The Left, Changing Course, Goes Pragmatic

The New Republic: The Netroots Miss Their Stokely Carmichael Moment

(The New Republic)  This column was written by Peter Beinart.

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What does Markos Moulitsas have against Mike Gravel? The über-blogger recently called for exiling the longshot presidential candidate from future Democratic debates. "Mike Gravel is a waste of our time," he wrote in an August 7 post. "[He's] a running joke."

That's an odd assessment coming from the founder of Daily Kos. Every time Gravel gets behind a lectern, he flays the Democratic Party for knuckling under to militarists and corporations. In other words, he sounds just like Markos Moulitsas. Gravel was a hero of the anti-Vietnam fight and is arguably the most radical Democrat running for president. (Dennis Kucinich comes close, but Moulitsas doesn't much like him, either.) It's understandable that Moulitsas and his Kossacks wouldn't support a quixotic candidate like the former senator from Alaska, but you'd think they would at least afford him some respect — the way Ralph Reed treated Alan Keyes in 2000. You might even think they would want him on stage, pushing the Democratic debate to the left. Instead, they mock the poor guy. In the most recent poll of Kos readers, he got 1 percent.

Gravel's sin? He's impractical. It's not just that he doesn't have a prayer of becoming president — it's that he doesn't seem to care. The thing that set Moulitsas off was Gravel's discussion of his national sales tax at the YearlyKos presidential debate. Moulitsas disapproves of the tax on its merits, but what really angered him was Gravel's acknowledgement that the proposal would never pass. "At least Kucinich pretends his agenda matters," he fumed. "Gravel won't even give us that courtesy."

It's no secret that Moulitsas cares more about victory than ideology. He's said it repeatedly. But it's worth pausing for a moment to recognize how remarkable this ultra-pragmatism is. As long as there has been an American left, American leftists have been arguing about their relationship to "the system." Can fundamental change come through one of the two major parties, or through the ballot box at all? Or must the system itself be overthrown through some sort of direct action?

For at least a century, this debate has been playing itself out again and again. It's Samuel Gompers versus Bill Haywood in 1905. Walter Lippmann versus John Reed in 1917. Franklin Roosevelt versus Norman Thomas in 1932. Bayard Rustin versus Stokely Carmichael in 1964. Michael Harrington versus Tom Hayden in 1968. Al Gore versus Ralph Nader in 2000. The outsiders have generally lost, but they have been a powerful force. Haywood's Industrial Workers of the World — with its call for a revolutionary general strike — enjoyed real strength in the pre-World War I American West. In 1932, 53 prominent intellectuals, including THE NEW REPUBLIC's Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, signed a statement demanding "the establishment of a workers' and farmers' government which will usher in the Socialist Commonwealth." And by 1965, after Lyndon Johnson spurned the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and escalated the Vietnam war, much of the New Left abandoned electoral politics in favor of outright resistance.

Today, by contrast, the debate is so lopsided that it barely qualifies as a debate at all. Among the netroots, it's taken as a virtual given that the best way to fundamentally change America isn't just to work through the political system, but through one of the two major parties and, at the presidential level, through mainstream candidates. (Even in 2004, the netroots overwhelmingly favored Howard Dean — who at that point didn't want to withdraw troops from Iraq — over Kucinich, who did.) The netroots aren't infinitely flexible, of course. Had Joe Lieberman won the Democratic nomination in 2004, some might have bailed. But, by historical standards, they're at the pragmatic extreme. Perhaps no progressive movement in U.S. history has so wholly identified itself with one party and with the political system writ large. That's the movement's great strength and, potentially, its greatest weakness.

What explains the netroots' faith in the Democratic Party? First, as Jonathan Chait has noted ("The Left's New Machine," May 7, 2007), they are using the right as a model. Between 1964 and 1980, the conservative movement captured the GOP. And, since then, the divide between movement groups like the Christian Coalition and the party itself has largely disappeared, with right-wing activists taking over the party in state after state. But just because conservatives took over the GOP doesn't explain why the netroots were so confident they could do the same in the Democratic Party. After all, although movement conservatives faced cultural barriers in overthrowing old-guard Rockefeller Republicans, they never threatened the people who paid the party's bills. Indeed, starting in the 1970s, corporate America's new hostility to government regulation meshed nicely with the concerns of the Goldwaterites and Christian conservatives then crashing the GOP's gates. The Democratic Party, by contrast, relies on big donations from people sharply at odds with the economic leanings of the netroots. (Though the netroots may be changing that by becoming a significant source of donations themselves.) After the 1990s — when Democrats became more dependent on corporate money and Bill Clinton pushed an aggressive free-trade agenda — it would have been reasonable for some on the left to argue that a progressive movement couldn't take over the Democratic Party in the way conservatives took over the GOP, and that the anti-corporate left needed to build a party of its own.

In fact, someone did make that argument: Ralph Nader. And herein lies another explanation for the netroots' devotion to the Democrats. There have been lots of progressive third-party candidates in U.S. history — Eugene Debs, Robert La Follette, Norman Thomas, Henry Wallace — all arguing that, even if they didn't win, they would push American politics to the left. Whether they succeeded is debatable. But, until Nader, no progressive third-party candidate had dramatically pushed American politics to the right — as Nader did when he helped elect George W. Bush. In the process, he discredited progressive third parties for a generation. Had Nader — once a liberal icon — showed up at YearlyKos, he probably would have been booed.

