"We desperately need to catch the Right in the Blogger Wars, and I am proud of each and every person who has the guts and initiative to start his or her own weblog. The progressive movement of the future will be built, in large part, on this digital foundation."
Daily Kos
"I disagree. The movement will be built by people in the streets and by organizing in the real world not in cyberspace. The Net is a tool. The real work is done face-to-face, in meetings, by the grunt work of flyering, postering, and building events and coalitions. That's how you build a movement. The Net can help get the word out, but can never replace that.
Saturday's historic immigrant rights march in L.A. aptly demonstrates how a massive movement can be built without the Net. While march organizers have websites, using the Net to build the march played a minor role. Instead, it was done by one-on-one, by phone, and by radio.
Liberal and progressive bloggers. You've been on the outside looking in at the antiwar and immigrant rights movements. Jump on in. We can all learn from and help each other. Then we can work together and win."
Politics in the Zeros 3-28-6
Beltway Democrats, looking always for number one, will not support grassroots demonstrations or activism of any type. Popular activism should be the bread and butter of the netroots. I believe the demonstrations influenced the Republican administration enough to send senators, to support Democrats in offering a reasonable Immigration Reform alternative to the House version, in a way that the netroots by themselves could not have accomplished. Enactment of fair and reasonable immigration reform is not an accomplished fact yet, but popular activism works. At this stage of the game breaking peaceful demonstrations could be more of a public relations nightmare for a corrupt and incompetent administration, than spying on and trying to suppress the blogosphere.
In a similar fashion netroot activism at the precinct level will not work without the grassroots being involved in a Get Out The Vote year long permanent campaign to maintain our base, and actively reach out and recruit all those citizens, voting and nonvoting, that are favorable to our platform.
In the Texas 28 CD primary. The netroots were inspired and gave Ciro Rodrigues a fighting chance. I believe, however, that not enough GOTV at the precinct level had been accomplished, by the time the primary rolled around, as revealed by the anemic voting in Bexar county, with almost three times more voters than Webb county. Granted, primaries may be different, and in Webb county voting machines "malfunctioned", and Republicans switched to vote Democratic. However, a better GOTV in Ciro's home base could have worked.
A netroot movement confined only to cyberspace may grow and be strident and become influental to a degree among those that are informed and enjoy and love blogging. I do not agree with CTG that a leaderless movement will be effective. It will be just another image of the present Democratic party that is in essence leaderless, lacks a coherent platform of issues and values, and, thus, has been confined to the political wilderness. In politics a "decentralized" system is just an invitation to eventual disarray, disunity, infighting, and relegation to the fringes.
To start becoming effective, the netroots, and the Democratic party, in addition to answering the Republican Noise Machine, should not forget its roots, that is the Grassroots.