Ronald Brownstein, writing in the National Journal, one of the must read publications for the Gang of 500, seems to be getting what the netroots, or at least Markos' part of it, is trying to do. Here are some excerpts (the entire article is reprinted in extended with the permission of the National Journal. We thank them for the courtesy.):
While Brownstein is right about the belief from most of us that the right politics demands confrontation with Bush and contrast with the Republicans, I think he is wrong to believe that this approach alienates independent swing voters. If anything, the alignment that Indys are having with Dems in most polling shows that it is exactly the opposite. That this approach is ATTRACTING swing voters. This is where the fundamental divide between the DLC Centrists and us lies. Where we think the swing voter will land. Take my friend Ed Kilgore of the DLC for instance. Ed is a sharp thinker and writer, but Ed lacks confidence in our Democratic ideals:
Ed, this is simply not true. And once you realize that, you will see why we are right and you are wrong. When we make folks pick sides agains the GOP Extremism of Dobson and the committed support to a policy of making sure the government leaves you alone in your private decisions advocated by Liberals, they will pick our side, in droves. Don't fear that fight.
And that is the real lesson, at least for me, of Markos and dailykos. The article discusses with him in detail his view on all of this and how he thinks we can make it happen. Here's a piece:
POLITICS
The Internet And Democrats
By Ronald Brownstein, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, July 1, 2005
In retrospect, the day in September 1998 when two wealthy software developers in Berkeley, Calif., posted an online petition opposing the impeachment of Bill Clinton may stand as the day his vision for the Democratic Party began to be eclipsed.
That petition from Wes Boyd and Joan Blades led to the formation of MoveOn.org, which has metamorphosed into the nation's largest and most effective Internet advocacy group. And MoveOn, an unstintingly liberal voice, has become the cutting edge of an online revolution that is reshaping the Democratic Party amid the intense political
polarization of George W. Bush's presidency.
The rise of a mass Democratic Internet fundraising and activist base -- a trend that includes not only the 3.1 million-member MoveOn, but the political organization founded by Howard Dean, the Internet contributors to the Democratic National Committee and the John Kerry presidential campaign, and the thousands of partisans venting daily on left-leaning Web logs like Daily Kos and MyDD.com -- is beginning to shift the balance of power in the Democratic Party away from the "Third Way" moderation that Clinton and his "New Democrat" movement promoted.
Centrist organizations such as the Democratic Leadership Council have produced nothing like the massive lists of activists and donors that liberals have assembled through the Internet. And that mass liberal base is pushing the party partly toward more-liberal positions, but even more so toward greater confrontation with Bush -- and increasing pressure on Democrats who consider cooperating with him in any way.
The Internet base, for the first time, has provided Democrats with a tool for raising money, recruiting volunteers, and directing messages
to their partisans that is comparable to the capacity that direct mail and talk radio have long provided Republicans. But just as those tools have mostly strengthened the Right in the GOP, the Internet has mostly strengthened the wing of the Democratic Party that feeds on polarization and conflict.
Indeed, the Internet is fast becoming the confrontation caucus in the Democratic Party. Defiance of Bush is almost instantly rewarded with a torrent of praise on liberal blogs and often with fundraising or other assistance from the blogs and groups like MoveOn; the group's PAC, for instance, raised a breathtaking $800,000 from its members in less than three days this spring for venerable Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., a vocal opponent of Republican threats to block filibusters of judicial nominations.
Just as surely, almost all gestures toward collaboration with Bush provoke condemnation and outrage. Most often, the criticism amounts to angry denunciations on liberal blogs that can generate e-mails or unfavorable stories in the mainstream media. Pushing further, liberal bloggers have been openly trolling for a Democrat to challenge Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., in a primary next year on the grounds that he has supported Bush too often. And MoveOn recently targeted House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., with negative radio ads because he voted for the Bush-backed bill making it more difficult for consumers to declare bankruptcy.
The rapidly growing Democratic Internet activist base "is more partisan than ideological," says Howard Wolfson, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "And it stems from a feeling in the grassroots that Democrats in Washington were not fighting back hard enough against Bush."
