Some of our esteemed contributors appear to disagree. They feel online political communities should provide marching orders and rally the base. I think this vision is too limited and will not be effective. Worse, it is unnecessary: there is no reason we cannot consider a spectrum of solutions, choose the most effective, then rally support for candidates who agree.
[Sco notes: Let me clarify. My comments were aimed toward the specific sites DailyKos and Democratic Underground. I’m not saying that there’s no place for policy discussions online, I just don’t think those two places are particularly good for that sort of thing anymore — at least not at the diary level. I’m all for places where reasoned discussion is the rule of the day, but unfortunately web communities don’t tend to scale upward very well in that manner.]
Finally, there is a difference of opinion about results to date. Some of us, I guess, feel quite satisfied. The election of Howard Dean as DNC Chair, for example, is cited as evidence for the power of the web. I think that to date, for all the attention they have garnered, web communities have proven to be of marginal, not decisive, importance. Dean was crushed in his race for President. The Boston Globe, not BMG or any other web community, is the most important source of political information in Massachusetts. To become more effective, we need to reach out, not turn inward.
Some specific Comments and Responses follow:
Sco: “The choir needs a place to get their marching orders. … They [Kos and myDD] are message machines, not think tanks.”
Cos: “Political impact comes primarily from getting people to do things, and one of the most effective ways of getting people to act, is to speak to the choir who already agrees with you, to inform them and/or to motivate them. Achieving political impact in this way is much easier, and more efficient, than doing it through reaching out to new groups and influencing their views to get them to come over to your side.”
Bob: “Cos, thank you very much for your thoughtful comments. I don’t discount what you write, but I think you need to keep the big picture in view. Dean lost. Kerry lost. The Bush administration is drawing up our budgets, setting our foreign policy, and appointing the judges. I didn’t say that choir preachers don’t have any influence, only that their influence is limited. I’ll give you that Dean won the DNC Chair in large part because of the blogosphere and that some candidates have used the web to raise money, but that is only a good start, not an end in itself. We need to change the terms of the debate by building a coalition of rationalists who can keep their eye focused on what works for the good of everyone (thus the “reality-based” part of our tagline) not on mobilizing a radical fringe. The latter strategy, although admittedly “much easier, and more efficient,” is not likely to produce any substantive change over the next 5-10-20 years. At best, in MHO it will score fleeting local successes, and maybe not even many of those.
Dude: “Well, I’d have to disagree here. When you have that many people coming together, it should be a good place to craft policy, not just to be a message machine. It should be a good place to discuss ideological arguments and craft the best ones, and also to craft good political strategy. That’s not how it’s evolved, for whatever reason, but it would bea good place for it.”
Andy: “I am with Bob and Dude. Kos in particular and MyDD as well, used to be places of ideas, that is what made the sites so great. But I have noticed over the last year that they aren’t about idealistic visions or even realistic plans and agendas. Instead much of the mega-blogosphere is becoming exactly what Washington is, a cesspool for partisan bickering, a tunnel forcing ever more narrow vision, and a battle field where even thinking that the other side could raise a valid point is tantamount to treason and solid reason for complete banishment. I turned to BMG because you all are still about discussion and debate. This is the same reason I started my own blog, my point of view would get shouted down on Kos so I figured I could fight the war the same way Kos did by starting a blog.
This is why I am really excited about the changes here at BMG. You guys are awesome for creating a community and hopefully we can, as a community, stay a little truer to the ideal than Kos has been. I feel more and more like he is selling out to get connected and that is ultimately what will kill the revolutionary power of the blog. I see a strange historical parallel between the blog and newspaper actually. Ponder that for a while.
Cos: “No. I’m all in favor of debating a broad spectrum of ideas, and welcoming as many new people as possible, but neither of those is a prerequisite for attaining and wielding political power. If that were true, how did the Christian far-right become so powerful? Decisive, even.
To become decisive, progressive communities need to learn and practice electoral politics. They need to run for office, volunteer on campaigns, contribute to campaigns, and get out the vote.
If they do all that while at the same time debating a broad spectrum of ideas and welcoming new people, so much the better – as I said, I’m all in favor of that. But your statement is false.
otherwise, we will have about as much impact as a preacher addressing a choir.
Preachers addressing their choirs can have a tremendous amount of political impact. Political impact comes primarily from getting people to do things, and one of the most effective ways of getting people to act, is to speak to the choir who already agrees with you, to inform them and/or to motivate them. Achieving political impact in this way is much easier, and more efficient, than doing it through reaching out to new groups and influencing their views to get them to come over to your side. There’s certainly an important place for both of these strategies, but to deny even the existence of the first is blindness.
