A brief note on why the progressive blog movement failed

I was there throughout, you take is my EXACT perception. A very important post, which I will do my best to spread around. Thanks Ian for a creating a place where the truth is told.

Yep. Yep. And, Yep, some more. In ’08 we chose to do the blog wars. Rallied on persona, pragmatism, lesser of two evils rather than principles.

Progressives are so afraid of losing ground that they won’t risk. They are so enamored of their “principles” they own them, voice them, promote them, adhere to them with great economy.

I get that progressives fear further losses to those who are vulnerable. That vulnerable populations could be made more vulnerable if political strategies fail. Take, for example, the so-called health care initiative. To me that was *really* instructive; and told me volumes about the “energy” of progressives. I get that if the legislation didn’t pass, many who could be served, wouldn’t be served if it failed. Any number of better alternatives could have been made painful for Democrats to avoid, but people did not want to risk. And, efforts to promote an alternative with met with bitter, derisive assaults.

If you’re always worried about what you could lose – if you feel you’re not in a position to withstand losses – then you don’t accept risk. You become trapped in your own inertia. Always ambivalent; stuck in the muck of what-if-s. And, thereby, agree to trade down; to accept the chipping away – the third, or fourth, or fifth best option.

Pragmatism is no friend of principles. I’d argue that the only “principle” progressives have is their loyalty, their unquestioning fealty, to pragmatism. And, pragmatism always seems to be defined by what’s offered to them.

It failed because it was driven by hatred for Bush and the bitterness left over from the 2000 election aftermath. Once Bush was gone, there was nothing to sustain the energy. Most of the bloggers had no institutional knowledge of politics. This was there new hobby rather than their lifelong passion. They were never going to stick around. So much of what remains on the left is hatred for the right — the “baggers,” they call them — that when the Tea Party phase passes, all the remaining energy will be gone.

But this is an extremely useful acknowledgement that Stoller and dKos and firedog lake and Jerome Armstrong and Atrios and all those who were important back then (a) accomplished few of their political objectives and (b) no longer matter at all, to the extent they ever did. Dean lost. Lieberman won. But Markos has made a nice living for himself, hasn’t he?

Wall Street Democrats persuaded so many progressives not to believe their lying eyes.

Progressive blogs didn’t fail. People on the left were disgusted with Democratic collaboration with then-President Bush. Progressive blogs successfully funneled these people back into the Democratic Party.

Progressives and liberals wring their hands over lousy policies like Obamacare but ultimately decide that There Is No Alternative. They criticize Democrats in-between elections, but come election year, they frighten people with scary Republican stories and demand that they vote for the Lesser Of Two Evils. They show that you can be disappointed by Democrats, yet you should still vote for them. They use liberal arguments to support policies that enrich capitalists. They model compliance for people who are aware of and critical of the faults of capitalism. That is their role and they are very good at it.

I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been, had we followed it up more often, and won.

Yet I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign. It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had the places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.

But, I view the clincher happening a bit later, with Bill Halter’s loss in the 2010 Democratic primary in Arkansas. That is when it really ended. The whole Labor-Netroots coalition, Accountability Now, the blogs went all-in big (still barely united) and MoveOn and PCCC. Over $10 million to defeat a BlueDog that gave us this crappy corporate ACA debacle. But Obama did all he could behind to the scenes to defeat Halter. Obama dissed the Lt Gov Halter by embracing Lincoln (Michelle Obama once came to Fayetteville and recognized all of the politicians on the stage — Lincoln, and even Republicans — while ignoring the Democratic Lt Gov Bill Halter standing behind her) sure. Obama mailers pushed the LR area African-American vote into Lincoln’s camp in the run-off. Lincoln was a rural democrat– a base of voters that Halter took away her. Obama being just neutral would have meant a Halter victory. But it wasn’t just the Lincoln victory, it was the way that national Democrats reacted to Halter’s message that convinced me the movement was finished. It took the attack site that we put up, BailoutBlanche.com, for me to see clearly what had happened.

This (rising against the Democrats that aligned with the banks) was the defining issue if this was to be a populist progressive movement within the party in 2010. And we rolled it out with Bill’s campaign, and it struck her hard. Halter’s numbers soared among the rural Democrats, this was (taking on the banks) the top polling issue. Halter was gaining on the issue, overtook her, and then the Democratic Party backlash against him was immense (it’s when Obama got involved heavily too). Halter buckled, and made us take down the website. A symbolic cave. Lincoln won the run-off by 4 percent.

Another flawed candidate the progressives sided with? Sure, but it really didn’t matter in the big scheme of things. When Democrats sided with the banks in 2008, and the progressive movement balked at primary challenges against those bankster-sponsored incumbents in 2010, it was all over.

The night of Halter’s loss, I sunk into a couch at the Excelsior in Little Rock across from PCCC’s Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor. We all just slumped over speechless. So yea, contrast that with the highpoint party we had when Lamont defeated Lieberman in the ‘06 primary in Connecticut– when MoveOn’s Tom Mattzie was busting open the biggest champaign bottle I’d ever seen. This is where we arrived 4 years later. When, after having $10M to spend in a primary against a incumbent that sided with the banks and defeated the public option in the Senate, all it proved was that the sitting Democratic President was against us.

I would agree with your general basis of criticism, that of our movement being non-ideological to a fault, but I am not convinced that is a defining feature of the reason for the failure. First, we just have to recognize that Obama (and Clinton, for that matter) are hugely compromised politicians. Flawed liars, and the most responsible for the failure of enacting a “progressive” agenda. And second, that the Democratic Party as an establishment voice can be summed up pretty much the same way. Wellstone and Feingold are gone, and no one else has stood up.

You know, when Markos and I wrote CTG, just when we finished the draft, I had an OMG moment, saying to him–“you know, we haven’t said at all what we meant by ‘progressive’ throughout the book.” I threw in a link in the footnotes to something about it moving things forward, but really, it made me pause to wonder at my faith that they meant what we meant. So, I’ve had to accept the failure to grasp that insight. We thought it was just about using tough tactics and the rest would follow. Because we knew it was the moment for the Democrats to have a massive majority. Fuck, weren’t we naive.

I left the Democratic party after 2010– threw away the whole Gravy Train Democratic consulting gig. Sure, I didn’t like the way that my entire world got dropped. I too put some years into it. As a sort of cleansing, last cycle I went to work helping to primary some incumbents in both parties for a rich Texan PAC, and managing libertarian Gary Johnson’s internet campaign. I felt a lot clearer and cleaner having done the partisan purge. It made me realize that libertarians and progressives have a lot more in common than do either libertarians with the Republican party or progressives with the Democratic party. I’ve also come to believe that this alliance is where the next movement is scares the shit out of the major parties, and the Government as a whole.

Yesterday, I was out on the DC Mall with this alliance. Against the surveillance state. Syria was another moment. SOPA also, and Audit the Fed. It’s a paradigm shifter, and it’s going to happen more and more. It could turn into something even bigger.

The alliance of progressives and libertarians (lets call it that for lack of a particular name for now) isn’t, for the most part, going to attract the purity-partisan types, the Democratic socialites like Tom Watson of Joan Walsh, or Daily Kos (though maybe Markos will get around to writing his “Libertarian Democrat” book and make a sea change there), but it’s going to happen regardless.