In effect, the rise of the Internet base is now subjecting Democrats to a mass experiment in conditioning behavior -- a political equivalent of Pavlov's dogs. "We are actually starting to build the kind of noise machine, to reward or beat up on people, that the Right has had for a long time," says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, 33, the pugnacious founder of the popular blog Daily Kos. "We are training these politicians that they don't have to be afraid of taking courageous stands -- and that they will be rewarded or punished based on their behavior."
In all of these ways, the Internet base is playing the same role in the Democratic Party that conservative economic and social groups (like the Club for Growth or Focus on the Family) play in the GOP. Both are increasing demands for ideological consistency and partisan loyalty. And both are becoming more influential as the country grows more deeply polarized over Bush's aggressively conservative agenda, and over the fervent Democratic opposition to almost all of it. On each side, polarization is feeding on itself, as the widening gulf between the parties strengthens those who argue that compromise on almost any issue has become impossible.
"The leadership of both sides has a gun to their head from the activist base," said Dan Gerstein, the former communications director for Lieberman. "If they don't hold the line, the trigger is going to be pulled against them."
The Democratic Internet base cradling that trigger does not speak with one voice. But the emerging generation of online Democratic activists, many of them young and shaped by the bruising partisan conflicts of the past decade, seems united most by the belief that the quickest way for Democrats to regain power is to confront Bush more forcefully and to draw brighter lines of division between the Democratic Party and the GOP.
In strikingly similar language, Internet-generation Democratic activists from Moulitsas to Eli Pariser, the 24-year-old executive director of MoveOn's giant PAC, describe Clinton's effort to reorient the party toward capturing centrist voters as "obsolete" in a highly partisan era that demands, above all, united opposition against the GOP. Moulitsas and Pariser, like most other voices in the Internet activist base, want a Democratic Party focused more on increasing turnout among its partisans than on persuading moderate swing voters. Both, in other words, want a party that emulates Bush's political strategy more than Clinton's.
"It may be in the 1990s, there was a middle; there isn't a middle now," Pariser says. "You have a Republican Party that is willing to break all the rules and accept no compromises to get what they want. In the face of that, saying 'I'll meet you halfway' is as sure a recipe for disaster as I know. You have to fight fire with fire."
Virtually all Democrats, even the most moderate, are growing more partisan as the battles with Bush escalate. But many Democratic moderates still fear that, both in substance and style, the politics that the Internet base is demanding may be leading the party away from the swing voters, especially in the culturally conservative red states it needs to regain Congress and the White House.
"The Internet is certainly a generator of some very positive factors for Democrats. But it's also a very small slice of our party, and if that slice dominates the entire pie, we're in serious trouble," says former Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., a centrist whose bid earlier this year for the party chairmanship stalled at the starting gate after intense opposition from the Left.
Yet even while some centrist groups such as the DLC are warning Democrats to distance themselves from liberal Internet-based voices like Daily Kos and MoveOn, the party is more overtly pursuing their help in the widening confrontations with Bush. On struggles like the fight over judicial nominations, party leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada are now appearing at MoveOn rallies and holding conference calls with liberal bloggers.
Tellingly, even some traditionally centrist Democratic voices are wooing the Internet base. Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the New Democrat Network, a political action committee for Clintonesque New Democrats, courted the Internet activists in his unsuccessful bid for the DNC chairmanship earlier this year. Reversing Roemer, Rosenberg believes that party moderates must learn from the Internet activists' critique of Clinton's strategy.
"The core thing this new Internet culture is looking for is recognition that the highest order of our politics today is stopping Bush," Rosenberg says. "Circumstances have changed [since Clinton's presidency]. I do believe the New Democrats have been too slow to recognize . . . that [the Republicans] must be stopped at all costs."
"They Don't Need the Internet As Much As We Do"
In the 2004 presidential campaign, the Internet was more visible and consequential in American politics than ever before. It became a mass
medium for obtaining political news. The most comprehensive study [PDF] on the subject, by the nonpartisan Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that during the campaign about 63 million people acquired political news online, nearly double the number who did just four years earlier.