My comments were aimed toward the specific sites DailyKos and Democratic Underground. I’m not saying that there’s no place for policy discussions online, I just don’t think those two places are particularly good for that sort of thing anymore — at least not at the diary level.
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I’m all for places where reasoned discussion is the rule of the day, but unfortunately web communities don’t tend to scale upward very well in that manner.
[ That post was getting unwieldy, and you copied your comment to this post, so I’ll copy my reply here, and hope discussion moves over here. ]
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I understand that you’re trying to advocate for the things you’d like to see more people do. I hope you’ll continue to advocate for those things, but making false claims is not an effective way to do it, because you’ll either turn people off or mislead them into believing false claims. I am looking at the big picture, I just think that you’re missing important pieces of it, or eliding over them in order to make your point, and in the process, writing misleading things.
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I didn’t say that choir preachers don’t have any influence, only that their influence is limited.
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Everyone’s influence is “limited” to some extent. Nobody has omnipotence here. But that’s just quibbling, because you’re clearly using “limited” as a near-synonym to “marginal” – what you’re saying is that they have very little influence, compared to others. And that’s simply not true.
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In fact, “choir preachers” in the metaphorical sense we’re using the term, actually have the most influence. They are among the most potent forces in politics, and for good reason. That doesn’t mean they are the be-all and end-all of politics, or that we shouldn’t strive for more. It does mean that belittling their importance and influence is very misleading. Nobody is more politically influential than those who use choir-preaching strategies. Again, how do you think the religious right got their “limited” influence over today’s government?
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Dismissing the influence of the online progressive movement with “Dean lost, Kerry lost” is myopic. I’ve seen it so often it feels like a tired cliche at this point, but the key is that it doesn’t mean what people keep using it to mean.
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1. Dean lost
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That would be a good illustration of your point, if what you’d actually said was something like this:
The progressive movement on the Internet has new and far-reaching power over politics in the US, but does not dominate it. Other forces, that have been around for longer, including the mass media, the conservative movement, and the major political parties, continue to exert their influence. The new progressive movement is now clearly an important player, but is not the most powerful of these players. Still, it’s remarkable how far and fast we’ve come in a few short years.
Dean’s emergence as a major candidate, loss to Kerry, founding of DFA, and election as head of the DNC, is a fairly good illustration of that. (And consider how many new Deanie/Reichie candidates have won local office around here recently!)
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But what you actually said was that we are “of marginal importance”. You undermine that claim when you bring up Dean. I think that’s because your claim is wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong to advocate what you’re advocating – in fact, I agree with much of it – but please don’t buttress your advocacy with counterproductive and plainly incorrect claims like that one. Hyperbole has its place, but when it’s false, it’s best avoided.
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2. Kerry lost
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Bush focused on a choir-preaching strategy. Kerry emphasized a “reach to the middle” strategy and emphasized it over the choir-preaching aspects of his campaign. Both strategies worked, but Bush’s worked better. Again, I think you’re undermining what you’re trying to say, with the examples you give.
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Also, I’m 100% confident that Dean had a better chance of beating Bush than Kerry did, and about 90% confident that Dean would have actually beaten Bush. And part of that is because Dean was much much better than Kerry at both choir-preaching and reaching out.
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(It’s actually a false dichotomy, if you believe Lakoff’s theory, which I do, but it’s so often misunderstood and misrepresented that I don’t want to contribute to the obfuscation by using it in brief without a full explanation of what I mean)
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People take the “Dean lost” cliche to some ridiculous extremes. I’ve actually read people write that Dean’s campaign showed that his strategy of focusing on Internet fundraising from small donors, and house parties, may not be the right way to go, because hey, he lost, didn’t he? Come on! Whatever the reasons may have been for Dean’s loss, weak fundraising certainly was not one of them! What you’re doing isn’t quite that extreme, but it’s along the same line.
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The latter strategy, although admittedly “much easier, and more efficient,” is not likely to produce any substantive change over the next 5-10-20 years.
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That, I think, is pure ideology. It’s a pretty generalization that is tempting to say and tempting to believe, but is not borne out by experience and history. Substantive political changes, even in recent American history, have come just as often from narrow but committed and active “choirs” as they have from broader coalitions. It’s great to pursue new coalitions and broad realignments, and I fully support you. But the fact is that the choir-preaching strategy is also a proven winner, that has allowed various groups to produce substantive change (both for the better and for the worse).