The oomph of the Democratic party in the blogosphere today can be summed up with a cursory glance at posts and comments on Balloon Juice, Little Green Footballs and Booman Tribune. They bend over backwards to justify the party bailing out banks, the nation going deeper into debt with global military expansion, and spying on citizens, yet they’ll nitpick that a libertarian is willing to allow abortion to be a state issue. They are more concerned with attacking truth-tellers like Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden then they are keeping anyone accountable or demanding transparency. That’s what they are really good at– justifying why the powerful should stay so and attacking the ones who challenge power. And, if needed, providing a handy social lifestyle issue to keep the division. There’s no energy left. Nothing that inspires people that are pissed off and want change. Just finger-pointing at the other team. It’s become pointless and principle-less tribalism.

We saw a big step with the netroots organizing last decade. It was the most exciting thing to happen within the Democratic Party in decades, but I now view it in a wider scope, without the partisan obstacle.I don’t think it’s over. It is dark. The internet is still hopeful for organizing a revolution. What I saw happen with the movement against Obama invading Syria tugged at my attention. Maybe we still could have some real transformational shifts happen, in the US and globally. I hope so. I’m counting on it to keep my sanity from making the traditional American blitz. When things get too tight, picking it all up and moving further west… to some remote pacific island. No wifi, just yoga 🙂

A small point about the money: it’s not that the Tea Party faction has all the money, it’s that they have enough of it. It’s important that they have people with the means and will to run in those primaries, but it’s also important that they have funders who will pay for those primary campaigns, *win or lose*. It’s a trivial amount of money for people like the Kochs, but it’s enough.

I would like to agree with Jerome, that progressives and libertarians can join forces to defeat Wall Street hegemony.

However,
I don’t see much much desire to cooperate except on single issues.
There’s tremendous distrust on the libertarian side.
There’s significant disdain on the progressive side.

I think that one way to seek common ground is pledge allegiance to the Constitution and to make restoring the Jeffersonian ideal of the citizen farmer the movement’s goal. By that I don’t mean a nation of farmers, but rather a nation in which each citizen has an opportunity at independence across numerous domains, starting with controlling your own economic destiny and building outward. Framed this way, government action is much less threatening. You might win support for everything from head start to the ACA if they’re framed as the ‘foundation’ for seeking out your destiny, much in the way people expect the police to suppress crime so they can leave their house and go to work . But it would entail renouncing certain liberal pieties, like gun control and attempting to achieve greater economic equality through affirmative action or overtly redistributive policies. It would probably entail accepting restrictions on abortion in states where that is popular.

If this broke the power of large corporate interests and impaired the US’s ability to wage war, this would probably be a net positive trade, but I’m not sure it would be palatable.

The alternative is to wait for the demographic facts to assert themselves in a nation that becomes progressively less white and more miserable every year.

Steve J,

Don’t know Ian’s reference, but Josh sure as hell seemed to…his take down of Hillary was line on line with the oppo I heard from somebody who was pretty far up the food chain of Obomar’s Chicago media links.

The Tea Party, say what you will about them, gets a great deal of obeisance from Republicans for one simple reason: they will primary you if they don’t like how you’ve been voting, and they’ll probably win that primary. They are feared. Progressives are not feared, because they do not believe enough in their ostensible principles to act on them in an effective fashion.

The Tea Party has multiple other characteristics that progressives do not, and they add up to: the ability not only to “primary” internal party opponents, but to do so within the existing Republican party structure and to make use of identity politics for policy purposes. ie, they know how to unite the “guns-and-butter” issues with the “shape-of-genital” issues.

What I see here—and I saw back then—among the don’t-vote-for-Obama/ersatz-Cassandra progressives as are rather disproportionally represented in places like this is a failure to engage with the electorate as it exists and why people vote for what they vote for. (It isn’t primarily the policy content, even for right-wing voters.) Progressives do not have the ability to create and sustain political careers. The Tea Party is the fruition of a very long process going back decades that the progressive left simply has not gone through.

Oh and, the same dynamic that produced the Tea Party also props up far-right movements in other countries, including in ones with long-standing left-wing traditions. See Front National/Marine le Pen in France. The failure of the elite coupled with the effective and mostly uncontested use of identity politics by the right, in further combination with a politically fickle and inconsistent left.

I wrote this in 2008 to describe the crushing of the netroots and all non-corporate sectors of the party: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-stoller/obamas-consolidation-of-t_b_100783.html

After Lieberman won, and I remember that moment very well, it was all downhill. Clinton and Obama realized they didn’t need the netroots, and openly smacked us around with the retroactive immunity policy lie. Edwards was an obvious fake, and I don’t meant the sex stuff. It was well-known he was going around Wall Street and telling donors not to pay attention to the populist message he was delivering, that that was just for the primary. We were cooked after 2006, the big players saw us lose and they realized they didn’t need to cut deals with us. After that election cycle we began accepting the policy lies as necessary, Iraq being the first and most important one.

You touched on a lot of the problems, I would add a few details. MSNBC emerged to provide competition for progressive blogs, as well as cherry-pick the social climbing talent from them. Most partisan fundraising, which had been a significant source of power, moved to that channel (which was at the time owned by GE, now Comcast).

The netroots never built real alliances with anyone, not labor or corporate segments or the military or anyone else. There was some modest electoral work of convenience, but that’s it. There was no money stream that came in, and a starvation diet took its toll. And there was, as you point out, a phenomenal lack of integrity and virtually no willingness to exercise power. So there was no institution-building.

Today people are scattered, and you see shards of possibility. But remember, that was a moment far bigger than the netroots. That was when the recount, Iraq and the financial crisis happened. It’s when the American elite turned us into Saudi America, decided global warming didn’t matter, and turned itself into an oligarchy. We failed to stop these shifts, but they were also very big shifts.

Anyway, no one’s done a post-mortem on this, which is probably why you got some flack.

I was a sucker for Obama the first time around, the sincerity of the progressive blogosphere sucked me in. No fault of sincere progressives, sincerity is not something it is useful to become jaded out of IMHO.

By the time Geithner and Emmanual were installed, however, I’d lost any hope for change. When Santelli’s rant conjured overnight the Tea Party from the frothing base of the “Grotty Old Plutocrats”, I had just struck up a correspondence with Tim Cox, the right wing techno utopian who thought GOOOH could fix an electoral system that didn’t see itself as broken (everyone who does not benefit from it sees it as broken, for its winners it is almost ideal). I ended up spending a weekend ferrying around Tim, the frothing sociopath Pamella Geller and a few Libertarian keepers of the contract.

We attended three “Tea Party” events at Holiday Inns upstate where Tim set up tables and ran seminars, the Libertarians circulated and Pamella incited bigotry otherwise not in evidence, but buried none too deep, easy to reach. At the end of the day I ended up at an Italian restaurant somewhere in Rockland County with a dozen of the organizers of these events: there were three mid thirties GOP activists who were the keepers of the cash, obviously funding all the publicity and operations from cash from “who knows were”. The cash was available for anything pushing the rabid right meme. Cut off the cash and IMO these things die out pretty quickly.

