Ian Welsh’s post on the “failure” of the progressive blog movement has been making the rounds (I got it from Jay Ackroyd). Here’s the part I don’t get:
Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate’s skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate’s policy. Identity is more important to them than how many brown children that politician is killing.
So progressives have no power, because they have no principles: they cannot be expected to actually vote for the most progressive candidate, to successfully primary candidates, to care about policy first and identity second, to not take scraps from the table and sell out other progressive’s interests.
The Tea Party, say what you will about them, gets a great deal of obeisance from Republicans for one simple reason: they will primary you if they don’t like how you’ve been voting, and they’ll probably win that primary. They are feared. Progressives are not feared, because they do not believe enough in their ostensible principles to act on them in an effective fashion.
This is a really short-sighted view of power. The Tea Party is indeed feared by elected Republicans, and they have primaried and challenged a lot of Republicans in purple districts, and what did that get them? Certainly not Senators Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. As a movement, all but 27% of the nation hates them, the legislation they’ve fought for the past 5 years is now being implemented (Obamacare) and their favorite legislator (Cruz) is damaged goods after leading the last big fight they picked. Progressives are supposed to want that?
I’d like to see some examples where progressives failed to vote for the most progressive candidate in a primary, where the candidate was any good. In my own state, I’d happily vote for someone to the left of Chuck Schumer. And DiFi needs a primary, badly. But I”m not going to hang my head in shame for thinking that primarying, say, Jon Tester is a bad idea.
Another part of Welsh’s post criticizes the 2008 Obama campaign for going around the “blogging gatekeepers” when organizing their campaign, but come on: the 2008 Obama campaign was pretty much a model of small donor grassroots financing. Isn’t that kind of engagement what Progressives are supposed to want?
Napoleon
Ian Welsh’s post is pretty much a joke from front to back.
Cervantes
The left in the U.S. went through a period in which identity politics predominated, and yes, it was largely ineffective. But I think we got over it. The main reason we don’t have a highly effective left is resources — not enough big money donors, a hostile corporate media. The Tea Party gets bazillions of dollars from the Koch brothers and the like, and the media treated them with respect bordering on awe, at least until recently. And absolutely right, the Republican party dances to their tune, but that’s going to result in a steady loss of state power. I don’t see anything there to emulate.
kindness
I must be obsolete. Who is Ian Welsh?
Wikipedia will be my friend.
SFAW
Not sure how he arrived at this contrafactual conclusion. PFL? Too much brown acid? Whomped upside the head with the Stupid Stick one-too-many times?
One of his tells is his comment about how progressives won’t sell out another progressive’s interests – selling out is now a sign of how “principled” you are?
It doesn’t take “principles” to primary someone less perfect than what you want, it just takes fanaticism.
So, Ian Welsh has readers why?
different-church-lady
Poutragers say what?
Corner Stone
I’ve been enjoying the back and forth at Ian Welsh’s place. Lots of interesting perspectives coming in.
SFAW
@Napoleon:
Intentional?
Linda Featheringill
So what inspired this circular firing squad? Ian Welsh doesn’t have enough to do? Geez.
Linda Featheringill
@kindness:
I think that Ian Welsh is one of those obscure bloggers and no one reads but other . . . uh. . . bloggers.
flukebucket
I had never heard of Ian Welsh and I certainly won’t be marking him as a must read. That was one of the dumbest fucking things I have ever read.
kos
Hilariously ridiculous. The Obama campaign was the MODEL of everything I’ve ever fought for. I guess if you want campaigns groveling at your feet like Republicans do at Norquist’s feet, then maybe you’d be disappointed. But for my part, certainly, I’ve fought to democratize progressive politics — that is, empower EVERYONE to have a role and say. I personally had no interest in replacing legacy gatekeepers, and quite frankly, I didn’t get the sense that my friends on the blogosphere did either. Except this guy, apparently.
And anyone that wants to emulate the Tea Party is a misguided at best, that is, unless they think the idea of the political wilderness and permanent minorities are wonderful things.
Finally, having read some of the people whining over at that site, it all comes down to drones and spying. They think those are the most important issues ever. And if that’s the only thing you care about, then sure, the Dems are the biggest sellouts ever (Jerome Armstrong actually worked for the Libertarian presidential candidate in 2012, who thinks the market provides fabulous health care, among other things). I think most people understand those issues are important, but there are also OTHER things also important. Perhaps even MORE important.
Betty Cracker
That was the smartest thing the Obama campaign ever did. “Blogging gatekeepers” are as useless as tits on a boar.
different-church-lady
@kos: Is that actually youse youself?
aimai
@SFAW: Yeah. Incorrect use of “ideology” and also the word “believe.” Also: why can’t a person’s ideology include a decision to, all things being equal, favor a candidate of a certain color, gender, or personal history over another candidate? Why can’t ideology and principle include, say, an appeal to “fairness” or “equality” or “turn taking?”
The accusation that, say, “progressives” chose Barack Obama over some more principled candidate is basically to say that white liberals chose the black guy out of race guilt. Thats a pretty unprogressive and even flat out right wing thing to argue, on top of its being, you know, wrong.
Napoleon
Another reason, which applies to the left pretty much everywhere at any time is it nearly always is coalition of various groups with various priorities. The right, pretty much at any time and any place, is almost always just defending the status quo and the powerful. It is just a whole lot easier to be pulling in the same direction effectively for them.
feebog
This is to laugh. Wasn’t the 2008 Presidential Democratic Primary about the “moderate” Hillary Clinton vs. the “commie liberal who pals around with terrorists” Barak Obama? Let see, if I can recall, who won that nomination and went on to be elected President?
Napoleon
@SFAW:
I doubt so.
fuckwit
More fucking concern trolling. And, a massive dose of Rethug Projection too. Yawn. Must be funded by Rove or the Koch brothers.
That post is also stuck in a retro time warp from like 1988. Identity politics drove the left up until the Shrub era, and it’s why it was getting crushed. Due to the horrors of Shrub and Cheney, the left got unity, and realized we’re all in this together, which actually is a very naturally lefty way to look at things: community, solidarity, sharing the load together.
The reality is this: today’s left is a hugely big tent, inclusive of everyone who wants a better America for ALL of us, not just the rich/white/male/old/straight/christians. This is the Obama-era left. In fact, the “left” of today includes a ton of people who had been Republicans all of our lives, including our bloghost, and many others here.
Please, spare us the concern trolling.
drew42
Welsh has no idea what “ideology” even means. The Tea Party doesn’t have an ideology. It’s nothing knee-jerk reactions to anything Democrats do, even if it means contradicting themselves, with stupid slogans and patriotic / small government sounding phrases to justify it.
Remember when the Tea Party was supposed to be a legitimate non-partisan movement? And how easily it slipped into becoming the hard-core segment of the Republican party?
Corner Stone
I think the incident they refer back to of Blanche Lincoln v Halter is an interesting one. It doesn’t perfectly fit your question because anyone who took two seconds to look knew Halter was not a progressive candidate and barely a measurable distance to the “left” of Blanche.
But, IMO, how that race went down was an interesting display.
ruemara
Well, first sentence says the entire thing is bullshit. Why can’t I get writing gigs for 800 words of bullshit? All I do is write things you can prove with empirics or research.Plus, his bigotry is showing real clear..
PeakVT
Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate’s skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate’s policy.
Cripes that’s fucking moronic.
Chyron HR
When I look at the Tea Party, what stands out most is the way they:
– Are nonpartisan.
– Do not concern themselves with any politician’s race.
– Have a consistent track record of implementing Teagressive policy at the federal level.
SatanicPanic
Unlike the rest of us, Ian doesn’t see Freddie DeBoer’s career as a cautionary tale.
Keith G
It seems to me that a part of Welch’s problem is that he is trying to formulate an easy answer to a complex issue – or a complex set of issues.
We are in the early rounds of a 15 round heavyweight slugfest. Even if you can adequately score the punches landed in the third round, it’s a little too early to be a celebratory or worried about the eventual winner.
That said, I guess it’s okay to be concerned if you perceive no definable strategy being used by the fighter you bet the mortgage on.
gussie
Setting aside the rest of the argument, I think this sorta proves his point: Senators Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle.
He’s saying that they’ll win that primary, not that election, and that winning that primary makes them feared. I imagine he’d say that this is why, for example, even when ‘moderate’ Republicans are a majority inside the caucus (see, government shutdown) they’re afraid to oppose the right.
And he’s claiming that this gives our counterparts on the right “a great deal of obeisance from Republicans,” not that they become popular or have the power to enact legislation–which he, I imagine, thinks is more entwined with the fact that they’re crazy, stupid, and crazystupid. Their policies are offensive. So you can’t really compare popularity/legislative success with a toxic platform to the Dem platform. But you can compare obeisance.
flukebucket
Slowly it is starting to dawn on me that I am not a conservative or a progressive. Maybe that does make me an Obot.
NotMax
Commonplace occurrence here (including, but not at all limited to, a primary back when I was on the ballot).
geg6
This is right up there with the stupidest things I’ve ever read, in cyberspace or meatspace. And who the hell is Ian Welsh anyway? If he’s such a huge figure in liberalism that I should listen to the ridiculous garbage he spews, why have I never heard of him?
Gene108
The reason far right candidates can primary incumbent Reps is because of deep pocketed interest groups willing to fund the challenger.
Nothing like that exists on the Left. The difference is entirely monetary and not about principles.
different-church-lady
I just read that passage again and realized he’s basically saying that progressives have no power because they’re not willing go all crazy ass scorched earth.
negative 1
@SFAW: He arrived at it via wishcasting.@drew42: He’s actually confusing tactics for ideology. There is more than one way to get what you want. The post highlights the difference — the Tea Party gets a lot of press for their ideology, and next to zero results. Since they’ve become ‘feared’ within the republican party, the republican party has lost ground and is only capable of what little they’ve done (obstructed) because of heavily favorable redistricing. Meanwhile, the ‘progressive left’ leans on existing legislators and gets universal healthcare, and end to one foreign war with another coming, and no major new ground force commitments. The only major failure thus far has ironically been a jobs bill, the one it would seem should be the easiest, and that’s not a ‘progressive’ goal as much as it is a common democratic party one. Was it always pretty? No, and that also highlights the difference — when your endgame is the endgame, you may not enjoy the process. Tellingly, the ‘ideology’ was not the dominant headline in any of those fights. However, when you look at it typed up like that, it seems like ‘the progressive left’ has ticked off a lot of goals on the list.