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Also, they’re not mutually exclusive. The most effective groups do both well. Advocating for the one, is not the same thing as advocating against the other. The former is productive (keep it up!), the latter is not necessarily so, and may be destructive. Just because we want to pursue newer, broader coalitions, doesn’t mean we need to attack the choir-preaching bases that may be providing important energy and activity for us.
OK, I agree, you are right. First, I wholeheartedly endorse your more effective characterization of Dean’s candidacy:
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The progressive movement on the Internet has new and far-reaching power over politics in the US, but does not dominate it. Other forces, that have been around for longer, including the mass media, the conservative movement, and the major political parties, continue to exert their influence. The new progressive movement is now clearly an important player, but is not the most powerful of these players. Still, it’s remarkable how far and fast we’ve come in a few short years.
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Second, I agree the example of Kerry’s failure could have been employed more effectively.
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Third, I agree the choir is an important element of the service. Let’s just make sure we are attracting as many parishioners as possible.
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Thanks for your advice.
Your post was excellent. Stick to every point you made because they were all right on the money. I have no idea what Cos is advocating. All he has done is try to “debunk” others while you actually put forward a strategy. The internet folks are sitting around marveling at the awesome force we have become on the internet yet that force really isn’t being used. I agree that small victories have been won. But for all the mystical power Cos says we progressives on the internet hold we have relatively little to show for it.
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DEAN LOST! Yes, his campaign was a campaign that got me to start dreaming again and I still love the guy but we must admit that the strategy employed was not a winning one because, you know, HE LOST! Kerry was a joke and that is all that needs to be said about him. He was a terrible candidate, he is a terrible leader, and he was the product of the machine element of the Party and we KNOW that is a losing strategy. Cos’s talk about being 90% and 100% sure of things is ridiculous, who is he? I am certain that Dean could have won too but I don’t see what that adds to the discussion, speculation is hardly a good reason rally around an idea.
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The biggest problem we face is a failure to lead. We are so busy figuring out which path to take that we are not taking a path and that is why Republicans are winning. We are out of ideas, we are bankrupt when it comes to vision, and we lack a reason to give to the people of this country on why they should move forward with us and not them. Where is the vision and the dreams of JFK? Where is the tenacity of Truman? Where have our leaders gone? I like what Bob said originally because it was a plan; it was about finding the candidates we want and getting them to run and then making sure they had what was needed to do so. Bob talks of action while Cos talks of I don’t know what.
I think you missed my comment on Bob’s previous post, where I listed a few examples of the progressive online community showing its influence. There are many, many, many more. Just because we haven’t beaten all our opponents and gotten everything we want yet, doesn’t mean we have “nothing to show for it” or “marginal influence”. It just means we can, and should, strive for more. On that point, I agree with you and Bob. But belittling how remarkably far we’ve come in such a very short time, is counterproductive, misleading, and falsely demoralizing. That’s why I’ve engaged this debate.
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The other half of what I’m advocating in this debate is that “preaching to the choir” is an important and effective method of achieving political power. I’m not saying it’s the only thing we should do, but again, I think belittling it is counterproductive and misleaing. Too many people pooh-pooh “preaching to the choir” without realizing how important and powerful it actually is, when used to inform and motivate activists to act.
but we must admit that the strategy employed was not a winning one because, you know, HE LOST!
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That goes to the heart of the matter that I addressed in a couple of my comments. By oversimplifying Dean’s campaign, as if there was just one “strategy”, and summarizing the result as simply “he lost”, you’re taking all the wrong lessons from the Dean campaign. There are many things the campaign did well and others that it did not do well. I could, and someday will, go into great detail about why Dean ended up not winning the nomination.
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First of all, Dean did not “lose”. By any reasonable measure, he was either 2nd or 3rd out of 11 (2nd, in my opinion), when most political observers at the beginning of the campaign would not have predicted that he had any chance of even being in the upper half of the field. Not only did he run a surprisingly strong campaign, but through doing so he created a lasting movement that continues to organize today. The number of candidates who have been elected to state and local offices around the country already, who would not have been and in many cases might not have even run if it weren’t for Dean, is already in the hundreds, and likely to grow. And he further parlayed that strong campaign, and the support of the movement that came out of it, into becoming head of the Democratic party. That’s some real influence!