A year or so latter I began to attend the Zucotti park encampment of OWS at lunch time as my office is near by. Whenever they marched or had a major rally I would make the time to attend: I was then, still, a free agent with control of time out of my own office. Subsequently economics has pressed me into a second full time job so I’ve not been able to see in person the organizational work I read about in the Rockaways. I expect that effort to be self sustaining unless another organized govt effort (like the multi city coordinated raid that ended the encampment phase of OWS) shuts it down to.

All of this is a long way of saying, in my direct experience, there are tons more people who would involve themselves in a real, no compromise, progressive movement if they weren’t up their asses in hock and desperate to keep the bills paid not knowing exactly where they would sleep or how they’d eat after bankruptcy. The genius of American Neo-Liberalsim was to first spread the population thin in a physical environment requiring cash flow to cover $4 a gallon gas between them and only then begin picking their pockets systematically a nickel at a time for the last forty years.

In this context a catastrophe seems the only path to mobilization: only when forced to face that “post bankruptcy” nightmare by fiat rather than choice does that group who would be most effective become available: these people are entrepreneurs, small business owners, corporate middle managers etc., educated and effective, natural organizers but financially drained and strained (to the extent you are honest, your work as a small bus owner is not rewarded but you remain progressive: to the extent you cheat you are rewarded handsomely and become a GOP activist). We (I speak here for all the folks I know who fit this description) want the change we voted for in 2008 but have lost the hope we can achieve it. It is entirely non-obvious what to do other than keep trying to pay the bills.

Could not agree more. I have (progressively) blogged that the trouble with Liberalism is Liberals. Hedges was right on with Death of the Liberal Class – the Left sold out. And the voters who were once the beneficiaries and supporters of Progressives recognize the sellout. They may be ignorant but they’re not stupid. They accept that the 1% is out th screw them – that’s been the case for thousands of years and they know it. What they really resent is the betrayal by those who pretended to be on their side. The Liberal, Progressive, Lefist – whatever you want to call him -is just another part of the problem instead of the solution. Without grassroots support – no power, no threat, no influence.

Interesting piece, Ian. You’re speaking here of progressive *blogs*, of course, and I don’t quite know where the overlaps are, but John Stauber’s piece nailing down the theme that ‘progressives’ are front groups for rich democrats seems extremely on topic.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/15/the-progressive-movement-is-a-pr-front-for-rich-democrats/

It’s hard for me to even choose a name for my political urges and bents, and I’ve pretty much blown off any hope for electoral politics being reshaped in the manner I imagine might lead to the best governance of the nation, at least pre-revolution. To me, it’s the same as believing that the NSA can be ‘reformed’ into something less odious than it is.

Matt Stoller, I do know that you once saw it clearly about the Democrats, because one of my early diaries at My.fdl was pinging off your piece about Dems being Elites, too, which was quasi-revolutionary at the time. ;~)

Macdonald Stainsby has written a number of articles on the big bucks funding of Big Green groups that shows us why they are so ineffective, so allied with Dems and big business; ‘Green Capitalism’, OMG! Boy, do the Indigenous of the planet know about that evil!

Yeah, I vote Green now, sometimes socialist (after working Large and on the ground for Dems for 25 years), but imagine that a worker/radical eco/socialist party would be attractive, although the latter would need to be practical/ideology-based, given the unfortunate turn-off of the term to so many. (Not that that might not change as more middle class peeps begin to suffer from job loss, poverty, pension devalutation, etc.

Also, I read a comment not long ago that maintained that ‘the golden days of blogging are over’, and it caused me to see that the millennials Tweet, not blog, nor perhaps even *read* blogs. So, there’s that, as well. And do they vote? Not so much, at least since Obomba let them down wholesale, and they are either in debt up to their asses with college debt, or know that gummint don’t give a fook for them.

@ Gil Smart: Yes! What utter nonsense she spouted. Kim Petersen at Dissident Voice spoke to that. ;~)

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/misanthropic-feminism/

When Santelli’s rant conjured overnight the Tea Party from the frothing base of the “Grotty Old Plutocrats”

Not true, it was Karl Denninger’s genuine populist outrage that started the Tea Party.

The corporate Right promptly subverted it, it in a manner not at all different from the subversion of the Netroots. The overwhelming willingness to pretend otherwise I see in many “left” quarters does not sit well with me…

Ahem, DINO’s might be a better term for the Neo Liberals. Yeah they suck and yeah they are the lesser of two evils but considering that I’m from Texas I would very much like to have LESS EVIL. You are right about the T-Pers. They are lunatics who have outsized influence because they vote early and they vote often. I point to them every time some a-hole says their vote, my vote, your vote doesn’t count so why bother? Really? That would be why the right is working like a fucking herd of beavers to disenfranchise women, the young, and people of color. Don’t throw in the towel just yet. The Dinosaurs are dying off and the young un’s are starting to vote and here in Texas they just woke a bunch of young women up and they are pissed off. Love your blog.

The effect of Tea Party and other conservative attempts in primaries is somewhat overstated. More Republicans in the House were defeated in the general election than in primaries in 2012 but Republicans remain mostly oblivious to Democrats and scared od the Tea Party. One reason is that once the right gets a member of the House in its sights it does not quit. Election after election, the member can expect a hard primary until either he/she retires or is defeated. This simply doesn’t happen with Democrats.

Second, right wing campaigns are emotional, not logical. Democratic insurgents on the other hand rarely seem to connect on an emotional level except when war is the issue (Vietnam, Iraq).

Third, while “conservatives” are loud and proud in the label, liberals got so cowed by constant attacks on the L word that they coined another, “progressive”, to replace it. Walking on tip-toe does not favor insurgency.

Fourth. liberal values can sometimes splinter blogs. I loved Jerome’s blog until I was chased off by the obots. And once the 2008 election was over, the presence of the left within the Democratic Party continued, as pointed out to dwindle. There was no organizational home like churches and no echo chamber.

Thanks, Ian, for saying what needed to be said.

Most of the high profile self-proclaimed “progressives” in Blogtopoia were/are “ex”-Republicans, libertarians, centrist Democrats and contrarians of all sorts.

The only political objective they seemed able to demonstrate was a quest for power.

If they had an ideology, they could not (or refused to) clearly express it. It certainly wasn’t anything identifiably leftist. In some cases, it was barely liberal.

Though Progressivism has a long history in American politics, in the Blogosphere “Progressive” became an essentially meaningless term — its only common thread initially was opposition to the Bush Regime. Once the Bush Regime was out of office, (purist) “progressive” came to mean opposition to the Obama Regime. Of course, Obama supporters called themselves “progressive” too.

Overall, the “Progressive” label was/is a marketing tool, not political. The failures of the “Progressive” blogosphere were typically denied by everyone involved, recast and rebranded as successes (ie: “See how we made Blanche Lincoln spend lots of money? That’s what it’s all about, youbetcha!”) The Lieberman disaster was rebranded the same way.

But that’s marketing, that’s not politics. When all it leads to is Republicans and Blue Dog-type political victories, you really have to wonder just what the “Progressive” brand is all about.