Tomolitics
We already lived voting via Pure Progressive Principles twice before: Anderson in ’80 and Nader in 2000. How’d that work out? Fking moran.
SFAW
@Napoleon:
OK. I was afraid I had missed some Colbert-like parody-ness of his commentary. Sounds like not.
Tomolitics
@PeakVT:
It really is worse than moronic–he’s saying that “progressives” only voted for Obama or Hillary because of race/gender. That is disgusting.
PeakVT
@fuckwit: Identity politics drove the left up until the Shrub era, and it’s why it was getting crushed.
Did it? Maybe I just missed all that because I’m not a target demographic. I remember reading a lot about economic issues in the late 1980s and the 1990s from the left-leaning magazines I perused.
Corner Stone
@gussie:
Witness Orrin Hatch. He was always a conservative asshole but he did have flashes of working with others to get things done. The fact that he got scared straight is pretty evident.
different-church-lady
Nonsense: they’ve also failed to nationalize the banks, eliminate the NSA, defund the defense department and return the highest tax bracket to 103%.
SFAW
@geg6:
Because you spend too much time here, hanging out with the Obots?
negative 1
@different-church-lady: and secure unicorns too, but the comment was already running long…
Corner Stone
@fuckwit:
I’m interested in what you mean by “identity politics”.
jacy
No idea who Ian Welsh is. But if I had to make a guess, he sounds like the undisputed king of Backwards Land.
balconesfault
I’ve never read Welsh before, but after reading this post end to end I’m having a difficult time deciding whether it’s trolling or delusional.
I am pretty sure that it doesn’t matter much though.
dpm (dread pirate mistermix)
@NotMax: Who? I’m trying to think of examples and falling short.
SFAW
@Gene108:
I thought George Soros funds every single non-right-thinking effort in the world. Unlike those pure souls in the wingnut camp.
Now, if we could only work the narrative to resemble “George Soros became a billionaire entirely through welfare fraud,” the circle might be complete.
ETA: Except that I don’t think anyone has referred to Soros as a “strapping young buck.” But other than that ….
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Because the Tea Party has been so principled and ideologically consistent.
Good green god.
Corner Stone
IMO, part of the more interesting discussion that came up due to Welsh’s posts was the mention of the term “Progressive” and what it means. Or that it actually doesn’t mean anything. Or something different to each target block of potential voters.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
Welsh has spun straw into a straw man. There aren’t that many all-or-nothing progressives out there. Welsh doesn’t even bother to name any of the fire-breathing progressive bloggers whose failure would vindicate his preposterous bullshit. Moreover, Welsh is comparing apples to wingnuts. A signal feature of the Tea Party is that most all of them have the same specific goals. That can not be be said of progressives who, IMHO, usually have a hierarchy of desirable outcomes. Yes, we sometimes carp and bitch about the actions, or lack of them, by our pols. We do not primary them in favor of more-leftier ones.
I would not support a left that marches in lockstep and is willing to destroy America in order to save it.
handy
@gussie:
I suppose this isn’t quite related to your point, but the Tea Party is funded by some serious coin, and quite frankly their culture war messaging jibes with a lot of R voters, and the big wigs know this. The corporate nature of the two party system assures us that the Dems would never see an analogous movement within their ranks from the left, powerful enough to cause the Joe Manchins of the world to start shaking in their boots.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I think the argument, to the extent it can be called an argument, is an exercise in pointlessness. Where there IS a discussion is in the overthrow or preservation of the current order. So-called Tea Partiers (libertarians, anarchists, idiots) want to overthrow the existing order and don’t care who gets hurt in the process. I can’t remember a time progressives wanted to overthrow the existing order. Progressives are currently on defense trying to preserve the gains we made in years past.
WJS
Instead of bashing progressive values, how about bashing the mentality where linking from Yglesias to Klein to Drum (heh, indeed) is the way to sustain a community? The predictable self-congratulatory circle jerk is part of the problem.
For all of their criticisms, when you have Cole at odds with his front pagers, and does so publicly and with great emphasis on cursing, you at least see a debate.
Anniecat45
Dianne Feinstein doesn’t need a primary. She needs a retirement party. and she’s one of my senators.
Stella B
DiFi doesn’t need to be primaried. She’s 80 and she needs to retire so that Linda Sánchez or Kamala Harris can run. That is all.
RP
He’s got it exactly backwards. The right, including the Tea Party, puts partisanship first, second, third, and last. But it’s not GOP partisanship — it’s partisanship in the form of opposing everything and anything liberals stand for, updated daily. It’s nothing but blind hatred and partisanship. Most of the left, by contrast, is actually working towards concrete goals, and is willing to take incremental steps and compromise in order to accomplish them.
Sadly, some on the far left aren’t that different from the far right IMO. I think there’s a subset of people on the left who hate liberals and democrats more than anyone on the right. They get off on outrage and anger, and they’re often more angry at their supposed allies for being “sellouts” than their enemies on the right.
Keith G
@Corner Stone: Progressive is a wonderful marketing term. It conveys an image while at the same time eluding a definitive meaning. Which also means there’s a limit to its usefulness.
chrome agnomen
every single word of that block quote is delusional.
cleek
any sentence which claims to know what an un-surveyed group of people really think is a fail.
so, i am unwilling to read further.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@Tomolitics:
See? You’re not progressive enough. You forget the landslide election of President Eugene McCarthy in 1968.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Or maybe the experience with Shrub the lesser made left wingers more pragmatic about the need to win elections than run unelectable purity ponies.
Also note the whiny white guy subtext in the post.
Butch
Probably a couple of fairly pointless observations (I excel at those), but first of all, glad I’m not the only one who never heard of Ian Welsh, and second, even more glad that I’m not the only one who didn’t buy his argument.
aimai
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set):
Yes, I think he actually has the Tea Party confused with the NRA which, being a literal single issue organization, can afford to use “ideology” as a blunt instrument and primary the impure. It is also, of course, a corporate front group so its donor base is a combination of willing dupes and deep pockets. It is, itself, a form of business advertising and a cost of doing business. So you’d expect it to operate differently from a legitimate political party or even faction within a political party.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@Butch:
You went there for an argument and all you got was a scolding.
Freemark
The crazy guy in the clock tower with a rifle has a lot of power too. But the problem with that kind of power is; one, you need to be insane to use it, and two, it is short lived and you end up dead or incarcerated.
The ‘teabagger’ movement does have the crazy. It is also dying because it has used its ‘power’ of crazy. In the short term it has had a good deal of power, in the long term it will end up like the Nazi’s , Commies, Know Nothings, Confederates, etc; historical footnotes. How much affect have those groups had on the development of our country? If we are honest those groups have had an effect, an influence similar to how exposure to germs as a child helps build your immune system. But nothing of what they wanted has become a permanent part of our country. Almost everything championed by ‘progressives’ has. Sure the time scale is large, but while progressives often lose battles we always seem to win the war in the end.
fuckwit
@kos: Glad to see you here. Yeah, when I read Welsh’s crap, the first thing I thought of was how completely oblivious he appeart to be to you, and your “Crashing the Gates” book and your blog and your work to pull together the little silos of identity politics into a coherent whole, a decade ago! It is also very apparent to me that Welsh’s post is part of a Koch-funded or Rove-funded attempt to splinter the left using drones and spying as wedge issues.
There’s nothing the corporate overlords want more than for firebaggers to gather force and pull away into their own party and destroy the Democrats the way that the teabaggers have destroyed the Republicans.
piratedan
well geez Ian, it’s a free country, get some signatures and run for office. I’m in favor of equal pay, a higher minimum wage, more investment in education and infrastructure, the space program, higher taxes for those making the most money, legallizing drugs… and feel free to add your own planks here, but while I can share those ideals and hopes here, it damn sure doesn’t get my ass elected.
xian
my favorite part is how he moves from skin color to brown people without a trace of irony
Roger Moore
@Cervantes:
That and lack of truly left wing voters. If the left really wants to accomplish anything, it needs to sell its ideas.
Cervantes
@Corner Stone: Witness Orrin Hatch. He was always a conservative asshole but he did have flashes of working with others to get things done. The fact that he got scared straight is pretty evident.
There’s reason to believe Hatch will support ENDA next week.
nate
“Instead of bashing progressive values, how about bashing the mentality where linking from Yglesias to Klein to “rum (heh, indeed)”
If only it didn’t go Yglesias to Klein to Kevin Drum to Megan Mcardle to Tom Maguire…
schrodinger's cat
I am the nth person who hasn’t heard of Ian Welsh, why should I care what he says?
Belafon
I believe this would be the definition of projection. Before Iraq, I know a number of progressives that talked about voting for Powell. In 2008, the two best candidates were Clinton and Obama, not because of their distinguishing features, but their policies. We weren’t choosing a candidate to shake up the election; we chose the one we thought would run the country the best. The other side chose Palin.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I am confused about how this conversation becomes an exercise in dumping on progressives.
Joel
Left is a relative term here; Ian Welsh seems to be bitching about mainstream Democrats, who by virtue of party affiliation are necessarily partisan. That’s how you advance your agenda. Taking cues from the
John BirchTea Party playbook won’t do much for “us”.It seems that Welsh has discovered – to his dismay – that most mainstream democrats don’t share his perspective on the “progressive agenda” as he sees it.
RSA
@Tomolitics:
I know. It’s something I hear from Tea Party people all the time. “You know who the real racists are?” “You know who the real sexists are?”
Uh, yeah, I generally do, and typically they’re the ones posing those rhetorical questions.
Yatsuno
@Cervantes: IIRC Hatch is retiring. So there’s no real consequence to him going against the Pure Teabagger Cause.
PaulW
He’s claiming that progressives don’t have principles, which is bullshit. Progressives have an interest in 1) effective working government, 2) jobs and more jobs, 3) living wages to lift enough people out of poverty, 4) sensible tax code that relies on a reasonable mix of tax HIKES as well as CUTS whenever appropriate, 5) common goddamn sense.