In the physical world and online, the number of people who participate in political activities is much smaller than those who read about them. But on the Internet, participation is growing substantially. The Pew study, based on a national post-election survey, estimates that last year 7 million people signed up to receive e-mails from the presidential campaigns; 4 million volunteered online for the campaigns; and 4 million contributed money to political efforts through the Internet. In 2000, only half as many donated online, Pew found.
About the same proportion of Republicans, Democrats, and independents used the Internet to acquire political information in 2004. But Pew's research found that Democrats and liberals pursued political activities over the Internet more frequently than Republicans and conservatives did. Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to volunteer online, and nearly five times as likely to contribute money, according to unpublished data from the study.
The disparity reflects the relative importance of the Internet in each party's political infrastructure. Republicans have also aggressively increased their capacity on the Internet. The Republican National Committee has a 7.5 million-name activist e-mail list it mobilizes to support administration initiatives. The Bush campaign used the Internet to help organize volunteers for its successful get-out-the-vote campaign. And conservative blogs have developed large followings -- as they demonstrated by generating such a rapid backlash against recent comments by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., about Guantanamo Bay.
But the Internet is exerting less influence over the direction of the Republican Party than that of the Democratic Party, because it plays a much smaller role in the overall GOP political machine. Internet fundraising hasn't been as crucial for Republicans, because they have both a bigger base of financial support in the business community and a more developed small-donor direct-mail program dating back to the 1970s. Blogs aren't as important for Republicans as they are for Democrats, because talk radio, dominated by conservative hosts, already provides the GOP an effective channel outside the mainstream media to distribute its message. "They don't need the Internet as much as we do," says Wolfson, a top adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.
Indeed, Democrats are increasingly relying on the Internet to match the roles that both talk radio and direct mail play for Republicans.
In the same way conservatives court talk radio, Reid, for instance, held a conference call with liberal bloggers in late April to press the party message in the battle to preserve the filibuster for judicial nominations. Shortly thereafter, MoveOn, by far the largest online group in either party, turned out scores of volunteers for 192 rallies on the issue across the country on the same day. Earlier, the group generated 40,000 phone calls in a single day by dispatching volunteers with cellphones to ask neighbors to urge their senators to oppose the filibuster ban.
The Internet's most dramatic contribution to the Democratic Party has come on the bottom line. In the Democratic primaries last year, the Internet ignited Dean's insurgent bid by generating a flood of small online donations that ultimately provided about half of all his money. In the general election, John Kerry stunned the political establishment by remaining competitive with Bush in fundraising, largely because the Democrat raised $80 million in Internet donations for his campaign and another $40 million from his online list for the Democratic National Committee.
Meanwhile, Move On says that along with its PAC and its voter fund, it collected another $50 million in online contributions (as well as $10 million more from large donors such as liberal financier George Soros).
In all, Democrats and their allied groups probably raised about $300 million online in 2004, estimates Tom Matzzie, who helped run Kerry's Internet campaign and now works as MoveOn's Washington director. That means the Internet accounted for about 15 percent of the $2 billion that the Center for Responsive Politics estimates the Democrats and their allied groups spent in the 2004 campaign. (Republicans raised about as much overall, but relied on the Internet much less; although a comparable estimate for the entire party isn't available, the Bush campaign raised less than one-fifth as much online as Kerry did, which may give a sense of scale.)
Whatever the exact figure, the amount of political money and activity generated on the Internet in 2004 represented a quantum leap over the levels of 2000 or 2002. (MoveOn's PAC alone increased its online fundraising tenfold from 2000 to 2004.) The audience for blogs, though still small compared with mass media like talk radio or daily newspapers, is steadily growing.
Almost all analysts expect the political use of the Internet to expand at least as much over the next four years. "It is going to just explode between now and 2008," says Joe Trippi, Dean's 2004 campaign manager. Matzzie said recently that Democratic candidates and groups would likely collect as much as $1 billion on the Internet for the 2008 election. Veteran Democratic strategist Tad Devine predicts that the next Democratic presidential nominee will reject the public financing system, not only for the primary, as Kerry and Bush did, but also for the general election (which no candidate has ever done) to preserve the freedom to raise unlimited money over the Internet.
