Love it or hate it, view it favorably or unfavorably, Matt Bai’s The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics has sparked a lively discussion in political circles about the future of the Democratic Party and the new forces participating in the shaping of it. A new sub-genre may even be spawned: critique of the critiques.
Bai joins us here today to take questions, talk about politics and discuss the Democratic Party. I got things rolling with an interview to start us off; commenters should feel free to chime in and move the discussion along.
Let’s start off with a definition of several terms that I think often get confused when discussing political issues. What’s a "big idea" or an "argument?" When you use the following terms, can you explain as specifically as possible what you mean and how they differ: ideology, "shared values," policy, strategy, tactics?
I mean, sure, we could go down the list. Shared values are things like "economic opportunity for all" and a "clean, sustainable environment," right? Policy and tactics are self-evident. An argument, as I define it in the book, is a larger case for how we arrived at the moment we face, and how government can adapt to meet it. But I don’t really want to get into making a glossary, only because I think it’s all beside the point. There’s a sense among some people who haven’t read the book that I think I have all of this neatly worked out, or that I think everybody should just get in a room and send up a plume of white smoke, like when they elect a Pope, when they’ve arrived at the big answer. That’s not it at all. You’ve read the book, so you know it’s not glib or preachy. I don’t claim to have the answers. The point of the book is really to tell the story of what I call these "oddly heroic" characters, these ordinary people who came to wield an enormous amount of power in a very short time. It connects the dots of the first political movement of the Internet age.
To the extent that I have some big critique, it’s that I think there’s a conversation that needs to happen that isn’t really getting a lot of attention yet, at this early stage of the movement. All of the energy is in the conversation about beating back the Bush era, and that’s understandable, but I think at some point, if you want long term success and to set a new direction for the country, you have to have some debate about the substance of government and how it needs to adapt to entirely new challenges. You see this beginning to happen in some quarters. Andy Stern is very eloquent about it. MoveOn’s leaders are thinking about how to start that conversation, too. You have some independent efforts like Energize America, which is really cool. All I’m saying is that that conversation is as important as the rest of it.
I got a note last week from the chairwoman of the Chatham County Democrats in Savannah. I put it on my website (www.mattbai.com). She said she loved the book, and she said the minute she put it down she asked herself what she could do to help start people talking about the argument. That made me feel terrific. That’s exactly what the book is about. As I say in the introduction, it’s a series of questions, not answers. And I hope it’s fun to read, too. Several people have already quoted back to me Rob Reiner’s line from chapter two: "I’ve got to take a leak. Talk amongst yourselves."
Can you give me an example of a Democratic "big idea?" A Republican one?
You know, you keep talking about big ideas, and I think that starts the wrong discussion, because then people say, "Well, we have big energy ideas and big healthcare plans," and I don't disagree with that. I've never said anywhere that there aren't any ideas. You know that, right? What I've said is that no one's connected them in a way that explains why we face so many unfamiliar dilemmas, and no one's made a case for how government can fundamentally change to solve those policy dilemmas. Is it enough to just add new programs on top of old ones? Does a new century's government need to approach problems differently the last century's? What's cool about Energize America, if I understand it, is that it decentralizes the solution, rather than just creating another assembly line program, and relies on local markets. That's sort of a new argument for how you solve problems in an age where local people are so much more empowered. And I just think it's something people should talk about.
In the last scene of the book, not that I want to give it away, Mario Cuomo comes before all the donors to speak, and he talks about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, in which Clinton talked a lot about the transformation of the economy from an industrial engine to an informational one and the need to modernize government to keep pace. Cuomo says, "It was a very big idea," and I think he’s right about that. He calls it a big idea—I would call it an argument.
By the way, Governor Cuomo called me last week. I was petrified, because the man was an icon to me growing up, and he’s famous for yelling at reporters. But in fact, he just wanted to tell me that he’d read the book over a single weekend and loved it. He kidded me about describing him as "shriveled and owlish." It was a thrill for me. And he DOES look owlish.
How long did you work on the book?
Man, a while. Really it started back in the spring of 2003. I traveled and reported it all the way up through the 2006 election. It took me about two months to write the first chapter and six months to write the rest. They tell me that’s how it goes with book writing, generally.
When you initially began collecting material for the book, was it with the idea that you were in search of a missing argument? Or did it begin with a different premise – say, the new movements in the Democratic Party – and over time, based on your research, evolve into a different book about what you see as a lack of big ideas?
