Bob Johnson has a
diary entry up about Robert Reich's
piece in the New York Times, which discusses the Democrats' need for a movement to rival the conservative movement.
In comments, I said:
You know... this may be kind of a trivial point to bring up, but... isn't there something weird about a movement with no name?
I mean, haven't all the big movements in the past had names? The communist movement, the civil rights movement, the youth movement, the black power movement, the student movement, the environmental movement--and, of course the conservative movement, with its "movement conservatives".
But look at Reich's column: He mentions the conservative movement twice, but never names the movement that the democrats need and that Dean most starkly represents. He just says the Democratic party "has had no analogous movement". Boy howdy, there's a rallying cry--"Up the analogous movement!"
He's not alone. Practically every time I hear someone saying we need a movement today, that's all they say. "We need to build a movement." Or sometimes it's a Democratic movement, but to me that's the same thing as having no name at all--the movement isn't about being Democrats, it's Democrats wanting to have a movement, because movements are good at getting people elected.
I completely agree, too: we do need a movement. But I think we need to be able to say what the movement is before we can have one. It seems to me that this equivocal, hesitant metadiscussion of a hypothetical movement-we-ought-to-have exhibits the same fears that have paralyzed the democratic party since the 70s. Nobody wants to call it the liberal movement because liberal is such a negatively stereotyped word and nobody wants to call it the progressive movement because that might alienate the electorally-critical centrists and moderates.
Am I just nuts, here, or does anyone else feel this way?
Bob, in a reply, suggested this might be a good idea for a diary. Let's talk about it. What is this movement that we on the left need to create? How do we (for lack of a better term) brand it? In one or two words, what--aside from taking our country back and changing America--are we doing this for?
If we don't have an answer, one that we're willing to go to the wall for, then I don't think we can have a movement.