Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 38 of
This Week’s Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of September 24.
Enjoy.
An important lesson was delivered today to the Netroots, one with its roots in The 1967 Game.
Know your enemies.
In the case of the Netroots, their aim is not to just support Democrats. It’s to fundamentally change Washington, Democrat and Republican, pundit and press. It is to shift the balance toward what they consider the center, which today is often derided as The Left.
But how far Left can you be when two-thirds of voters agree with you? That’s what the Netroots is asking today. And that’s what the Conservative Party of the state of New York was saying 40 years ago.
New York Conservatives were extremely frustrated back then. They were being told to get behind liberals like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits in order to stop liberals like Arthur Goldberg. And they had had enough — that was their slogan by the way. They risked Goldberg to support an unknown named Paul Adams for Governor in 1966, and then ran James L. Buckley against Javits in 1968. Both lost.
But the message was eventually sent, and when liberal Charles Goodell was selected to replace Bobby Kennedy in the Senate, they used the support of the Nixon Administration to get Buckley elected in 1970. (More important, the party steadily gained a veto over the Republican Party apparatus, resulting in Al D’Amato and George Pataki. You may not like them, I did not like them. New York Conservatives loved them, and with reason.)
It’s amazing how few in the Netroots have gotten the message. I checked after today’s Moveon vote in the Senate,
where half the Democrats called a strong anti-war message out-of-bounds
because it dared criticize a political appointee of a politicized
military who delivered a political message. There was nothing on the
main page of Dailykos. Nothing on the main page of Atrios. Silence.
Chirping crickets.
It’s true that Moveon is not a Netroots organization. You might
think of it as the America Online or the Netscape of the movement, in
that it was founded in the 1990s, it runs from the top-down, and it’s
barely interactive. It hasn’t moved into Web 2.0 in any meaningful way.
Even the name, an homage to the Clinton Impeachment, is antique.
But c’mon. If your Senator said that ad was out-of-bounds, he or she
was putting you out-of-bounds, if like the majority of Americans you
favor getting out of Iraq now. Rush Limbaugh has never been condemned
by the Senate, nor Glenn Beck, nor Bill O’Reilly, nor Melanie Morgan,
nor even Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. They’re all in-bounds. But
an organization whom 64% agree with is out-of-bounds, with an
Administration holding a 29% approval rating?
Ridiculous. Absurd. And in failing to go to the mat in support of this ad, the Netroots movement puts itself out of bounds. Thanks to today’s vote, the Netroots can be marginalized. And it is, in fact, being marginalized.
Not everyone has been AWOL today. Firedoglake gets it. Americablog gets it. Down with Tyranny says it’s a Moveon Democrat. And Hoffmania understands the implications of this week — Democrats as a whole are wussies.
But few are willing to take the next step, and acknowledge that the
enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, that triangulation has to
end, that half the Democrats in the U.S. Senate betrayed their most
avid supporters today and need to be punished for it. MyDD gets it. OpenLeft gets it.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment today was Barack Obama going AWOL.
The point from history is this. The Netroots today does not have to be practical. It doesn’t have to triangulate. If it wants to become relevant it must demand relevance. If it wants to shift the center it must lean hard. That’s how you change the media, that’s how you change Washington, and that’s how you change the culture.
That’s the lesson the Conservatives of 1967 have to teach today’s Netroots. You may not get Reagan, but you don’t have to settle for Nixon.
UPDATE: And if anyone in the Netroots wants to know how you lead, here’s a lesson:
