Before the newest FPers were chosen I wrote a diary that argued:
With all the talk of front pagers, it got me to thinking a little bit about the Front Pager role and one of the things that, to me at least, has been lost a little bit, the community building aspect of the role. . . . I think we were more tolerant of non-conformist (for us partisan Dems I mean) discussions. No elections loomed, and folks like AGG and MB spoke to our hearts and values. In my view we need a little more of that here.
In recent discussions on issues like impeachment and Obama, some have expressed concern about the volatility and hostility of the threads and the effect on the dkos community. I think that concern is overblown. A look at our history as a community and site will demonstrate this. More.
Earlier tonight, I was perusing this diary which spurred to a review of my own diaries. I ran across one that discussed my history at daily kos and one from DHinMi that discussed what was popular at daily kos in the early years. These diaries were very illuminating in two ways -- first on the ability of the community to pull together AFTER divisive primaries, and second, on the wide range of opinions that were "unpopular" at one time or another here.
From my history, about the primary wars of 2003-04 and the aftermath:
Lurked in the summer of 03 and registered when dkos Scooped - September? I think so. As a Clark supporter it was a wilderness for me. It really was a Dean stronghold. But I was intrepid and there were a fair amount of Clark folks around. There probably were alot of personal relationships and friendships here at the time, but it didn't seem that way to me. It was incredibly focused on politics and issues, especially of course, the Dem primaries.
What was it like then and later for me? As a Clark supporter, of course the first thing that stood out was the number of Dean supporters and how much "stuff" they knew and talked about. I don't mean a few, it seemed like ALL of them back then. As a group they were incredibly smart, well informed, and the passion was, well, palpable, to use a cliche. It was invigorating, even though I was for another candidate. Also, the place seemed really big to me. Sounds stupid I know, but it seems smaller in scope now. But of course, that's cuz I didn't anybody.
I noticed the Clark supporters first of course. Rick Robinson stood out immediately. Why? Because he would argue forcefully for Clark and yet remain on very friendly terms with everybody. I still wonder how he did it. Johnny Rotten, Wendell Gee, tameszu, Steve4Clark, a few others stood out. They were sharp and really fearless. They would wade into a thread full of Dean supporters and engage in battle. They seemed really brave to me at the time. They inspired me and I started doing it too. Getting slapped around constantly, but trying to stay in the tussle. Sometimes getting run off, sometimes winning a battle or 2.
Once I started diarying, I got a lot better. It's obvious why, when you diary, you have looked at the issue you are going to discuss and are well prepared. Like anything in life, preparation was very important. Also the terms of the debate almost always were set by the diary. Someone might challenge your premises etc, but you really did get to set the terms of the debate. My issue has always been Iraq/WoT. Since the beginning. But at the time, the real issue was politically, who could make the best case. I thought Clark, and the arguments are too familiar by now. Dean supporters would attack and attack, seemed like in swarms. Marie was one of the first that would really leave me seriously wounded. Marisacat. Mitch Gore. Morat, who doesn't come around much anymore. A host of others I can't remember.
Back then Dean was riding high and Clark looked like the biggest threat to him, but the early Kerry hate still was very prevalent and, even then, Lieberman hate was universal. Edwards was a speck, no one bothered with him too much. Though he had strong supporters - Petey of course. Dr. Frank. Drew. Those guys were smart and tough. Susan Nunes showed up occasionally but her appearances were always very bizarre.
But really, to me, the principal wars were Clark v. Dean. And while Dean was under attack from the DLC and the Media generally, at dkos, Clark was under attack by Dean supporters -- and boy, would they attack -- Lincoln Dinner, SOA, WWIII, DU, consultant contracts, CAPSS II, Nagourney, Sterling, Fowler, Iowa and so on.
And as January approached and Dean had the money, and Gore, etc., when the national media REALLY launched its attack on Dean, it reached a fever pitch. And that's when kos became a much more consistent presence to me. Sure, he was posting constantly, but he wasn't involved in the fights much. Well, he said we need to cool it. It was too much. Moratorium. No "unelectable", no Lincoln dinner, none of that. You have to remember at the time, Kerry was toast. He was a punch line. In the December Cattle Calls, we all declared it a 2 man race, Dean and Clark - heh. Well that truce lasted about 5 minutes and back at it. Around that time, I started accusing kos of bias against Clark. Was he biased? Who the hell knows? I was biased, how would I know?
Well Saddam got captured, Dean said what he said, Joementum said what he said, Gore did what he did and then the pack was off to Iowa after New Year's Day, except for Clark and Joe. Clark caught fire in NH. Moved up to tie Dean, was really rolling. Came out with a great taxplan. Drew huge crowds. I have to admit, I started to believe. Joe was a joke still.