These projections are encouraging Democrats about their ability to compete financially and organizationally with the GOP. But one of the most profound truths in politics is that no money, or any other form of support, is free; it all arrives with some kind of price tag. Few Democrats have thought seriously about what that price tag may be for the lifeline the Internet base is now offering them. The Internet activists believe they are liberating the Democrats from the demands of "special interests" by creating an alternative source of grassroots money. But the Internet support, financial and otherwise, comes with its own strong demands, as recent visits to two of the movement's leading figures demonstrated.
Eli Pariser and Markos Moulitsas
It speaks volumes about the Internet's tendency to diffuse power that two of the most influential figures in online liberal politics work alone, in their homes, in neighborhoods that have hosted far more rent parties than black-tie dinners.
Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn's giant political action committee, and Markos Moulitsas, the founder and ringmaster of the popular Daily Kos Web site, have emerged as two of the principal strategists shaping liberal use of the Internet.
Pariser, working with Boyd and Blades and MoveOn's small group of 13 other employees, runs a vastly larger institution than Moulitsas does. MoveOn has become perhaps the largest source of funds, volunteers, and activism (such as e-mail and grassroots lobbying campaigns) for Democrats outside of organized labor. MoveOn officials believe that their membership, now growing by 75,000 per month, could reach 5 million by 2006 and perhaps 10 million by 2008.
Moulitsas is more like a guerrilla force compared with MoveOn's teeming infantry. He says his site receives 500,000 visits a day, more than any other political Web log (although many say figures on blog audiences are notoriously fuzzy, and Moulitsas acknowledges no one knows how much of that traffic represents repeat visits from the same readers). He estimates that his site raised about $700,000 for candidates in the 2004 election. That's not bad for someone armed with only a laptop, but MoveOn occasionally takes in that much in a single day.
Daily Kos's real influence is more indirect; it comes from the site's ability to launch ideas through the Democratic universe and to some extent the mainstream media, too. Moulitsas thinks of himself not as a journalist, but an activist. His principal goal, he says, is to provide "talking points" that Democrats around the country can use to persuade friends and neighbors, much the way conservative talk radio equips millions of Republican listeners every day with a common set of arguments and outrages for water-cooler conversation. "I look at this as armies," Moulitsas says. "It's training our troops how to fight rhetorically."
Both men emphatically keep their distance from the Democratic power structure in Washington. Pariser works out of the apartment he shares with his girlfriend on an ungentrified block south of Brooklyn's fashionable Park Slope; within a block of his building are shops selling off-price jeans, Mexican and Ecuadoran restaurants, and a pizza place where the crowd of teens hanging out one recent sunny afternoon included a young man with a fresh shiner under his right eye. Pariser is arguably one of the 50 most powerful people in the Democratic Party, and he doesn't own a car. He opens his apartment door wearing a T-shirt that reads, "I [heart] Social Security."
Moulitsas is a bit more settled. He owns a car (a beat-up Subaru) and writes from the house he shares with his wife and infant son in a weathered Berkeley neighborhood known as the flats. When he moved in, there were crack houses on his street. Often he'll file his first daily posts via his laptop while he's still in bed.
The two men share little in personal style. The e-mails from Pariser to MoveOn members usually have the earnest and friendly tone of a chat at the corner store. The biting exchanges between "Kos" and the "kossacks," who post responses to him and to one another on the site, sound more like arguments at the corner bar.
Pariser almost always considers his words carefully, as if imagining how they would look in print. In person, Moulitsas is soft-spoken, ingratiating, and quick to laugh. But online, he is confrontational, impulsive, and unequivocal; the other day, he sweepingly dismissed the Democratic Leadership Council, Joe Lieberman, and The New Republic magazine as "tools of the GOP." In 2004, Kerry's campaign cut its link to Moulitsas's Web site after he wrote that he felt nothing" when four American contractors were killed in Falluja, because "they are there to wage war for profit."
