Now, I thought the 2003-2006 netroots was all about the 'fighting dems' that invigorated the Democratic Party with a strong sense of partisanship and Howard Dean's "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" candidacy.
The "netroots" is not about one thing. Never was, never could be. Lacking in centralized leadership and with millions of participants, there were always going to be competing motives and goals. To even attempt to define it as one single thing is to speak for huge swaths of its participants about which we know little. For my part, I always viewed it as small to medium sized part of a broad social transformation that is reshaping the entire social fabric of the nation. I began participating in it full-time because I viewed it as a particularly strong and useful engine to bring about wide ranging progressive change, the potential for which is embedded in larger demographic trends. The nation is becoming less white and less Christian at a rapid pace. The cost of accessing, publishing, and distributing information is declining rapidly through the Internet and portable devices like cell phones. And the new economic governing class, the creative class, has a decidedly more progressive value set than its predecessors. The netroots and the blogosphere are part of these larger trends, and I want to be involved in them, since they seem to hold an important key to unlocking something I have desired since I was a teenager: sweeping progressive chance in America.
However, I am also aware that my reasons for participating in the blogosphere, the netroots, the Democratic Party, and the broader progressive movement are probably quite different from the reasons that most people participate. I even conducted a survey of the netroots two years ago that indicated my personal goals, which are largely long-term and ideological, are quite a bit different from the majority of netroots activists, most of whom seem to think (or at least thought) that the necessary change could be quickly accomplished by replacing the disastrous leadership in Washington, D.C.. I think this is one of the reasons why when Matt makes a point about progressives being culled from potential leadership positions, or when I try to make a point about which voting groups Democrats should target, many readers will subsume those points under the Obama vs. Clinton rubric rather than the broader, long-term progressive framework in which they were intended. I don't want to speak for Matt, but I'm pretty sure his political goals are far too expansive to be contained under the Obama vs. Clinton campaign, and he is more concerned about having progressives in leadership positions in D.C. than about who wins the primary. In the same vein, I am far more concerned about building a long-term progressive, governing coalition than about who wins the Democratic nomination in 2008, 2004, 2012, or whenever. The implications those points have to the Obama vs. Clinton campaign as side notes to the more ideologically and movement orientated point. However, many others will have different goals from Matt and I, and those differences will invariably cause others to view our writing on these topics primarily within the context of Obama vs. Clinton, rather than the broader goal of building a long-term progressive governing majority.
Such differences of perspective are both inevitable and not negative. In fact, it is a very good sign that these widely distributed progressive trends have reached such a high point of participation where it is impossible to create a single definition of netroots goals, or a centralized leadership that can execute those goals. The early adopters of the movement are not only no longer in control, but we are not even representative of the movement anymore. No matter what bloggers say or do about the campaign, online activists are now pumping one million dollars a day to Hillary Clinton, and one and a half million dollars a day to Barack Obama. Whatever the movement was intended to be at its inception, it has grown to such a size and mass participation level that the most any campaign or organization can do to "control" at any given movement is provide a convincing enough argument to some of its participants to temporarily join in that effort. Obama right now has the largest share of that energy, but clearly Clinton has a huge amount as well. There are partisan campaigns that can tap the energy, and there are ideological campaigns that can tap that energy. As such, it is accurate to argue that Obama is the progressive movement, or that Clinton is, or that neither of them are. In the end, all of them are using some of the energy of the movement, and all of them have some of energy of the movement pitted against them. And really, that was even the case way back in 2003, when huge numbers of netroots activists drafted Wesley Clark into the campaign with defeating Howard Dean as one of their main goals. There were always conflicting and contradictory perspectives, motives and goals in the netroots, even in its early days. It simply can't be defined as having singular political motives or strategies. This is inevitable in such a widely distributed, decentralized network.
The progressive movement, the netroots, the blogosphere--none of it is about one thing. It never was, and the distribution is only becoming more widespread by the day. There will be some consolidation during the general election campaign, but once that is over the fracturing will continue apace. At the base of these wider demographic trends is a rapid movement toward a far more pluralistic society, both in terms of demographics and in terms of media distribution. Trying to find contradictions in those trends / that movement is shooting fish in a barrel, especially when you don't even bother to notice that the objections you raise were already accepted in the very article you are criticizing. One of the important things to keep in mind while participating in the movement is that not everyone will be doing so for the same reasons, and that apparent double standards and contradictions from an Obama vs. Clinton perspective are nothing of the sort from a broader, long-term movement perspective.
We all have different goals. Mine are not subsumed under Obama vs. Clinton, or about "fighting Dems" creating a more partisan Democartic base. One of those goals is to forge a winning electoral coalition that can support a progressive governing majority. If one candidate in a primary ha a modestly larger amount of that future coalition, from my perspective that is a perfectly logical reason to support that candidate. Deal with it.
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