It is regrettable that when Tom Daschle went down for HHS (an outcome that pleased me, by the way) the Netroots devoted more energy to freakouts about complete non-stories -- idle announcements of Romney or Gingrich for HHS -- rather than organizing a massive push for consideration of Howard Dean for HHS.
It is regrettable that when Obama didn't get out ahead of Hoover Republican spin on the stimulus in the mainstream media, the Netroots devoted more energy to freakouts about capitulation and betrayal, rather than organizing a massive support of what was sound and strong in the stimulus -- countering the Dittohead megaphone with thousands of supportive phonecalls, countering flabbergastingly discredited Republican spin with concise reality-based frames.
Instead, we got progressive commentators complaining about about impurities (as if anything this huge could emerge legislatively without being ugly -- are you kidding me?), freakouts about an outlier Rasmussen poll indicating diminishing support for the stimulus that they surely knew better than to treat so seriously but did anyway, and scattered old-school progressive organizations panicking about threatened cuts to their own agendas as they inevitably began to accumulate given this lack of sense or co-ordination.
For me the fly in the ointment at present is Harry Reid -- who needs to force the Republicans to filibuster for real, rather than endlessly allowing them a pre-emptive cost-free filibuster. We have the 51 votes we need for the passage of a stronger bill than the one we're left with, just not the votes to get a vote. Circumstances in the Senate are precarious, certainly, but the realities skew to the Dems (for now) and fortune favors the bold. Reid needs to make the Republicans pay for their obstructionism and deluded arias of discredited unpopular ideological nonsense. Let's see Republicans reading the phone book while the media megaphones the unemployment lines, foreclosures, and bank failures.
The Netroots should be a prop to our President rather than an ineffectual narcissistic scold wallowing in paranoid or idealistic abstractions, it should be organizing its energies to proffer a prosthetic backbone for the timorous Reid, to make the Republicans immolate themselves for their ideology or domesticate themselves in the face of changed realities, to pay for the choices they are making earlier rather than later, because there is a lot of work to do beyond this stimulus.
We will need to push Obama from the left to keep him strong in the bloody fight for Unions to come (probably the definitive fight of this historical moment in the grand scheme of things), and to move him to a more universal healthcare system than the one he is offering now in the name of needed reform.
The Netroots in Opposition have managed to turn the tide of three decades of disastrous Movement Conservatism and Washington Consensus. This is a real accomplishment.
But the Netroots needs to re-evaluate its default strategies and knee-jerk perceptions and narrative frames of first resort if we would function to facilitate more progressive outcomes with a wildly popular center-left Obama presiding over congressional majorities in a world pressuring the corporate-militarist hegemony of complementary neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies and extractive-industrial-petrochemical-broadcast social formations. Conventional opposition is not apt to the changed demands of taking the initiative in the face of problems or facilitating most-progressive actually-possible outcomes among the options at hand.
I have no doubt that the Netroots will adapt to these changed circumstances. It is the responsiveness of p2p formations like the Netroots to diverse local knowledges that render these formations so smart and resilient in general. Just as I feel it is absurd in the extreme to declare Obama a failure or denounce him as a traitor to progressivism after a few weeks in the hornet's nest, it would be just as wrong for me to declare the Netroots a failure just because they are a bit deranged in their focus and response time in the aftermath of the transformative Election 08.
I just hope we adjust sooner rather than later, since there is work to be done that won't ever be more accomplishable than it is right now, and won't easily be accomplished at all without the effective educational, agitational, and organizational resources of the Netroots at its disposal.
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I've been fairly worried about this myself. Speaking for my own country, I was quite pleased by the fact that the New Democratic Party were willing to support the centrist positions of the Liberal Party in the event of a historically unprecedented Coalition government; you know Tory leader Stephen Harper is now bad-mouthing Jack Layton for, on the one hand, being willing to accede to centrist-corporatist policies, and on the other hand returning to loudly champion left-wing principles now that the prospects for a Coalition have largely sunk according to the new Liberal leader. Of course Harper is; he's a right-wing nutbar who, until the threat of the Coalition, was planning on fiscally disembowelling the opposition parties and had proposed no stimulus package of any kind because of his unflagging belief that the Canadian economy was unsinkable as long as the government didn't run a deficit.
For one, I was proud that the New Democrats had the vision to realise what a historical opportunity a centre-left Coalition government could have been for the country, even though any such coalition would be not all to the liking of the progressive-left of Canadian politics, and I'm sure the progressive-left here understood that. Certainly everybody I talk to knew that.
However, I've been.... disturbed by the apparent lack of similar such vision on the part of the progressive-left of the United States, which includes large sectors of your Netroots, Dale. I hear an awful lot of crying and not very much doing anything about it; and you guys won, you got the best you could have hoped for, you got the country in the palm of your hand (or, to be more correct, you've remembered again that the country is in the palm of your hand), and yet so many sources there seem to be reflexively shunting themselves back into the role of "loyal opposition". I'm reminded of a satirical song by Roy Zimmerman: how about waiting until you win to throw it? That'll be a new trick.
I suspect a large part of this is just self-righteousness. The American left has gotten comfortable with the position of sitting at the back of the class, knowing the correct answer, and never getting asked the question. It can be awfully comforting to feel that you don't have to compromise your principles in the messy, to-and-fro of actual politics, but eventually succumbing to this notion, even subconsciously, is a death sentence. It puts you in the position of being perpetually marginal, ineffectual, and ultimately therefore politically disposable.
No, the radical American progressive-left has got to pull itself out of this funk; that it was the elite, hegemonic interests that did the initial marginalising work is only an excuse to a point. Eventually the radical Netroots inactivists will find (hopefully will find) that they've been locked in a cage the door to which is open; and that while they've been huddled around the warmth of their own self-gratified certitude, those same hegemonic interests have been going on their merry business, snafuing all the way.
That’s my take on it, at least.
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