Neither are Pariser and Moulitsas ideological twins. Pariser and MoveOn fall in the party mainstream on most domestic issues (the group, for instance, has stressed fiscal discipline). But they define the Democrats' left flank on foreign policy. MoveOn as an institution, and especially Pariser as an individual, not only opposed the war in Iraq, but resisted military action in Afghanistan. MoveOn now is pushing Democrats to demand a deadline for removing American troops from Iraq.
Moulitsas is more eclectic. He served a three-year stint in the Army, and although he opposed the Iraq war, he supported the invasion of Afghanistan and calls himself a "military hawk." His favorite Democrats aren't Eastern cultural liberals like Kerry, but Westerners who combine economic populism with libertarian views on social issues like gun control. For the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Kos is currently touting Montana's new governor, Brian Schweitzer, a favorite of both the National Rifle Association and Democrats who yearn for an unabashed populist message.
The careers of Pariser and Moulitsas have unfolded in contrasting styles as well. Pariser has been a political prodigy, the equivalent of a baseball player who makes the major leagues without ever stopping in the minors. The son of 1960s activists who founded an alternative high school in Maine, he was a recent college graduate working for a nonprofit in Boston when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, shook America. Pariser quickly launched a Web site that promoted a petition resisting a military response to the attack (he urged "moderation and restraint"). Even though polls showed that most Americans supported the attack on Afghanistan, within two weeks Pariser had collected an astonishing 500,000 names for the petition. Soon he was receiving calls from media outlets as far away as the BBC. "They said, 'We've been hearing a lot about this. Who are you?'" Pariser later recalled. "[I said] 'I'm 20 years old; I don't know who I am.' "
Later that fall, Pariser brought his names to MoveOn (doubling the e-mail list the group had assembled duringClinton's impeachment) and joined the group as an organizer. Eventually, he directed MoveOn's campaign against the Iraq war (which virtually doubled the size of its e-mail list again). Now, with founders Wes Boyd and Joan Blades preferring a less public role, he's emerged as the group's most visible figure (at a recent MoveOn rally, he was introduced as "the man whose second home is your in-box"), and an architect of its efforts to expand beyond cyberspace into on-the-ground organizing. A few months ago, Senate Democrats invited him to address them during a retreat.
Moulitsas took a more circuitous route to his identity as the fierce Kos. He split his youth between Chicago and El Salvador (his mother's native country), where he lived amid a brutal civil war. After returning to the Chicago suburbs for a rocky adolescence, he enlisted in the Army at 17 and spent two and a half years with an artillery unit in Germany. College and law school followed, as Moulitsas contemplated careers as diverse as journalism and composing film scores. He was working as a project manager for a Web-designing company in San Francisco when he started his blog in May 2002, angered by Bush's direction and inspired by the example of the liberal MyDD Web site.
After years of uncertainty, he had discovered his niche. Kos quickly found an audience by expressing the unmediated anger of the Democratic base toward Bush, and even more so toward Democrats who cooperated with him, especially over the war in Iraq. Moulitsas shrewdly built a community by providing readers unusual freedom to post their own thoughts, and rose to the forefront of political blogs on the same wave of grassroots liberal discontent with the Democratic leadership that initially propelled Dean's presidential campaign. (Kos was one of Dean's first promoters and consulted for his campaign on Internet strategy.) Moulitsas's site has been so successful (Daily Kos has continued to gain readers even since the 2004 election) that it has not only become a full-time job but also allowed him to edge into a new role as a media entrepreneur by launching a series of sports blogs.
In Search of a Warrior Party
For all their differences in style, temperament, and experience, Pariser and Moulitsas, in conversations three days apart, demonstrated a series of shared political assumptions that reflect the solidifying consensus in the online Democratic community. Each man believes that the Democratic Party must change in the same way and that the rise of the Internet activist base is the critical lever to force that change. In Washington, many Democratic consultants consider the Internet a new source of funding for the party's familiar approaches and strategies. But Pariser and Moulitsas made clear that they, and those they represent, are looking for something very different.
