As a follow-up to David's post from earlier today on whether we are a movement or a political party, I felt it was necessary to chime in an re-iterate an argument I made on Open Left nine months ago: there is no progressive movement as such (see The Medium Is the Movement, Yes, The Medium Is the Movement, The Value Positive Internet for the earlier argument). Lacking formalized goals, hierarchy (although there is no "flat" blogosphere, of course), or participation criteria, the progressive netroots are, instead of a movement, an outgrowth of a broader social re-organization instigated by the self-publishing, public sphere multiplying, network neutral Internet. It is changing our daily interaction with cultural production, with the workplace, with social interaction and, yes, with political institutions as well. However, the political changes often described as "people powered politics" are only part of a larger re-organization.
In their articles today on how "the left" is failing under the Obama administration John Judis and Glenn Greenwald decry the lack of a mass popular movement agitating all political actors, including President Obama, to enact a specific policy agenda. However, the decentralized, self-producing, public sphere multiplying reorganization of our society brought on by the self-publishing, network neutral Internet is in direct contradiction with the vision of a discrete, hierarchical organization working to enact specific policy agenda. We are well past the point of being able to create new, large, hierarchical organizations to agitate the government on behalf of a specific, left-wing policy agenda. That just isn't going to happen anymore.
The relationships between individuals and the larger institutions in which they participate are now highly decentralized and fluid. The trend in that direction will only continue. As such, even mass membership institutions themselves will be variable in how, and why, they continue to operate. Their goals will be vague, and even those vague goals will not be fixed. This is less comment on the state of the American Left than it is a comment on broader changes in our largest cultural institutions. There is simply no way for the sort of left-wing movement implied by Judis and Greenwald to come into existing given our larger societal trends.
It is a new world, more in line with The Uprising that David describes or the Taking On the System that Markos describes. Any new American Left will reflect these larger trends. It should be judged not by the standards of a type of societal organization that is no longer possible.
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