If we as bloggers are not getting heard, it’s because we’re not shouters and nobody on Fox/CNN/even MSNBC will invite us. We are not part of the incestuous green room Beltway circle.
aimai
@xian: Yup. That caught my eye as well.
Roger Moore
@SFAW:
No, he’s a rootless cosmopolitan, which is the go-to calumny to use against Jews.
Roxy
I’m from the Golden state that DiFi represents and I would love to see her primaried
Belafon
@Belafon: OK, having found out who Welsh actually is, the first sentence should be replaced with “Talk about not being able to think through ODS.”
Roger Moore
@Stella B:
FTFY.
Marc
The title of this post reminds me (perhaps deliberately) of a good Rolling Stone piece a few years back:
Ugly or not, I’ll take the win any day.
kindness
It’s a sad statement of the times we live in when non-sensical bullshit is given any credence by others. Really, I’d like to think that but am probably wrong. Past ages no doubt had many of the same lunatics we have today. They just didn’t have Rupert Murdoch nor the internet.
Still, it makes you wonder. What are they teaching kids in school/college now? And this geezeer (if wikipedia served me well (and he isn’t that far from me so cut me some slack with the geezer stuff)) was a labor guy in Scotland? Hard to believe that it’s given the energy it is. Then again, I’ve posted twice on it now.
Kevin
That quote you posted screams “Brogressive”. The only important things are the things that white Ian Welsh finds important, and if you can’t see that, you are engaged in identity politics and have no principals.
Wasn’t interesting when Greenwald said it. Or DeBoer. Isn’t any more interesting now.
These guys (all white males with decent jobs), fail to see the world through other people’s eyes. They ignore problems faced in the USA by woman, minorities, the elderly, the poor, all for their perceived “most important issue ever!!!”.
I dislike drones too. I dislike the NSA. Drones have killed maybe a couple hundred people. America’s horrible health care system kills multiple times that a month. America’s poverty and inequality kills many times that a day. Thinking that these are also important doesn’t mean you want brown babies in the middle east to die.
piratedan
@Marc: yeah I sit back and look at all of that progressive legislation he vetoed…. hey, wait a minute….
Roger Moore
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
I believe the the subtext here is rapidly becoming, uh, text.
geg6
@SFAW:
Good thing then. Because if getting out of the boat means being subjected to stupid shit like this idiot’s “analysis”, I made the better choice.
(FTR, I only found this place in about ’06. I spent a LOT of time online reading blogs at least three years before that and I still have never heard of this guy. He didn’t exactly set the world on fire with his intellect if he was somehow a leader of left blogistan and I missed it.)
Anybodybuther2016
@drew42:
No I do not. The teabaggers were never non- partisan they are and always have been a front group for some powerful white people who want to neutralize PBO. How else do you explain them blaming PBO for bank bail outs that started under Bush? Why are very wealthy men spending billions of dollars to undermine his presidency? Since when has the corporate media showed so much concern for and attempts at legitimizing people who betrayed their country? This isn’t about policy, it’s personal. Their whole world view is at stake.
Chris
@aimai:
I didn’t remember the name “Ian Walsh” from anywhere, but yeah, I filed that excerpt under “Patent Bullshit” as soon as I’d read that part. Your basic white man’s lament that no woman or nonwhite person could possibly have risen to an important position on their own merit, and that his point of view as a white man is no longer being given the deference it deserves.
Fred
When the whole of your principled position is, “NO!” it is a lot easier to stick to your principles. Er, principle.
SFAW
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set):
No he didn’t
Chyron HR
@Belafon:
Yeah, but he did some pretty good stuff with Fleetwood Mac, right?
Corner Stone
@Cervantes:
From the snippet I saw on TRMS with Reid he seemed like he could find 5 R Senators for ENDA. I hope that is the case.
But specifically for Hatch – he went hard freakin right until he won the re-nom and now his rhetoric stays pretty hard right.
piratedan
@Kevin: ding! well said! I wish I’d said it…. but hell I’ll just steal it and blame Rand Paul….
Bill E Pilgrim
@Cervantes:
This is the difference. The Tea Party is actually a tiny group, if you count heads, but if you count dollars, it’s large enough to have had a real impact on the Republican Party. Primarying people takes a lot of money
Dick Armey and people like him astro-turfed a great deal of it, and there are B rolls of FOX “News” producers choreographing supposed protests (“Okay give me a big cheer here, that’s good. Now, when we’re filming, do it just like that”). The “respect” was natural, since most of the news media is owned by corporations in turn owned by Republicans.
Nothing like that on the left, despite breathless paranoia about George Soros.
different-church-lady
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
You can’t remember yesterday?
Well, actually, to be fair, you might be talking about actual progressives and I might be talking about this new breed of social-libertarian-anarchists who call themselves progressives.
piratedan
@Chyron HR: good try, unfortunately Bob (“Ebony Eyes”) Welch passed in 2012….
SFAW
@geg6:
“He didn’t exactly set the world on fire with his intellect” and “leader of left blogistan” are self-contradictory.
Example of a non-self-contradictory statement: “He’s a dumbfuck who’s a thinked leader for the right.”
Roger Moore
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set):
FTFY.
Chris
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Having the media on your side also helps to spread the bullshit much farther and wider than OWS was ever allowed to.
bobbo
Also, too, $$$. Progressivism does not tend to attract people with lots of it. Progressives will never have the support of billionaire rightwing reactionaries dedicated to the protection of their right to pollute water and air.
scav
So. The internet is doing one of its things about a somebody’s efforts at deep and meaningful typing skipping the deep and meaningful thinking step. Good ol’ interwebs.
with the both sides do it balance add-on! If one side’s extreme partisans are flailing badly, it must be true everywhere! Instant Profundity! Just Add Url!
PeakVT
Apart from being completely wrong about the nature of “the left”, Welsh also seems to have bought into the notion that the Tea Party is some kind interesting organic movement that is worthy of study. Perhaps someone has actually published serious research on that somewhere and I missed it, but as far as I can tell the Tea Party has never been anything more than an astroturf Republican marketing campaign. Sure, more successful than others, but nonetheless just a bunch of standard Republican haters re-mobilized under a new banner.
ETA: Others got there before me.
schrodinger's cat
BTW has Freddie stopped posting here completely? Were we too coarse for his beautiful mind?
boatboy_srq
That’s pretty rich coming from a proponent for a movement whose chief complaint is that Obama is Presidenting While Black.
boatboy_srq
That’s pretty rich coming from a proponent for a movement whose chief complaint is that Obama is Presidenting While Black.
boatboy_srq
What is this with the steel buttons today? Two post, both doubles.
Gex
Shorter traumatic brian injury: A true progressive insists upon straight white male candidates, obviously. They make sure they don’t show favoritism to minorities by insisting upon favoring the dominant group instead of evaluate candidates on their merits. It only looks like it’s the same as the sexism and racism of conservatives but it is completely different.
Cervantes
@Yatsuno: IIRC Hatch is retiring. So there’s no real consequence to him going against the Pure Teabagger Cause.
Well, he did say in 2012 that, if re-elected, this next would be his last term — but he’s also in line to chair Senate Finance if the Republicans take back the chamber. I doubt he’ll go so far as to run again, but I’m not sure.
SFAW
@PeakVT:
So are cow flops, but at least they have some use.
El Caganer
I think Mr. Welsh draws the wrong lessons from the Tea Partiers and other right-wingers. It is not a measure of “success” to nominate lunatics who get destroyed in general elections for national offices. Where the TPers are successful is at the state and local level, where they’ve been able to work all manner of mischief. That’s also the level where progressives (whatever they might be) need to be working if they want to move either of the major parties in their preferred direction. It’s not about the ideological purity; it’s figuring out what goals are attainable and how to build from them after they’re attained. He’s busy looking at the failed part of the Tea Party attack, not the successful one.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
You must have inadvertently entered the Balloon-Juice-super-secret-coupon-code which gets you two-for-one.
Cervantes
@kindness: Who is Ian Welsh?
Ian Welsh has been blogging since 2003. He was the Managing Editor of FireDogLake.
artem1s
yes, this is why Sarah Palin was elected VP in 2008 and Herman Cain was elected President in 2012.
obviously, this asshat spends way too much time with Karl Rove.
PurpleGirl
Ian Welsh is a Brit living and working in Canada. He’s a media strategy consultant. Would it surprise anyone that he was an editor at FireDogLake.
About two years ago I was reading him, mainly from links from another blog I read. I stopped reading him when I became tired of his telling Americans to leave and move someplace else. It became really tiresome. As I said, he’s a Brit in Canada. Yeah, he can move around a bit.
Elizabelle
Yawn.
Who cares about Ian Welsh? Is that a crow or a magpie on his website? And his blogroll looks even more ill-kempt than BJ’s was.
Can we have a new thread? An open one? Or maybe a panel or two from Hyperbole and a Half?
Got to keep up with elmo AND publicize the new book.
geg6
@SFAW:
No, I read his post and that’s exactly what I got from it. He implies he was some kind of leader in some movement from the left but the movement failed him. I’ve never heard of him despite being someone who followed the people who he claims were a part of this so-called movement, so he couldn’t have been as effective as the fantasy about himself that he has in his head tells him he was. Not at all sure what’s self-contradictory about it. Brogressives can never fail, they can only BE failed.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
If you fail to comprehend that the Tea Party is the apotheosis of forty plus years of Republican resentment politics and instead decry ‘identity politics’, then, well, yeah. Brogressive.
Chris
@Napoleon:
IMO, this is also the actual substance behind the phrase “America is a center right nation.” Yes, true, in the sense that the system is biased towards inertia; changing the status quo, however slightly (“center left”) requires effort, maintaining it (“center right”) does not. And in that sense, every nation is a “center right nation.”
scav
@geg6: It’s always so tragic when a white boy doesn’t get his own ticker tape parade.
geg6
@Cervantes:
Oh, holy fuck. So he’s a troll.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
So in addition to being a fucking Canuck, his “Mission Statement” (or whatever that idiotic “horizon” aphorism should be called) shows him to be a serious contender for the Bulwer-Lytton Prize.
What a dork. And I do NOT mean that in the nicest possible way.