I have much to say on this topic as I too started my boots on the ground journey into the Roach Motel called The Democratic Party in January of 2004 when I went to Iowa and participated in my first political campaign as a volunteer for the Edwards campaign. (A previous excursion had been doing political satire in NYC in the mid 1980s. Other than that not much other than voting for the rainbow coalition of Jesse Jackson and realizing something bad happened in 2000. My answer to 2000 was to buy a lot of “progressive magazines”. Whew! Whew! How active.)
Language is my deal and cliches, weasel words and management speak are my enemies. (Great 2005 book by Aussie Don Watson called “Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weaselwords and Management Speak are Strangling Public Language”.)
So last week an essay by economist Stephanie Kelton had in the title “Don’t Think of an Elephant” and she put in a footnote that it was from the “brilliant book” by George Lakoff. In political discussions , references to the professor of framing hooey sets my teeth on edge more than almost anything else. (I met him in 2004 at the “Take Back America” convention and that’s a whole chapter in my yet to be completed book.) When I went back to find like minded souls who also called out the professor back in 2004 -2006, I came across an essay by Marc Cooper in “The Atlantic” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/thinking-of-jackasses/303838/
I highly recommend it as it mentions the “smugness” of the Volvo Democrats and how after their defeat in 2004, the polling indicated that the two biggest things that Dems needed to address was 1) electoral reform and 2) media reform. Bwahahahaha! No economic justice, no anti-militarism, no anti racism i.e. Dr. King’s triple evils. No bringing back Glass Steagall and ending the Fed. Nope. It had to be those darn voting machines and that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. And so the marketing aka propaganda continued. Thomas Frank admitted in some French publication that

“Leftists of these tendencies aren’t really interested in the catastrophic decline of the American left as a social force … If anything, this decline makes sense to them: the left is people in sympathy with the downtrodden, not the downtrodden themselves. It is a charity operation.”

As a result they searched for their own sugar daddies and found them and aligned themselves with them rather than the downtrodden themselves. Cooper said,

As a result, “they imagined themselves the ‘metro’ party of cool billionaires engaged in some kind of cosmic combat with the square billionaires of the ‘retro’ Republican Party.”

The great labor activist and writer, Staughton Lynd, said that you have to work among the people. You cannot work from afar or in D.C. He lived in the decaying steel towns. We cannot separate ourselves from the vast majority of working people. I am no longer young enough to do all that heavy lifting, but I do try to converse with the right libertarians in these parts. I call myself a left libertarian and talk about how the libertarian movements started in the 19th century. We disagree fundamentally about private property as the answer to the oppression of the state, but we do occupy, yes OCCUPY, some common ground as hunting is big around here and nobody really likes to ask permission of the landowner even if they say they do. My position as a rancher and hence a landowner who gives permission gives me a bit of gravitas even as I shock them when I say that I was happiest when I was renting an apartment on 85th and Columbus in New York City.

Never liked the idea of “progressives” as they were tweakers of a corrupt system, it seemed to me. If I had been born a hundred years ago, would I have been brave enough to be a Wobblie? or a Kropotkin fan? I ask myself that often.

@ Bob Morris

Yes. Quite different than the Koch astro-turfed Tea Party. (And yes, I like few of their votes otherwise), but Denniger supported OWS back in the day.

http://my.firedoglake.com/wendydavis/2012/01/22/ows-and-forging-common-cause-with-tea-people-and-libertarians/

‘Progressive’ has been as coopted as the 99% meme, and a new vector of class unity on the biggies needs to be coined. Yves Smith recently coined ‘debtcroppers’ as opposed to ‘neo-feudal slaves’. It has a certain ring to it.

@ Bob Morris: yes; gatekeepers for the status quo, as are so many Stainsby and Stueber detail. The funders’ purposes are essentially about the snake swallowing its own tail, imo., and never moving forward. Faux-gressivism, some call it.

The Tea Party has no respect for incumbency. None. If anything, they see incumbency as a point against. That might change over time – as they develop their own sediment of incumbency – but it is the starting point. The “progressive movement” wants to win without organizing and without antagonizing, but you can’t start the race at the finish line.

If you don’t like what has happened in the past decade+, do not support/donate to/elect anybody who was in office during. I have been sick and tired of the Feingold’s, Udall’s, Wyden’s of the world for years – Senators enjoying the utmost in legal immunity, unable to match, let alone exceed what Gravel managed to do with higher stakes. Try another: If Warren does not deliver, why vote for her again? Because she asks the right questions?

Parties are not a sports team. For a citizen who understands the founding principles of the Nation – and the motives of those that crafted them – parties are the enemy. You can show any attitude towards an elected representative except deference. Whatever their failings and their bigotries, the Tea Partiers understand that.

FYI everybody. Speaking of “populists”, Brian Schweitzer will start hosting on CNN today. As much as I have come to hate electoral politics, for sheer fun I am hoping for a Schweitzer/Christie populist mashup in 2016.
@ Wendy Davis. Everybody should read the John Stauber piece that you reference. One of the best parts of Netflix’s “House of Cards” is Robin Wright’s character as the head of a “clean water non-profit” that is also used for both her and hubby’s (Kevin Spacey character) climb up the power ladder.
@bystander. Yes, I can’t believe I quoted from an Atlantic article and Cooper but this essay was dead on. I remember engaging with several people on “Open Left” about talking to regular “folks”, but can’t recall the monikers.

Even the word *Progressive* whenever used has become the equivalent to chewing on a stick of chalk. Please stop! You don’t have the slightest idea what they are, that word comes from the same lexicon as neoliberal and neoconservative and other BS shite.

re left/right/center: for kicks, check this out:

http://www.people-press.org/political-party-quiz/

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/new-american-center-1113

re Lakoff: I haven’t read the book, so won’t try to defend it, but I do find his contemporary essays on education pretty darned cogent. Framing is just another word for branding, which is immensely powerful, and is why politicos spend so much time and money on poll testing – because it works. Branding is not the only solution to the left’s problems of course, but even the best idea in the world won’t sell itself in this competitive marketplace of ideas, without thoughtful and deliberate marketing campaigns.

Or maybe it’s because, unlike the Teaturds, the Prog Bloggers don’t have the numbers to make a difference electorally.

That and unlike the Teaturds, they have some grip on the reality of American political institutions.

Green Party, Green Party, Green Party!
The democrats stink like last weeks tuna salad left out in the sun!
Obama has betrayed every single principle I hold dear. I’m done with him and
All the apologist butt sniffers in the Democratic Party.

Thanks for saying that about DKoS.

Interesting article. I linked in… hope you don’t mind.

Seriously, fuck Tbogg. He is astroturfing over at Raw Story for Koch Brother’s Megan Carpentier now. FDL should be happy they lost the 8 pedophiles that make up his readership.

http://exiledonline.com/bombshell-yves-smith-on-raw-story-editor-megan-carpentiers-hidden-past-as-top-koch-lobbyist/

“The Tea Party, say what you will about them, gets a great deal of obeisance from Republicans for one simple reason: they will primary you if they don’t like how you’ve been voting, and they’ll probably win that primary.”

And then go on to lose an easily-winnable general election, shutter the government, threaten to destroy the entire planetary economy, and push your party’s favorability rating to record lows while making your ideological foes look like the only sane alternative.

The lesson any rational person would learn from the Tea Party is “this here, don’t do it.”.

“The American political spectrum ranges from centre-right to extreme-right with a politically and statistically insignificant number of centre-left to left-wing outliers.”

By any objective scale or measure known to political scientists, the Democratic Party is left-of-center. That’s just a fact, they may not be left enough for you but they are definitely not on the right of the spectrum, not by any measure. But then you’re not actually a fair representative of a ‘British Catholic conservative’ either, because those guys are generally very far to the right of where the Democrats are.

