Yesterday, I tested out the idea that what we are dealing with in Congress is a nominally Democratic majority but an effective Republican working majority. I mostly pinned this on the Blue Dog swing bloc and a conservative Senate, but there are other important factors at work. The conversation was really amazing, and punctured some holes in my piece.
The fact is, things have changed quite a bit. I'm friendly with a lawyer in a major executive branch agency, and she told me that the investigations going on by Congress are allowing her to do her job. Steve Novick, candidate for Senate in Oregon (who is really quite terrific), told me the same thing about friends he has in the Federal bureaucracy. Governance itself is getting better, or at least has stopped getting worse. So Blue Dogs are not Republicans.
There are other weaknesses in what I wrote, and the commenters pointed them out. In particular, this comment by Paul Rosenberg is I think accurate, as he argues that we are facing a conservative but not right-wing Blue Dog/DLC bloc combined with an anti-progressive elite consensus in the form of a hostile media establishment, a hostile think tank and academic structure, a hostile regulatory structure, a hostile set of cultural leaders and a set of old world economic incentives for elites.
I'm going to revise my earlier title, and argue that while we don't have a Republican working majority, we do have a conservative working majority to contend with. Most of the strategic problems I highlighted in the original piece remain, with the additional need to attack and/or subvert elite structures. The irony, or perhaps the not entirely-coincidental pattern of the Open Left, is that we're all at once going after the right-wing, their Blue Dog enablers, and the elite structures that love them.
While the Blue Dogs and the DLC Dems are by no means progressive, neither are they rightwing. They are conservative on some issues, to be sure. And they readily use conservative--sometimes even rightwing frames. But their voting records overall are almost entirely to the left of virtually the entire Republican Party. This is partly because the Democratic brand still means something to them--or, more importantly, it still means something to those who voted them into office. But that's not nothing, particularly since so many Boll Wevills or their political heirs moved over to the GOP some time ago.
I'm by no means offering apologies for the Blue Dogs and DLC Dems. I would like to get rid of the whole lot of them--particularly because I think it's a lie (aka a "self-fullfilling prophecy") that progressives can't win in their districts. But I think it's important to recognize that the political landscape is more nuanced than a simple progressive/rightwing dichotomy...
While I still think that you're conclusions are more sound overall than not, I draw one important distinction: I don't think that Bush does have a governing majority, much less a man-date. What he does have that you haven't talked about is an anti-progessive elite consensus more unified than anything this country has seen since the 1920s, which the netroots encounters most directly in the form of the media, but which has also been highlighted more recently in the form of the foreign policy establishment.
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