No, I didn’t know where it was going, other than that I wanted to write about this bunch of people I’d met who were trying to change the Democratic Party. That was part of my hesitance in agreeing to do the book, frankly—that I couldn’t envision the whole thing. I wrote a proposal, which was really like an introductory chapter, and there was nothing in it about an argument—it was just some of the characters. The working title was "AfterParty," the idea being that these were the people who were reshaping Democratic politics after the party had more or less come apart.
If you ask people who are written about what they don’t like about the media, one of things you will always hear is that the reporter knows what he wants to write before he ever does the reporting, and he’s just trying to fill in the blanks. I’ve never operated that way, and I think that’s why my stories tend to resonate with people. I actually try to watch and listen as much as I can, and only toward the end of my reporting do I spend a lot of time thinking about the point of it all. Sometimes it just smacks you in the face, because it’s so obvious, and sometimes it’s an intellectual struggle to make sense of what you’ve seen. And I tend to change my mind a lot before it’s over.
In this case, I still don’t think it’s a book about a lack of big ideas, as you put it. I know that’s how some people have talked about it, and I don’t know if they’ve really read it, but to me it’s first and foremost a story about people and events, and the search for a compelling argument is a theme that only emerges as the story unfolds. And a lot of that happened in the writing itself. The more I put down on paper, the more obvious it became to me that this search was part of what connected all the people I was writing about, if that makes sense.
Were you limited? Do you wish you could have written more?
More? Are you crazy? You’re always limited by space, time, circumstance. It has to end somewhere. I think I covered a lot of ground in a readable amount of pages. I cut a chapter and a half at the end because I had too many people in the book for a reader to deal with. That hurt, but I had to do it. Fortunately, though, Susan, you did not get cut. Or else we’d REALLY be having a tough conversation.
The chapters that were cut ... were they about different groups, or just more information about the same groups?
Actually, they were all about you, Susan. An entire biography. I decided to save it for another book.
No, one was an entire chapter about Andy Stern and the breakup of Big Labor, because I had gone with him to the fateful convention in Chicago and had lots of cool scenery. The other was a chapter about George Lakoff and his ideas, which was adapted from a cover I’d done on him, but which—like all the stuff I adapted from the magazine—had been completely rewritten for the book. My magazine editor, who’s kind of a storytelling genius, convinced me to cut that stuff so that the story moved along faster and the reader had an easier time following along. I had some friends reading the early draft who really loved those chapters and thought I was being an idiot. Maybe it’ll all turn up someday in my great unpublished works.
The book seemed to me to be an attempt to capture a moment of time – a snapshot of change – in the Democratic Party. Is that what you were aiming for?
Yeah, I think that’s a very fair way to put it. Anyone who knows my work knows I don’t go in for grand predictions. I don’t need to know what’s going to happen before everyone else—I never have. I just try to make sense of the moment and let events go where they may. When you do that, I think things reveal themselves. Like that scene in the book where Bill Clinton blows up at a roomful of liberal millionaires. That moment was very poignant, I thought—it captured all the resentment that people feel about centrism and the war. That’s a powerful snapshot.
What would you say is the closest form to it, in another book? What’s an example of what you were trying to capture?
It’s funny, because when I first went around to publishers to sell the book, I was asked that question a lot, and I didn’t have a good answer. There aren’t really political books like this—books that are narrative. Everything’s a polemic. The closest thing in my mind was probably Moneyball, by my colleague Michael Lewis, because there he captured this moment of profound change. Even though he was writing about baseball, a lot of people in business latched onto that book, too, because the moment he was describing was happening everywhere. I always said that I wasn’t writing a political book—I was writing a book about change that just happened to be set in the political world.
What do you see as the role of books in political discourse, as opposed to covering – as you have done over the years – politics in general?
Generally speaking, my problem with political books over the last few years is that they seem to be written to make the audience feel good. They’re targeted to tell a certain group of people what they want to hear, and to reinforce a set of preconceptions, so that a lot of people will buy them. And I think that’s the worst kind of analysis. I always figure my role as a journalist is to add layers of complexity, not obscure them. We should be challenging people’s preconceptions, asking them to look at the world from different angles. It doesn’t always make you popular, but you know, journalism isn’t the business for that.
In your book, you cover through following individual story lines different parts of the progressive movement. At the moment in time you were writing about, how aware do you think the individuals (Democracy Alliance, MoveOn, the blogs) were of each other? And do you think since that time, they have increased or decreased in awareness?
That was a really cool thing about reporting the book. When I started, there was very little connective tissue between the bloggers, say, and the donors, or between MoveOn and the service employees and the Center for American Progress. Everyone was trying to do pretty much his own thing. But as the years passed, all the people I was writing about began to collide. They’d ask me about each other with genuine curiosity. I really saw the movement come together. And that’s probably why the book ended up being the story that it is. I didn’t know that that would happen. I didn’t know what the book would be about, exactly. You have to watch and listen and follow a story where it goes. Too many political writers, I think, want to start with the thesis and work backward. That’s not great journalism, and it’s also boring as hell. The fun is in figuring it out.