Both men believe that the small-donor base developing on the Internet will allow Democrats to reduce their reliance on business for campaign financing. That, they argue, would allow the party to pursue a much more economically populist anti-corporate message that they believe could win back blue-collar voters who have trended Republican over the past generation primarily on issues relating to values, taxes, and national security.
Both say they recognize that Democrats cannot hold together for a scorched-earth opposition to Bush on every issue. Neither Moulitsas nor MoveOn, for instance, was enthusiastic about the recent Gang of 14 deal on judicial nominations, but both accepted it as a necessary tactical retreat that could allow Senate Democrats to fight the filibuster issue again, against the backdrop of a Supreme Court nomination.
But both men want a party of warriors who will link arms to resist Bush's principal initiatives, especially the restructuring of Social Security. "When our core values are being attacked," Moulitsas argues, "the party needs to stand together." In the long run, both want Democrats to move away from the Clinton model of courting swing voters through "Third Way" moderation and turn instead toward a Bush approach that tries to build a majority mostly by inspiring a large turnout from its base with an unapologetically polarizing agenda. To Moulitsas, the key lesson from 2004 is that Bush won re-election while losing moderates badly and independents narrowly to Kerry, according to exit polls. "We won the center and it wasn't enough," he insists. "So, clearly, we have to reach out more to our base."
Pariser, similarly, argues that Bush's re-election victory demonstrated that the "passion" of hard-core followers was "the most powerful political asset around. It was more than money, more than message -- it's that [Bush] harnessed that energy. To dismiss the energy on our side would be a tremendous mistake."
The two differ somewhat on the tactical question of how to tilt the party in this direction. But the difference is of degree, not kind. Moulitsas is heavier on sticks than carrots. His Web site crackles with attacks on the Democratic Leadership Council and other party centrists, and it actively supports the liberals searching for a candidate to mount a primary challenge next year against Lieberman.
Moulitsas says he's not promoting civil war between Democratic liberals and moderates. Some Democrats representing conservative states, like Nebraska's Sen. Ben Nelson, need to vote with Bush at times, he acknowledges. But, he says, the party shouldn't tolerate defection on its core priorities, Democrats who consistently criticize other Democrats, or those from blue states who vote with Bush.
Those latter two points explain why he's so eager to challenge Lieberman, who has become a target of the Internet activists for defending the Iraq war and at times criticizing the Left. A primary against Lieberman, says Moulitsas, "will send a message that behavior that harms the party is going to have repercussions."
Moulitsas speaks with the abandon of someone who understands he is speaking only for himself. Pariser, as the voice of an organization whose size makes it a target both for other Democrats and for Republicans like Karl Rove, who denounced it in June, is more cautious, but still ultimately eager to push the party in the same direction that Kos is pushing it.
In contrast to its earlier emphasis on Iraq, MoveOn this year has focused primarily on domestic issues that unify Democrats, like Social Security or the battle against Bush's judicial appointments. Rather than intimidating Democrats who support Bush, Pariser says, MoveOn hopes to reward those who confront him, with initiatives like the massive fundraising drive for Byrd. "We believe it's the role of the progressive movement to create the political space where politicians say and do the right thing," Pariser says.
But MoveOn hasn't ruled out more-coercive efforts to compel party discipline. It turned heads recently when it ran its ads criticizing Rep. Hoyer for supporting the Bush-backed bill toughening bankruptcy laws. And while MoveOn, with an eye on 2006, is focusing mostly on strengthening its volunteer organization in congressional districts held by Republicans, Pariser says that it's maintaining the option of building grassroots organizations to pressure Democrats who vote with Bush too often.
During a several-hour conversation, Pariser frequently said that the group had not yet decided to take such pressure to the next, far more explosive, step by supporting liberal challengers to Democratic incumbents. But he also repeatedly made clear that the group wasn't closing off the idea. "That's a question we are talking about now," he said.