That a plurality votes on identity rather than policy is not news, Ian. Converse measured it back in the 1950s, and I’ve been writing about it since 2009.

And, well, it sounds really good to complain that the left is not ideological enough. It echoes the complaints of the right that conservatism cannot fail, only be failed. But the left has done ideology, and we know that ideology without ethics turns into authoritarianism. Some conservatives have started to remember this, have realized that they have sown the wind and are now, as conservatives of the past century did, are reaping the whirlwind.

I think, rather, that there is a need for less ideology and more ethics throughout the culture, on all sides. This is the problem with the real leaders of the extreme right, people like the Kochs, Scaife, and so on—they have no ethics worthy of the name. Perhaps the biggest failure of the left was a failure to defend the anti-fascist mass media concentration and balance laws and regulations. It’s not a secret that perceived attacks on identity leads to easily-led authoritarianism among the populace; the people who wrote the media laws knew it very well, since they’d just lived through it. But the rest of us seem to have forgotten for many years.

“Part of it is the general blog decline”

Ian, part of it is that general cynicism that has set in when everyone realizes that all the nice diaries and blog posts in the world are not going to save them from the repressive apparatus that crushed Occupy, spies on them 24/7, and is going to bring to America the Grand Bargain and the Trans-Pacific Partnership because, hey, rich people want it.

Maybe something like an independent political party would have helped. Even having a consistent political philosophy would have helped “progressives.” As it stands, being “progressive” is like being a chalk writer in a rain storm. You can see this at dailykos.com — all sorts of writers professing that “I’m a liberal because I believe in blah blah blah,” but still they support regressive Democrats, so it doesn’t mean anything.

Do the “progressives” have the least clue as to their place in the trajectory of historical events that has led capitalism past its Golden Age (1948-1971) to the neoliberal era (1973-present) and beyond into the grim period to come? Gopal Balakrishnan, from four years ago:

http://newleftreview.org/II/59/gopal-balakrishnan-speculations-on-the-stationary-state

“We are entering into a period of inconclusive struggles between a weakened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, within delegitimated and insolvent political orders. The end of history could be thought to begin when no project of global scope is left standing, and a new kind of ‘worldlessness’ and drift begins. This would conform to Hegel’s suspicion that at this spiritual terminus, the past would be known, but that a singular future might cease to be a relevant category. In the absence of organized political projects to build new forms of autonomous life, the ongoing crisis will be stalked by ecological fatalities that will not be evaded by faltering growth.”

So the key, then, is to create “new forms of autonomous life.” That’s not done via a blog. Oh, sure, the blogs can help, but fieldwork, conducted with an understanding of history, political economy, and so on, is essential.

Good read, and an interesting viewpoint for someone like me who is a recovering Republican and identifies as a right-libertaria. I could be in agreement with so many “progressive” goals, but I think what you’re pointing out here, perhaps unintentionally, is what you get when you put your faith in government as an agent of social change. You get the people who are more interested in other agendas (and, I suspect, mostly in obtaining and retaining power) using the mechanism of the electoral system to “compromise” their way into power and shut the rest of you up.

@Ian for “If money was the primary determinant then mainstream Republicans would crush Tea Partiers, not the other way around.”

I think the TP’s have connections to a few billionaires that are willing to fund lavishly as needed. I don’t see that on the radical left. When a few billionaires step up to fund a new radical left party (greenish, laborish, Marxish etc.) then I will believe we would see successful primary challenges on the left.

(damn there are a lot and high, quantity and quality, of comments here!!!)

If you aren’t prepared to ever lose, progressive politics is not for you.

@Jerome Armstrong:

That is a key point about the meaning of “progressive” ~ “progressive” is not a noun, its an adjective. When the “Progressives” became a force in US politics, people had an understanding about what it meant, because it was applying a label to an emerging collection of movements. But generically, you could have a group of white power supremacists, and there will be some issue on which some of them believe in holding the current position ~ “conservative” ~ and others on making progress toward a goal ~ “progressive”.

Indeed, it was part of the intellectual foundation of many Progressive Era thinkers that “progress” is intrinsically derived from the criteria you use (your “pragma”, hence “pragmatists”). So two people using “progressive” without a common understanding of what constitutes progress are more likely than not to be talking past each other.

Hence #p2, aka “progressive populist”, where Populism is the anchor, and “Progressive” is to discriminate it from the reactionary populism that our political system seems particularly prone to at present.

Ian –
I responded to Jerome so I ought to respond to you, as well. Although I commend your optimism, I was rather startled by your naivete back then. Most of you were thirty-somethings – out to change the world. (Or at least the Dem Party) It’s not the oldest political party in the world – having survived slavery, the Civil War, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the sixties because it is a frail reed buffeted in the wind.
As I said elsewhere, the Dem Party bought off a few and marginalized the rest. That’s what it has been doing for 200 years. Why should it be different for your generation? Remember, the Democratic Party ACCEPTED slavery in order to flourish politically. It TOLERATED legalized discrimination within its Southern wing for 100 years. It was at the FOREFRONT of the militarism that led to Vietnam. The Democratic Party is not inherently progressive. It does, however, inherently seek to maintain its power.
That’s why I was so stunned at the actions of the so-called progressive blogosphere during the Lieberman/Lamont campaign. I was aware that Connecticut allowed independent campaigns. I was also aware that, even should Lamont win the primary, he would need to draw in a significant portion of blue-collar Dems who had voted for Lieberman. Instead, the bloggers delighted in casting Lieberman supporters in the most hateful of terms. And, not surprisingly, few switched their votes and voted for Lamont in November. I had no love for Lieberman – but I predicted I early August that he would win 50/40/10. The bloggers and Lamont’s staffers – including the one who described Waterbury Dems as evil and slime – insured his defeat.
There was a brittleness and rigidity of the blogosphere that was heightened by the internal aspects of blogging – esp. the ratings system and piling on. What happened is that, instead of effective debate, you saw an orthodoxy creep in. It could have been different – but it was not.

Raven, yep you’re a liberal in a conservative business. I did say most progressives, not all. I also said we could find areas to disagree on but, that’s not why I commented and I’m not going to go that way now.

That said, the point I was making still stands. If you accept to paraphrase BruceMcF, that progressive is progressing towards a goal, in effect, Progressives are trying to get something that they don’t already have. If they stop fighting for it, they aren’t worse off than they are now. The Tea Partiers don’t see it that way. They are fighting to keep what they have and they feel that if they stop fighting, they will lose at least some of it. Therefore there’s a real difference in intensity and tenacity.

It is hard to get excited when the Big Banks (which are all run by Democrats) are protected by the Obama administration. When the inner city schools are all run be Democrats and producing illiterate graduates yet Obama takes away money from poor students who were attending Sidwell Friends school with his daughters just as a nod to the teacher’s union, I can see where the problem lies.

Ken, oh, I see. That was what I meant by “existential threat.” The problem, though, is when one considers, existential threats to small business, surely the most immediate is the rotten economy, a direct result of banking deregulation allowing massive fraud. Another is the enormous power of large business to control supplier prices, cough, Walmart, making it near-impossible for a US-based small business to become suppliers in the USA. This is also a consequence of deregulation, in this case the abandonment of the control of monopoly. A third is the collapse of wages in the USA, leading to a collapse of consumer demand, largely as a result of the gutting of the National Labor Relations Board and the undercutting of the unions, both directly and by regulatory failure. There is no conceivable regulatory pinch that outweighs these pinches derived from deregulation.

