| Some Themes From the TPMCafe Discussion
Striking the theme of blogger's outsider roots, and continued outsider status, Amanda Marcotte wrote that this was a good thing, really:
Blogs were built up for a lot of reasons, but as Eric notes, most of us got into this, especially in the beginning, because we wanted to vent. We had no ambitions to change the world, and when we started to get pulled in that direction, most of us shrugged our shoulders and said you can't turn destiny away when it starts knocking on your door.
But like many of the bloggers Eric interviews note, ours is the energy of outsiders. The metaphor people grasp for more than anything is punk rock, and it's apt (especially the way that people who break into the mainstream are berated for selling out). So, instead of being mad at Obama for keeping us at a distance, I humbly suggest that he did us a favor. If he'd brought the bloggers into his inner circle, then it would be a lot harder for us to criticize him and hold him accountable for what appears to be a long 4-8 years of selling out progressive values because the skittish Democratic mindset is kicking in.
Being outsiders actually makes us better allies to the Democrats when they actually deserve it. There were Clinton camps and Obama camps, but both camps jumped all over Chris Matthews for his relentless sexism towards Clinton, which is easier for us to do as we're independent and don't have to worry too much about whether our words reflect poorly on this campaign or that campaign's message.
In his diary "Why Elections Will Continue to Lean Left Due to the Web", Greg Mitchell. editor of Editor & Publisher offered a view from his perch as an internal critic of the journalism establishment, citing the way in which the internet performed an important, here-to-fore missing journalistic function:
I guess I feel that the uprising on the left side of online, pushed also by generational and demographic changes, will keep the country at least somewhat to the left for many years. And you can quote me. In fact, I predicted that last year even before the current rise of Twitter.
I could go on and on, but let me just mention one reason for feeling this way: fact-checking and instant counter-punditry online. And I'll just cite one dramatic example.
Last fall's four major candidate debates could have swung the election, narrowly, to McCain. Obama's lead was not strong and we've seen before what can happen, with Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and Bush in 2000. Indeed, the performances by Obama or Biden in the four debates were not particularly strong. But the ticket won going away. For several reasons, of course, but I'd argue that online activity around the debates had a lot to do with it.
Why? You may recall that each of the debates ended with the TV commentators, by and large, claiming the Republican candidates (even Palin) surprisingly "held their own" and maybe even gained an edge. In elections past, this likely would have given the GOP a nice bump in the days that followed and led to a deadlock in the next polls.
But this year that "momentum" was blunted, even reversed by one big factor: the Web. Popular liberal sites immediately fact-checked the Republicans' statements and analyzed why those candidates had, in reality, lost ground. Even more importantly, this time around, various news organizations sponsored scientific instant polls and focus groups - and in every case (even over at Fox), they showed a landslide of public opinion in favor of the Democratic debater. Not even close. Palin, for example, had "held her own" against Biden only in the minds of the pundits.
The results not only came quickly, they were disseminated quickly via the Web, so the next day's news summaries all had to cite them.
It must have been humiliating for most of the TV pundits. One minute they were assuring viewers that McCain and Palin and held their own or more -and within a few minutes they had to cite polls showing that their analysis had been wholly wrong. Whoops.
In a follow-up diary, Eric picked up one of Amanda's themes, arguing that the outsider spirit live--and even has some impact on policy:
Generally, I think Amanda's right that the blogs can maintain an energy and passion by continuing with its outside status, even with a Democrat in the WH. (And I think lib bloggers have proved wrong their conservative critics who claimed they'd simply roll over for Obama in the WH and act as cheerleaders.) They key is that the blogosphere was never created (way back when) to be an appendage of the DNC. There are plenty other Beltway institutions that will robotically cheer Dem politicians no matter what they do. Instead, the blogs were created to give voice to liberalism in America. And if liberals today don't like some of the things they see in government, then the blogs are still quite willing to document that and give a cohesive voice to the left; a voice that did not exist the last time a Democrat was in the WH.
So I'd suggest that the question Armando raised about whether Obama will continue to receive the type of unquestioning love from the blogs (the kind of love he enjoyed last year) is being answered, and the answer is no. (See Amanda's comment re: DOMA.) And those critiques, I'd argue, are paying off. Witness the announcement about Obama extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.