In all of this, Pariser and Moulitsas, like many of those they represent on the Internet, appear very much the product of the Democrats' fall from power. Almost everyone in the party's Washington hierarchy can remember a time when Democrats thought of themselves as the nation's natural majority party. Pariser and Moulitsas are children of the minority. For Democrats, they believe, the first step toward recovery is to acknowledge that revival requires more than tinkering. In their eyes, it will require Democrats to think of themselves not as a governing, but an opposition, party that bloodies the majority Republicans by any means necessary -- much as Republicans did under Newt Gingrich in the final years of their assault against the decades-old Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. "D.C. is still trapped in 1970s thinking," sighs Moulitsas. "It is hard for them to realize we really are a minority party. What they have to understand is that Republicans became a majority party only by being a really effective opposition party."
Demise of the "Third Way"
One theory of international relations holds that wars most often start when a new force emerges to disrupt an established power structure, the way, say, Germany did in the early 20th century. Much the same dynamic is under way in the Democratic Party today. Through Clinton's two terms, centrists dominated the party. Now, largely because of the rise of the Internet activist base, the Left is resurgent. And that is heightening tensions.
For liberals who chafed under Clinton's reign, the emergence of MoveOn, Dean's Democracy for America, and the blogs is like the arrival of the cavalry. Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, has been pulling in the tug-of-war between Democratic liberals and centrists for more than two decades. He sees the development of the Internet as a decisive tilt in that struggle.
"I think this means, certainly at a presidential level and probably at a senatorial level and maybe at a congressional level, candidates will always know there is a slot on the progressive side of the dial that can be competitive financially ... and they don't have to bow to the large-money interests in the Democratic Party in order to be financially competitive," he says. "Someone will always compete for that slot, and that, I think, transforms elections and transforms the opportunity to create the politics that many of us have thought is necessary to re-create a progressive majority for change -- one that has a clear economic message for working people."
Although liberals like Borosage unreservedly embrace the new Internet forces, Democratic centrists have divided over how to respond. The most vehement camp views the Internet Left as a danger. These activists argue that for all of the organizational and technological capacity of the Internet activists, they are pushing the party toward policies, especially in foreign affairs, that will fatally narrow the Democrats' support.
Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic, developed this case extensively in a controversial cover story last winter when he called on Democrats to "take back" the party from MoveOn and the Internet Left -- what he called "the softs" -- much the way liberals after World War II rejected alliance with domestic Communists. Beinart was especially impassioned, but he is hardly alone. The DLC promoted his conclusions. And several other centrist party strategists worry that the hyperpartisan turn-out-the-base strategy that many online activists demand won't work for Democrats, because polls consistently show that more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal.
"We are more of a coalition party than they are," says Ed Kilgore, the policy director for the DLC. "If we put a gun to everybody's head in the country and make them pick sides, we're not likely to win."
Simon Rosenberg defines the other pole of the debate among centrists. In May, Rosenberg appointed Moulitsas as a founding adviser to a new think tank, the New Democratic Network, established to craft fresh political strategies for Democrats. Rosenberg has not only welcomed the Internet activists, but also argued that New Democrats need to learn from their call for a more partisan resistance to Bush.
Strikingly, Rosenberg accepts the Internet Left's fundamental argument that Democrats should move away from Clinton's efforts to court the middle by finding a Third Way between traditional Democratic and Republican approaches. Such efforts to find compromises between the parties, Rosenberg says, have become "obsolete" in the face of Bush's crusading conservatism.
"As powerful as the Third Way formulation was in the 1990s, it is an antiquated way of looking at the world ... and it is not a viable position in the United States right now," Rosenberg says. "What people [in the Democratic Party] are looking for is not a Third Way; they are looking for a modern progressive movement that can fight the conservative movement. [The choice] has become binary, and that is what has changed."
In this dispute, each side can already point to examples of Internet-base influence that support its case. Many give the online activists credit for helping to solidify Democratic opposition to Bush's plan to restructure Social Security -- in no small part by so openly threatening primary challenges against Democrats, like Lieberman, who have considered supporting him. "It has helped stiffen spines, and I think that's a good thing," said Wolfson.
