hour, a hundred thousand visitors were pounding at Jerome's virtual door, overwhelming the rented set of servers that powered his site from the safety of a cooled room in upstate New York. The blog crashed and went dark. It took hours to restore the servers, but it hardly mattered; by then, it seemed that any American with a computer and more than a passing interest in politics had pulled down the detailed data that had been, in every previous election, the property of a select few. The club had just gotten a whole lot bigger.
There are scores of passages like this sprinkled throughout the book that bring back memories I'm sure a lot of you share as well. I happened to be one of the thousands of readers that November evening in 2004 searching around for whatever information I could find, watching a TV in the background to see what the media was reporting. I went to bed in my San Francisco apartment late that evening, pissed off, disappointed, drained. I woke up the next morning to find this diary on DailyKos which lead to starting an organization I lead for over 2 years. There are more stories than I can count of others that started their own things about this time as well, the election spurred us on.
While I think you'll thoroughly enjoy reading the narrative portion of the book but the real value of this is the keen and critical observations about our recent political history and the undercurrents driving the movement. For the activist, blogger, or political junkie I look at this as a textbook. What mistakes have been made, and what opportunities have been missed? I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with every word written in this book, but we can all learn from it. And it sums up the most critical task - define the argument for a Progressive governing majority.
I'll quote from the book again here, this time from the chapter titled The Road to Dysfunction:
Arguments come and go in American politics from one campaign to the next, but some endure. The twentieth century, in fact, was dominated by the arguments of just a few popular movements and their visionary leaders. Roosevelt's New Deal, built on the progressive movement that proceeded it, was based on the highly controversial argument that a more expansive and intrusive government was the only way to address the inequities inherent in capitalism--to save the unbridled market from itself. Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, affected by the equality movements of their time, picked up where that brief left off, arguing that government had not just an active role to play in economic growth of a nation, but also a moral obligation to intervene in social injustices. The conservative movement led by Ronald Reagan advanced Hayek's argument about the inevitable evil of central planning (including taxes and forced integration) and the necessity of standing up to totalitarianism (which included "rolling back" Soviet aggression). These movements were distinguished not by their end goals--all of them sought "opportunity" and "the blessings of freedom"--but by their arguments about why those things had eluded too many Americans and what was needed to secure them.
While all of their proponents labored to make them as universal and as palatable to voters as possible, none of these arguments grew originally from a desire to win elections, nor were they designed to be immediately acceptable to the broadest swath of voters. FDR's vision inspired generations of free marketeers to detest everything he stood for, even as they reached unimagined prosperity. Johnson and Kennedy turned the entire American South away from the Democratic cause. Reagan's thesis cleaved the country, bringing on twenty years of intense polarization. Each of these arguments, in fact, infuriated large numbers of reasonable and influential Americans--but that was precisely what made them compelling and important. That was the cost of forcing people to choose between one governing path and another, and in such choices lay the fate of the public.
This theme is repeated and expanded upon throughout the book, but this is the most concise summary of it I can recall. I should also make it clear that Bai is optimistic that the Netroots can help define and advance an argument as the movement grows and matures.
The critical problem we face currently is that the focus is on tactics, poll tested slogans, "electability", and consultants trying to ensure candidates say as few controversial things as possible. What we need for the 21st century is a leader willing to articulate a new argument that gives the American people a clear choice between one governing path and another. That doesn't mean having a platform that includes great buzz word policies that sound great to everyone but ultimately don't change the status quo. I've been desperately looking for that in our current crop of candidates, and I haven't seen it... yet.
But here's where we come in. We've been incredibly successful at like raising money for candidates, propelling our candidates to victory, putting pressure on our leadership, even forming policy--we can do this too. One of the great things about the Netroots is that we are the American people. We come from diverse backgrounds, we are passionate about the future of our country and we are willing to work hard towards reaching our vision of that future.
So lets have a discussion, and let's invite others to discuss this until we find that vision. What is your argument?
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