In Iowa, the Dean-Gep wars were full throttle. Honestly a week before Iowa, NO ONE was thinking about Kerry or Edwards. No one. 'Cept people kept talking about this Whouley guy. I was like, come on, some guy can get Kerry in the game in Iowa? You know the rest. Trapper John argued for Gep well. Bob Johnson told us a hilarious story about Iowa where Edwards drove by and gave his group of Dean folks the finger. There was a Dean guy who would blog the day's events every night. I want to say JonathanforDean [It was jumbo] but I think that's wrong. Who was that? GOTV was blogging under various names. Heh. [He was.]
Oh, I forgot to mention the Finance Limits issues. Dean was going to break the limits. I criticized him vociferously. I still think I was right in saying that Dean should have stuck to the limits for the primaries VOLUNTARILY. And then Kerry went, cuz he had to to mortgage the house. Clark decided no. Seemed the right decision at the time.
About that time, I started to take a keen interest in Chris Bowers' analytical work -the Empirical Cattle Call, he called it. Very creative thinking. Of course it failed utterly, but so did every other indicator.
Iowa happened and it decided the whole thing. Oh people will tell you it didn't, but it did. Clark sank when Kerry went up, Edwards being buoyed destroyed Clark's Southern strategy fallback, the Plan A was a 2 man race. And then we discovered Dean was short on money, which was flabbergasting. I felt really bad for the Dean supporters. It all happened so fast. After Gore, Dean was inevitable. Everyone said so and thought so. I didn't actually. I thought Clark could emerge as the challenger and could maybe win. And then a month later, Dean was toast. The orange hats, the 1 and 2s, the data base, the innovation, Trippi as Jedi, all of it. Over just like that. After NH, they ALL knew it. But fought the good fight, but it wasn't the same.
And a pall fell over dkos. See we were all against Kerry. All of us. Some moved to Edwards as the Stop Kerry guy, but that was half hearted, even by Markos. That's when I became better friends with DemfromCt. He had been uncommitted, but settled on Kerry went it became clear that he would be the nominee. I was recalcitrant. Because of Iraq. But he was a friendly reasoned intelligent voice. He turned alot of us around at that time. And really helped get us started to get behind Kerry. And by late March we were. . . .
My point here is, and I address this especially to the Obama supporters, the "contrasts" for each of the candidates will come, it will be vociferous and tough. In other words, you ain;t seen nuthin yet. So calm down. It'll all be ok in the end.
Now on the issues, and I am looking specifically at the Impeachment folks here, DH's diary, (I republish here in its entirety because it is excellent) will illuminate you on what has been "popular" and "unpopular" at daily kos over the years:
Here's a by no means exhaustive list of some of the major unpopular opinions at Daily Kos. As you'll probably figure out, most are both popular and unpopular, and they appear in multiple combinations:
Anti-and-pro-Dean, Clark, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Clinton(s), Daschle, Pelosi, McAulliffe.
Failure to accept as gospel truth the following: The DLC controls everything; Clinton controls everything; the South should be written off; the South should be contested; the Democrats are broken beyond repair; the Democrats are not broken beyond repair; not gaining seats in House/Senate is direct fault of Gephardt/Pelosi/Daschle; the Israelis are pure victims; the Israelis are evil Zionist racists and equivalent to the Nazis; the Palestinians are pure victims; the Palestinians are evil terrorists equivalent to the Nazis; the leadership of the Democratic party hates "us" ("us" being a lose and flexible definition/descriptor); Trippi is a genius, Trippi is a crook; Dean got nothing but great press; Dean was taken down by the press and the Democratic establishement; Dean is a raving liberal; Dean is not a liberal but a centrist; Dean was a darling of the DLC; Dean was always despised by the DLC; the DLC is different from the DNC; Dean is fully to blame for the demise of his campaign; Dean is without blame for the demise of his campaign; Kerry's IWR vote was a vote for Bush to invade Iraq; Kerry shouldn't be blamed for voting for the IWR because he couldn't know Bush would use it to justify invading Iraq; Clark is a Republican; Clark has always be unambiguous about his partisan history; Clark was for the war; Clark's position was always clearly against the war.
Here are some opinions that are claimed to be far more unpopular or dangerous than they actually are:
Pro-Dean, anti-Dean, anti-DLC, anti-Democratic establishment (which is seldom defined), desire to fix our election system and ensure all votes are counted; viewing criticism of Dems and Dem candidates as useful; expressing an upopular opinion will result in you being banned or treated like a pariah; criticising Markos; suggesting improvements for Daily Kos; criticizing established participants; criticizing guest posters.
Here are some commonly seen red-herrings: Criticism of fraud claims=don't want to improve integrity of voting systems; investigating questionable voting results=tin-foil habedashery; criticism of candidate=that candidate's supporters are rubes/morons/should be purged/blacklisted/despised/etc; Dems don't always live up to their ideals and potential=Dems take advantage of minorities and are to blame for all their problems.