Conversely, many centrists believe that the demands of the Internet Left influenced John Kerry's decision in 2003 to vote against Bush's $87 billion request to fund the war in Iraq. That vote became an albatross for Kerry in the general election when Bush used it as his prime example to accuse the Democrat, who had voted to authorize the war, of flip-flopping on issues. MoveOn had urged Democrats to oppose the funding, and Kerry cast his vote at a moment when Dean's presidential campaign, fueled largely by the torrent of online donations, was at its zenith.
Pariser and Moulitsas both say that the problem wasn't Kerry's vote, but his failure to effectively defend it. But to those who are uneasy about the party's direction, Kerry's stance against the funding dramatized the potential cost with swing voters for pursuing policies meant to energize the Internet base.
Like many other Democrats who have avoided extreme positions in this debate, Wolfson says that the challenge for Democrats is to maximize the tangible benefits the Internet provides without losing sight of a larger electorate whose views aren't nearly so fervent.
"It's wonderful to have a network of donors through the Internet that is the equal of the Republican direct-mail donor base, ... and it is obviously important for Democrats to have a way to talk to Democrats," he says. "The downside is if we have a conversation [only] with ourselves. And at this moment, the center of gravity in the U.S. is not on the left; it may not even be on the center-left, so a conversation geared to the left is, by definition, exclusionary."
At a time when Internet activists are agitating for challenges to party centrists, and liberal blogs are crackling with denunciations of legislators who vote with Bush, though, it seems unlikely that the party can reap the benefits of the online activists and donors without bending toward the confrontational politics they are demanding. "I don't think a Democratic politician anymore can poke the base in the eye," says Matzzie, MoveOn's D.C. director. "They can, but only if they are willing to walk away from everything the Internet can give them."
The Ultimate Test
This isn't the first time that technological change has triggered ideological turmoil. In 1972, the emergence of direct-mail fundraising helped George McGovern overwhelm the party establishment and seize the Democratic presidential nomination on an insurgent anti-war platform. Later in the decade, those same direct-mail techniques, adapted by conservatives, powered the rise of Jesse Helms, the "New Right" advocacy groups, and then Ronald Reagan. The spread of talk radio provided a comparable boost for the next great wave of conservative advance, the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.
The common thread is that each of these new tools proved more effective at mobilizing ardent activists than moderate voters. All provided new means to concentrate and harvest the emotion of an ideological vanguard that cared enough about politics to respond to requests for contributions or volunteers or calls to Capitol Hill. In that way, each technological advance strengthened the ideological edge of the parties against the center, just as the Internet is doing in the Democratic Party today.
But that history also shows that it's wrong to assume technology is destiny in determining a party's direction. Conservatives, aided by the new technologies of direct mail and talk radio, have consolidated their control of the Republican Party over the past three decades. Liberals, until recently, have lost ground in the Democratic Party for roughly the same period. The difference is that the Right has elected far more of its true believers to office than has the Left. McGovern, remember, lost 49 states in the 1972 presidential race; Reagan won 49 in 1984. Even today, the share of Republican senators and House members who qualify as hard-core conservatives exceeds the share of Democrats who could be identified as die-hard liberals.
This history frames both the opportunity and challenge for the reinvigorated Left that is now organizing online. The Internet's tremendous power to transmute ideological passion into money and activism is increasing the Left's stature inside the Democratic Party for the first time since at least Reagan's 1984 landslide over Walter Mondale, and perhaps since the McGovern campaign itself. But the Left's position inevitably will erode again unless the strategy it is promoting wins elections. After all, Dean failed to win a single Democratic primary and Kerry lost the general election, despite the unprecedented energy that each man unleashed on the Internet. The ultimate test of political success isn't inspiring passion or even generating volunteers and contributions; it's attracting more votes than the other side.
Moulitsas, for one, understands that as the influence of the online Democratic activists grows, so does the pressure on them to produce results. "The centrists' strategy [in the 1990s] didn't turn things around, and the decline for Democrats just kept going," he says. "If we get our way, and we have a more partisan Democrat [as the presidential nominee] and the money is there, and in eight years we haven't made any headway, I'm willing to say we should try something else."