A while ago, on a diary about choosing new front pagers, I asked a few questions that got no answers:
The success of dkos has been, IMO, in great part because of the clearly stated goal of the site, and the fact that that goal ended up aligning with a need in the society. The FPers have acted as the most able and wide-ranging polemicists in support of the goal and against the forces arrayed against it. The diaries have been on every topic imaginable, of course, but there's always been that touchstone to match them against, of the goal, electing Democrats.
OK, now the goal has been achieved. Does it need to be restated? Adjusted? Reaffirmed? Should it be electing more Democrats? Electing a Democratic president? Electing Democrats in perpetuity? Educating the broader society on progressive ideas? Educating elected Dems on progressive ideas?
I think the goal should be the starting point, and that other choices will flow naturally from it.
There have been a lot of conflicts running through the site lately that seem to me to relate to a deeper conflict of goals. All the arguments over site moderation, "group think," message control, attitude toward third parties (Greens, libertarians, independents, etc.), and so on are set off by particular incidents, but they roil on and on in the back threads because they express real and conflicting impulses.
In conflict after conflict now, it seems movement forces are saying that a party-specific goal of electing Democrats is too limiting -- that if the movement just supports the party and the party doesn’t listen, the movement is no further ahead. Movement forces that make winning possible for the party are explicitly shut out from a goal expressed purely in party terms. And that’s a problem:
Mass movements exist outside electoral politics, and outside the law, or they don’t exist at all. Mass movements are never respecters of law and order. How can they be? A mass movement is an assertion of popular leadership by the people themselves. A mass movement aims to persuade courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not the other way around. Mass movements accomplish this through appeals to shared sets of deep and widely held convictions among the people they aim to mobilize, along with acts or credible threats of sustained and popular civil disobedience.
Either a party takes over (and blunts or even suppresses) a movement, or a movement takes over a party. The way the site goal is currently expressed, that question for us is clearly weighted in one direction. And that, I believe, is what is fuelling so much of the current strife here.
It doesn’t have to be so. A formal alliance can be of benefit to both movement and party provided it’s negotiated to benefit both. Because, of course, a party that can harness a movement can more easily win elections, and a movement that can express its values through a winning party has access to the levers of power.
As far as the conflict playing out here, I’d like to point out that it can be resolved by amending the site goal. Specifically, that the short-term (immediate two-year cycle) goal remain electing Democrats, because Democrats are the party currently most aligned with movement goals. But that an explicit long-term goal be added formally to the site’s objectives that speaks directly to the movement: to influence both political parties in a progressive direction, and in fact, to shift the whole spectrum of American political thought from center-right to center-left.
I believe this could go a long way toward resolving some of the repetitive conflicts we have here and help us use our energies more constructively for positive goals instead of for fighting each other.