One of the criticisms you level at the blogs is that the tone (in general) is uncivil, adamant and counterproductive to having reasonable conversations. Yet I would say that a great deal of teaching, learning and policy discussion (health care, Energize America) does indeed go on. And it seems to me that allowing "incivility" in open forum is actually a very small price to pay for citizen engagement on the level we see at Daily Kos. I’m curious as to what measures you think blogs could undertake that would balance out what you view as counterproductive discussion versus productive discussion. My own view is that each individual learns – through participation – how to steer a course through the postings, and that any attempt beyond the self-policing methods already in place would stifle the energy and a lot of the "outside the box" thinking that you seem to be saying the Democratic Party needs to capture in the first place.
Really, Susan, I don’t spend much time on that in the book, do I? What, a few paragraphs? I talk a lot less about incivility, in any event, than I do talking about what’s inspiring about the blogs, including your story. So I don’t want you to further a false impression of the book.
Now, as far as your point goes, I really just describe it as it is. I certainly wouldn’t advocate controls of any kind—that would be a disaster. But that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize the tenor of some of the exchanges. I think you’re probably right that the culture of the blogs is conducive to a very dynamic kind of civic engagement, but it also comes at a cost, which is that people with unpopular ideas get shouted down, and sometimes unpopular ideas are worth hearing. Anyway, like I said, I present a much more complex picture than you’re describing.
How can the Democratic Party – or the progressive movement – come up with a list of issues truly in need of a "big idea" when this administration alters, withholds or flat-out lies about facts that would help such an assessment? Obviously, the climate crisis, the effects of economic globalization and Medicare/Social Security funding are areas that need a serious look, but given the unreliability and secrecy of information gathering from executive branch agencies tasked with providing it, how can we determine how quickly we need to act or how "big" a solution needs to be found?
There’s plenty of independent scholarship on all of these issues. You don’t have to rely on the administration. But look, again, I’m not suggesting that everyone should sit in a room and hammer out a 21st century agenda this minute. I’m not that prescriptive. My point at the end of the book, and it’s exactly what that chairwoman in Savannah took away from it, God bless her, is that developing an intellectual argument for the long term takes a long time, and so why not start putting some energy into that conversation now. And most of the characters in the book are thinking about that, too, in one way or another. They’re asking themselves the same questions. You know, at one point in the book Andy Stern tells the donors of the Democracy Alliance, and I’m not quoting directly from the book here, so I may not have it exactly right: "We are now as far from the New Deal as Franklin Roosevelt was from the Civil War, and I don’t think FDR looked back to Abraham Lincoln to figure out what to do. And I don’t think we can look back to FDR." Pretty compelling.
And by the way, I’m also not saying that Republican are doing any better at this, and neither is Andy. They’ve proven their argument isn’t sustainable, and they have no idea what comes next. As I say in the introduction to the book, there’s this void at the heart of our politics, and whoever fills it will have a profound influence on the direction of the country.
Don’t you think that the current anti-Bush stridency is in large part due to the feeling on the part of progressives that extremely egregious constitutional violations on the part of the administration are often undercovered in the traditional media? (Not by everyone, obviously ... but compared with the magnitude of the breaches, the word count devoted to them seems low when compared with horse-race stories or John Edwards’ haircut stories.) In my view, when you feel you’re not being heard, you get louder, and I think that’s what is happening with the "stridency" of citizens who are flocking to blogs.
Yes, I do. And I think it’s because of the technology that people can make themselves heard in way they never have before. I write in the book about a guy named Chuck who holds a MoveOn house party in Virginia. So I go to the party and I ask him, why is he doing this? And he says he’s not a Democrat. he’s never voted. But a while back he found out that his neighbor across the street is an infamous conservative activist, Brent Bozell. Chuck’s furious. He wants to go pee in the guy’s pool. Instead, he joins MoveOn and hold a house party for 50 other progressives. How cool is that? Five years ago, what could this guy have done to get involved? Go join his local party, if it even existed, and get stuck memorizing Robert’s Rules of order? Now he’s got broadband, and he can not only join a community, but he can help create one. He can make himself heard. I’ve got no problem with people who hate Bush’s policies. That’s American. It’s when that sentiment blocks out everything else and becomes the only guide post for the movement that I think it becomes a longer term problem, because then something important is missing. And like I said, a lot of the people I write about understand that, too.
