Eyewitness Testimony

(9 AM – promoted by TheMomCat)

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Beyond Netroots Nation – The Progressive Blogosphere vs. The Democratic Establishment

By one_outer, featured at Firedog Lake (also top of the Recommended List)

Monday June 20, 2011 5:15 am

It was in speaking with fellow rank and file netroots types that I soon realized what was really going on at this conference. The dominant theme of the conference was not chosen, intended, or likely desired by any of the organizers. It wasn’t discussed by any of the panels or speakers I saw. Instead, it was in the halls, in the questions, and on the lips of those without an exhibitor, speaker, or media badge.

…

Everywhere at NN11 there were media consultants, organizing consultants, all manner of firms doing everything from polling to new media. All for campaigns, parties and anyone else that can afford them. I wrote about some of these folks yesterday. They are not capable of questioning the rationale of the campaigns they work on because the system works for them. Anything you want, just organize for a candidate and work hard enough and it can happen. Magic thinking, all self serving, and almost all genuinely self deceiving as opposed to knowingly misrepresenting the electoral choices we have every two years.

These professional political types are well on their way to full commodification of progressive politics for their own gain, as the elite gatekeepers of progressive votes, volunteer hours, and wallets. These folks, whether they realize it personally or not, see all the progressives that aren’t them as part of their business model. In their business model what is in our best interest is what works for them and their employers – any other view is unserious and bound to help the scary Republicans.

The professional class in DC sees a world in which there is no alternative, a world in which our goals and salvation runs through them and only through them. And they’re panicking – they know they’re losing us and don’t know what to do. After all, why would everyone with a microphone volunteer their thoughts on the enthusiasm and voting problem if they weren’t scared shitless they were going to lose all of us – and our readers!?

The countervailing force to the Democratic establishment is us, the bloggers, who make these communities what they are and who all know that we have been misled and betrayed on some level. These folks see the choice in front of them. They are seeing that there is an avenue of investigation into activism other than Democratic politics.

These folks, from FDL and dKos and everywhere else, didn’t get into progressive politics to protect their own little turf, or bump their salary, or get their ego stroked by networking. They did not get involved to select a nominee (and we did – Obama would not be president without the support of the netroots during the nomination fight) only to watch that man as president betray their principles and their belief in him, to say nothing of the spineless and corrupted Democrats in Congress. They do not see themselves as cogs in an establishment political system that merely calls itself “progressive”. They got involved to change a country and a world. And increasingly they are seeing the path forward as around the Democratic establishment rather than through it.

These folks know they have a choice, and they are taking that choice seriously. Netroots Nation is a major data point in how people will make that choice. By that measure, the establishment failed miserably. Will progressives now take the chance to jump ship, chart a new course in keeping with our independent spirit, or will be be subsumed by scare tactics and stern talking to’s?

Are we really the kind of fucking retards that will allow ourselves to be used and thrown away twice?

Some musings by Jane Hamsher below.

Dan Pfeiffer only made things worse the next day.  DailyKos’s Khali Joy Gray did a fine job of moderating the discussion with Pfieffer, and asked about a 1996 candidate survey in which Obama indicated he supported gay marriage.  Pfeiffer maintained that Obama didn’t actually fill out that survey himself.  I’m not sure it was possible to offer a worse answer to that question, but Tracy Baim, the editor who published the survey at the time, stands by the paper’s original reporting that Obama’s signature was very much attached to the questionnaire.

The entire event was very symptomatic of the problem that the White House will have engaging progressives in the next election and rallying them behind the President.  On the same day that Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reported that “Obama’s Relationship With Gay Rights Advocates Thaws In Time For 2012,” the Obama Justice Department was scheduling a date to put Dan Choi on trial for protesting in front of the White House – the first person since Alice Paul in 1917 to be brought up on federal charges for doing so, according to Choi’s attorney.

Coddling donors doesn’t equate with meaningful action, but the White House consistently conflates the two.

Dan Pfieffer was dispatched to scold the Daily Kos community for not being supportive enough of the President, and to let them know that if they don’t get in line, they’ll be responsible for putting a Republican in office.  It was a weak and petty message that did not even come close to addressing the concerns that all Americans share right now.  It isn’t only the Netroots Nation attendees who have serious questions about the economy, jobs, civil liberties, social security, medicare, taxes, accountability and a host of other critical issues that the President seems to have reversed himself on since the 2008 campaign.

The anonymous trolls who flood social media channels with blind obedience to the White House were almost nowhere to be found at Netroots Nation 2011, while the people who were willing to match their faces to their names don’t seem willing to accept “better than Sarah Palin” as a sufficient response to the problems the country faces right now.  It might behoove some enterprising journalists to start asking why these mysterious people who spend all day long cheering the President and attacking his critics on social networking sites apparently don’t want to show their faces.