[jimmyc1955]

Prinzowhales - I am curious what exactly what positions or policies that a true "peoples" candidate would hold?

[Razzl]

While there''s a lot of good material here if one were attempting to write a history of American leftism, it''s just a wrong way of looking at it to believe that today''s Progressives and internet liberals are somehow plugged into that long stream of ideological history and therefore somehow always in danger of destabilizing into primitive leftism. I got the impression, working continuously on college campuses, the best place to see the intellectual development of liberalism, that the Reagan years pretty much put an end to serious political leftism for a while. By the early ''90''s one would not have found young leftists passing out pamphlets in Central Square in Cambridge or running small bookstores; all historical continuities of radical leftism were broken. By the time the overlapping generations of liberals saw the need to revive politics in our lives because of Bush the youngest generation had before them the example of Bill Clinton, who cleverly preserved the public sector with his veto while knitting American capitalism into the world economy. Those of us who witnessed the prior generations through Vietnam were educated enough to see the wisdom of that pragmatic approach.

No, today''s generation of "netroots" liberals were not distilled from previous generations, most having no direct contact with prior movements, so much of the analysis above is invalid even though fascinating in its detail...

[sharncedar]

How much longer will they be able to play this fake left versus fake right thing to confuse the voters. It seemed old to me 10 years ago, I guess I have to dumb down a little more to understand the American voter. Maybe I ned to drink more, a few six packs, then bash my head against a brick wall for few hours, and perhaps I''ll be dumb enough to think that Hillary Clinton is a populist and George Bush is a fiscal conservative.

Let''s see, George Bush, the president who expanded the size of the government more than any other president, let''s see, Hillary Clinton, the rabid pro-war candidate who a week ago said the surge was working.

Gee I''m feeling sumb now. Ouch (bang) ouch (bang). Yes, I see it - we have to get out and vote for our guy, the liberal/conservative, so the liberal/conservative we hate doesn''t get into power. Yes, that makes sense. Please, raise my taxes and kill my children in Iraq, just don''t let the liberal/conservative be president.

[infidel_us]

I can hardly wait for the REAL race to get started. That''s when the RNC will start pulling out film of these ultra leftwing DNC condidates at this kook convention. Watching their collapse is going to be glorious! :)

[den_q_public]

I think the whole lib/conservative thing is wearing thin. No more real controversy here, just more name calling and attack ads. What is a ''centrist'' anyway, some one who plays the ends against the middle? In the end, what is it that YOU really want, compared to what you really NEED compared to what you END UP WITH. In reality, you get what you get regardless of who''s pretending to run the show. The "right" end up with a few goodies this time, next time the "left" will remove them or get their own goodies. In a funny kind of way, the "New" Republic isn''t really new at all, but dancing to an old tune. Should probably look a little harder at what they really got this time around, can''t really pin it on a donkey..even though a few DID donate some of their hide to political science. lol
(you know, clean up your own closet kids, too many toys in there to find any actual tools of the trade off.Begs the question of "who" is really being "Pragmatic", what ever that is supposed to mean?)

[prinzowhales]

KOS is simply another centrist organization like MoveOn used by the Establishment to set bounds on political debate. I call them "ropers"...like the Buchananites on the right, they try to round up straying dissenters and bring them back to the mainstream herd... back to casting the "lesser of two evils"-vote that keeps the Establishment in power.

If the Establishment candidates win--the American people loose. Moulitsas, with his CIA background, is rather like Gloria Steinem and ''Billy Blythe'' Clinton--prostituting themselves for the Establishment.

[usaisdway189]

Ahhhh, FeelJihadi is here. Thought he''d be in Beirut fighting alongside his fellow roaches...

Surprised though, that another "true believer"
Brian, agrees with me though. It is money - just as in the case of the Left Fascist Pig Andy Stern and his bogus SEIU 660.

But it is Mike who puts the icing on the cake. Thanks to pro-Islamonazi organizations like MoveOn.Org - supposedly created as a "non-partisan" group - lol - to defend the pervert and draft dodging bomber of Serbs, and Markos the Nutcase''s Daily Kostroite, the Democratic Party has been taken over by Anti-Semites, Neo-Nazis, former Klansmen and their real Plantation Slave lackeys like Boy Obama and Hymietown Jackson, and a bunch of non-serving cowards like Reid, Pelosi, Dean, Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Richardson, the Clintons and others who blatantly lie when they claim "they support the troops" - Osama''s perhaps, not America''s.

The Democratic Party - an adjunct branch of the American Nazi Party, courtesy of MoveOn.Org and the Daily Kostroite.

[mike71067]

Great. Seven of the eight DNC presidential candidates appearing at the left-wing fringe Daily Kos convention. I guess we now know which group of sicks now owns the Dumbocrat party. You know, there used to be the mainstream left, and the kooky left. Now it seems that fringe groups like MoveOn.org have taken over the party, and there is no mainstream left anymore - it''s been replaced by the kooky left.

