A good friend of mine was chiding me for some dubiousness I had about the blogswarm of action around Disney/ABC.
I'm sorry, but as a veteran of previous blogswarms (Sinclair, Swiftboats, Tucker Carlson) I am a bit dubious. Not out of any opposition to taking action in this instance; in fact, not at all. But my reservation comes more out of a political instinct that can be expressed in these dual principles:
Outrage within infrastructure is powerful.
And the converse:
Outrage without infrastructure melts away.
There are two key points here. First, I am making a distinction between outrage that happens inside versus outside of an organizational infrastructure; I'm saying that there's a qualitative difference between the two. Second, without questioning the validity of any particular expression of outrage, I am making a concrete challenge to HOW that outrage is channeled. I'm asking whether the structures through which we channel our outrage are ad hoc and throw away or whether they are permanent and enduring and live to fight another day...
In the winter of 1988 I trooped up to New Hampshire with my friends Karl and Justin to GOTV for
Jesse Jackson and
the Rainbow Coalition. I was nineteen years old. We had snow, we had stocking caps. It was our "Perfect Storm" moment.
Now, at that point, I believed that I was a part of something: a grassroots, progressive political movement committed to building unity and empowering like-minded citizens all over the country. Jesse Jackson, in his outrage and his optimism, spoke for me.
However, I ruefully learned as the months and years went on that...despite registering hundreds of thousands of new voters...the organizational structure of the Rainbow Coalition was synonymous with the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson. With the dissolution of that campaign, our coalition melted away like the New Hampshire snow. Some of it melted away quickly like snow in a spring thaw, and other parts more slowly, like the ice on the north-facing wall of a ski lodge. Either way, by the late-90s the Rainbow Coalition didn't have much resonance to 19-year-olds at all. The energies, the connections, the people we met...all of the structures that we felt we were building...were taken down like tents in a campground after labor day.
That's not unique to the Rainbow Coalition. As numerous analysts from Kos & Armstrong to George Lakoff have pointed out...that's the way Democratic politics has been for years. We love our causes and battles and groups. We love our particular hot button issues. We love our charismatic leaders. We are not so good, however, at building and sustaining organizational structures that last and build from battle to battle.
Quite frankly, we progressives rock at generating outrage, but we suck at channelling that outrage into infrastructure that wins elections. We love the thrill of ad hoc. We love screaming emails. We're less good at the pragmatic, enduring nuts and bolts organizing that delivers on election day. That may sting, but it's a fact that confronts us during the stretch run of every election season.
That is true even here in the netroots. While the infrastructure of national blog communities and ACTBlue are vast improvements over the way online politics was practised just three years ago. And while it is also true that when we put our shoulders to our keyboards, we in the netroots can powerfully rally to a cause. However, I would ask, how many of the structures (email lists, petition drives, websites, Alito nomination pledges) built out of our previous blogswarms are still standing and useful today?
Too often, we in the netroots are all swarm and no hive.
We should think about that. We should examine how to make our sting more powerful and organized.
I don't profess to have all of the answers to this challenge. (Looking at how organized labor approaches electoral activism wouldn't be a bad start, however.) For myself, this election season I've decided to focus my efforts on infrastructure; I've focused on local blogs and the netroots infrastructure that supports them. To this end, I've built a DFA-link group for local and regional progressive bloggers called Blogs United that has 130 members from all over the country...and growing. (If you are a local or regional blogger who writes about politics you are most welcome to join. Email me at kidoaklandactivism"at"comcast"dot"net.) This group is my small effort at changing how I do things and channelling my personal efforts into building infrastructure.
I am focusing on local blogs this fall because I am convinced, like many, that they are the focal point for the next big wave of infrastructure building within the netroots: local blogs are where citizen journalism meets grassroots activism. Local blogging gives our generic national "outrage" a local habitation and a name. And I think local bloggers deserve as much support and focus as we can give them.
Now, I've done diaries about this trend here on dkos, but I think one recent blog post (by a local blogger from New Hampshire, ironically enough) says it best. Keener is a kossack and a local blogger who's written an essay called Why I Blog Locally that sums up neatly the power of local blogs. Keener's essay is a must read. In closing, I'd encourage you to take a look at that essay and ask yourself is there some new way this election season that you can channel outrage into infrastructure?
That could take the form, like keener, of starting a local political blog. (It's still not too late.) Or it could take the form of getting involved at the DNC's Party Builder or at DFA-link. Hell, it could take the form of revitalizing dusty MoveOn lists from the bake sales of 2004.
I am optimistic when I think about the level of justified outrage at our government in this nation. I think that speaks to our basic political instincts. I am convinced, however, that the lesson of 2004 is that outrage is simply not enough. It is not focused enough; it is not enduring enough. Outrage needs infrastructure to have meaning and impact. We need to get linked up. We need to build some hives.
I also know, as you do too, that every time the GOP executes their electoral and media strategy that they demonstrate the maxim that outrage within infrastructure is powerful.
In 2006, let's give them a taste of what we Democrats can do with that insight.