Jerome Armstrong on the Failure of the Netroots

These people are still living in 2005: still fighting Iraq War era battles, still obsessed with imperialism and the state despite the US’s rapidly crumbling global footprint and influence, still embracing the “paranoid style” of American politics. They really have no progressive agenda apart from the most half-baked impulses, since they are fundamentally hostile to government. That is why they are falling apart as a potential source of progressive development and change.

Here’s what it seems to come down to. There are some people who are willing the heart Ron and Rand Paul and other far right laissez faire types, because all they really care about is whether the NSA is inserting electrodes in their brains or reading their emails, and because every issue for them is rapidly turned into some kind of highly emotional conspiracy theory based on a co-dependent blogospheric ranting. There is no real foundation for progress here. It’s just a bunch online geeks stewing in a contemporary style of anti-government, anti-social left Bircherism.

It isn’t just a few social issues that stop us from joining with Libertarians. Although we are on the same page with civil liberties, they disdain everything we FDR type Lefties hold dear. They are the original “if your poor it’s your own fault” faction. We love government programs like SS, Medicare etc. whilst they hate ALL government programs and side with Republicans in wanting to drown then in a bathtub. I have no answers. I too left the Dem Party after the 2004 debacle and do not see any alternative rising. :-/

Libertarians have been trying to assume the “liberal” or “progressive” mantle for quite a long time now. They see such weakness among the Democrats that many of them have seen that Dem extinction is nigh and have strenuously advocated for it.

But the way the political pendulum is swinging, we may see the extinction of the Rs first.

As the Democratic Party becomes more firmly conservative, the Rs become more radical and reactionary. A libertarian alternative to to Democrats would likely be even more reactionary than the current R Party under TP dominance.

Instead of trying to figure out how to align with libertarians, maybe online “progressives” would do better to figure out how to build a better future among and with the remnants of the leftist political interests. Some of them still exist…

I also am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. But I see no foundation for work with people in the Paul, Rothbard, Raimondo, Hayek, Rand etc. camp. In my view, the US needs to move in the direction of greater solidarity, social commitment and national purpose behind an economically pro-active government, pursuing an agenda of strategic economic transformation, state-financed full employment, egalitarian income redistribution and mission-driven public investment. The libertarian camp with its radical individualism, laissez faire economic agenda and all-embracing hostility to government is nearly 180 degrees from where I am.

Oh, and I never bought into that Netroots crap and Markos suspended my Kos account (got booted in all but name) for being too progressive and too Green.

Dan K misrepresents libertarians in his screed labeling their “all-embracing hostility to government”. Nonsense:

http://www.cato.org/blog/are-libertarians-anti-government

Dan’s litmus test for the good society is not even remotely plausible. It’s simply naive. It certainly, to my thinking, does not comport with Ian’s view on a new ideology, in that Dan’s vision would be tilted much too far to radical centralized government. Individuals be damned. We’ve seen how that works the past 100 or so years. I’m frightened by his rhetoric, far more than that of the libertarians, whom I don’t much care for either. I prefer a synthesis of great ideas, however they are ideologically labeled, to Dan’s utopian nonsense. I prefer to meet the world I inhabit on where it’s at now, not where I hope it will be some day far in the future, if at all. That means making alliances with those folks whose ideas dovetail with mine, along with the sentiments of the vast majority of Americans too. Compromise isn’t a dirty word. The notion that it’s a my way or the highway, all or nothing proposition is ludicrous. That’s coercion inducing rubbish. Perhaps this synthesis will fall flat, but it’s seems to me it’s well worth a try given the pluralistic state of the nation–read: lack of consensus writ large that isn’t going away soon no matter how much one demonizes the “other side” . Figure out a way to effect change, yes. Discounting cooperation with others because they lack some mythical notion of purity is a certain death sentence in moving forward.

What’s wrong with direct democracy. Does the idea of having to trust the common sense of the people scare too many lib/progs? As for “libertarians” I can’t trust any movement that has to steal the name of another much older ideology.(Libertarian Communism)

Ewwwww, L/libertarians have Cooties!