So the small business Tea Party Republicans want what they cannot have: deregulation and a favorable environment for their businesses. The problem is aggravated by the assumption that their understanding of business is an understanding of economics and the reinforcement of these ideas provided by right-wing propaganda channels, especially Fox News. This is a fake existential crisis.

On the other side of the fence, progressives or liberals or whatever they are calling themselves this week want something they don’t have, yes: health care. And this is a genuine existential crisis: people die every day for the lack of it.

There is a problem of not recognizing what is real. Life or death, that’s pretty real. But I don’t know any honest small businessperson who will shut down in the face of modest regulation. So long as there is a profit to be made, why quit?

I am not and never have been a professional blogger. I have participated in blogs for many years, including Glenn Greenwald’s pre-Salon gig at Unclaimed Territory. I have also commented and posted diaries in Firedoglake, Daily Kos and many other Progressive blogs, generally using pseudonyms. This is my view.

Progressivism is in crisis today for one main reason: Barack Obama. That is not to say that Progressivism was flourishing pre-Obama. Conservatism reached its apex under Bush but then began a rapid decline that was snowballing into full collapse. Wall Street had destroyed the economy, causing enormous suffering for the American People. Conservatives were overreaching floridly on issue after issue. The time was right for an alternative ideology to supplant Conservatism. The country was ready. The American People were eager. Obama spoke like a Progressive and gave ringing endorsements to Progressive values and solutions. This was the Progressive wave Obama rode into the White House. It was, of course, a mirage, or subterfuge to be less charitable.

Once Obama was inaugurated, he immediately abandoned Progressivism. He refused even to prosecute those responsible for the greatest economic crime in history. The outrage the American People felt was denied its vent and the Tea Party — a brilliant tactical construct devised by the discredited Conservatives — arose to fill the void. That set the Washington political dynamic for the Obama Presidency, one that endures.

Progressives did succeed. We pushed the Corporatist Hillary Clinton aside for the — so we thought — more Progressive Obama. We got a president elected. But we were betrayed and deceived and we have not recovered. Why we haven’t recovered is explained in Mr. Welsh’s piece. Much of the reason, I agree, is Obama’s race and the place of identity-politics in the Democratic Party. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party moved Right on economic matters until Bill Clinton effectively sold the Democratic Party to Wall Street. On issue after issue, the Democrats lurched ever more Rightward until identity politics was all that remained to meaningfully distinguish the two major parties. Since the two parties are really just corporations now, this is really nothing more than brand differentiation. The Democratic Party today stands for two things: 1) identity politics; and 2) not being Republicans. That is what the party has been reduced to.

And one must recognize the sensitive role played by African Americans in the Democratic Party, both as base voters and as an historical symbol. The plutocrats could not have chosen more wisely than Barack Obama, who is effectively immune from intra-party attack due to his race. And the crowning achievement of the Tea Party was to (more-or-less) successfully cast Obama as a radical Leftist, making Progressive criticism appear ridiculous. These two factors — Obama’s race and the misconception that he was a Leftist — staved off any mainstream criticism of Obama from within the Democratic Party. Certainly, there would be no party rebellion no matter how much Obama betrayed the party and Progressive principles. So we have embittered Progressives within the Democratic Party stewing in frustration and feuding with party loyalists and those who defend Obama based upon racial solidarity. It is a mess.

This isn’t all Obama. This could not be done without the complicity of the Democratic Party Establishment. But, as seen, the Democratic Party has sold out and no longer holds Progressive principles. Even so, Obama was given the Progressive mantle at a moment of historical inflection and he betrayed us. Obama had the control in his hands when he got elected and he chose the Conservative status quo rather than change. I see scant evidence anything can be done other that to fend off Obama’s assaults until his presidency ends. I’m not sanguine. I know that Obama is pathologically determined to cut the social safety net. Perhaps the remaining Progressive Democrats in Congress will be emboldened to resist Obama’s efforts but I doubt it.

As for the union between the Tea Party and Progressives, I recall many years ago when Glenn Greenwald — while at Unclaimed Territory – seemed to attempt such a thing. Unfortunately, Greenwald’s efforts failed because they were directed at the economic libertarians, not the civil libertarians and populists. Economic libertarians are simply the GOP version of the Democratic Party neoliberals: they are all Corporatists who are implacably opposed to the people organizing and acting collectively. I do think there are legitimate populist elements within the Tea Party movement with which Progressives can find common cause, if not perfect harmony.

Thanks for writing the essay and for letting me comment.

By the way, I’m surprised to see Bob Fertik repeating the story that Air America failed because of its content and on-air performance.

Air America Radio was wildly successful in terms of content. It picked up listeners fast and expanded the reach of every station that carried it.

And then those stations were immediately bought out by right-wing owners who switched to country or religious or Spanish programming, thus dropping their listenership exponentially.

The failure of AAR was not a result of its talent, but of the business end, which was full of grifters. And this is because rich liberals have been wasting their money for years on identity crap and feel-good junk and no one has bothered to grab the things that could have given us our media infrastructure while there was still something left to grab.

I’m not sure that it is Progressives who failed, but it certainly is Liberal Democrats. They still believe NPR is truthful and not government/corporate propaganda. The Dems care only about power and control, and as you said, not about fighting for their principles.

I lived in Maine in 2010 when the governor’s race was three way, when Libby, the machine Dem, LePage, the Teabagger and Cutler, the Independent were running. Eliot Cutler had worked in the Carter administration and written the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. But he was smart enough to sense the mood of the state, which was tired of the decades long Dem control, and ran as an Independent.

Cutler and LePage were running to within 2% points near the end, at around 37% each, with Libby at 18% and sinking fast. The Dems went door to door to try to convince voters to NOT vote for Cutler, rather than acknowledging reality and throwing their support behind Cutler to prevent the disaster that LePage has become for the state. There was no way that Libby was going to garner those votes. The Dems were convinced that Cutler was “splitting” the Dem vote, when in reality, people were sick of the Dem machine and wanted a fresh approach. I talked to many who I knew who voted for Cutler (as did I) and there was no sympathy for Libby, or an inclination to rally behind her.

Also, Maine had elected an Independent as governor before with Angus King, who they recently sent to the Senate as an Independent to replace Republican Snowe. The lessons I took away from that experience was (1) that Dems are only interested in power and winning, and not in the welfare of the state and its citizens, and (2) that I would never vote Dem in Maine again.

A prime example of Dems only caring about winning is the ACA-ObamaCare, a piece of junk that could have been done right if they were more interested in crafting really good legislation with 60 years of progressive health care plans from other countries as examples to use to do the job right. But no, it was more important to keep the private insurance companies on as contributors to the party, and as we watch Sibelius get savaged by the Rethugs in a hearing today, we should realize that if we are going to vote for a Dem for POTUS, we should vote for one with the courage to go single payer, Medicare for All, on health care, and to not be a war monger, drone bomber and whistle blower prosecutor. That means, no to Hillary Clinton for POTUS, and good riddance to Obama as he hits the Wall Street talk scene to cash in.