Are you surprised at the reaction you’ve had from reviews of the book – a lot of unfavorable reaction on the blogs, favorable in the traditional media?
Not really. I was really gratified by the reviews in the Times and Mother Jones and the Prospect and other places. They got that the book was about people, and they felt it brought politics to life, and that’s great. I love that. A lot of the people who have criticized the book online admit they haven’t actually read it; they’re going on what other bloggers have said. That is a little disappointing. I think there are a whole lot of very smart people who read the blogs who will read the book and make their own judgments. Most people online don’t see me as an enemy of the state just because I can be critical—that was clear to me at YearlyKos, from all the great conversations I had.
Of the people covered in your book – from Democracy Alliance, MoveOn, blogs – have you heard directly back that they were upset by your presentation of them?
Not really, no. A few minor quibbles here and there, which is to be expected. Some of them were right. Eli Pariser liked the book but had a few disagreements, and he and will sort that out over a beer sometime. Markos was annoyed with a few things, but he and I talked at YearlyKos, and he was fine with the portrayal overall. It’s like painting, I suppose: you try to render people as accurately as you can, but inevitably there are features that aren’t exactly right, because that’s the nature of the craft. I know you can’t get everything right. A few of the donors have called or emailed to say they loved the book, which surprised me a little, because their portrait is not always flattering. But they saw it as fair. My experience has been that most people can handle some criticism, as long as you’re fair and not thoughtless about it. We all know we have faults. We just want to see them put into context.
Our readers consistently point to terrific collaborative projects like Energize America as evidence of big ideas and policy in action. Doesn’t the existence of such projects contradict your view that the blogs, while full of energy and noise, and are not contributing much to the formation of big ideas? The diaries at Daily Kos are bursting full with idea discussions and conversations about ideology, and seem to me to be mini idea factories in their own right.
Well, let’s see. Like I said, I love Energize America. Those guys are onto something. A quick search tells me that right now, at this moment, the lead stories on Open Left, which I happen to have open, are:
- Get Rid of All of Them
- IL-03: A Good Place To Start The Primary Challenges
- Bush Administration Comes After the Internet
- Moveon Sends Out Primary Challenge Email
- WA-08: Burner Leads Reichert In New Poll
There may be some mini-ideas factories, but they’re rarely making the front pages of any blog. Again, I’m not indicting anyone for caring about winning. I understand why it is the way it is. This is a very early moment in a very potent movement. I’m just saying, there’s another kind of conversation that isn’t getting a lot of oxygen, and it’s an important one.
One of your observations about blogs like Daily Kos is that it’s too focused on winning elections at the expense of articulating ideas. Yet I would argue that from its founding, Markos has made it clear that other parts of the progressive movement have plenty of ideas, he trusts our nascent think tanks and policy wonks to come up with possible solutions while the blog focuses on the nuts and bolts of winning. Given that, isn’t it illogical to expect the blogs – or at least Daily Kos – to deliver more than what it’s owner has defined as its mission? Isn’t that a little like walking into a restaurant and complaining that it doesn’t act as a grocery store?
Well, that would be disappointing, if you could manage to engage hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Americans, in a conversation about politics and change, and all they aspired to talk about was how to win elections and to leave the substance to someone else. I don’t believe that’s all the Kos community cares about. There are too many smart, intellectual people on the blogs, people who worry about their country in the longer term, for that to be the case.
And Susan, you just got through saying that the blogs are full of "mini idea factories." Now you say they were founded to win elections and nothing else. I think you should make up your mind. (I don’t know how to do emoticons, so consider this a smiley face.)
Let me clarify ... I think that individual blogs, like different traditional media outlets, often have different focuses. And in a community like Daily Kos, where there is a great deal of reader-generated material, there are even within that large community different types of content: calls to immediate action, focus on winning, idea generation, even simple social bonding over issues. So I would say that many blogs – including Daily Kos – are "mini idea factories," while others may be more focused on a single issue or on the horse race or on winning elections. Markos’ focus on winning is inarguable and he is perceived as the largest voice, but things like Energize America are going on all the time as well. Even if the traditional media often chooses to focus only on Markos, I think it may well turn out that a lot of idea factories are being housed on the blog and may in the long run have a large, slow-but-consistent impact on ideas, policy and implementation. And the fact that the blog is specifically designed to allow all kinds of discourse from pretty much anyone interested in discussion tells me (at least) that the founder thought his own favorite focus and interest should not necessarily be the same focus as all other interested progressive activists. There is a strength in having each other cover for each other’s lack of knowledge or interest in other areas – while still acknowledging those other areas should be addressed.