Or, at least that’s how the resistance reads to me, anymore. But, then, I’ve only been a consistent vote for Democrats for the past 40 years having never been a registered Democrat. In 2012, I voted for Gary Johnson. And, if H. Clinton is the Democratic candidate in ’16, I’ll do it (or, the equivalent) again. There is no earthly way that progressives are going to influence the Democratic Party machine’s agenda without scaring them shitless. The DLC, DCSC, DCCC… will effectively block, neuter or co-opt any truly progressive/populist effort, any grassroots group attempts to undertake under their umbrella, Every.Single.Time.They.Try. And, there aren’t enough aggressive progressives to even get the DLC-DCSC-DCCC’s attention should they try.

I’ll make common cause with L/libertarians whenever there is an intersection of values, or shared purpose. It might be that civil liberties (red as: surveillance) is the only port of trade. That would be disappointing, but I’ll take it over an empty space. Working towards something beats the hell out of caterwauling over the differences. If progress is destined to be accomplished on a coalition by coalition – issue by issue – basis, it’s going to be a very long road. And, I’m too old to imagine that I’ll ever see more that one successful effort. But, that one is worth working for.

Dan,

I want what you want. I really do. I’m just not sure it can be achieved, if at all, absent one hell of a bloody fight. I also don’t want it forced on people. I don’t want another revolutionary bloodbath that has the cure ending up worse than the disease. Thus, I’d much rather prefer it being embraced rather than coerced, with the latter way possibly being the only way before it’s too late, which has me teetering on accepting some degree of the former. On the other hand if the effects of this fucked up way of life start being felt by enough people in the near future then perhaps we’ll find consensus in time. After reading Kunstler today, I sure have my doubts:

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/two-forces-and-three-bears/

JZ,

It would be nice for there to be no coercion, but no significant good has ever been accomplished without substantial numbers of people being compelled to accept it. Social Security, child labor restrictions, working class bargaining rights and wage floors, the destruction of chattel slavery and feudal serfdom, the displacement of monarchic governments by parliamentary ones, female suffrage, high marginal tax rates on the rich, inheritance taxes – all of those things were passed into law and in the face of abundant kicking and screaming from people who were strongly opposed.

It’s nice to build as durable a consensus as is possible, but in a democratic society, the best one can ask for and deserve is an equal share in the law-making power of the country. If that were ever achieved, it would still be the case that a majority would sometimes succeed in imposing their political will on a minority. The US isn’t a chunk of land filled with 300 million sovereign individual countries. It’s one political community.

I had a moment a few months ago where I looked around as an online organizer and asked – what the hell am I really doing? I was on payroll for the one progressive org I’d idolized my entire political career… but we didn’t really care about the work… about winning anything… it was all just about building an email list. After about 3 months of nonstop bitching and being miserable I finally alienated pretty much everyone around me and decided to quit show business.

I agree that libertarians and progressives have a LOT in common. It’s that old joke about the CEO, the libertarian and the progressive and a plate of cookies. CEO eats all but one turns to the libertarian and says – that liberal wants your cookie and leaves. We should be working together on a great many things – but both sides have been co-opted by their relative establishments. Though less so on the right.

I would argue that like all movements our tendency to fund older orgs that have far outlasted their usefulness rather than look at either local or smaller orgs that actually move people and policy is what will be our downfall. We’re spreading money too thin. Do you register voters? Do you GOTV? Do you win elections? Do you train activists? Do you lobby congress? Then what use are you to the movement?

You know, every time a disillusioned American left-liberal proposes an alliance with the libertarians, a copy of the Fountainhead gets its wings. I really have to laugh. Who are you kidding? Y’all have way more in common with the sellout neoliberals Dem elite than you would care to admit. I mean, even in terms of agreed-upon values. And I should hope so!

Hear this now: there will be no “emergent” party outside the Dem structure until you have understood how and why the voter is driven to vote they way s/he votes. You can poll people for single payer, you can educate them, and all that jazz, but it means squat until you learn to study how people *feel* about it, and feel when they enter the voting booth. Until then, even if eats a kitten live on stage and worse, I recommend now as then that you vote for Obama or HClinton or whatever other neoliberal elected imperator comes to the fore the next times around, until infinity.

At base, I think Netroots simply didn’t, virtually or in reality, feed or comfort anyone or provide any real sense of solidarity. For the sites that were aimed nationally, I’m not really sure it changed lives in a way that could be felt meaningfully on the local level, or that it seemed particularly interested in connecting with real on the ground movements. That may be more impression than fact, because I didn’t follow it rigorously and haven’t researched the case. I was interested by Move On because I knew one of its early movers and shakers, but it’s general drift was off-putting and it was impossible to keep up with the barrage of e-mails. Once my friend left, I took my name off the their e-mail list, although I had long since stopped engaging with it. Daily Kos always felt remote, cold, and coercive and more interested in propping up a structure I already felt post-Bill Clinton was completely hollow.

