Aug. 26, 2007
The Left, Changing Course, Goes Pragmatic
The New Republic: The Netroots Miss Their Stokely Carmichael Moment
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Seven of the eight leading Democratic Presidential candidates attend the Yearly Kos Convention's Presidential Leadership Forum in Chicago, Saturday, Aug. 4, 2007. (AP)
But if Nader explains why the netroots spurn third parties, he doesn't answer the more fundamental question of why they put so much faith in the electoral process at all. Winning elections was rarely a central concern for Students for a Democratic Society or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, never mind the gun-toting militants of the Black Panther Party. By contrast, Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong's 2006 book, "Crashing the Gate," is basically a primer on campaign strategy.
This metamorphosis owes itself in part to the cultural shifts of the past four decades. Postwar America was an exclusionary place that forced blacks, women, students, gays, and others to contort their identities into the narrow and often demeaning spaces permitted by the straight white men who made up the establishment. The movements of the 1960s, therefore especially later in the decade were as much about identity as about policy, aimed at allowing historically marginalized groups to decide for themselves how they looked, dressed, procreated, recreated, worked, and loved. And, even when these movements did seek political change, they often relied on institutions outside the electoral system. The civil rights movement operated largely through black churches and communities. In the Port Huron Statement, SDS argued that universities were a key vehicle for radical change. For the left, therefore, elections were not the only or even the best path to progress.
The netroots are different. Largely because of the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements, today's cultural mainstream is far broader, and the activists who attend YearlyKos fit in fine. The netroots may consist of political outsiders, but, unlike their progressive predecessors, they are not cultural ones. When Moulitsas talks about crashing the gate, he's not talking about social acceptance; he's talking about political power.
If the netroots work through the Democratic Party because they have political rather than cultural goals, they also do so because there aren't many other options. In today's America, few powerful institutions outside the electoral system are pushing for progressive change. The universities are politically quiet. Some union leaders want to make labor a national protest movement (and the netroots want that too), but, after decades of decline, it isn't at least not yet. Black activism has also moved firmly inside the political system. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who are part politicians, part agitators increasingly look like transitional figures, as activist ministers give way to black mayors and members of Congress who campaign and govern rather than protest. Perhaps the closest thing to a robust political movement outside today's two-party system is the campaign for immigrants' rights organized through unions, ethnic organizations, and churches which showed flashes of power earlier this year. But, while the civil rights and antiwar movements split the Democratic Party 40 years ago, labor's decision to abandon its historic fear of immigration means that immigrant activism and partisan activism can probably go hand in hand. The netroots doesn't have to choose.
Finally, there's one last deeper explanation for the netroots' pragmatism. It's the first broad-based liberal movement to emerge since communism's demise. In the Progressive era, it was conventional wisdom on the American left asserted by everyone from Eugene Debs to John Dewey that socialism was historically inevitable. Then, during the Depression until Stalin's alliance with Hitler and the news of his terrible crimes brought most leftists to their senses the Soviet Union became a real-life model of what revolution, as opposed to mere reform, could achieve. Even in the '60s, the shift towards outright resistance coincided with an enthusiasm for revolutions abroad. In Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, the New Left saw blueprints for the revolution it desired at home. Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd visited Hanoi, and Stokely Carmichael moved to West Africa, where he took the name Kwame Toure in honor of the leaders who had brought independence to Ghana and Guinea. "For generations," writes Todd Gitlin in his excellent book "The Sixties," "the American left has externalized good: we needed to tie our fates to someone, somewhere in the world, who was seizing the chances for a humane society."
Now that's impossible. Sean Penn can embrace Hugo Chαvez and Michael Moore may swoon over Cuban health care, but such radical camaraderie pales in comparison even to that of the Reagan years, when every major campus boasted a branch of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which championed El Salvador's Marxist FMLN. The Soviet Union is gone, and, virtually without exception, leftist revolutions in the third world have ended in tears. (Nelson Mandela, perhaps the only recent foreign leader to enjoy demigod status on the American left, underscores the point. Post-apartheid South Africa may be anti-American, but it is more capitalist than it was under white rule.) Even the social democracies of Western Europe don't shine as brightly as they did a few decades ago. With the cold war's end, there is simply no compelling ideological alternative beyond America's shores.
On the right, this has produced a utopian spasm: a belief that communism's demise proves capitalism's perfection, vindicating its purest, most deregulated form. But, on the left, it has made revolutionary rhetoric sound absurd. The netroots feel the American system has gone fundamentally wrong; that, in some profound ways, it has become less just, less decent, less free. And yet, the American system is all they have. It can be reformed, turned into a better version of itself. But it can't be overthrown because there is nothing with which to replace it. Markos Moulitsas is an idealist in a post-utopian age.
On balance, that's a very good thing. Revolutionary leftism has usually turned ugly. And the netroots' pragmatism their willingness to sully themselves with the compromise that electoral politics inevitably entails, their preference for achieving results rather than just bearing witness could make them a formidable force for change. There is, however, a danger. The sophisticated argument for outside agitation, for staking out an extreme position and refusing to budge, has always been that it empowers the pragmatists. It lets reformers tell people in power that, if they don't make reforms, all hell will break loose. In that way, Haywood empowered Gompers. Thomas empowered FDR. And Carmichael empowered Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King. The sophisticated argument against pure pragmatism is that, without an unpragmatic alternative, it doesn't work.
If Democrats take power, the absence of such an alternative in a post-Marxist, post-Nader age may prove the netroots' Achilles heel. What if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama doesn't fully withdraw from Iraq, or push hard for universal health care? What is the liberal blogosphere's implied threat? What is the institutional or even ideological basis for threatening to leave the Democratic mainstream, or the political game altogether, and join the threatening hordes outside? One day in the not-too-distant future, Markos Moulitsas may realize that Mike Gravel isn't such a waste of time after all.
By Peter Beinart
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See all 40 CommentsNo, 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...
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.
(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?)
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.
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.
Money. It never fails to corrupt, just ask Babs Bush.
USAisdway189,
Please get up to speed.
www.zeitgeistmovie.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
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