But Duncan Black offers a more nuanced view, seeing blogging's impact as perhaps more cultural--creating a liberal narrative--and seeing the major limit of blogging's impact coming from congressional staffers who still don't quite get a clear sense of how bloggers could be more valuable through working more closely together:
To me, since the beginning, the blogosphere's key feature has been to provide a sustained and cohesive unapologetic liberal narrative not found elsewhere. While I certainly hope that the Obama administration moves the country in a more progressive direction, and I will continue to push for this, like Amanda I don't have any sense bloggers are owed some sort of seat at the table.
The important failure of Democrats, particular the more liberal Dems who are obvious allies, to engage the blogosphere effectively comes not from the Obama administration but from members of Congress, and their staffs, who have never understood well enough the power of having alternative ways of getting information and messages out. Liberal blogs have never been empowered by those they have been trying to aid.
Arguably liberal bloggers can, and some have certainly tried to, do more to empower themselves, to leverage what influence they have to greater ends. And, arguably, we should. But few of us started ranting away on the internet with the expectation that we would be sitting down with members of Congress or administration officials. We didn't start blogging because we thought it would change the world.
Three Waves and A Wall Redux
If all these bloggers have valuable insights--and they do--what they don't have is any sort of definitive stance with respect to larger historical forces. And that's the new element I hope to add to this mix. This is not to say that I claim to know what will happen, much less what must happen. But I do think I have a sense of some major macro-historical factors that indicate something of what may happen, of possibilities that exist now which did not exist eight or 12 or 16 or 60 years ago. I wrote about them before in an early 2008 series "Three Waves and A Wall: 2008 And The American Future. As I explained in the first diary in the series,
the three waves are:
- The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.
- The rise and fall of successive world powers-Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us-described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.
- The recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
The first wave helps explain why the GOP is in such total disarray. Were it not for the wall (described below) and its disorienting effect on Democrats, we'd be in the midst of a full-fledged realignment more similar to the aftermath of the 1932 election than anything seen since, except, perhaps the aftermath of the 1964 election, when Lyndon Johnson managed to push through an impressive array of programs largely intended to fulfill ambitious first stirred in the early post-1932 period.
The last time we had such an election was the anomalous 1968 election, which ushered in an era of divided government, the only such period in American history. Although nothing is written in stone, the pattern of history strongly suggests that the 2008 election will usher in a period of Democratic dominance lasting roughly 36 years. However, the example of 1896, which began a period of Republican dominance, clearly warns us that there's no assurance the dominant party will be internally unified or coherent.
The second wave indicates that we're at the end of a period reactionary politics that typically follows a stinging defeat at the peak of imperial power (the Vietnam War). The previous three dominant world powers turned their politics in a decidedly more egalitarian direction once the reactionary period came to a close.
The financial collapse of fall 2008 was tailor made for ushering in this change, however (as part of the "wall" described below), Barack Obama turned out to be much more deeply committed the worldview of finance capitalism than anyone seemed to previously realize, and this has lead to a significant blockage of this otherwise expected transition.
The third wave is very much associated with values of democratic participation, self-expression, gender equaltiy, and environmentalism, which have infused the online world not just in America, but around the world, including, as we have recently seen, such supposedly "other" cultures as Iran.
Then there was what the waves were crashing up against--the wall, as described in Part Four:
these forces stand opposed by a powerful obstructing wall, which I have referred to repeatedly under the rubric of hegemony, which has both an institutional and an ideological aspect. The ideology is authoritarian, anti-modern, anti-reason, and anti-democracy. Over the past decade, it has sought to overturn one election (1996) by hounding an elected President into acts of desperation for which it then sought to remove him from office. It sought-successfully, to steal another election in broad daylight by usurping the popular will and preventing the counting of ballots, based on legal "reasoning" by the Supreme Court which were declared null and void for any other purposes. It virtually ignored a mass murderer responsible for killing 3,000 Americans, and fraudulently took us to war with that mass murderer's chief ideological rival. It sought to turn the entire executive branch-but especially the Department of Justice-into an arm of the Republican National Committee, in a quest to establish permanent one-party rule. It sought to undermine the separation of powers, the architectural keystone of Constitution. It sought to nullify the right to habeas corpus, dating back to 1215 and the Magna Charta. It sought to turn the Federal Government into an instrument for taxing the public in order to amass enormous private wealth for friends of the President, Vice President and the Republican Party.
