Tag: Netroots

Lately, I find it more and more difficult to come and talk to you here.  It is hard for me to do so without saying at all times that I feel strongly that we have lost our path, are wandering further and further from it, and that our new route leads only to disaster.  And what is hardest for me is the feeling that many of us are the leaders of our departure.

The crisis before us has been well-recounted, and I do not wish to revisit all of it.  But certain things are absolute: Our constitutional rights have been repeatedly abrogated, violated, and removed by our government.  This same government, of and by the American people, has blatantly and openly committed numerous war crimes, and indeed many candidates for the highest political office in the land openly proclaim that they will continue to commit war crimes should they be elected.  This same government, having collected more taxes than any other in history and spent even more than that, also openly states that it can not and will not account for where billions of those tax dollars have gone.  This same government has led our nation into a war which has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and has neither success nor victory in sight, yet as every other nation allied with us is withdrawing, our government has escalated our involvement.

As bloggers, all of us have played an important role in bringing these facts to the American people, who have rightly risen in indignation which crosses all racial, social, political and economic boundaries.  We have played an essential role in highlighting how important these actions by our government, a government which we permit to act in our name based on the premise that we ourselves have formed it by contractual agreement in the Constitution, damage the most fundamental nature of what we ourselves are – a nation of free citizens forming a democratic Republic by choice.

Put simply, a United States of America where the government violates its own laws and treaties to commit war crimes, where tax revenues disappear without the people being told of its use, where the government refuses to allow citizens the right to hear evidence against them and tortures them into giving evidence against themselves is a nation with neither meaning nor significance.  In such a United States, we cease to be citizens and become serfs.

Matt Yglesias sparks the retrospective.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Digby on Abraham Lincoln.

Kid Oakland on Being a Fighting Democrat.

Me on Richard Hofstadter, Lincoln, FDR and Obama.

List some of your picks and include one of your own so I look less of an egomaniac.

One of the biggest problems of the Netroots remains its inability to take criticism. Consider this post from Matt Stoller:

Frank Rich wrote a column called ‘The Good Germans’.  He spends a bunch of column inches lamenting how ‘we’ have let the war go on, and are as complicit as the Germans during the Nazi regime.  Here’s the nub:

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

And yet, last month, here’s Frank Rich.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the “General Betray-Us” headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction.

Rich is operating according to the rules of the media elite.  It’s ok to whine about the problem, but try to do anything about it and you’re getting very much uncivil, sir.

Um Matt, it was not the incivility, it was the stupidity. The Netroots’ problem on Move On, indeed, regarding ANY criticism of the Netroots, is the uncheckable impulse to attack the criticizer instead of considering the point. Matt might be interested to learn that Frank Rich was harshly critical of General Petraeus in repeated columns, including in the very column cited by Stoller.

It so happens that I myself was subject to criticism in a Frank Rich column:

It’s a mistake imo to talk about “the netroots” as if it’s a something instead of many things, because it gets thinking about what can be done off on the wrong foot right from the start. It’s like saying “the American citizenry is at a crossroads.” Um, OK, but not particularly useful.

The leftosphere blogs perform five main functions that I can see:

It is probably going to be difficult to stop the party of complaining about Congress, the media and the political culture generally and move towards a party of organizing a strong disciplined movement towards change. I believe our country needs a strong left, right and center. I believe the center and right show signs of strength and vigor but the left seems to be still weak. This is shown by the way Congress in particular has treated the concerns of the left-progressives even loyal Democrats. Many net-based activists have worked very hard to bring a Democratic majority to Congress and keep the election of 04 close despite and poor campaign strategy (as usual) from the party hacks. The realization that the Democratic Party has little interest in the sorts of concerns voiced in the left-blogosphere seems to have shocked many people. Well, clearly something isn’t working. So what next?

Matt Stoller writes:

To party committee leaders like Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, the money coming through Moveon and Actblue is nice but no longer necessary.  There’s no reason to make any trade-offs to progressives to get it, unlike the period from 2002-2006 when business lobbyists had no reason to give to Democrats. . . .

(Emphasis supplied.) What exactly are Move On and Act Blue pushing for? They have been stunningly quiet on pressing Democrats on Iraq. Oh let me guess, this is about the stupid Move On censure, cuz that is what matters. The Dem Capitulation on Iraq? Not so much.  What a joke.

Chris Bowers writes:

If our vote totals on key pieces of legislation are actually going backward in Congress, then no one in the Democratic field is successfully leading on Iraq in Congress. Good leadership isn’t just about proposing legislation (which all current members of Congress have done), sending out press releases announcing how you will vote beforehand (which a couple of candidates did this time), exhorting your colleagues in Congress to vote a certain way (which at least Dodd has done among current members of Congress running for President), and then casting the right votes (which pretty much everyone does now, even though none of the Senators running for President did so last year). Successful leadership is actually causing the debate to bend in your direction, and gathering support where none previously existed. According to this criteria, when it comes to the impact of the 2008 Presidential field on the Iraq fight in Congress, no one has done that. To varying degrees, they all have tried-or at least made it look like they were trying-but no one has succeeded.

I think that is a fair criteria for all of us. And by that criteria, I think it is fair to say that the leaders of the Netroots have utterly failed. It is ironic that Bowers criticizes people like Chris Dodd (for his post is really a pushback against Dodd’s little surge in the Daily Kos straw poll while his preferred candidate, Bill Richardson, had a meltdown) for their efforts in Congress without even considering his own failures and that of the other leading Netroots lights, like Move On. Interesting use of blinders there. More.