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The reasons Kerry beat Dean are things like: miscommunication about the meaning of 1’s between Iowa and campaign headquarters, and a failure to train precinct captains in Iowa; Kerry’s decision to fire his campaign manager and hire Mary Beth Cahill, and Cahill’s bold move into Iowa; the multiplier effect of the unprecedentedly close timing of the first two states; the dynamics of mass media and the “frontrunner” effect; bad IT in Iowa; and several other things.
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There are also plenty reasons Dean did so remarkably well, despite his poor starting positions: A brilliant campaign message in the early stage; another brilliant campaign message later on; ceding control to the grassroots and supporting them; excellent use of the Internet to empower organizers, raise money, and leverage media; a great candidate; Marshall Ganz style house meeting organizing in NH; meetups and innovative grassroots groups that sprang from them; and many other things.
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Saying “we must admit that the strategy employed was not a winning one” is pointless. What strategy are you talking about? What did and didn’t happen? What changes would you recommend? By generally dismissing the whole thing, you’re not only missing the point, you’re actually mis-learning. You’re “learning” lessons that are the opposite of reality.
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You’re not alone. Many other people do this. That’s another reason why I engage in this debate.
Since I’m neglecting my family at holiday time, I’ll be brief: We all need to be careful with our counter-factuals here. The question is not, “Did Dean win or lose?” The question is “How well would Dean have done without (pick one) the influence of the internet/grassroots activism/motivating the base?” And that’s a really dicey question… actually unanswerable.
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And really, Bob has productively posed a central question facing us as a national minority party: Do we A. plant a flag, stand tall and strong, and encourage people to rally around it? Or B. Try to move the flag to where the most people are?
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To my mind, the smarter strategy is A, which to my mind is why this blog refers to itself as “reality-based”: Get your policy right, and then staunchly defend it, with guts and heart, with rationality and emotional resonance. And I actually don’t think that folks here disagree with that.
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Whether the main point of Bob’s post at Kos or the MTA strike really have anything to do with this, I can’t say. đŸ™‚
Do any of us really disagree?
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What I hear from Cos is: don’t neglect the base; don’t dismiss the base; build on the base.
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What I hear from Andy is: the base alone is not enough to win; we need to do more; we need to be bold and lead; we must not rest on laurels real or imagined.
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My conclusions: applaud the base; be forthright about our limitations; reach out for new ideas to broaden our appeal and make winning, by which I mean a #1 finish nationwide and nothing less, more likely.
I blogged about this at Blog for Cambridge, but I’ll sum it up here. I think the progressive blogosphere is first and foremost about building a progressive community and a progressive movement. So there is room for discussion and dissent, and clearly people hurling nasty commentary back and forth is counter-productive. It’s a by-product of the online world, and it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon, though.
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But being a member of a community means that you have a team and you stick up for it. In particular, that means that you support your allies, and that you think carefully before criticizing your allies. The labor movement is one of our best allies. It is hurting mightily now, and public employees are one of the few areas where there is real promise for growth. So that means that you think double-extra-super-carefully before you undercut efforts to hold together the public employee labor movement.
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Union members should be welcome in our community, online and offline. Not only are they hard-working folk, they are among our most reliable allies for everything from envelope-stuffing to fund-raising and ballot-casting. By and large, they also stick up for some of the most important components of broad economic equality – decent wages, health care coverage, pension benefits – not just for their own members, but for
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When we thrash them as harshly as BMG did over the past week, we are turning them away. Some of those posts were not far off from standard conservative anti-union talking points. These are the talking points used to shatter our coalition and weaken our allies. If the conservatives have their way and unions are further seriously weakened, progressives will be certain losers at the polls for decades to come, and the Robber Baron era will seem like a golden age of economic equality. So why are we peddling these talking points? Why would we ever want to undercut our best friends?
And when a rogue anti-union local breaks the law, hurts the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community, and refuses reasonable and fair procedures like arbitration they deserve every bit of criticism they get. Supporting strikers anytime, anywhere is not progressive or pro-labor, or pro-union, it’s regressive and exactly the kind of no-compremise attitide that destroyed much of the labor movement in Great Britain, has weakened organized labor terribly in this country, and in MHO helps account for the marginalization (there’s that word again) of the progressive movement in the U.S. right now (although we’re coming on strong and have great days ahead, I agree).
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I personally welcome union members into this community and will fight for their legal rights and reasonable constructive positions as hard as I can. If there are any unions out there in Massachusetts that are being treated unfairly, please ask them to come on over here and tell us their story so we can learn more and figure out how to do our best to support them.