In short, it sought to turn America into a neo-feudal, pre-modern state. This agenda is so deeply and profoundly anti-American that the nation as a whole is in revolt. Approximately 50 percent of all Americans strongly disapprove of President Bush's job performance. At this point, four things, above all, are keeping back the tide of sweeping change. One, a deeply intimidate political "opposition" that is more like the GOP's hapless sidekick than a real opposition party. Two, a press corps[e] that functions primarily as a palace propaganda machine. Three, a broader array of institutional power, from politicized churches, to propagandistic "think tanks" to ideologically lock-step federal judges, that is militantly opposed to allowing even the slightest moves in the direction of changing course. Four, a public that has long been starved of any truly oppositional political discourse, so that it has an extremely difficult time formulating anything it wants in positive terms that are recognizable to more than a fragment of the public at large.
This is the nature of the wall.
Today, I would be inclined to put that somewhat differently. The Democrats are not simply intimidated, as I wrote in the passage above, they are also deeply constrained by having internalized a good deal of rightwing GOP ideology. But for the most part, the descriptions I offered in early 2008 still serve our discussion today.
Our Place In the Macro-Picture
So how does the framework just described relate to the future of blogging as discussed at TPMCafe? Simple answer? It tosses us into a multi-dimensional blender, and says, "Have fun!" While many people feel an understandable sense of let-down, the framework above suggests that we're just passing through a phase that's deceptively slow-moving and static. The fact that Obama's major policy initiatives are both disappointingly centrist and diminutive will not be the end of the story, given the dynamics of history at play.
For example, thinking only in terms of the first wave, for the moment-as if it could be considered in isolation-we need to let go of our disappointment that this isn't going to be 1933 with FDR's Hundred Days. Truth be told, FDR's Hundred Day wasn't all that hot, either. The first New Deal wasn't nearly as progressive as the second one, passed after the first one had largely fizzled and business elites had turned against Roosevelt. And though there's some small hope that we might follow a similar path, that hope, too, should be set aside. A much more plausible guide for what we're going through would be the rather decisive, but deeply ambiguous realignment of 1896. Not that we're living through an exact re-run-we aren't-but that a similar set of tensions are at play. Consider these three points:
(1) Like the Republican Party after 1896, the Democratic Party today is deeply divided against itself, which can potentially cripple its ability to definitively set the political agenda for new roughly-36-year cycle.
(2) Unlike the post-1896 era, there is presently little potential for something like the bipartisan Progressive Movement to emerge. Moreover, to the extent it is possible, this would not be a progressive movement, even in the somewhat conflicted sense of the original Progressive Movement. The record of Washington bipartisanship in recent years has routinely been retrograde, and shows every sign of continuing to be so.
While the Progressives were generally hostile to the Socialists who had a strong base in the recent immigrant class, they nonetheless shared some concerns in common, and their political competition sometimes resulted in genuine progress. This cannot be said of present-day DC-based bipartisanship. However, a similar alliance of techno-elitists and scruffy grassroots radical types definitely can be envisioned not just on net neutrality and related new media issues, but also, potentially, on campaign finance reform. This, in turn, genuinely could start to move mountains. This was brought up in a discussion thread on Chris's dairy, "I Got The 'Make Them Do It' Blues". Yoda made a comment raising the issue of the Clean Elections model and the surprising depth of ignorance about it on progressive blogs. (Yes, I take the hint. I'll be writing something about it soon, I promise). A few other commentators joined in as well. In particular, bruorton added:
I came on the thread to make exactly this point. Time to start coalescing the movement for public financing -- perhaps a timely addition to OpenLeft's excellent projects list? It is entirely possible, starting now, that we could propel this into a 2012 campaign issue.
First, it will need to be a 2010 campaign issue. One opening is the public perception of corporate lobbyists, which led to pledges in the '08 primaries to take various steps to block them from the WH. There is also Lessig's Change-Congress.org which could be a key player here.
This could be a real rallying cry for the many Democrats who do not see the dramatic changes in government they were expecting.
As disappointment with Obama's diminutive agenda sinks in over the next few weeks, months and years, substantially canceling the concentrated power of money in our politics could well emerge as the defining issue long enough for something truly transformational to be done. This is one way, of many that next few years of this highly-contested realignment could unfold.