The largest problem with the progressive movement is the tendency to excuse the non-progressiveness of Democrats. Several people have said that above, and several have epitomized the apologist side as well.

There is simply NO ONE on the right-wing side that says “So-and-so isn’t a conservative, but he’s running under the Republican ticket, so hold your nose and vote for him anyway, because the most important thing is to get people with (R) after their names regardless of their values”. No one. None. Zero. Nada. But a huge percentage of liberal/progressive commentary goes exactly like that. I googled “hold your nose and vote for Bush” and the only articles that come up are people arguing that conservatives should NOT hold their nose and vote for Bush, AND people arguing that progressives SHOULD hold their nose and vote for Obama.

What everyone needs to realize is that your power is NOT in getting progressives, or even Democrats, elected. Your power is in getting shitbags de-elected. When the Tea Partiers primary some not-so-conservative and he loses the primary, they’ve won, full stop. Winning the final election is not the important part. The important part is that Bob wasn’t conservative enough, so he has to go back to his used car dealership in Kansas, and now Jim and Joe and Ted who are still in Congress look around at each other and think “Who’s next to go?”. This enlightens their thinking and their actions for all future situations that occur, because they don’t want to go back to the auto dealership.

Dianne Feinstein is one of the worst human beings on the planet. She serves in a strongly progressive state, with (now) a very friendly primary system. Progressives needed to turn out 13% of the public to vote for a decent challenger in a PRIMARY, and Dianne Feinstein would have been out of office entirely AND replaced by a good progressive Senator. Instead, this happened:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_California,_2012

2% for decent challengers! That’s rounding error, that’s people who check a box at random. No press or blog attention for them at all. No money for them at all. An awesome opportunity, squandered.

That is to say, out of every 25 Democrats/Liberals/Progressives who went to that primary election to vote, about 24 of them voted for Dianne Feinstein and 1 voted for some other Democrat. That is absurd, that Feinstein would attract 24-to-1 support if anyone at all was showcasing her flaws.

Concentrate on purging non-liberal people calling themselves Democrats. Never urge anyone to hold their nose and vote for X, even though s/he is not a liberal. The rest will follow.

I definitely think that what the progressive movement needs in order to find strength and unity is white men condescendingly explaining to women and minorities what their REAL problems are.

My critical discussion of incrementalism and Obama, now nearly two years old: http://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2011/01/obama-inequity-and-democracy.html. “Obama came to power in a time when radical approaches were appropriate and instead adopted incremental approaches, discarding a great opportunity.”

Miracle Max: When. Will. You. Be. Back? I’ve been checking Maxspeak since July.

Yes. Exactly so.
But with one caveat. It’s not too late.
It’s not as if the model isn’t sitting there ready for progressives to use. It’s harder now. Lots of momentum and opportunity has been lost, but there’s still no reason not to start picking candidates to primary from the left in 2014.

@Kal

The joke, I’m afraid–and it’s not a very funny one–is on people who thought “progressive blogging” was a movement.

Good one. I was wondering if anyone would question the “movement” premise of this whole discussion. I’m especially interested in whether anyone who was involved in all the backchannel movement building ever questioned the premise at the time — and whether they’d care to expound somewhat on what sort of questions were raised.

As you say, for those on the ground doing organizing and movement building, policy advocacy, Occupy, and so forth, the blogs were not a “movement,” not even remotely. Often, they weren’t even resources, though candidates figured out they could use them as ATM machines. Often enough, there was neither communication nor recognition between those on the ground and blogmeisters — who would often enough be spending their time talking to one another and/or watching the teevee “news” for something to say in their next blogpost.

It’s hard to call anything of that sort a “movement,” but I guess those who were most closely involved thought it was a movement because they had coteries of followers (often sharing the same people), they were able to raise a good deal of money for candidates, and some of them were being invited to mingle with important people.

But from the ground, Progressive Blogtopia it never looked like a movement.

@Kal, no I don’t think a legislative alliance is going to fix those long term problems that you mention. It’s merely a way, in this poisonous political climate, to get a few of the things we want to happen. I think we have to be pragmatic in our expectations, and realistic about the limitations. It’s not ideal, but it’s one of the few alternative that have emerged for the short-term.

Seeing the widespread ideological opposition to bombing Syria had me sit up and take notice. That was historical, and no-doubt led by those in opposition for progressive or libertarian reasons (though I wouldn’t ignore the partisanship in it either). Amash-Conyers is happening and will likely now move out of the House (to die in the Senate). Audit the Fed is happening again. Marijuana decriminalization, and outright legalization, is happening in the states. Those are very important causes that go directly against the Republican-Democratic establishment position, but where progressives and libertarians align and could pose majorities.

There are political windows that open for a very short time. Remember McCain-Fiengold? Gutted now, but at the time, it passed in a window that was slammed shut the year before, and the year after. Obama might not give a shit about progressives, but those Democrats in Congress know that the base is stewed, and will get on board; in fact they already are.

As for all the movement talk. Man, I just don’t want to go through that dialogue again. I think MyDD and Open Left spent about 6 weeks straight in 2007 posting and posting about it. it was mostly an electoral movement, with the big exception of stopping Bush’s agenda (especially in regard to gutting SS) and getting Democrats elected to a massive majority in the House and Senate (see 2006) and then taking the Presidency. I don’t think the ‘movement’ played much a part in the latter, because the apple-cart got flipped over in the process.

Did you seriously write this whole screed to complain that Obama didn’t feel the need to kiss your obscure and unimportant ring in 2008?

Obama didn’t win by copying the netroots’ infrastructure – the net roots has no infrastructure outside of funding capabilities. He won the old-fashioned way, by organizing on a local level and driving turnout.

How to get one’s arms around such a challenging subject. Well, to begin with, the progressive blogosphere was never left, at least not in the sense of being either Social Democratic or Marxist and anti-imperialist. It had no real engagement beyond the electoral process with challenging subjects related to contemporary capitalism and whether it could be tamed (if so, how?), or, alternatively, requires eradication, assuming, of course, that it doesn’t eradicate itself to our detriment.

Instead, all of this was suppressed under the mid-2000s band-aid of “more and better Democrats”, a mantra that both Daily Kos and firedoglake chanted through 2008, despite the betrayals of the 2006 Democratic Congress. If there had been such an engagement, then we might have been better prepared for the cynicism of the Obama presidency. But, in the absence of any social and ideological perspective, except an innocuous form of progressive reformism (campaign finance reform, the public option), we got the continuation of a war without end and the perversion of progressive objectives to serve the purposes of the capital class as with health care reform.

As Ian says, the Lieberman episode was a watershed moment. It taught me that the neoliberal, militaristic mafia will do whatever is necessary to preserve their power and protect one of their own. While I don’t characterize myself as anarchist as it would be rather absurd, I do find its critique of violence and hierarchy increasingly relevant to our predicament. Expecting to address these evils within the electoral process through a social movement, like the late, lamented progressive blogosphere, strikes me as naive. Any political movement, whether in the bricks and morter or cyberspace world, is going to have great difficulty in changing this country unless it directly confronts the violence perpetrated by the US domestically and abroad. It requires that we drain the military/prison industrial complex swamp and stop instigating violence globally through military interventions and arms sales.

Sounds impossible, but, then, people probably told abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s that it was impossible to get rid of slavery, too.