I happen to like this site because it focuses on unvarnished non-partisan truth, and those conversations are hard to come by in any forum, virtual or real, but real conversations over coffee are better. What the Unions used to know, but have largely forgotten, and what Occupy briefly resuscitated, was a sense of real community, that the work of a Union doesn’t stop at the worksite, or that the work of politics doesn’t stop at an internet poll or the voting booth. Suborned to the aim of achieving real in person community the internet could be (and is) a wonderful tool, witness the Arab Spring, and it’s that same partnership that will be needed to overcome the counter-revolution there as well.

I also think that too many intellectualized political progressive movements, and the Netroots movement seems to qualify, think that arguments based on fact matter, and that just appears not to be the case, we will always lose to the propagandists until the system is so bad, people know for certain (even if they are afraid to say it) that Pravda (or our versions The NY Times) is simply a lie from the very first page to the very last.

It’s community engagement that matters and that has a far more powerful effect. If those who shape community do so based on factual analysis, so much the better, but organizations like Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood which many might not find to offer a secular humanist democratic vision of the world they might like, win hearts and minds by providing meaningful infrastructure, jobs and social services. In the same fashion that FDR was beloved (not of course by all, but by a very great many) for the perception, largely reasonable, that he lifted the country out of The Great Depression.

The Netroots movement might have helped with moving a vote on this atrocity (Food Stamp Shutdown Looms Friday), but taking some food to struggling working families, or volunteering to care for someone’s child who’s struggling while working several jobs will always make a bigger impact. Disconnected from that kind of community engagement, the movement withers.

Fairly, there’s only so much time in the day and the challenge of meaningfully connecting the local to the national to the global has not been exceptionally difficult without the resources of transnational capital, which certainly doesn’t do it in humanity’s interest.

Jerome, you is no a ting, bruv.

John Cole is is a bit tee’d-off with the groupings I made of the blogs above. Which I guess is the sort of thing that happens when you make a comment that turns into a blog post. But as I pointed out to him there, and can be more specific here, the commenters on BJ’s are exactly as I posted, not the posts; on Booman Tribune, I’d say it’s the opposite; on LGF both. Doesn’t it say it all that the most rabid dog partisan site for Democrats nowadays is LGF.

Hey Ian, you made http://www.memeorandum.com/ …

@ Everythings Jake@

October 28, 2013 Suborned to the aim of achieving real in person community the internet could be (and is) a wonderful tool, witness the Arab Spring, and it’s that same partnership that will be needed to overcome the counter-revolution there as well.

So far the ‘Arab Spring’ has resulted in entrenching the Egyptian military tyranny yet deeper into Egyptian society and in the case of the Copts savage religious persecution, then there’s the vicious treatment of Syrian refugees, to say nothing of the increased suffering of the Gazan population. Things are no better in Tunisia where it all started than they were under Bouteffika – and are arguably worse as tourists have been scared off by reports of political violence. Libya is sliding ever more rapidly into a tribal and failed state that exports violence and weaponry at a phenomenal rate. Then there’s war in Syria the savagery of which is an order of magnitude worse than anything I saw in Irak during the ‘war of the death squads’. Political violence in Lebanon has escalated massively both in intensity and frequency and no it’s not just spill over from Syria. And that’s just a few of the Arabic countries – do you remember the so-called “Twitter Revolution” in Iran? The one where backed by western governments and to loud chorus of approval from western liberals some of the most corrupt politicians Iran has ever seen tried to pretend the election had been stolen? It hadn’t and what had been a mildly reformist populist presidency clamped down savagely.

The time of the western-inspired ‘colour revolutions’ is over and a good thing too any worthwhile improvement in the Middle-East or North-Africa is going to have to come from hard work and struggle from within broad local coalitions and not from well-fed western-inspired middle class ‘activists’.