And as follow-up to the previous question, if we can’t win, what good are all the ideas in the world?
None. Who’s saying you shouldn’t try to win? That’s just silly. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only conversation that matters. You can have two big conversations at the same time. And a lot of progressives are hungry for that conversation about a new way to govern, but they don’t know where to start. I know because I hear from them.
I think one of the frustrations that the grassroots of the Democratic Party is expressing on the blogs is with the inability of the party establishment to articulate any passion – not just ideas, but to take stands firmly and with passion instead of the watered-down and often cringing language they seem to use when challenging the administration. If our party’s so-called leaders won’t articulate clearly what we – and the majority of the America people, according to polls – feel about the war, for example, do you really see it as our role to tamp that frustration down? Isn’t this a medium that can legitimately give feedback and push discourse in a direction that defines different visions for America?
Arrgh, Susan. To quote the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, "There you go again." When did I ever suggest that your frustration isn’t justified? No one who reads the book can reasonably come away with that message. I have this whole section in there where the Democrats in Washington go through this really cynical process of trying to come up with a "bumper sticker" for 2006, and every idea gets rejected because it’s risky in some way, and they go around and around until finally they come up with, "Together, America Can Do Better," which of course means less than nothing. No wonder the bloggers are frustrated. So am I. And I write repeatedly in the book that the people on the blogs and on MoveOn.org are filling a total vacuum of leadership. Again, the point here is that the frustration can’t be ALL there is. There has to be another act. What reasonable activist would disagree with that?
Considering that the current conservative movement got its renewed recharging with Goldwater’s defeat – and that it focused on being anti-New Deal, anti-modernism, anti-"hippie culture" – isn’t it fair to characterize that movement and today’s fruition as also lacking in big ideas? After all, how is being anti-Bush today and wanting to dismantle his legacy (militaristic democracy spreading, privatization of everything, drowning government in a bathtub) any different from being anti-New Deal, anti-FDR and wanting to dismantle that legacy?
Like I said earlier, yes, neither party seems to be exactly blazing a trail into the 21st century. Simon Rosenberg, among others, has said the same thing very eloquently, comparing them to bloodied and tired prizefighters—a nice image. A lot of progressives don’t like to talk about this, I think, because it equates the parties, and thus it muddies the message that Democrats are better for the country right now than Republicans. But my sense is that they agree with it, by and large, and I think it’s largely a generational thing. We have these two parties dominated by leaders who were born into an entirely different world—a world where the industrial economy was humming along, where cathode tubes and transistors represented the most cutting-edge technology, where suburbs barely existed, where the Cold War defined America’s role in the world. And I’ve come to believe that they’re just constitutionally incapable of wrapping their heads around such a tectonic shift. They’re more comfortable just litigating and relitigating the same culture wars and stale economic arguments of the last 30 years. To hear them go back and forth, you’d think nothing had changed, and yet everything has changed. To go back to Andy Stern, he likes to say that no generation in human history has witnessed anything like this pace of change, and I agree with that. Industrialization took decades. The Internet sprouted up in a couple of years. Amazing.
So, in my view, it may just be that we have to have a generational shift before we can begin to articulate new, relevant and competing arguments for what kind of government we want to construct. We’re not going back to the days, for instance, when workers derived all of their security from their employers, because the workers stayed put at one job, and the employer was playing on a level field of competition. We’re just not. And that’s OK, because maybe there’s an opportunity there for more workers, if they can get a basic level of education, to get more control over their own lives. But we have to figure out, then, how to get them that education, and how to ensure they get healthcare and retirement security that’s portable and fairly financed, and we have to do something about childcare, which wasn’t even a topic of conversation when the social contract was last amended. And I doubt you can get that kind of change done here and there, with little tweaks to existing programs that may or may not add up to a whole. I think someone has to put all of this into a larger theory of change that people can understand, which is how we’ve always adapted in the past. Bill Clinton started down that road in 1992, but he was hindered by his opponents and by his own missteps. I think history will record that he began a very important conversation, but it seems to have stalled, partly, as you point out, because these years under Bush have been marked by more immediate crises, like these very serious assaults on transparency and civil liberties.
When you think about it, no generation in American history has failed to meet the challenge of fundamental change when confronted with it. It hasn’t always been smooth, but we are the beneficiaries of some really ingenious and courageous thinking. But this Boomer generation—well, I think they ARE failing. So those of us who are a little younger need to figure out what’s next. We need to hear some intellectual and divisive arguments that force us to make difficult but important choices as a nation. And I think the bloggers can and will play a huge, huge role in that. The whole progressive movement can. And if there’s a larger message to the story I tell in "The Argument," that’s it.