Crashing the Gate
Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
By Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
Foreword by Simon Rosenberg
Reviewed by Jules Siegel
"Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."
-- Eli Pariser, MoveOn PAC, December 9, 2004
"Crashing the Gate" is a manifesto aimed at fixing the structural defects that have caused the steady decline of Democratic power since Lyndon B. Johnson abdicated in 1968. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas brilliantly exploited bleeding-edge technology to create a new kind of interactive political media that brought open source journalism to the ordinary Internet user. They helped convert the netroots (the digital equivalent of grassroots) into a $40 million ATM for the Howard Dean campaign.
Their book is at once awesomely inspiring and profoundly depressing. Devoting themselves almost entirely to analysis of political technique rather than ideology, Armstrong and Moulitsas describe the massive superiority of the Republicans in creating and deploying political infrastructure, the greedy incompetence of the Democratic consultants who enrich themselves while losing again and again, the fanatic single-issue pressure groups that have made it impossible for the Democratic party to present a unified, disciplined public image.
It's on the Alternet.org front page today but you can read the rest of my original unedited text here.