ETA: And to save people the trouble: yes, I know that a name like “Welsh” wouldn’t qualify him to be a true Canuck. Despite what that alleged hockey team might say.
J.W. Hamner
I see now where the term “bro-gressive” comes from… was not really a fan when I heard it, but I can’t think of anything better to describe this mindset. The only concern worth having relates to drones and the national security state. Everything else is “identity politics”. That someone might prioritize reproductive rights or the voting rights act or gay marriage or income inequality over drone policy shows a lack of belief in progressive ideology and that you only care about genital shape and/or skin color.
Corner Stone
I think it’s interesting that it’s not enough to disagree with the post(s), but it’s an obvious conclusion that since you disagree so strongly the blogger must be in league with Koch/Rove.
Dee Loralei
If it’s the guy I’m thinking of, he used to write at FDL. I vaguely remember a few about South America, but hell I quit reading over there during the 2008 election when it seemed to go into full blown ODS.
And it’s obvious DPMix, you also don’t read this blog. This was already posted a few days ago.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Chris: That’s what I was getting at with the second part of my comment. No one should discount the impact of what’s essentially a huge, well-financed propaganda arm and the damper that puts on any real debate.
They money is now waking up to what a self-propelling monster it created, with schandenfreudiliscious results, but it’s caused a lot of damage along the way.
John O
Expecting purity in a representative democracy is a fool’s errand, and incredibly juvenile. That should be left to those on the Right.
It’s the same impulse that compels children in the “*I* want!” game.
PurpleGirl
@kindness: The Wikipedia article is about a different Ian Welsh, who really should now use his middle initial to distinguish himself from this idiot.
DBaker
A lot of people asked, “who is Ian Welsh?”
Ian Welsh is this guy: http://firedoglake.com/2009/01/18/the-american-death-wish/
And especially this guy: http://firedoglake.com/2009/01/04/economic-predictions-scorecard/
He was a front pager at FiredogLake during the 2008 campaign who advised readers to start planting vegetables in their backyards because the Apocalypse was coming. Let’s just say he was wrong.
There are certain people who enjoy being miserable because they are “reality based” and excoriate everyone who does not see the true light of their ways. Funnily enough, another Firedoglake contributor, Tbogg, skewered this whole line of thinking with the post about the magical ponies (I am poorly paraphrasing).
Belafon
@Chyron HR: When I went look him up, I ended up with the Scottish Ian Welsh who has this in his wikipedia entry:
I’m thinking, “Another Sarah Palin.”
Gene108
@Freemark:
Have you ever lived in the South?
Sympathy for the Confederacy is alive and well. There are plenty of guys waiving Stars and Bars flags around, because they want to commemorate the the Confederacy and the War of Northern Aggression.
Chyron HR
@PurpleGirl:
I’m surprised. I thought FDL’s alleged lack of editorial oversight was how they excused stuff like front-page posts denouncing Obama as a “house ni**er”.
SFAW
@geg6:
That he’s some type of left “leader,” who couldn’t construct a rational argument even if Rachel Maddow wrote it all down for him in big letters.
Davis X. Machina
Whose latest National Journal piece begins….“This is what happens when the two parties ruling Washington lose touch with America and pander to their crazy-extreme bases”?
Ron Fournier... but you probably guessed that…
Kevin
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think Freddie has just disappeared from the internets entirely. He no longer updates his pretentiously named website, L’Hote.
It’s a great loss. Glad that Ian and young Connor on the Atlantic are filling the concern trolling void.
geg6
@SFAW:
But this is an argument that guys (and they are almost always guys) use all the time. In fact, it’s also the argument that wingnuts and teabaggers use all the time. If they don’t see the contradiction in it, far be if from me to argue.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
Ahahahahaha.
geg6
@Kevin:
Don’t get too excited. Can’t remember where, but I’m pretty sure I saw him guest posting somewhere. And Sully is always quoting him.
polyorchnid octopunch
@PeakVT: No it’s not. It’s projection.
Elizabelle
@DBaker:
So is a crow or a magpie eating Ian Welsh’s vegetable garden?
That’s all I want to know.
Lex
@fuckwit: What fuckwit said. This is concern trolling, pure and simple.
schrodinger's cat
@DBaker: So he took up residence in La-La Land, a while ago?
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set):
Which goals are those? I didn’t hear the tea party mewling about deficit spending under the last administration. I didn’t hear them scream about the unfunded part D.
The tea party wants the blah man our of office. When PBO is no longer in the “white” house, the tea party will dissipate like a fart in a windstorm.
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: The crazies of the Republican Party are the elected officials while the leftie crazies are mostly ranting on their virtual soap boxes like this Ian person, annoying but hardly that dangerous.
Kevin
@geg6:
He was my favourite brogressive. Lecture feminists on what feminism is (then cry when they rip him all sorts of new ones for not knowing what he was talking about), lecture the gay movement about not being radical enough (cause, see, he knew some real flaming art types when he was a kid, and the fact that the people fighting for equality aren’t drag queens throwing molotovs is really depressing to young Freddie).
He truly is a man without shame. Mr Welsh seems like a sad imitation.
schrodinger's cat
@geg6: Sully, he makes sense only half of the time. I have been checking his blog less and less over the years.
schrodinger's cat
@Kevin: He is probably working on his thesis. What ever you do, do not dress your kitteh for Halloween.
eemom
This is hilarious.
Haven’t had time to read the comments……I just remember this self-important twat from when he was a FPer at FDL, before Hamsher, as always was her wont, turned on him for some reason.
Elizabelle
@Davis X. Machina:
The AP recently fired a reporter and two editors over an erroneous story about Terry McAuliffe. (They ran with story that he was the “TM” caught lying to investigators in a federal case; he was not; AP retracted story 90 minutes later.)
The reporter, Bob Lewis, was a 28-year AP veteran and apparently highly respected.
Made me wonder how Ron Fournier not only survived, but rose to the top, at AP. Different standards, I guess. Fournier is such a partisan hack.
God-Emperor Aardvark-Penguin IV Jr
Progressives need to learn two things and put them into practice relentlessly:
1) Take state/local politics very seriously. If you control the state houses, you can advance an awful lot of your agenda, regardless of what Washington does or doesn’t do. If you control the school boards, you can make sure that the crazies don’t waste the students’ time teaching Jesus Refudiates Evolution 101.
2) Make it an overwhelming priority to turn your voters out for every election, not just for the “big games”.
Once progressives have mastered those two points, they can afford to spend time debating purity and the intricate views of the libertarian who would love to be a liberal, if it weren’t for the need to preserve white male privilege.
Punchy
Shorter Welsh: DIMOCRATZ DONT HAF THEYR OWN CLEEKS LAW! I HAX A SAD FAYSE! WHY CANT WEAK DIMS ACT LIKE GYANT SHITHEDZ LIKE REPUBS DO?
cleek
@aimai:
it’s also ridiculously a-historic. the 2008 choice was quickly narrowed down to Obama vs Clinton. and they share the same basic positions. neither of them are ‘principled’ progressives: they’re mainstream Dems.
Southern Beale
Progressives have no principles? And yet the Tea Party, which supposedly is oh-so concerned about the national debt and fiscal conservatism, just blew $24 billion to shut down the government for which they got absolutely NOTHING in return. Hmm.
I’d say Welsh is doing a bit of projecting here.
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: Indeed. INDEED.
Belafon
@Punchy: I thought Democrats always did the opposite of what Democrats wanted, updated daily.
Sad_Dem
@Roxy: Me too. I’ve been hoping for years that Lady Di will get sent packing.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@different-church-lady:
I think it’s more likely yer talking out of yer ass, per usual.
John S.
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
I am confused about your confusion over how a conversation becomes an exercise in taking a dump.
FlipYrWhig
I chalked the whole thing up to another case of “True Progressives know that the most important issues involve executive power, and if you disagree, you are no True Progressive, and I cast you out.”
But another factor that surprises me: the blogosphere was supposed to be a “movement”? How does that work? Isn’t the “movement” something else, like increased popular participation, and blogs just a medium conducive to that? Harnessing small-dollar fundraising to the blogosphere was a noteworthy innovation (at least before Citizens United) but even then I don’t remember very much about finding candidates who were in sync on executive power issues. So I’m not seeing how the goal Ian Welsh remembers was the goal at the time.
patroclus
Uh, I don’t think the Tea Party is something that we should try to emulate. I want good policies enacted – like ENDA and immigration reform. I fail to see how primarying Jon Tester (or Mark Pryor or Bill Nelson) from the left is going to accomplish that. Firedoglake and its editors have a terrible actual record of accomplishing things. Ian Walsh’s post is mind-bogglingly stupid – there is more to politics than drones and the NSA and I’m definitely not in favor of reliving the Ralph Nader debacle.
FlipYrWhig
@cleek: well, yes, but that’s how deep the betrayal runs. Every politician who could have been a principled progressive came pre-stabbed in the back! Frankly, if your big complaint about politics is that not enough people prioritize what you prioritize, try to, you know, do some politics and change that. Don’t blame the world for not handing you a victory, win one.
Another Holocene Human
Well, I’m not sure about Ian Walsh, but Joe Lieberman got primaried and got back in; however, he was done on round two. And pointing at that would be sticking in the past–the Bush II era Republican party was a bigger tent. I may have hated them but I did respect the fact that they reached out to minorities and kept a lot of the crazy tamped down (more crazy than I knew, apparently).
It’s not the early 2000s anymore. The Neocons have been cast into the wilderness and rightly so, and the neo-Confederates are trying to take control of the GOP with horrific results.
catclub
@Elizabelle: This is how I conjecture that political organizations that work, earn respect. They spotted the error and immediately came down on AP like a ton of bricks, because it was during the election and no half measure would do. PLUS, they knew they were in the right and that AP would be made to look very bad very fast if they did not pull the mistake. So McAuliffe has a very effective team.
Apparently Fournier has not made the same kind of mistake at the wrong time.
Sly
“Say what you will about the tenets of American Reactionary Populism, Dude, at least its an ethos.”
There are two points that need to be stated and, unfortunately, repeated until they sink in:
The first is that anyone who feels (and this is simply a feeling) that revolutionary change for “Progressives” is impossible needs to (a) stop deluding yourself into believing that “Progressivism” is a catch all for American revolutionary movements when it was only assumed as a name because American conservatives turned liberalism into a dirty word, and (b) stop assuming that leftists and liberals are always going to be on the same side both strategically and tactically.
The difference between liberals and leftists (or “Obots” and “Firebaggers,” as you like) is that the former has much greater deal of respect for the idea of institutional preservation than the latter. Institutions like political parties. Sometimes that respect is healthy and productive. Sometimes it isn’t.
This is all also true of conservatives and reactionaries. The reason why reactionaries, however, have a greater deal of sway over conservatives than leftists do liberals is not because liberals are constantly seeking to sell leftists down the river. It is because the left in the United States is weak. Centuries of successful backlash politics have triumphed over the left’s ability to find any purchase in our national political discourse, and the left has never learned to adapt to this kind of dynamic.
The second, and more important point is this; Fuck Ian Welsh:
Look, fellow white man, I’m sorry that you feel the issues you hold closest to your heart often take a backseat to the issues that are closest to the hearts of others. That really sucks, doesn’t it? The feeling that someone else has a say over your political destiny? No one besides us ever feels like that, especially not people who have dark skin and vaginas who, to make it even more intolerable, don’t even have legitimate political wants and needs of their own. Unlike us. We’re rational and reasonable and never let something as silly as “identity” cloud our judgement.
NonyNony
@J.W. Hamner:
Exactly. This is why I don’t mind the term brogressive at all. It encapsulates neatly the idea that the only progressive agenda items worth worrying about are the ones that straight white male progressive guys care about and if you care about things like voting rights or reproductive freedom or immigration then it’s all “identity politics”.
Welsh is one of the worst examples of this attitude too. When I saw this being fisked around the blogosphere I thought “Grod, is Welsh still vomiting out this claptrap and are people still reading him? Yeesh.”
There are a lot of really good points to be made for progressive activists who are looking to move the country to the left. Only a handful of them have anything to do with electoral politics though. Our government is incredibly conservative and hard to change. Change in this country has ALWAYS come from the bottom-up – first the opinion becomes popular enough that representatives start to feel legitimately threatened if they don’t take a particular position, then the narrative changes. The Tea Party has been trying to short-circuit that and it’s not working – it NEVER WORKS – and it will inevitably lead to a backlash against legislators who have confused the size of their supporters’ megaphones with the size of their population of support.
NR
Everybody here saying “LOL, the Tea Party are a bunch of losers!” is missing one very simple, basic fact: The Tea Party WON the government shutdown fight. Everybody was so focused on “Obamacare” that they didn’t notice that the Democrats surrendered on spending before the shutdown fight even began.
Sure, they look like a bunch of jacktards in the media now, but they got what they wanted–painful cuts to essential government services.
And the fact that people here think that funding the government at sequester levels was some sort of victory for the left, is exactly the problem that Welsh is talking about.
different-church-lady
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: This… THIS is what I get for fundamentally agreeing with you.
John S.
@NR:
Would you care to elaborate on what “winning” means in this context?
Another Holocene Human
@aimai:
Well, it’s not guilt. Not at all. But the very belated poll about voter’s attitudes released last week revealed that white liberals, much more than people of color, are likely to think that more diverse candidates and politicians alone make a meaningful difference politically, as opposed to making no difference in how politics goes down.
I’m not sure why this might be but the corporate world does its own research and what I’ve heard from consultants who wandered over to my public sector world is that diversity (sexual, gender, nationality, creed, and color) actually does–by itself–enhance workplace productivity especially intangible stuff like morale and creative thinking. And that diversity has to extend to the people in charge. So this may be why some white liberals think this way–they have good jobs where they’ve heard this at work and figure that public service can’t be all that different from what they know is true in business.
I wonder if some voters of color were thinking about “tokens” who go against their own community’s interest when they were asked that question. (Examples: Clarence Thomas, Sarah Palin)
I personally think that something very meaningful is going on when white males start voting for a non-white-male candidate. (Btw, you can map the Confederacy and its internal migration outposts by which states had white males go for Obama, which had a close contest in this demo, and which went overwhelmingly for The Other Guy.)
FlipYrWhig
@NR: no, it’s not. The problem that Welsh is talking about is that Democrats care too much about social issues and not enough about drones.
Roger Moore
@cleek:
And this, friends, is the main difference between Teabaggers and Progressives: Teabaggers define the Republican mainstream these days, but Progressives do not define the Democratic mainstream. You can’t ignore that basic point when discussing their relative success in driving their parties’ agendas.
different-church-lady
@Sly:
Or the continued function of some kind of banking system. (See 2008: Fail, let them all)
Cervantes
@catclub: Fournier has not made the same kind of mistake at the wrong time
There’s that, plus many of Fournier’s “errors” are not as easily corrected.
Sly
@different-church-lady:
Pffft. We can just replace a banking system with an unregulated non-profit run by people who know nothing about credit. What could go wrong?
Belafon
@NR: Get over it. The Tea Party did not win the shutdown. Their goal was ending Obamacare. If you want to make it about the sequester, they had already won that.
See, here’s the rub: They control the House. Until they stop controlling the House, they will be in control of spending bills. It looks to me that the shutdown finally proved to the Democrats in Congress, and the President, that they can’t give into everything. But you can’t pass a bill unless it comes out of the House, and until such time as Boehner stops using the Hastert rule, what you get out of the House will be Tea Party bills. Could the president and the Senate push for more? Sure, until such time as another shutdown is looming. And since “feed the poor” is not high on most middle class’ list of important things, the blame for that one will not be on the Republicans, and it definitely won’t fit into how the government is supposed to work.
kc
most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate’s skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate’s policy. Identity is more important to them than how many brown children that politician is killing.
I can see how a person might feel that way, if he spent too much time reading comments at BJ and assumed that Cacti et al represented “most left wingers.”
Roger Moore
@NR:
I’m not sure that’s true. The Tea Party may have won a major policy point, but they were clearly trying to win some extra ones and didn’t get them. They also looked like a bunch of fools who couldn’t get their story or their policy straight, and polls seem to show them as having lost a big chunk of popularity. That says they lost out politically, even if they got a policy win. If the shutdown costs them the 2014 election, it will be a major political loss, even if it was a short-term policy win.
Another Holocene Human
@FlipYrWhig:
Oh, god, yes. These are people who refuse to learn a single lesson from:
The Gay Liberation Movement
The Marriage Equality Movement
The American Civil Rights Movement
The Immigrant Rights Coalition
The Peace Movement
The Environmental Movement
or
The Labor Movement
Either from their successes or failures. Instead they want to hijack an entire political party which–guess what–is a coalition. Coalitions represent a diverse group of interests who… wait for it… wait for it… listen to each other, form alliances, and practice the politics of the possible. They find common ground where they can (yes! this is negotiating!) where they can do the most good on their mutual issues without bringing the entire edifice down fighting a damaging losing battle. Which is, btw, why POTUS BHO backed the fuck off of Gitmo when a bipartisan (hmmm, what could that mean) pushback erupted in the legislature, backed by 70% of Americans who still wet their pants every night.
Keystone XL hasn’t been in limbo all this time because environmentalists attempted to blow up the Democratic party from some blogs, okay? Environmentalists work both with and outside BOTH parties, and they mobilized A LOT, not 200 pikers, okay, A LOT OF PEOPLE.
Obama knows, btw, that if a grand bargain comes up for real on Social Security that organized labor is going to go FUCKING APESHIT. Actually, the GOP knows this as well. That’s why they want Obama to get that “I cut SS checks” smell all over himself while they sit back. Obama is trying to roll them by offering SS cuts in exchange for taxes in order to not only raise taxes but get that “I raised taxes” odor all over the GOP.
Single issue groups, and big non-partisan movements, can be very effective and very powerful when they’re:
knowledgeable
good lobbyists for themselves
persistent
actually have the public on their side
know the fuck how to organize
Then it’s a matter of getting a few friends in elected office and pulling some Saul Alinsky shit so the other side backs off whatever dipshit plutocrat plan was on the table because they got nervous.
That’s the problem with these SoCon Teabaggers. They’re fearless. God told them to do it. They never have a moment of doubt. They can’t be intimidated.
Doubt is that little voice in the back of your head telling you that MAYBE this is just not a good idea right now.
The fanatics will destroy the GOP (at least for now) for this reason. Every time they try to “win” they turn more and more people off.
FlipYrWhig
@Roger Moore: I guess it depends on your definition of “Progressive.” The Democrats collectively are fairly progressive, IMHO, at least in their inclinations: they want to be fair to the greatest number of people. They care more about that than they do about surveillance or drones, which displeases people who think those are fundamental. So, well, win the argument, then. I don’t have a lot of patience for the meta-argument that everyone totally would care the most about that stuff if not for… media, The Corporatists, Obama, whoever. That’s excuse-making of the Ted Cruz sort, where the Great Victory was in your grasp until some of You wavered and They took it away.
NonyNony
@NR:
So wait. Your premise is that the Tea Party “won” the shutdown fight because – and this is the key bit – the Democrats had already agreed to sequester level spending as an ongoing resolution BEFORE the Tea Party shut down the government? That works, I suppose, if you get rid of the whole “cause must precede effect” bit about how the universe operates.
The Tea Party LOST the shutdown fight. They shutdown the government and forced a default to try to exchange reopening the government for scuttling the PPACA. The PPACA did not get scuttled. Therefore THEY LOST. They WON a previous round of shutdown fighting, but they didn’t win this one.
Jesus – if you consider it a loss unless you win every single battle you’re going to give up and go off and get drunk long before the fight is over. This last one was a win. Count it as a win and get ready to fight it all again in February when the Tea Party decides to shut down the government for no reason whatsoever, just to show that they can.
mclaren
@Napoleon:
Any evidence to back up that statement?
Any logic?
Do you have an argument to make?
Any facts you want to cite in support of your claim?
Not only is Ian Welsh dead on target, vacuous sneers like this one from the commenter “Napolean” illustrate with perfect clarity another big problem with progressives: no intellectual content.
Progressives have turned into kneejerk mouth-breathers. They reflexively vote for whatever warm body the Democratic leadership hauls out on stage. Just as long as the warm body isn’t a Republican, they’re happy to vote for that thug.
