Markos Moulitsas is a successful businessman. To understand what is happening to DKos in this election cycle, that is all you need to know. Although he may once have had some sense of ideological mission, he is now apparently motivated by considerations of managing a successful enterprise. He is exactly the kind of urban professional that Thomas Frank identifies as the new “base” of the Clinton-era Democratic party.
As Frank points out in his new book, “Listen, Liberal” Clinton shut down the New Deal agenda of FDR and substituted a Republican Lite strategy aimed at the middle class professional elites. He spurned working class voters, reasoning that because their only political alternative was supporting the even more unfriendly Republicans they would continue to vote for Democrats.
It is important to realize that Clinton’s betrayal of FDR’s politics was not an isolated decision of one American leader. Bill Clinton understood and echoed the act of betrayal of America’s liberal white collar elites. Liberals who once felt some solidarity with workers, immigrants, and victims of prejudice were now more interested in securing and increasing their own prosperity. It was a great triumph of selfishness that called itself “centrism.”
The subtitile of Frank’s book is “What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?” The appropriate question on DKos is “What ever happened to the web site of the people? Smug professionals post here saying that they are for Hillary because they are looking forward to a comfortable retirement and don’t want Bernie raising their taxes or messing with the value of their stock portfolio. Markos delivers blistering attacks on Sanders, a candidate who is far more representative of what used to be the base of the Democratic party than Clinton.
What Markos fails to grasp is that the Democratic Party clubhouse has pinned its hopes on an unstable sector of the electorate. As middle class living standards continue to decline, more and more of the comfortable centrist Democrats will find themselves dumped out of their cozy lifestyles. At the same time, the anger of the low-income people abandoned by the Democrats will turn to populist candidates. A younger Sanders leading a third party will get their votes.
The exodus from DKos is the result of a serious miscalculation by Markos Moulitsas. His earlier success was based on a promise of commitment to the ideals of a Democratic party that has vanished. The Democratic nominee he supports is an admirer of Kissinger, a NeoCon with a belligerent foreign policy, a friend of Wall Street, and a defender of Bill Clinton’s centrist abandonment of unions and minorities.
DKos is now a liberal website in name only. It is an integral part of a Democratic Party machine that is controlled by an affluent elite. Markos Moulitsas aspires to be part of that elite, but as the DKos exodus continues, he may come to see that he has made a poor business decision.