Immediatly after the election you would have thought it was the end of the world. Many bloggers talked of moving to Canada, some quit blogging, and overall everyone seemed rightly depressed.
But now that the depression has long since worn off, many folks are trying to continue the fight. And in doing so, we on the left have exposed our greatest weakness: our inability to unite.
The left is not a focused group with a clear agenda. We are comprised of many different people with very specific causes. And there is a great deal of passion from those involved to get each and every issue to the front. This was pointed out all too well by the pie-war and abortion threads that popped up at DKos. Hell, I got attacked for sharing my experience in an abortion clinic because of my gender.
And it's getting worse. Lately I have noticed an extreme bitchiness taking over any real conversation on the big sites. It seems that since the 2006 elections are too far away, folks are turning on each other. I am not going to link to specific diaries or posts, go read for yourselves. What I am trying to do here is to point out that we on the left are in real trouble.
This seems to stem from overly sensitive people who spend hours fighting with each other over the semantics of someone's comment, or far too many posts responding to a single post in disagreement. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone is right. Great, except that what is happening is that what little real value the blogs have provided is being eroded.
Now, I think part of it stems from the sense that despite a lot of hard work by some folks, the enemy is still alive and kicking. No matter how much we scream, the country is still asleep. Sure, some stories have been given life on the blogs, but to date no one of great importance has been taken down. What did we expect? Do any of us really believe that sitting in our underwear googling will change the world?
Without a clear target we are just a bunch of concerned folks pushing what we think is important in a medium that only gets read by us. The average person is not going to bother reading a million posts on a million blogs just to get the news. That's why big media rules the day. They can condense the news, use flashy graphics, and repeat the same crap at the top of every hour.
Now, what happens when an outsider comes into the blogosphere and sees fifty posts comdemning one post? They do what I do and close the page. Why bother? Who fucking cares if some unknown person from who knows where got offended by the language of a post by some unknown person from who knows where.
I would say we have lost focus but we never really had focus. Hating people is not a cause. And that is what drove many people to blog in the first place. I know there are some really great writers out there doing real investigative work, but googling news and making snarky comments about it is not going to change things. I don't believe for a second that what I write matters in the big picture.
The left wants to do too many things at once, and we want it all right now. We live in this hyper-reality where everything makes sense to us and we cannot for the life of us figure out why everyone else doesn't see that we are right. But instead of getting focused and having the real conversations we need to be having, we choose to fight amongst ourselves over what he said or she said, about how Armando is wrong or Markos hates women or some other inane bullshit.
Well, keep it up folks, because we are making ourselves more irrelavant by the day. Hating Bush is not enough to win the war against the extremists in our country.
We need to focus on winning each and every little battle with them, not waste bandwidth trashing each other. We do ourselves no service when we split our community apart because someone gets offended by what someone else says.
But maybe thats just it. The left is divided into warring camps itself. The fight against BushCo brought together many folks from many different groups, and now that there is no one central theme to our attacks, we have retreated back to our comfort zones and decided it was everyone else's fault we lost our asses in 2004.
Sad. Just sad. So, where do we go from here? Well hopefully things will change as the 2006 elections draw near. But until then go on posting about how Armando is a jerk, or how Plutonium Page is a rascist or whatever is pissing you off today.
And remember to troll rate each other into oblivion.
update: I put this in as a comment, but I should have appended the post instead. So here goes.
I need to follow this thought out some more so bear with me. The left as we are called does not exist as a solid unit. It is comprised of many smaller groups that do not agree on many issues. What united the left was a hatred for George Bush. That was the underlying theme of 2004.But look at the pictures of the protests and what do you see? A thousand signs promoting a thousand different ideas. While this is a healthy sign for democracy, it is not good for a political party. And that is the problem. The Democratic party cannot reasonably encompass such diversity in its platform because so many people will not budge on their beliefs. Everyone wants a voice, but after a while all you hear is a dull roar.
This whole thought train comes from conversations with Jerome and Markos at Demfest. They both brought up the point that the party is weakened by the in-fighting between groups who want to be the most important issue in the Democratic platform. And having taken a very hard look at the left I agree completely. We are not offering an alternative because we are too divided on what that alternative is.
The left sounds off so loudly when it comes to trashing the right, but I have yet to hear a difinitive explanation of just how we would do things differently. The anger is what unites us against them. But what are we?
One party can not be all things to all people. One voice cannot be achieved when so many are screaming to be heard. The reality of the reality based community is that we cannot win elections if we cannot explain to people what we stand for without running out of breath.
All this talk of "framing" issues proves this point. Go read a framing thread and you get a hundred different ways to say something that, while all valid, cannot be repeated verbatum by a politician on the news. We all know how the sound bite game works. Our candidates can only get elected when people know what they stand for. But it's getting harder and harder to pin down what Democrats actually stand for besides being against BuchCo.