As a result, Democratic candidates have drifted so far right that we now have a president who laughs at the idea of decriminalizing marijuana even though organizations like Police Officers for Legalization advocate it and well over half the American public support that policy and governors strongly support it to slash their unsustainable prison costs.
As a result of Democratic fecklessness and empty-headed anti-intellectualism of the kind “Napolean” demonstrates, we now have elected Democratic politicians who think the NSA spying is perfectly fine (Nancy Pelosi), a Democratic Vice President who boast that the unconstitutional atrocity misnamed the USA Patriot Act “is my bill” (Joe Biden), and we now have a Democratic president who thinks it’s perfectly fine to murder innocent children in wedding parties with drone strikes in countries with which we’re not at war, creating hordes of new terrorists in the process.
Sly
@FlipYrWhig:
But, hey, at least they have a plan for victory.
Step 1: Convince people to stop voting for Democrats.
Step 2: Victory!
Omnes Omnibus
@Sly: Heightening the contradictions seldom works and it hurts a lot of people along the way.
Another Holocene Human
@FlipYrWhig: drone whining seems to appeal to a lot of young people, and I remember from being young not so long ago that my sense of empathy was highly er underdeveloped
so very theoretical arguments about right and wrong might have–oh wait, DID–appeal to me
now that I’m older, live in a community deeply impacted by austerity and police brutality and all that shit, I just don’t really care all that deeply that drone warfare might, in a sci fi what if sense, cause the cost of war to be less valued. In fact, I have the wisdom to know that drones are being used because those in power know all too well the cost of war, and these robots are being used as an alternative to a costly, destructive ground invasion and to in this case ineffective police action.
Yeah, police action. Notice that drones are not being employed in Britain or Germany because the police arrest people and shit. Which is NOT what was going on Yemen when we blew away that happened-to-have-magic-us-citizenship TRAITOR in his hideyhole. From what I remember, the Yemeni authorities gave the US the go-ahead b/c they couldn’t get that guy. Y’know, I’m just trying to peg this on my outrage-o-meter. Hmmm, thousands of black and latino kids getting stopped and frisked, Stand Your Ground leading to hundreds of unprosecuted murders of people of color, including an innocent kid, Trayvon Martin, and maybe some not-as-innocent kids and adults who still should not have been on the receiving end of offensive firepower because some white guy with a gun had firey crotch itch … or some asshole who declared war on the US and some of his buddies got blowed up by a bomb.
I know there are plenty of old drone whiners too. I don’t know what their problem is–fear? Being plugged into the lefty version of Fox News and eliminating all competing facts (oh lord I know somebody like this)?
The other thing the young ones do is that they’re not happy with the status quo so they think anybody who criticizes the US is their brother and are completely insensitive to the agenda behind it. I had lefties on my FB who were pissed about the revolution in Libya, which they ought to have been cheering (whether or not they agreed with US intervention) since, idk, Libya was an autocracy with one ethnic group in power and lording it over all the others?! Exactly what you hyperbolically call the US? But Ghaddafi said some shit critical of the US once and pitched a tent in Washington, DC, so he’s the new Cesar Chavez. Or something.
One more reason I have stayed off book of faces recently. It makes me crazy.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: Good to see you’ve simplified the laundry list down to two items. I’m surprised nobody had noted those two items earlier in the comments.
Chris
@Sly:
I always thought “liberal” and “leftist” were about class as much as anything else.
Liberalism being the ideology of the middle class, the bourgeoisie (minus its upper echelons), the people who have enough invested in the system that they don’t want to burn it down or even rock the boat too severely, but not so much that they’re comfortable shutting down avenues of dissent, reform, etc.
The left is the ideology of the working-class and/or the disenfranchised who’re getting shafted under the existing system, and therefore aren’t nearly as concerned about the niceties of working within the system, as you say. (And, as you say, it’s really weak in America right now).
Go in the other direction and you get conservatism, the ideology of the upper class.
different-church-lady
The rainbow unicorn told them that if we only elected the correct candidate all conflict would be resolved and nobody would ever die again ever.
I don’t get any kicks out of people getting blown up, no matter what tech is used. But I’m also not naive enough to think that we got rid of the military everyone else in the world would just mellow out.
Peter
@mclaren:
You know, completely unlike all those other Presidents.
Southern Beale
I guess I can assume by the high volume of trolling on this thread that someone has answered the RNC’s “Get paid to blog” Craigslist ads?
patroclus
@mclaren: Marijuana decriminalization just took effect in Chicago this year under RAAHHHMMM and it’s working well. Obama doesn’t support it nationally but the state-by-state changes have been happening every year since he took office. You sound shocked that Obama opposes it, but no President since FDR (when it was enacted) ever has, so I’m not sure why you’re so shocked.
Our lousy health care system kills hundreds of thousands of people more than the few drones that were mistargeted have ever done and Obama fought for and won the ACA battle and health insurance is being implemented nationwide. You like to think you’re holier than the rest of us, but you don’t seem to focus on the real issues and what is really happening. It’s no wonder that you and the idiotic Ian Walsh are in agreement.
Heliopause
Several dozen members of Congress plus maybe 150 more who at least pretend to be like them, a public relations fiasco for the Obamacare rollout which is in part due to their efforts, and complete governmental paralysis in Washington. Those are pretty impressive accomplishments for 27% of the population, probably the best outcome they could have hoped for short of a military coup.
Another Holocene Human
Mais oui, my last statement was a lie in that Cesar is entirely the wrong Chavez–they worship Hugo.
I like Hugo, even grudgingly admire him in a “Kingfisher” kind of way, but just because he made buddy-buddy with some country and criticized Bush (who I guess tried to assassinate him, so he can be forgiven for a small grudge there) doesn’t mean that every country in his alliance is some sort of progressive/socialist utopia, or that Venezuela is, I mean, come on.
Cuba and the US make a good case study in political hysteria, I think. Cuba is so afraid of the ills of inequality that they discourage economic development, for example the tourist economy, or even farmer’s markets. Meanwhile, the US is so afraid of “socialism” that they’ve brought down all the ills of 3rd world levels of inequality on themselves.
If they would just calm the fuck down–maybe roll a few joints and pass them around, or maybe this calls for nitrous oxide or ketamine, lol–they could look at a nice fact sheet and realize that the Scandanavian countries achieved relatively low inequality (by worldwide measures–it’s not zero, but it’s a HELL of a lot better than Britain, Canada, or esp the US, which makes Britain and Canada look really good) and relatively good economic development and growth. And they did it with regulated, redistributative capitalism. Regulated.
ps: I think part of the us hatred for regulation comes of regulatory bureaucracies like the ICC getting stuck in the 19th century which gave regulation in general a bad name … deregulating energy–epic fail, deregulating airlines–rolling failure, deregulating railroads in part–crash followed by recovery, but remember, the rr’s are still very regulated, just not in the way that they were before
of course this is used to smear environmental regs, which cut right at the heart of the profits of assholes like Massey, Kochs, Dow, Dupont, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Monsanto, etc. Oh noes we won’t be able to frack/strip mine/dump toxic wastes, spill toxic fuels, pollute the air, try out new aromatic hydrocarbons on the public without consequences. Waaaaa! Waaaaaaa!
Another Holocene Human
@Heliopause: Bullshit. The establishment GOP provided critical support to put the GOP over the edge in 2010, not just nationally but in the states.
The TPers are biting the hand that gave them a hand up into power. They’re clowns.
different-church-lady
@patroclus:
Obama didn’t support gay marriage either, and look how staunchly he’s held his ground on that!
different-church-lady
@Another Holocene Human:
Every Dr. Frankenstein starts out thinking he can control his own monster.
Another Holocene Human
@patroclus:
Imagine you’re Obama and secretly want MJ to be legal. Now, suppose you are also as smart as Obama and know what happens every time you express an opinion on something.
Do you come out in support of MJ legalization? Why or why not?
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
This exactly.
I finally figured out a few months ago that this was my basic problem with the “professional left” (which I otherwise agree with quite a bit if we’re just talking about their ideas): they basically want to be another Democratic Party, but without having any of the building blocs behind them out of which a political party is actually assembled. Apparently not realizing that a party platform isn’t just a wish list of how you’d run the country in a perfect world, it’s the sum total of what your different constituencies want, balanced against the political realities of how likely they are to get it.
patroclus
@different-church-lady: Exactly, I have a feeling that were he not so constrained politically, Obama would, in fact, support mj decriminalization. Which is why I brought up the Chicago example, which was enacted by Mayor Emmanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff in Obama’s home town. Mclaren is “shocked” that Obama currently mouths the position taken by every President since 1937 whilst substantial changes are taking place state-by-state and city-by-city under his watch.
different-church-lady
@Another Holocene Human: 11 D CHESS! O-BOT! NO PRINCIPLES!
Aww, fuck it. Poe’s law.
different-church-lady
@Another Holocene Human:
Now that I think about it, that might be one of the major driving forces behind Welch’s post: he’s envious because he doesn’t have a hand to bite.
Sly
@Chris:
Leftists and liberals are divided over how best to achieve revolutionary goals – gradualism and molding existing institutions vs. radicalism – and not those simply related to economic class. It is the fault line over which the entirety of the liberal/left divide appears on every issue. The larger fault-line between the politics of revolution (left/liberal) and counter-revolution (conservative/reactionary) are systems that perpetuate privilege; privilege that is unjustifiable and immoral to the revolution, but are necessary and moral to the counter-revolution.
The problem for liberals is that sometimes the radicals are right and there are cases where existing institutions are terminally corrupt and/or immoral, and no amount of peace and stability is worth their preservation (slavery being the biggest historical example). The problem for leftists is that their lack of institutional respect makes them organizationally ineffective, particularly when confronted by organized political interests, and their methodology makes it very easy to reduce any failure or setback to insufficient willpower. This, in turn, makes it easy for them to feel betrayed and lash out at allies in order to punish them.
The same kind of relationship exists between conservatives and reactionaries, but in the context of counter-revolution. “You’re either with us or against us.”