I’d be the last person to disagree with your other points. Community involvement is essential, as both Hizballah and the Ikhwanis can testify. But you don’t have to go to the Middle East for examples the same is also true of Western countries. The cooperative movement in both Denmark and Ireland played a large part in lifting those countries from poverty. The trade union movement/Labour Party in the UK was a communitarian one that, unlike the American left succeeded. There are lots of studies on how it worked and why. If anybody wants some non-academic reading which gives a good introduction to the roots of the Labour/Socialist movement of the period and why it succeeded then I suggest Robert Tressell’s novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which is a fictionalised account that drew heavily on reports and documented accounts. Similarly the Swedish Social Democrats were heavily communitarian and solidaristic providing everything from kindergartens to ‘helping hand’ services to the elderly.

mfi

There were many things that contributed to the failure of the Netroots, but chief among them was the Great Purge of 2008. Suddenly it wasn’t good enough to just be a liberal Democrat, you had to support Obama or you were a racist Republican ratfucker.

That schism never healed.

BTW – It has been a while since I have been here, but I see that some people are still trapped in the idiocy of labels. Labels are just another form of tribalism. They bind us to the wrong people and keep us separated from potential allies.

After spending nearly 30 years as a self-identified liberal Democrat I am now an independent and my ideology has no name. I refuse to be pigeonholed by labels anymore.

But my ideals and principles remain unchanged.

@ mfi

I think Mark that you made the point I wanted to. Or maybe not. I meant to make clear that technology is only a tool that might be of service to the real necessary work, which I believe happens in exactly the way of the examples you pointed to. My read of history is that the way to effect meaningful social and economic change for the benefit of more than a few elite has always been and will likely always be long and hard, and for many, it will also be brutal and some will die. Taking Egypt, the case I’m most familiar with, I understood that substantial organizing and strikes by workers on the Nile was a principal foundation on which the “revolution,” which never really seemed to be that and short lived as it may have been, was built (with I think some tinder provided by increases in the price of food?) and that’s where it will likely continue. Technology may have facilitated gathering so many so quickly and in helping to coordinate some actions (and I’m not certain if in Egypt, but in Occupy demonstrations, a way to foil police attempts to corral demonstrators), but the conceit of Western media that the revolution was technological in nature or its origins were technological was I thought a near deliberate attempt to obscure meaningful analysis that very real class concerns were at play. I am not qualified to speak to the degree to which religious division plays a role in Middle Eastern politics of its own accord, except to observe that fanatical groups seems to gain a lot of power when conditions of economic misery are widespread.

Hi Jerome – I see nothing wrong with progressive alliances with libertarians on specific issues – that’s just politics – as long as progressives doing so are clear-eyed about who exactly they are making alliances with.

That’s just coalition politics. And, how many constituencies can an effective progressive movement throw under the bus ? Remember, the Democratic Party is heavily reliant upon the votes of citizens otherwise known as “women”.

Thus, if you characterize access to birth control, abortion, and Planned Parenthood clinics as a “social lifestyle issue” and accuse those who oppose the religious right’s decades-long strategy of devolving the reproductive rights issue to the states, you would seem, to my mind, to be discounting one of the biggest demographics on the left.

And for what?

The problem with many “libertarians” is that they’re not. Or, rather, the libertarian tendency can be bisected into two main constituencies, secular libertarians, and religious libertarians — many of whom are under the ideological sway of Christian Reconstructionism.

Ron Paul’s political organizing was one of the two main vectors of the 2009-21010 rise of the Tea Party (the other vector being Koch brothers-funded organizing). One of Paul’s top political advisers – who has co-authored Paul’s new Christian homeschooling curriculum – is Dr. Gary North, who is probably the second most important Christian Reconstructionist theory next to CR founder R.J. Rushdoony.

Beyond the penchant of North and other Christian Reconstructionists for advocating that gays, un-chaste women (who have sex before marriage), adulterers, witches, idolaters, blasphemers, and rebellious teens be stoned to death, literally with rocks, Taliban-style, an equally significant aspect of the CR program is that almost any and all current government activities and programs are illegitimate, especially because they are funded by an illegitimate “taking” (taxation) that is, in effect, socialism. CR rejects, categorically, all government redistribution.

Here’s the paradox – it’s fine to make common cause with folks who say they are “libertarians”, on specific issues – anti-interventionism, anti-surveillance, and so on – as long as one is clear that at the end of the (protest) day, Ron Paul will head off to a fundraiser to be photographed with the founder of the white supremacist website Stormfront… and as long as one is clear that there is no better apologist for corporate malfeasance and the current economic corporate regime than Ron Paul, who is opposed to any and all government intervention, regulation, or taxation.