[brianbwb-2009]

"So...I just wonder what happened in the families of Arianna Huffington, Markos Mousilitas and George Stephanopolis''''??? Posted by USAisdway189"

Money. It never fails to corrupt, just ask Babs Bush.

[feelfree1]

USAisdway189,

Please get up to speed.

www.zeitgeistmovie.com

[usaisdway189]

Most Greek people are wonderful and have brains, beauty, and intelligence.

They also have a visceral hate of totalitarism.

So...I just wonder what happened in the families of Arianna Huffington, Markos Mousilitas and George Stephanopolis''???

All of them have the intelligence - and stench - of pig manure.

lol.

[usaisdway189]

Most Greek people are wonderful and have brains, beauty, and intelligence.

They also have a visceral hate of totalitarism.

So...I just wonder what happened in the families of Arianna Huffington, Markos Mousilitas and George Stephanopolis''???

All of them have the intelligence - and stench - of pig manure.

lol.

[usaisdway189]

Andy Stern and Markos Moulistis'' mantra.

All workers are created equal, but some workers -pigs - are more equal than others.

Who caused 9/11? The United States of America because it didn''t give money or arms to Islamonazi terrorist.

Who is the greatest threat to world peace? Those dam Jooz.

Arise ye Nazis of starvation, arise ye Islamoappeasers of the earth.

[usaisdway189]

One of the guys invited as a special guest along with Hillary Shrew and Boy Obama to the Daily Kostroite hate fest was a bloke by the name of Andy Stern.

Stern is the head of the SEIU 660 union, an organization which you CANNOT leave if other workers vote it in, an organization which takes your wages, and it is mandatory.

An organization that claims to fight for the workers, but has often left them high and dry and defenceless against management. I know.
In L.A. County they declared a victory while at least two unions were still trying to get adequate c-o-s wages from management. Stern''s cronies walked away, leaving the County department to fend for itself. Result - part-time workers in that department lost medical benefits that they had worked hard to get.

While all that time Andy Stern was fighting - on the golf course - to get money, not for the workers, but for one John Kerry.

Stern and 660 - hypocrites, liars, and anti-American. And ANTI-WORKER. Just like Markos the Stalinist and his fascist Blame-America, Jew-baiting friends at the Daily Kostroite.

[brianbwb-2009]

The exchange between Socrates392 and LawyerTom1 illustrates how the obfuscation generated by the government - influenced media can incite even intelligent people to argue over the symptoms of a cold rather than addressing the root cause, corruption.

Teachers aren''t paid well because the states steal the money allocated for education, and the unions heads are simply bought off. Lawsuits prevail because in this "get rich by whatever means" zeitgeist, coupled with corporate greed and the aforementioned corruption, make it close to impossible to make a living the taking the "honest hard work" route.

It seems every eight years, the "right" moves ever farther into fascism, then the media pushes the left to follow, in order to capture the "mainstream".

"Conservatives" now accept deficit spending to finance an illegal war, that notion would have been heresy, as would have the abrogation of constitutional rights.

Liberals have given up the advocacy of worker rights, civil rights, equal opportunity and social responsibility, even going along with extending our illegal wars, also heresy.

There is no difference, save the labels...

[ekswitaj]

I wonder about the definition of pragmatic being used here. Contributing to the victory of a candidate who does not share progressive values in the name of some distant hope of taking over a party doesn''t seem like a particularly pragmatic course of action to me.

[timothyone-2009]

A winning Netroots candidate will have the threat of mobilizing his/her already antsy base. It will then be the threat itself at the helm of government. That win will carry the message "NOW F**K WITH US".

[feelfree1]

LawyerTom1,

Re: "Surely you are not saying let millions die so you can sit in your comfortable chair and throw brickbats at the Shrub and his team of idiots?"

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about here, or how it relates to me.

Re: "Clearly you have no practical idea how to make the world better, only to rant about the failures of the idiots currently in charge."

And you reached this sweeping generalization and summary judgement based on my one comment to you?

Are you serious?

[lawyertom1]

FeelFree1. Surely you are not saying let millions die so you can sit in your comfortable chair and throw brickbats at the Shrub and his team of idiots? It is a Hobsian world. We are blessed, which is why I hate the totalitarian policies of the current idiots, policies that do nothing to make us safer. Your rhetoric belies a disconnect from reality, of the type that some find comforting. Perhaps you do. Achieving positive results is very hard. Clearly you have no practical idea how to make the world better, only to rant about the failures of the idiots currently in charge. When you realize that ideology gets you nowhere, except among your cohort of fellow travelers, try considering what can be done to make life better for the vast majority, both at home and abroad.

[xzavierbrown]

I very much wish that Saddam was still alive, as he would be an extremely valuable witness in the war crimes tribunals against the Bush global terror network.

You sound like an apologist for the Democrats- the other Corporate/AIPAC-owned Party.

Posted by FeelFree1 at 10:15 PM : Aug 26, 2007
+ report abuse

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so you agree that the DNC is weak and incompetent?? and Nancy Pelosi is a sausage wallet? liberals..divided they fall