With respect to the current confab – the security state – liberals see aspects of the system that are worth preserving, or at least not worth destroying if that means destroying other moral and necessary institutions. There’s just too much baby to throw out with the bathwater. Leftists do not; the security state is an apparatus of imperialism and must be destroyed.
Another Holocene Human
@Chris: Yes, but for some odd reason lefties seem to stem from the WHITE working class, as well as young members of the bourgeoisie or to be fair, what we call middle class, which is a little bit more skint.
I wonder why that would be…?
Maybe because the old left in the US wanted the whole corrupt system taken down, but FDR took the wind out of revolution’s sails by enacting the New Deal and then Stalin pretty much sowed the seeds of the destruction of what was left of the left, since the Wobblies had streamed into the CPA?
But most African American labor organizing of any note got cranking during the 1930s and wasn’t beholden to the CPA (note: they tried), and the civil rights movement had made a decision a loooong time ago to attempt to force change within the system instead of trying to blow it all up and start over? (I mean, if you wanted to check out there was always Liberia or the Caribbean or, later, France.) Because instead of Big Bill Hayworth there was A. Philip Randolph and yeah, that guy was talented tenth, not working class. Because the civil rights movement actually succeeded in its struggle (ugh, until now) whereas the traditional US left, er, failed and disintegrated?
IDK why so many whites are still hardcore lefties but I find that most of them are very ignorant of African-American history in this country. I haven’t figured it all out. But I know very few Black lefties unless you mean people like Van Jones who is an urban radical–he calls himself progressive, not a leftist, and I would too. Urban radicals have fought stuff like “urban renewal”, environmental justice issues, education issues, police issues, & so on for decades, and they’re a core demo of the Democratic party. They are NOT people who wait around for a purity pony. (I’m sure some of them DID vote Green when that was a thing, but the Green leadership fucked that up. So now urban radicals try to push progressive D candidates in primaries, since they live in districts where the primary is the election, anyway.)
The Pale Scot
Finally, some Radiators, Oh Beautiful Loser
grape_crush
> “Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology.”
Most left wingers don’t have an ideology, only what seems to work best for most people most of the time. A loose allegiance to utilitarianism and pragmatism, maybe, but not a religious-like following.
Hence the whole, ‘herding cats’ analogy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sly: Another aspect of this is that leftists were, for example, leading strikes and liberals were drafting pro-union legislation. Both necessary. Both different.
Another Holocene Human
I’ll tell you the difference between Black progressives and white lefties in one little interlude–before Rev Al was on MSNBC, back when he was doing hunger strikes in NYC and organizing around police brutality and conditions in Haiti–the Daily Show sent a correspondent to interview him. It was a white guy, could have been anyone from Mo Rocca to the other Steve, I don’t really remember. The correspondent asks Sharpton about “sticking it to the Man”. Sharpton replies:
“No. I’m not trying to ‘stick it’ to anybody.”
Lurking Buffoon
I keep trying to read Welsh’s except here (I refuse to give blatant bullshit a page hit), but every time I try all I see is, “Democrats in disarray! Democrats in disarray!”
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Strikes can be effective tools. But inchoate anger is rarely effective. So many strikes have been failures. Not “oh it failed, but we won on another plane”. I mean complete and abject failures. You lost more than you won and you won’t get up to fight another day.
Just another “lost cause” for white keyboard commandoes to whine about while they enjoy their unconscious privilege that lets them think their whining it totally relevant and deep and makes them interesting.
patroclus
@Another Holocene Human: Agreed. Weed decriminalization at the federal level has no chance of passage until many states and cities have tried it and it has been proven to work. Obama supporting it now would be cutting off his nose to spite his face and would be counter-productive. I like the subterraneian strategy better as the more profitable tactic. I certainly support decriminalization, but would probably oppose a firebagging candidate who made that their sole electoral strategy. Mclaren doesn’t seem to grasp that and would probably consider me a political enemy.
Cervantes
@Sly:
How would you apply this analysis to OWS? (That’s a question, not a criticism.)
I wonder if, instead of dichotomizing “liberals” and “leftists”/”radicals” we could just characterize extremes (if we want to) while acknowledging (or trying to show) that most people are (by definition) not at those extremes.
(And yes, in case it’s not obvious, I think talking about Ian Welsh is a waste of time.)
LongHairedWeirdo
There’s one problem that a lot of people seem to fail to realize.
The Republicans are brutally nasty, pushing their agenda even if they have to shut down the government or threaten default, and they have to at least say “don’t think I won’t drive off the cliff!”
If *two* parties do that, it’s a recipe for complete disaster. If one does it, it’s hideous enough, a lot of damage has been done already. But if they both do that? If both people playing chicken think they have to be – *have* to be – the last person to swerve, are you more or less likely to see a crash?
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: I am thinking more in terms of the labor movement of 100 years ago. It probably plugs into Chris’s class focused view. The leftists of the time were largely with (literally) the workers or they were workers themselves. Their actions in publicizing working conditions and disrupting business led to middle class folks noticing and caring.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cervantes:
I think a lot of the slugfests that come up on this blog are due to the fact that the difference does exist. They are fights over means to an end and timing rather than fights over ends in and of themselves. Half of the acrimony could be turned down if people bore that in mind.
Rex Everything
Everyone’s harping on the fact that the Tea Party has turned out to be a disaster for the GOP, as if this conclusively skewers Welsh’s argument. I just want to point out that the Tea Party’s failures are not at all due to the tactics Welsh endorses, which were an unmitigated success, but to the Tea Party’s policies: their stupidity, untenability, and political unpopularity. The Left, not being stupid, nor trafficking in untenable and unpopular ideas, has no reason to fear a similar outcome.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: You’re really oversimplifying here. For one thing, the “middle class” was Marx’s “bourgeoisie”. The American middle class as we know it–a vast middle class made up of white and blue collar workers–happened after WWII.
From my reading of the 20s and the 30s, the bourgeoisie didn’t give a shit about working class conditions. Even Upton Sinclair only really got shit done by grossing people out. (Just as today, the reason truckers have hours of service–with teeth–is not because anyone gives a shit about truckers’ life expectancies but because car drivers are worried about their own life expectancy with critically fatigued truckers sharing the road.)
The organizing and the strikes–the effective ones–gave working class people a different attitude towards themselves. Remember, in the 19th century, the factory worker was looked upon as almost the lowest. No land, no status, has to sell his/her back to the man. (Recall farmers were or at least became an organized political force at the same time–farmers came over from Europe with certain attitudes about land ownership and status.) General strikes, work stoppages, union membership, demands, all of these things gave these workers a sense of solidarity, pride, esteem and also a class consciousness. These folks had come from many different countries and did not all speak the same language. The powers that be were at war with them from the start. Wilson (the supposed liberal Democrat) sent in the National Guard to crush a streetcar driver’s strike in Pensacola, Florida which had turned into a general strike and unrest, little boys throwing rocks at scab driver’s cars.
These folks had not been given a piece of American society, nor even afforded the dignity that should come with citizenship, and the ruling class was afraid of what they might do. Think Syria. That’s what they were afraid of.
The US is not like that now. And a strike can still be effective and can still galvanize a community. Why do you think there are so many legal restrictions on strikes? But strikes failed then and they can fail now. We hear about the strikes that really worked, like the GM sit-down during the Great Depression. It was ugly, but it was also momentous. We don’t hear about the hundreds of cotton mill wildcat strikes and mine strikes that were crushed and condemned that town to decades more of poverty and hopelessness.
My point is that a tactic without a goal and a strategy is as likely to blow you up as the other guy.
different-church-lady
@Rex Everything: The Tea Party was extremely successful at bringing heat. Welch seems to be envious of this. However, in the long run people do eventually crave some light with their heat — eventually they want to leave the cave and enjoy the daybreak, no matter how warm the fire might be.
Cervantes
Regarding radicals and liberals and the middle class and institutions and revolutions — and progress — and beautiful losers and winners — below is an admittedly long excerpt from Saul Alinsky’s Playboy interview (March, 1972), given a few short months (not, alas, ten years) before he died. It’s worth reading.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
When I say “Progressives” in this case, I’m thinking of self-described progressives, who don’t seem to be that numerous on the ground.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Yes, I was oversimplifying. I was writing a short blog comment, not a thesis. And the middle class that I was talking about was the middle class groups who formed the Progressive movement. Jane Addams, Harold Ickes (not that one, the other one) and so on. I’ll try to more precise in the future.
Peter
@Rex Everything: Tactics and policy are not so easily separable. The Tea Party’s tactics require a level of extremetism that in turn created extreme policy.
Corner Stone
@Cervantes: Goodness. Are we sure that interview was in 1972 and not 2012?
ranger3
Cry me a river, dude. I fucking despise women but thanks to our wonderful two-party system I get to choose between one run by the Teatards or the one with all the feminists. Every election day is fucking painful for me and I tell myself next time I’m voting Libertarian but I always get pushed back to voting Democrat.
God I fucking hate listening to those vile, bitter, privileged bitches griping about how oppressed they are. But I put up with them because that’s how politics works. It’s them or Ted Cruz.
I can at least take heart that BHO delayed Hillary’s utterly undeserved ascendancy to her husband’s former post by 8 years. That was pretty awesome. The Obama/Clinton “Bro’s Before Ho’s” t-shirts were especially satisfying… brought a smile to my jaded face. So there was that.
But yes, the NSA thing is bad. They should stop that.
Sly
@Cervantes:
1) The active embrace of a decentralized organizational structure.
2) Repelling existing institutional actors.
3) A general revolt against the idea of expertise.
I understand why the “leadership” of OWS thought it necessary to take these stances; they thought a movement that emphasized democratic direct-action needed to live up to its ideals. I just disagree that it was necessary or productive.
While “the extremes” do have aspects in common, those aspects are more related to their position relative to the “moderates,” and the operating principles of political action that this position entails, but not actual goals. To use an example from the other side, Ted Cruz and David Brooks fundamentally want the same thing: an end to revolutionary politics. Where they differ is how they think revolutionary politics can and should end. That’s an important difference, and a difference that can make marginal alliances between liberals and conservatives (one such alliance existed over exactly this issue – the security state – during the Cold War). But goals are still important.
In other words, I, as a liberal, have no problem working with leftists towards common goals, one of which is a reduction in the power of the security state. I just don’t like being called a “sell out” for not thinking that the abolition of the security state is either a realistic or worthy goal to pursue.