Back in 2008, when Ron Paul’s presidential bid was gaining lots of press (and raising lots of money) the libertarian magazine Reason attacked Paul by dropping the bomb that his political career had been built with heavy funding from neo-Nazi kingpin Willis Carto’s mailing list, for Carto’s publication The Spotlight. The long knives were out – the Koch-funded wing of the Tea Party wanted to squash Paul because they couldn’t control him (Paul and the Kochs have a long history, FYI — he was chairman of their group Citizens For a Sound Economy back in 1984.)

And what did the Tea Party-backed politicians do when they got into office ? Well, they proceeded not only to unleash a flood of anti-reproductive rights and antigay legislation, but they also moved to crush unions, de-fund public schools, cut corporate taxes, cut programs for the poor, and generally seek to erase the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But the 2010 wave was just a replay of the 1994 Gingrich-fronted wave, powered by the Christian Coalition and backed by Koch money, that rolled into Congress and proceeded to — hello ? — shut down the government.

The new right and the religious right have been running strategic and tactical circles around the American left for decades. The people I encounter who seem, to have the most acute understanding of what’s going on are those who have bailed out of the Republican Party over the past twenty years.

Meanwhile, I leave, for your consideration, Paul Weyrich’s Teaching Manual For The New Progressive Movement – http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/9/9/13473/53538

Cheers, Bruce Wilson

Heh. Alliance of progressives + libertarians = gay, dope-smoking bankster gun-nuts. Not gonna influence or change a damn thing, and in many ways make things worse. The Democratic party is an imperfect vehicle but it is the only vehicle for any sort of progressive change, however incremental and erratic.

@ Everythings Jake October 29, 2013

Yes I think we were making complementary points with the proviso that the tool can be used both by the forces of revolution and those of the counter-revolution. Egypt and Iran being very good examples of exactly where that was done. (Iran particularly where the organisers of dueling demonstrations used exactly the same methods. There’s an idea in the West that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Conservative and the ‘Greens’ were somehow ‘liberals’ or reformers. Ahmadinejad’s party Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran is a populist party small ‘c’ conservative party. And he represents the generation that fought in the war with Irak, being populists they did a fair bit of redistribtion/subsidisation. The ‘greens’ are economic liberals in the 19th century sense and some of the most corrupt and plutocratic figures in Iran today – such as Rafsanjani, stood behind them).

I’ll add a further proviso which is that that smart ‘phone in a demonstrator’s pocket is also an instrument of social atomisation and that an atomised population are far easier to delude, distract, and control.

It can also be an instrument of outright repression – but that’s a topic for another day.

At to Egypt, religion and religious divisions play an important part in politics in every country here, in some countries it defines that country’s primary political activities. That’s not the case for Egypt which is overwhelmingly Sunni but Coptic Christians have always been the subject of social suspicion not least because they’ve tended to be both literate and better of than the peasants (Fellaheen) in the countryside and rural towns and villages and the displaced peasants who make up such a large proportion of Egypt’s urban poor. [Egypt’s Shi’i community is miniscule but they too have been attacked since the Ikhwani government was overthrown]. Copts (and Shi’i) make very convenient scapegoats and both have been scapegoated by all sides recently as have Syrian refugees and Gazan Palestinians.

Yes Egyptian unions have been campaigning and will continue I suppose but they’re not all that significant a force. If I were organising a demonstration I’d want the ‘Ultras’ on my side and would be indifferent about the unions who are at best peripheral, it’d be nice to have them but not important. You’re right about the western perception of the technological revolution, Egypt is a (failing) agricultural economy that also has a large tourism sector. The twitterers and facebookers are a very thin veneer on top of that. It remains a peasant society albeit one with several large cities and one of the cruelest things that has been done to the peasantry has been the repeal of the land reforms of 1952 and the driving off the peasantry from holdings that were theirs and that were viable. The beneficiaries of this has been the army and their friends. The ‘revolutionaries’? Those nice middle class kids with their lazer shows? They don’t give a shit about the misery of either the fellaheen or the displaced landless peasants who’ve flocked to the cities. Who did care about them were the Ikhwanis who were trying to bring back the 52 legislation. Not going to happen now.

Yes poverty and lack of opportunity can help breed fanaticism – which is one of the reasons why I was already pessimistic about Egypt’s future it has lots of young men with no future and no prospects and they’ve just been taught by experience that those people who said that the promises of democracy were a pack of lies were right.