(3) Directly contrary to Teddy Roosevelt among the Republican leadership of the 1896 era, the Democrats' most charismatic leader, Barack Obama, is aligned with the party establishment against the reformers, despite some very sparkling rhetoric to the contrary. The firmness of this alliance has yet to be seriously tested. If progressives in the Democratic Party mounted serious pressure, Obama might shift his allegiances somewhat, but this is yet to become a serious possibility--although that could be about to change (or is that merely the perpetual illusion with Obama?).
If we add the third wave of post-materialism to the mix, we can add:
(4) Just as Obama's charisma connected to the party establishment reverses the historical precedent of the 1896 era, there is a linked reversal in realm of post-materialist values. Obama is much more in tune with the expressive nature of such values, even though he is actually less supportive of the substance. This relates to the discussion above of his distancing from the blogosphere on the one hand, coupled with his sophisticated use of other online technology, and it contrasts with the more politically progressive members of Congress, and their failure to develop more effective partnerhips with progressive bloggers, also referenced in the TPMCafe discussion, by Duncan Black.
It's as if there were a cross-wiring of the natural connections one would expect from the macro-historical patterns. History, however, is filled with such examples. History is conflictual, not logical. Nonetheless, the existence of such contradictions always holds out the potential for resolution. Furthermore, if the blogosphere is to play a role in resolving such contradictions, we damn sure need to get much clearer on what they are and how they work.
And now to Wave 2:
(5) The attempt to preserve existing levels of elite privilege, most notably in the concentrated power of the financial sector, is almost certainly doomed to fail. The manner in which it will fail, and the fallout that follows from the failure, are far less certain. Nor is the time-frame in any way certain. But the continued well-known (though routinely denied) problems of the financial sector have strong historical parallels from earlier historical examples. Such levels of inequality are simply not sustainable, unless we set off on a new historical tangent, in which case the result is likely to be deeply confrontational, if not bloody.
Connecting all the above with my previous diary, Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours", it is at least plausible that the creation of Progressive Block refusing to vote for fatally compromised legislation could trigger a much broader realignment of forces, resolving some of the contradictions referred to above. Underlying this potential is the objective reality that Obama's stated goals cannot be realized by the strategy of top-down bipartisan compromise.
This strategy has already produced a fatally undersized stimulus package, and is on the verge of producing similarly inadequate climate change legislation, with a similar fate facing health care reform. While there may be short-term political gains to be made just from passing anything, no matter how inadequate, such a strategy cannot hold for long. Whatever else it may be, it is definitely not a strategy for ensuring political dominance for a roughly-36-year-cycle of American political history.
The question, quite simply, is whether the various tensions at play can be tamed and contained by the political establishment, or if they will swing increasingly out of control, forcing actions that will in turn create further openings for progressives to bring pressure to bear, and advance new political agendas. The brief survey above is meant to suggest some of the tensions at play beneath the surface of the current play of GOP disarray and Democratic disappointment.
But we would be remiss to also not add the increasing role of international relations that are increasingly liberated from Washington control, and increasingly close to the American people. The Iranian election aftermath is the big example of this so far, but it's unlikely to be the last, though others will surely take much different forms. The simple fact is, we are finally becoming the global village that Marshall McLuhan wrote about, not just in fact, but in common experience. Iran's meaning is dense, dynamic, complex and immediate-it is half like a mirror to us, half like a lover ("I'll Be Your Mirror" as Nico sang.)
I would like to have made this a much tighter, neater narrative, but the very messiness I'm wallowing in is part of the point. That's no excuse really, just an admission that I'm not really on top of this, still struggling in early stages of trying to make sense of how a wide ranging confluence of forces is not about to leave us alone. But if I wait to have it all figured out, I know it will be too late.
The group mind is orders of magnitude smarter than any of us, and that's the biggest point of all to be made here. It's not so much that bloggers can change the world. It's that bloggers are part of the emerging world mind , and because we are here that world mind has a different configuration than if we didn't exist. We're a long, long way from having the influence that the brain-dead troglodytes of Versailles have, but as Greg Mitchell notes above, we have enough influence that we may well have kept them from pocketing the election for McCain-Palin. Thus, however painfully obvious it is to us how much power we don't have, our very presence has altered the world mind in ways we can't usually perceive.