El Cid
The progressive blog movement “failed” for those who vastly overfantasized its possible trajectory. If you didn’t begin by assuming some revolution would flow out of it, then I don’t quite see the “failure”.
Cervantes
@ranger3: If parody was not your intention, please seek help.
Chris
@Sly:
Thanks for the summarization.
@El Cid:
LOLOL. Yeah, the focus on the blogosphere is… odd; it’s like they actually believe the Ender’s Game fantasy of bloggers taking over the world.
fuckwit
@Corner Stone: I mean circa 1988, the circular firing squad that was the Democratic Party. Al Sharpton. NOW. Greenpeace. Palestinian rights. Immigration. NO-NUKES. Anti-war. Labor. ACT-UP. It was silos of people mostly focussed narrowly on their own personal identity issues– feminists, gays, African Americans, Central America, homeless, labor– and being ignorant of, dismissive of, and even hostile to, the issues of their fellow (“competing”) oppressed folks, claiming that they were the REAL victims and everyone else wasn’t really entitled to that status. And definitely hostile to the more privileged mainstream white/christian/male/white-collar/straight middle class who were already well on thier way to being just as fucked. It was a bad place to be.
What changed that really was when the privileged white/christian/male/white-collar/straight middle class started to NOTICE we were just as fucked, and started to develop solidarity with people who had been oppressed (often by us!) for a long time. That started to happen about 10 years ago. I saw it; I remember going to the first protests against the Iraq war in Oct 2002 and noticing a palpable feel of middle-aged middle class white people starting to feel silenced and ignored, and maybe for the first time for some of them.
It’s still an ongoing process; notice now that white/straight/chrstian/male middle class people are starting to get creeped out by and outraged by being under the thumb of the domestic surveillance and police state, which is something that black people have been screaming about at least since NWA.
The path to progressive solidarity continues to go like this: as long as there are people oppressed, then NONE of us are really free. We need a fair system where everyone has an equal chance, where we work together so that all of us can do well. There was a Pastor Niemoller moment for a lot of us. I think what many of us former Republicans learned in the Shrub years, is that we have to be concerned about those who are less privileged, not only because it’s right to do so, but because if we don’t, those less privileged will soon include us.
God-Emperor Aardvark-Penguin IV Jr
@ranger3:
With warmth and charm like that, I am guessing you and Mr Right Hand take a lot of trips to lotion-land together.
Xecky Gilchrist
Ian Welsh is the blogger who inspired in me the term “reedy nasal whine” for PUMA-type anti-Obama complaining back in ’08.
philadelphialawyer
I think the first disconnect here is that the bloggers formerly known as the big name bloggers are not to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party is to the Republican Party. Big name bloggers, by definition, are a handful of people. Tea Partiers, for all the Koch money, for all the astroturfing, are a big chunk of the Republican electorate, especially the primary voters.
More problems….the right wing, which means the Tea Partiers, is a bigger percentage of the GOP than left wingers are of the Democratic party. The Dems include and embrace multitudes, different kinds of people from all walks of life, and, politically, everything from the far left to the moderate conservative right. The Republicans are more like a small clique, demographically limited in every way, and with political views only from the moderate conservative right to the bat crap crazy right. So, again, there is a disconnect here, even assuming what the big name bloggers want is what the left wants.
And that is another problem, as, from what I recall, there was never a vote among far left or all left Democrats that selected the big name bloggers as their representatives. Most big name bloggers are not really all that immoderate. And, how did they become big name bloggers? By climbing through, often with each others’ help, a soon to be closed (or at least, blocked) window during a relatively brief formative period in the history of the internet. With all due respect (and, in my opinion, not all that much is due), the idea that Marcos or Jerome or Atrios or the like were ever some kind of political geniuses, much less the best and truest keepers of the lefty flame, is fairly ridiculous. Soooo, the problem is not that the blogger supported the “most progressive” candidates, but the dumb Dem Party primary voters were too stupid to heed their betters, but rather the big name bloggers themselves were (1) not particularly progressive, (2) not particularly effective or persuasive, and (3) not particularly representative.
The last bit, about Obama end running around the self appointed “Gatekeepers” pretty much says it all! Who in the name of heck decided that this small group of mostly male, mostly white, mostly hetero, mostly pretty damn moderate bloggers were going to be the “gatekeepers” for the left? Last time I checked, these guys didn’t own the internet. And Obama, for all that you might want to criticize his campaign (and his presidency) was certainly not obligated to go through the Great Orange Satan et al to get his message out, reach voters, get donors, get lists of activists, provide fora for discussions, and so on. And what in the world would be “progressive” about it if these characters were able to act as gatekeepers? Having gotten rid of the Mayor Dailys and the smoked filled rooms, are we now to replace them with Marcos and his big name blogger buddies and their private chat room?
Big babies who no longer run the playground crying in their milk bottles. Wah, wah, wah! Someone call Ian a Wahmbulance!
Corner Stone
@fuckwit: Thanks for the response. I’m either misunderstanding your comment, or there seems to be an unaccounted for discrepancy in your evaluation/definition. So I have two follow up questions:
How do you account for the Clinton years?
Were you a Republican immediately prior to GWB?
Corner Stone
And personally, IMO, Markos Moulitsas can take a long fucking running jump off the shortest of short piers.
Cervantes
@fuckwit:
Interesting. Al Sharpton, really?
How does Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition fit in your narrative?
Recall that in 1984 Jackson won Democratic primaries in South Carolina, Virginia, & Louisiana — and an overall 21% (3.5 million votes) of the national Democratic primary vote. Whereas Ernest Hollings, John Glenn, and Gary Hart won no primaries at all.
And in 1988 Jackson won primaries/caucuses in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, DC, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina, & Vermont, for a total of 6.9 million votes overall (doubling his vote count relative to 1984).
I doubt you can explain these results if you’re thinking only in terms of a “circular firing squad.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
philadelphialawyer
@Another Holocene Human:
Dude, no reason to go off the deep end in the other direction. The drone war sucks, it is in violation of all tenets of international law, is deeply immoral, and is continuing the blowback problem.
That being said, yeah, other stuff, police brutality, lack of jobs, certainly matter too.
Vote GOP, and get the drones, or worse, AND all the other bad shit.
Vote Dem, and get the drones, and at least somewhat less of the other bad shit and maybe even some good stuff too.
FlipYrWhig
@philadelphialawyer: I also never understood how on the Venn Diagram of the American center-left there were supposed to be three circles — blog participants, “the left,” and “the base” — that were really just one circle, and that that circle was the vanguard of political change. Seems like a highly self-flattering vision. Also seems like proclaiming that CB radio would inevitably overtake Jimmy Carter.
Corner Stone
@philadelphialawyer:
Jerome Armstrong, is that you?
Corner Stone
@ranger3: Righteous.
Omnes Omnibus
@philadelphialawyer:
Yep.
I disagree.
Arguable.
Definitely.
RaflW
I’m late to the Tbogg unit in the making, but I just gotta say: who the hell is this Ian guy, and why should I care about his bullshit?
That’s the kind of useless, boilerplate ‘criticism’ that La Palin manages to valiantly tap out on her Facebook page when she’s feeling like her marks haven’t read enough from her lately.
Honestly, Ian, why the fk should I care who you are or what you say?
philadelphialawyer
@Corner Stone:
Um, no. I’m saying half a loaf is better than none. And that the drone strikes are not the end all be all. Directly contrary to what Jerome is saying.
Tell me, can anyone oppose the drone strikes and NOT be Jerome?
Corner Stone
@philadelphialawyer: Your comment seemed, IMO, to be a “lesser of two evils” formulation. Which is what, again IMO, Jerome was railing against.
As for against drone policy, brother/sister, you better strap in for the full ride if you want to hear my againstness.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@John S.:
Projection.
philadelphialawyer
@Corner Stone:
Well, now you’ve got me confused…..Cuz I was embracing a lesser of two evil formulation, which Jerome doesn’t like, therefore you thought I was Jerome?
As for the drones, I’ll match my againstness against anyone’s any day.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@philadelphialawyer:
Your hyperbole and inaccuracy are showing.
Corner Stone
@philadelphialawyer: To highlight the things he’s claimed Balloon-Juice, among others are guilty of.
It’s not really a hard formulation.
Jerome purportedly claims BJ is a sell-out who makes excuses for any D action and preaches the decision that “lesser of two evils” is the way to approach politics.
You make a “lesser” argument.
I invoke His name to highlight the hilarity.
Not difficult.
philadelphialawyer
@GHayduke (formerly lojasmo):
Your link ain’t the last or only word.
See, eg, here:
http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report-legality/
philadelphialawyer
@Corner Stone:
I still don’t get it, but whatever.
Heliopause
@Another Holocene Human:
Didn’t really read what I said, did you?
The OP pointed out correctly that the TP are not only a minority, a majority think their ideas are nuts. So in a binary democracy what should their influence on national policy be? About zero, right? In fact, their influence is greater than zero.
As recently as the 1990s it was possible for a deeply conservative Congress and a centrist Democratic President to at least do a few policy things together. As recently as 2009 there were still a few “moderate” Republican senators who would work with the Dems on a few issues. What happened to those heady days? Washington is basically non-functional at this point. You can thank the Tea Party for some of that. Impressive work for a group that three quarters of the country consider a joke.
The OP implied that success is measured strictly in electoral terms, but consider that if electoral successes are limited, yet your primary policy goal of rendering Washington non-functional is being realized, you’re accomplishing something.
Phoenix Woman
@Napoleon: He’s a Canadian who pretty much thinks all US progs should just shoot or stab themselves because Canadians like him have been so good at putting progressives in charge in Canada and keeping out of power people like Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper. Oh, wait.
Phoenix Woman
@DBaker: A-yep.
The Raven on the Hill
I believe Obama’s largest campaign contributor in 2008 was Goldman Sachs. See, http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/20/obama.goldman.donations/.
The Raven on the Hill
Correction, the second biggest PAC contributor was Goldman Sachs PAC, putting in a whopping $1,034,615. It was dwarfed by the individual contributions, but still.
It’s also the case that in 2008, it was anything-but-Bush.