Thanks to everyone so far who’ve been so thoughtful.
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I think we do need to not just sum up the Dean candidacy as “he lost, thus his strategy failed.” There were a lot of forces at play. For one thing, the Democratic establishment’s “Anybody But Dean” tilt really did hurt him. And Iowa might have been a little too mainstream for him to really win. If Clark and Gephardt hadn’t been in that race, Dean would have come in well behind Kerry. It just wasn’t a great state for Dean.
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All of that said, there is plenty that can be taken from the Dean campaign’s foray into the blogosphere.
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There is a lot of organizational power available on the internet. Motivating the base is part of that. The choir often sits stagnant for months or years at a time, waiting to be energized. I think we’ve seen from Dean, from MoveOn, even from Kerry to some degree what that can look like. Not just raising money, but talking. It’s the conversations that are so important, more than the money.
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But if we progressives really want to make a difference on the political stage, we have to find ways to frame our arguments better. We have to find ways to show how what we believe isn’t just good for progressives, but that there is a larger good. I think these blogs give us an opportunity to discuss things and mold our views and come up with ideas and language and even just practice writing them down in a way that we can then take our results to a political stage and offer them up in a way that can be framed for a larger benefit. There are so many intelligent people, so many intelligent ideas, and so many of us who are talking about these things have a chance to take it all in and bring our ideas to other forums.
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So long as all we have is “progressive ideas”, the impact we have won’t be great. We can win some smaller campaigns here and there. We can get places like Cambridge and Jamaica Plain and Amherst riled up and motivated. And, by the way, it feels really really good to do that. But our real impact can be having conversations that bring those ideas outside of our circle and to political groups that may not even know how close their views are to ours.
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So I guess I do agree with Bob, that if Kos is coming to a point where they banish people for having moderate views, then they are missing the point. Getting those views into the conversation is the only way we’re going to have a chance to learn how others think, and figure out ways to bring them closer to us. No, we’re never going to convince a moderate to give up his views and become a liberal. But we certainly can persuade him that ideas that seem progressive may actually not be. If the argument can be framed to win one new voter, then it can be framed to win others.
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Over the last few years, I’ve participated on a messageboard of mixed political views, and I feel my own views have come into much sharper focus having the ability to debate a broader range of ideas. I think we can all benefit from that.
I mostly agree with your thoughts, but I have a different prescription. Or rather, a different emphasis. I do support bringing ideas to new people, and broadening our support – and I’ve done things towards that end all over the country, as I’ve noted in other comments. However, I don’t think that’s what determines how great our impact will be.
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Our impact will be determined primarily by one thing, and it’s pretty simple: participating in electoral politics. That means volunteering on campaigns, working for campaigns, running for office, attending hearings at the state house, talking to our representatives on a regular basis – doing all of those things together. Even if we never broadened our appeal beyond our “base” – the people who already mostly agree with us – even if we never did that at all, if all we did was simply get most of that base actively engaged in electoral politics, we would completely dominate this country. At least until everyone else started doing the same thing. And then we’d have real democracy, and we could move on to broadening our coalition.
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I’m not saying we shouldn’t reach out, right now, mind you. I want to do that. All I’m saying is, it’s not something we need to do to achieve political power at the current time. Nor is it even a particularly effective way of doing so, compared to simply participating in electoral politics.
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We can win some smaller campaigns here and there. We can get places like Cambridge and Jamaica Plain and Amherst riled up and motivated.
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We’ve only done that to a small excent (well, we’ve got Somerville pretty damn well riled up, but we’re not doing nearly so well with Cambridge and JP), and yet it has already reverberated. A single election for state rep can up-end the politics of the entire state, as Carl Sciortino showed. Couple that with one or two more, as actually happened, and you can turn a statewide tide. What elected officials really respect and fear, far more than “reaching out” or the broad feelings of the public, is a group that can focus on campaigns it deems important and can deliver the things those campaigns most need – donors, volunteers, and getting out the vote.
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Does MassEquality reach out to its opponents? No. It’s near the bottom of their list, if it’s on their list at all.
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Is MassEquality the most potent force in Massachusetts politics today? Unquestionably yes.
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Has MassEquality, in coalition with groups that fully agree with it (DFA and Progressive Dems and so forth), had a “great impact”? Yes. On a national scale.
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If we want to have a real impact, we should do what MassEquality does: engage in local campaigns.
(And I do, oh how I do! đŸ™‚