The heartbreaking thing about all of this is that inept and hamfisted as the Ikhwani were they did deserve support for one thing. And that was that they tried to do in Egypt what was successfully done in Turkey to force the army back into its barracks and under civilian control. Of course it took a long time in Turkey and there were massive setbacks along the way but for the present at least the Turkish Army and it’s ideology of Kemalist nationalism is under civilian control. They may hate and despise Erdogan and his government but they obey them. Morsi tried to do the same but neither the circumstances nor his character were favourable to the task. This is a crying miserable shame, civilised societies keep their military under control. The ones that don’t wind up barbarous. There was a chance to disentrench the military in Egypt from their control of the economy but that chance has now been blown – with the active connivance of the ‘democrats’ and ‘liberals’ this is unlikely to end well. What I suspect we’ll see in the near future is a revived security state in the cities and Sinai, and Bangladeshi levels of deprivation in the countryside it’s enough to make you weep.

mfi

Incidentally I’ll add that I predicted much of this when the first Tahrir ‘revolution’ was taking place I said then and repeat now that the little fluffy bunnies in Tahrir square were the catspaws of the Egyptian army and that they’d be jetisoned the moment they’d served their purpose. I was publicly assured by every single American ‘lefty’ I know and quite a few I don’t that I was wrong and that I was anti-democratic, anti-freedom, a militaristic bastard, and quite a lot of things even less savoury. One of the most miserable failings of the American left is their adamant refusal to consider any model other than a Eurocentric one starting in 1848 (not saying the European left is much better mind you).

mfi

@Jerome: If John Cole isn’t teed off, u r doin it wrong.

@mfi

As always, thanks for the detail and perspective. I’m not sure if you have read Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, which you may find interesting. Although, you may not need to read it, as it sounds like you are a front line witness to the worst aspects it addresses. Your analysis of the repeal of the 1952 land reforms shares much in common with one of the book’s central themes.

Completely agreed on your point on technology. I started to add it last night, but did not want to run on. One concern I have is that implementation of the modern Panopticon, locally, nationally, globally, and a para-militarized police force armed with modern weaponry such as the “Active Denial System,” not to mention the lethal weaponry, are the tools needed for the elite to achieve, in Michael Parenti’s analysis, a fascist state resistant to all challenge as a final solution to class conflict in their favor. I take some hope, I guess, that resistance is possible as the U.S. lost in Iraq and is losing and will lose in Afghanistan. On the other hand, if we lost, who won (Iran perhaps) and how exactly do you measure the victory when the entire country seems left broken, shattered and littered with depleted uranium?

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.

Armstrong doesn’t mention the comparable amount spent by the Democratic Party to defend Lincoln, and the mopey tone of this remark almost dovetails with the attitude of the Party establishment at the time, mocking the “lesser people”‘s temerity in thinking they could have some influence on their choice of candidate. Hah! The nerve of those losers!

Frankly all the garment-rending and wallowing in shame I see above makes no sense to me. The conclusion I draw from the Lieberman and Lincoln debacles isn’t that the Netroots “failed”–I really don’t see anything else they could have done that would have been meaingfully better–it’s that the U.S electoral system is so thoroughly captured by insiders that it can’t really be characterized as democracy.

Jerome,

Hope you’re still following the comments.

When looking back at the 2008 primaries, do you have thoughts on how to better deal with that situation, given the high likelihood that the Democratic party will see similar situations in the future. I was drawn to Obama because, unlike Clinton, he seemed to have seen how ill-advised the Iraq War was before going into it. Even though I realize there probably was no perfect progressive option in the primary, with hindsight, I can’t help but wonder what was a better course of action.

This week, the House of Representatives will be voting to roll back the anti-derivative provisions of Dodd-Frank that Senator Lincoln introduced because of the pressure from the Democratic primary. Given that many New Democrats are strong advocates of the repeal, do you have any thoughts on operating within a party in which Wall Street has such a strong foothold?

If I’m interested in working with libertarians and progressives, which I am, what online community can I turn to?

@Lambert Strether

Check out this graph on page 7, go through it and see where you find yourself. Chances are, you’ll find yourself with a 5-4 or 4-5 breakdown.
http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2013.AVS_WEB.pdf

@John Casper, Jane is way ahead with this, always has been. There’s an easy 10 issues to make a legislative agenda.

@Logan, I don’t think it will ever be the same again. It was unique in that we had a movement formed when about 50% of the US was online, and the blogs were relatively new, and the place for social action.