In addition to those opinions, there are a few other dynamics going on here. Some people who've been here for a while--and numbers aren't an accurate indicator, as they were only instituted as of Sept or Oct of 2003, while the site goes back to 2002--cannot accept change. For some, that means somebody like me--who started reading in Dec 2002 or Jan 2003, began posting in March or April 2003, and, along with Meteor Blades, has been a front-page poster since August of 2003--is an "outsider" who represents what's been wrong with the place since the time that somebody downthread aptly characterized as the idealize and imagined Golden Age. For others who came later, it means that it's too different than it was last June or July, and the people who came in September or the week of the election are a pernicious influence who are trying to subvert a delicate balance they percieve existed back in the early Summer. Still others don't give a shit about anybody who's been around for a while, because they're all cliquish and tyrants who want to lord their seniority and low numbers over anybody new.
Then there's the very different views of what the hell Daily Kos really is, why people come here, and what it should become. For some of those most bitter over the changes, it's simply because it's not the intimate place where everyone knew each other and could kibbitz and kvetch about Bush. They remember the days before Dean, and they remember the overwhelming unanimity between the early joiners to DKos and the early joiners to the Dean campaign, and they associate anyone who wasn't with Dean and/or DKos as an outsider. That to me is the crucial shift; at that point, even though Markos posted a disclaimer that he was working for Dean but didn't make it a rah-rah site, and even though it wasn't really a fundraising our organizing tool of the Dean campaign, it was percieved by many as a warm place full of (mostly) Dean supporters. Backers of Dean took to the shift fine, many who didn't back Dean dealt with the shift without a problem, even though they were supporting a different candidate. (An example is Trapper John, who backed Gephardt.) Others stayed agnostic on the intra-party stuff. (I sort of fall into that category, athough in December 2003 I began actively supporting Clark, but I was also mostly absent from here through the Holidays and the entire month of January, and only came back in mid-February.) But plenty of others left because their reason for being here wasn't the primary, it was because it was an excellent place to get news and discussion about Iraq, foreign policy, and meatier discussion about ideas. For many of the real old-timers, they blame animus toward Dean supporters or animus by Dean supporters toward supporters of other candidates for the disappearance of some of the more eccentric or distinctive voices of that era. The more likely explanation, however, is that as the primaries and then the general heated up, the site became more partisan--in both rhetoric and active fundraising for partisan candiates and committees--and that simply wasn't their cup of tea.
The partisanship is what brought plenty of people here in the Spring through the election, and this is all like ancient history. It's like moving into a neighborhood you like just fine but hearing the people next door bitch all day about how the neighborhood was once so much nicer, and now they hardly know anyone and those they know they don't much like.
Others have been here a long time, but as readers and not participants. For them, this is all like the history of a foreign country, because while they remember much of Daily Kos, they have no sense of the changes to the "community." Many liked Daily Kos much more before it was a site of fundraising for the party committees, Kerry and Senate and Congressional candidates. Others came here because of the media attention. And tens of thousands--probably more--who love Daily Kos will never, ever see a comment like this, because they never open up a comment thread. They're readers, not participants, and that's just fine for them. Notions of the place being broken are foreign and strange to them.
Finally, there's a tension that I think exists with all online forums: the difference between people who believe their arguments speak for themselves and judge their interlocutors solely by their arguments, and those people who chose to view the arguments through the lens of who wrote it, why they would write that, and how it should be interpreted based upon the poster's motives, history, character, allegiances, etc. I try to adhere to "the argument, not the person." While I certainly have gotten to recognize voices and have become friends with many scores of people on here, to be honest I've never met anyone in person (although that will change in a couple weeks) and can't really know if people are really who they say they are. Somebody the other day congratulated me for being one of the more distincive female voices at DKos, when in fact I'm a man. I've been called a DLC'er, a labor stooge, an anti-Semite, an Arab-hater, I've been criticized for shilling for my supposed favored candidate, who at various times was identified as Gephardt, Dean and Kerry (but surprisingly never Clark). For some folks, what's written and argued isn't good enough, it's the supposed motivations and allegiances one is supposedly keeping secret that matter, and those motivations are offered up all the time, with seldom a shred of evidence to support the accusations, and seldom a reason for it to be pertinent to the discussion taking place. It's the deepest rift I see here, and one being played out right on this thread.
Anyway, that was realllllllyyyyy longwinded, but the idea of "unpopular opinions" is something I've found one of the most anthropologically intersting dynamics on Daily Kos.
Keep that in mind when you feel that persecution complex coming on.
In the end, we agree so much more than we disagree that we will end up fighting together in the end. In 2008 you'll see.