If there are things we can do to be significantly more powerful, those things will primarily be by way of making stronger connections with others-and by way of taking leaps that usually can't be foreseen in advance. It's not us, individually, or even collectively as the blogosphere that has real power. It's larger interconnectivity of which we are a part. And if DC right now can't make heads nor tails of us, we should probably worry more about the larger circle of people in the world we have yet to connect to who make us feel the same way. There's an enormous world of outsiders out there, and our job is to include them all.
It's with this sense of our own intermediary place in the scheme of things that I conclude with some tentative suggestions about things we might do, collaborating with others, to alter the shape of the emerging global mind, the ecology of our shared imaginary landscape. None of this can we do alone. Or even do at all. At best, we can facilitate a coming together that creates it. In that spirit, here's a sample list of three briefly-described suggestive ideas:
(1) Intensifying connections between blogs, advocacy groups, experts and geographically specific constituencies capable of directly lobbying representatives at every level from city councils, up through state legislatures and on to Congress. A possibly-rear-view-mirror view of what this might look like would include a dense interconnection of national-, state-, legislative district-, county- and city-level blogs, with software capable of automatically republishing a diary from one blog to another, as well as a wide spectrum of media-embedding tools, and real-time online conferencing capabilities.
As an example, Chris's Friday diary "Senator Dorgan Supports The Public Option" showed the importance state blogs can have, pointing the way to potentially much greater influence in the future--particularly as an integrated part of more diverse coalition efforts:
In the effort to pass a public health care option, state blogs are going to be key. Today, North Decoder, a great state blog out of North Dakota, shows why.
Elected officials are very responsive to local media. As such, North Decoder has been pressing the state's two Democratic Senators to make a public statement on the public option. Entering today, Stand with Dr. Dean listed both Senators Conrad and Dorgan as "unknowns" on the public option. However, due to the efforts of North Decdorer to push Conrad and Dorgan to provide answers, we can now put Byron Dorgan in the "yes" column.
Imagine what it would be like to have similar coverage at every level of government, from city council districts on up. That sort of citizen media coverage, linked to organized activists could seriously challenge the power of special interests, particularly if we passed clean election laws nationwide. The point here is not what bloggers alone can do, but what we can play a role in bringing into being.
(2) Developing a coherent methodology of policy preference polling that can be deployed at any geographical level, so that broad public priorities can be identified, positions of overwhelming public consensus-such as current support for the public option-can be promoted as essential components of any proposed legislation, and so that areas of fundamental differences can be identified for intensive work on developing new perspectives and possibilities that can bring about new foundations for agreement.
The pioneering work on this has already been done, most notably by self-described "public interest" pollster Alan Kay, as described in his book Locating Consensus for Democracy - A Ten-Year U.S. Experiment . Kay developed a set of strategies-such as presenting people with a broad set of options relative to a general goal, asking sequences of questions designed to reveal underlying attitudes and preferences, and approaching the same subject from two or more different directions-that are far removed from the sorts of strategies that naturally fit well with elite political priorities.
Kay's work can be expanded on by integrating with the sort of polling by our old friend Sun Tzu who did the polling and analysis for the MyDD poll Chris conceived-polling that illuminates the nature of hidden blocks of voters. There is tremendous untapped potential here for understanding the nature of public opinion, simply because the kinds of knowledge I'm talking about is not of interest to political elites, and hence has not been the subject of sustained, systematic investigation. As a connective community space, the blogosphere could help change all that.
(3) Developing a multi-skill training program for citizen activists to empower people to do everything from citizen journalism to running a statewide campaign. This would include both traditional skill sets and ones that progressives have generally lagged in, such as communicating policy advocacy in terms of values, as advocated by George Lakoff. By shifting as much of this as possible into online media training formats, we can maximize the value of live trainers providing the kinds of sensitive, interactive instruction that cannot be duplicated in any other form.
None of the above can be done by bloggers alone. We cannot will them into existence. Which is why I offer them only as a list of suggestive ideas. My point is not that we should do these particular things, but to suggest that there is an entire realm of activities we can engage in that we have not even begun to consider that could substantially empower common citizens to become much more powerful political actors. And it would be a very good idea indeed for us to spend some time thinking about new ways to empower the other 290-some-million citizen outsiders in America today. |
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