My guess, like Lambert and others believe, is that we are only seeing the beginning of the Democratic Party becoming the de facto corporate agenda majority party in the US in its leadership, as the Republican party becomes more populist and libertarian. At least through this decade.

Yea, that bill in Congress is being pushed now by the Democrat Hines, who is fresh off his career at Goldman Sachs. And I had forgotten about that being the law Lincoln put in when she started feeling the heat we laid on her.

There’s not a blog out there that is writing from this POV (working with libertarians and progressives), but this place is good, as there are many bloggers mostly open to the alliance. There’s a lot of hostility, especially on the progressive side, to making it work. But I have been surprised at the number of people that have reached out to me about trying to get an alliance based on a legislative agenda off the ground.

More concise analysis:

http://www.openleft.com/showComment.do?commentId=227328

My view has not really changed.

The hostility toward libertarians and progressives working together is what really gets me, and it’s been an issue since I got involved in politics, blogs, and all that jazz back in 2003 during the Howard Dean campaign.

I remember trying to help a libertarian candidate who had joined the Democratic Party to run for Congress in 2006 work with the local DFA chapter and get a cold shoulder simply because of his background, even though he emphasized social issues, the war in Iraq, and the need to cut back subsidies to oil and gas companies in his campaign.

I’ve also worked for what I firmly believed was a strong progressive candidate who, because they deviated on one or two issues, was viciously attacked by some members of the progressive blogging community.

It’s not just hostility towards libertarians, it’s hostility towards progressives who don’t measure up on all issues. There’s litmus test after litmus test, and often not on something big like “Oppose Social Security Cuts!” but “Sign this letter that shows you oppose Social Security cuts in using the language that I prefer but maybe you wouldn’t use.”

And then there are the failures. Ann Kuster in New Hampshire ran as a progressive, twice, received significant support from the PCCC, and is now one of the worst New Democrats in Congress. How can you avoid that in the future? There was also the David Gill race in Illinois, where the PCCC upset the established Democratic pick in the primary, only to sit on their hands in the general election and watch Gill go down to defeat.

Libertarianism is highly unpopular in this country, almost as unpopular as anarchism or communism. The main problem with libertarianism in the United States is that it is so backward-looking, almost neo-feudal.

Progressivism still has somewhat of the aura it had when it was the standard operating system of governance in the United States and it was focused on progress. But those days are gone, and the notion of “progress” itself has almost become a curse as so much of what “progress” meant has turned nightmarish. If fracking is “progress,” or the ACA is “progress…”

We’ve seen over and over again that “Progressive” in the context of blogs has no definition in any case. An alliance between undefined “Progressives” and libertarians of some stripe ought to be a natural, then. It might even gain some political clout. But I doubt it would resonate much beyond the practitioners and would likely be as loathed by the public as the current crop in Congress are.

@ Ché Pasa October 30, 2013

Yup to all of that.

mfi

Most of the progressive left disdain for libertarianism relies on outmoded stereotypes and caricatures which are, of course, furthered by right-wing statists who run on (steal) the language of libertarianism while enacting and supporting views that are actually inimical to what most libertarian-minded people actually believe.

Luckily, here’s the Public Religion Research Institute to the rescue:

http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/29/whos-a-real-libertarian-now/

Of course, I’d caution (and wager) that even this exhaustive study gets quite a few things wrong. The “Libertarian Orientation Scale” is far too moored to conventional discourse and definitions. But, the trends are pretty clear: young white people (mostly men, but a substantial number of women) are increasingly libertarian and are very much tuned into their world and involved in it.

Question: is my thinking that libertarians do not object to austerity planning an “outmoded stereotype”? Are the libertarians all secretly believers in taxing the rich so the poor can have food stamps?

Is being a libertarian really “pro-civil rights”? I thought the point of being a libertarian in the South was so that property rights could trump the 1964 Civil Rights Act and we could go back to the era of segregated restaurants, bathrooms, and so on.

If the progressives had guns, the FBI would be doing to them what it did to the Black Panthers.

Cthebear November 1, 2013 @

Well said. Politicians will do what you want if they know that failure to do so will have consequences they won’t enjoy.

The other point on the netroots, they were felt to be largely made up of a white collar, uppity upper middle class sect which sought to regulate the lifestyles of those blue collar, lower castes and largely treated them with disdain

Yup.

And that is why they failed.

mfi

mfi