The minute Obama was elected, he dismissed Howard Dean and started dismantling the 50 State Strategy — and he quite consciously ignored the Netroots except to the extent its operations could be folded in to Obama’s Dem Party apparat and amid all the other loyalists.

2010 was the result, a disaster for the Dems, losing seats in Congress, but even more importantly, losing Statehouse after Statehouse, resulting in the gerrymandering that ensures the perpetuation of radical Republicanism for the foreseeable future. I assumed at the time — and I assume now — that the Dem disaster of 2010 was an intentional and radical strategic loss by the Big Wigs for purposes that remain obscure. The results, however, are plain to see.

A shocking number of Dems who were elected with extensive Netroots support turned out to be PINOs — Progressives In Name Only. Few of the very few actual progressive Dems in office will buck Party leadership on anything, but worse was the number of Dems who ran as Progressives but were installed as Blue Dogs or worse. On the other hand quite a few progressive candidates could not obtain Netroots support to save their lives in a fire. Marcy Winograd comes to mind; Ami Bera was another. There are lots of them.

Inability to exert effective pressure on candidates and refusal to support some progressive candidates along with the Netroots’ tendency to split support between candidates confused more than a few would be supporters and advocates of a Progressive Netroots/Blog Movement. Inability to define — or outright refusal to define — “Progressive” meant that the Movement — such as it was — had no coherent ideological basis. The tendency to negativity, focusing on the Other Guy, and being against policies, candidates and officeholders rather than for a comprehensive, coherent and consistent set of values and policies has been a limitation.

The continuing efforts to align with libertarians and radical rightists — even if only issue-by-issue — alienates many more leftish progressive advocates and activists than it advances progressive interests .

From the ground, as has been pointed out, the blogs/Netroots did not appear a movement at all. They were just blogs and blogging communities, often sharing the same audience, many of whom would not/could not become political activists. They could raise money and could promote candidates. Beyond that? Well, they could be ignored, too.

Declaring a “movement” doesn’t always make one.

Those who were activists and advocates rarely had time or interest for blogs and blogospheric matters in any case.

@Ian

I wrote on the end of the 50 state strategy

Yes, you did, and this is one of those posts, immediately after Obama’s election:

http://firedoglake.com/2008/11/07/50-state-strategy-being-killed-by-letting-the-organizers-go/

The episode would have been bizarre if it weren’t already becoming clear that once the New Guy got the job, there would be [big] changes made at the roots level,”‘bye bye, so long, glad you could make it! Mwah! [Get outta here, ya creep!]”

At the elite level, there would be only cosmetic changes, no matter the rhetoric and glib assurances.

Those of us who didn’t like it were free to lump it.

Somewhere around 2006, liberal bloggers began making up dumb reasons to be angry, jumping on minor points and gaffes and forgetting the Big Picture disasters happening everywhere.

Basically, liberals turned to a slightly more honest version of the “gotcha” politics that Republicans have always used. The hand-wringing and minor deceptions I get in my inbox from the once-great MoveOn reminds me daily why I’ve abandoned the more connected liberal groups.

It doesn’t help that the 2 biggest liberal blogs — the Daily Kos and Huffpo — are web design nightmares, difficult to navigate and littered with moving ads and overlays. And, of course, there’s the issue with Huffpo pissing all over its roots by trying to become Salon-meets-TMZ.

At this point, the only liberal blog I follow is Wonkette, because at least its humorous.

Obama won because he lied through his teeth, preyed on naive young people, used his brilliant speeches to manipulate everyone, wasn’t Clinton, and was black. He pushed all of the buttons to make the liberals “feel” good and seal the deal. Prior to Obama, I became an ex-Democrat. Because of Obama, I became an ex-liberal. If dailykos and the people at the blog are progressive, it is abundantly clear what is wrong. There is no left.

Totally off topic but I wanted to share some really good news. I’ve had congestive heart failure for nine years and was just told this morning that I’m on the list for a heart transplant. No more pump with constant medicine 24/7, no more pacemaker/defibrillator to shock the **** out of me when it chooses and it will be much easier to take a shower (don’t have to cover the bag up in plastic), travel and get around. The heart transplant patients I’ve seen (always two or three of them per visit to the doctor) are all full of pep and vigor and look better than their age which they happily share with everybody.

Just to add a scoop of ice cream to the pie (haven’t had those in a while), the operation is expected to add 15 to 30 years to my life and the number is growing rapidly. The doctor has been doing it for 25 years and has personally done 450 heart transplants, the hospital has the third largest program in the country. Yes, I really am ecstatic and so are nearly everybody else I’ve told except for my dog and my brother. The dog heard first but she actually cares about me.

I started reading blogs (including DailyKOS, OpenLeft/MyDD, Eschaton, FireDogLake, etc.) because, at the time they began appearing, I felt completely alienated from (by?) other media. Coming off the years of Cablenews conspiring with repubs to bring down Bill Clinton, followed by the unforgivable crowning of GW, it didn’t seem to me that my outrage or horror was remotely recognized by what we now call Mainstream Media.

At that time, you have to remember, it was all new. People who paid attention to politics and current events were having to come to the realization that we couldn’t trust sources in which we had previously invested full faith. At that time we didn’t really know what was happening — only in hindsight did it become clear that media consolidation was, increasingly, silencing all voices that threatened to weaken what would become the iron grip of the 1%.

We knew nothing about ALEC; we didn’t know that all sorts of media figures were getting payola to advance corporate and conservative interests; the effects of the ending of the Fairness Doctrine were still relatively subtle. We just knew that things weren’t right but at the time it was really hard to articulate just what was wrong, and why, and how.

My husband and I were telling friends and family things that it took them literally years to believe or accept. They do believe those things now. But they resisted, fiercely. Why? Because to believe them was to call into question practically everything we’re taught about our country, our system, etc.

Now, while you had a small segment of people like us who were following events through the blogosphere and developing a worldview shaped by that, you had another segment of people being captured by the continually growing right-wing machine. And, as always, you had a far larger segment of people who remained generally uninterested in politics and largely uninformed. Those people were not served well by the MSM, and still aren’t.

But the leftwing blogosphere began as an outlet; as a response to failed media. As time went on, a number of external forces exerted all sorts of influences, and blogosphere residents and activists went off in all sorts of directions and experienced a variety of successes, near-successes, and failures.

But I think considering the blogosphere to have “failed” is to have invested expectations in it that are/were misplaced. To me, the “blogosphere” is a communication resource or tool — activists can use it, but can’t “be” it. “It” isn’t and never was “the answer”. It’s a tool, not a solution.

The underlying challenge is, and has been, figuring out how to clearly articulate what’s “wrong” and present a viable path to something “better”. When the changes needed require what amounts to a massive overhaul of worldview, unquestioned assumptions, lifetimes of conditioning, etc. the word “challenge” is an understatement.

Ian’s column about 44 steps to a better world is filled with challenges to the prevailing order. Such changes don’t simply threaten the 1%, they threaten how most Americans view themselves and the world.

One of two things has to happen — a long slog of steady education by enough activists convincing enough others to achieve “critical mass” OR massive dislocation/disaster caused by either climate change or some irretrievable overstep by the 1%, significant enough to literally break through people’s quite normal resistance to change.

In my view, we need to proceed with the former and hope the latter isn’t required.