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For most Democrats, election night of 2006 was a happy experience. You saw your candidate win, you saw Democrats take over the reigns of power, and you were proud of the work you did to make this happen. I spent election night in Connecticut, with Tim Tagaris, David Sirota, and the rest of the Lamont crew hoping that the early returns which showed us getting crushed were statistic anomalies. They weren't. We were crushed. And if you read my analysis of the Lamont race throughout 2006, I spent time making the argument that the fight was really between two political forces - the new machine driven by internet progressive whites, African-American progressives, and labor dissidents, and the old machine of Beltway lobbyists, Republican and Democratic elites, Broderite media creatures, 'liberal' single issue groups and old labor leaders. And of course, Lamont lost. Now you could make the argument that Lamont was a flawed candidate, but there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. We just couldn't persuade enough voters that Lieberman did not deserve the job of Senator from Connecticut.
This was not a rational choice, but a choice borne of insufficient information and organizing. I remember spending time with one woman, a strong antiwar liberal who was volunteering at the polls for Lieberman. I offered her some cake, and she demurred, citing diabetes. And then she said 'Besides, I have donuts in the car'. That fundamental unwillingness to look yourself in the race and recognize your own error, as she was unwilling to do (and as I was unwilling to do in 2002 when I supported the war in Iraq), strikes me as an apt metaphor for where we are now.
So while others might have been happy about the Democratic takeover, and while I was really jazzed when Speaker Pelosi became the first woman Speaker of the House, I did not feel a sense of victory that night. I felt angry and alienated, bitter about the betrayal that was coming. I had been through the draft Clark movement, and there was a similar moment the night he declared for President on October 19th. The crowd around me was happy and jubilant, celebrating a successful draft effort. I knew, but couldn't and wouldn't communicate to these joyful people, that the DC insiders were already crushing the campaign.
Many of us have been through similar experiences over the years. Betrayal of activists by Democratic leaders is a consistent theme of Democratic politics, and it has created enormous bad will that we saw explicitly in the Moveon condemnation in the House and Senate. This is just how things work. And since election night, I've been in a sort of angry and cynical mood, embittered at the institutional power structures that took our money and our volunteering and turned around and laughed at us.
About two weeks ago, I pulled out of it. A wonderful mentor of mine, Roger Kennedy, helped me realize that assuming bad faith on everyone's part is cowardly and lazy, and that good and bad things will happen in every administration. Right now, there's a crisis of confidence among progressive insiders and operatives that I know. They feel immensely upset and frustrated that they can't deliver on ending the war, and feel misunderstood by the grassroots that apparently hates and insults them. At the same time, the smartest and best operatives I know, the ones who came into politics in 2004, are not working for a Presidential campaign, but are working to build independent institutions, or in some cases, leaving politics.
Unfortunately, the Democracy Alliance and new funding channels just don't work, and Howard Dean's tenure at the DNC has been a complete failure to date at encouraging any political entrepreneurship. Dean is supposed to be our champion, and he has been giving great speeches, but he really has done almost nothing to empower progressives. He's never even written a diary on Dailykos. At the same time, the blogosphere chugs onward, with Media Matters, TPM, Dailykos, etc, creating a constant progressive din. Moveon has stepped up and gotten smacked in the face, and Color of Change and Ella Baker have become the face of progressive African-American internet leadership. There's consolidation in the progressive space, and USA Action and True Majority merge, heralding future mergers.
There's not a lot of great news on the horizon. Hillary Clinton's Presidency will not be a good one for progressives, though she will investigate the right and there will be bright spots (hopefully Wes Clark as Secretary of Defense). Still, Bush's awful morbid fog of death over our political system, a fog that prevents all thought of governing, will be lifted, and that will open tremendous new possibilities.
Little illustrates where we are than the utter chaos in the House. Speaker Pelosi is just not in control of the agenda, with Hoyer consistently undercutting her along with the Bush dogs to enable Bush to remain in Iraq. She cannot prevent bad legislation from passing, and she cannot force good legislation to move. I hope she starts to be upfront with her lack of a progressive majority, and begins to ask for help through surrogates like Ed Markey, Hilda Solis, and George Miller. I'm reminded of the statement from Rahm Emanuel after the blank check bill, when he pretended that the funding for the war with no restrictions was the first step in holding Bush accountable. That central lie caused a breach of trust between activist progressives and Democratic leaders that has never healed, because Democratic leaders have never bothered to recognize we don't like being lied to.
The House is in obvious chaos. That's not a bad thing. It's what happens in moments of realignment. Out with the old, in with the new, only, the old tend to fight back pretty hard since they are organized and know where the bodies are buried and the new don't have their shit together.
We aren't ready to take power, and won't be ready for another eight years. That doesn't mean we won't affect things and then in eight years a fully formed progressive beast will swoop in from the sky. It simply means our impact will be on the margins, as we build the networks of staffers, intellectuals, labor and business leaders, candidates, and political operatives necessary to govern.
UPDATE: I'm beginning to read about Complexity Economics in Eric Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth. Complexity economics explains non-market phenomena like the internet by building a new framework for economic analysis that relies more on ecology and cognitive science than stale models of perfect markets. Historically speaking, complexity economics is the intellectual analogue to the Chicago school of economics in the 1960s that gave birth to the now-dominant Law and Economics model of political analysis through which all our legislation must fit. Law and Economics can't explain things like the internet, which is a big problem, and Naomi Klein's The Schock Doctrine is ultimately a devastating indictment of scions of the Chicago school like Milton Friedman, who was both an economic and a neoconservative Machievellian strategist. Klein, who came from the anti-globalization movement, and Beinhocker, who comes from the global business elitist firm McKinsey, are or will be critical movement thinkers with substantial and meaningful impacts, just as Van Jones and James Rucker will be figuring out how to scale what they do.
There are big forces at work that are on our side, intellectual currents and new social networks. Merging these is no small challenge. I suppose this is what bugs me about the Matt Bai-school of narrow thinkers more than anything, their complete failure to see anything outside of their own social worlds. As a result, they don't situate the blogs in a larger historical context, and think that the progressive movement is contained by Moveon and a few rich billionaires.
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