Almost instantly after he reached 270 EVs on Tuesday night, the opposition blogosphere began new uproars over the appropriate staffing of an Obama administration and howls of protest at the impending selection of Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff. Already, these opposition-born institutions are showing that they are going to, at best, have trouble supporting the sausage-making of a liberal agenda more than painting a utopian picture on a blank slate in opposition. This same problem had a lot to do with Ralph Nader’s popularity in 2000, which was enough to be a necessary but not sufficient cause of Al Gore’s defeat. Worse, in 2000 these institutions didn’t exist. Will they create an anti-Obama frankenstein that is more like Ross Perot than Ralph Nader in 2012?
More on the flip…
I was writing my thoughts on my college-assigned webserver space in the mid 90s. It wasn’t much of a “blog” because there was no database mechanism or syndication—it was not even made with Notepad, it was made with Pico. But, needless to say, I was doing it from the beginning.
In the 90s, I had a lot to say about core philosophical values of the liberal mainstream. I argued, for example, for class-based, not race-based, affirmative action and the use of federalism to liberal advantage in liberal states.
I started a blog with the earliest bloggers, and for a while I was on the blog roll with some of those that rose to blogger-stardom. I was too involved in my education, and later my work-life, to keep up. But the first wave of important blogging arose with the 2000 presidential election. Particularly, Talking Points Memo and the Daily Howler. These, along with Altercation, the Kaus Files, and conservative equivalents largely rose from the ranks of second-string political writers that already had a few bylines to their credit.
Sui generis bloggers, like Kos and those that sprang from him, mostly arose in opposition to the Bush administration in the wake of the traditional media’s utter obeisance to Bush after 9/11. Many of the political blogs at this time were uninfluential, poorly written, and more or less useless.
For the first time, it’s worth point out, a very old 80s BBS era facility had an important influence on the Internet: the WELL, a San Francisco-based BBS, one of the few BBSes that had nationwide users, in its iteration as an Internet site ultimately became the nursery for literally thousands of blogs. Most pre-Internet computer systems were destroyed by the Internet in its early years—only a very few, like AOL held out for any significant period of time. I note this because BBSes were an early forum for electronic political discourse.
What blogs ended up being part of was the biggest part of the new generation of the Democratic Party, the generation that got us to where we are today. That was: the realization that traditional non-party institutions were not reliable political allies against the manufactured conservative institutions.
The Brookings Institution is a non-partisan think tank; it is no counterweight to the dozen or so influential Conservative think tanks that are not hesitant about their status as a cog in a larger machine.
The New York Times et al. are not partisan papers; they are no counterweight to the numerous explicitly partisan news sources like Fox News, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and so forth. Most traditionally “liberal” magazines, like The Nation of Mother Jones, while reliably liberal, are free agents, and are not part of a liberal movement.
The American Bar Association is a non-partisan association; it is no counterweight to the expressly partisan Federalist Society, which, over it’s roughly 30 years in existence has been a ticket to insiderdom for conservative law students, and has created a powerful network of conservative lawyers and judges.
The handful of non-political radio shows that survived the 90s survived by never touching on the subject. For example, liberal firebrand Tom Leykis, who spent hours ripping Rush Limbaugh’s guts out in the late 80s reinvented himself as an overdriven male chauvanist who taught his listeners how to get laid, and lampooned political talk radio as stuff that people “don’t care about.” In other words, there was literally nothing on radio to counter the army of conservative talkers, and little in the whole world to counter it at all.
The mainline Protestant churches emptied. Younger Christians flocked to evangelical strip mall churches, whose message was extremely conservative. You would hear a quip here and there about Jesus being a liberal, but the only growing liberal religious institution that I am aware of in the 90s was the Jewish Reform movement, which became the largest group by the end of the 90s.
The Democratic conceit that the truth is liberal, and, therefore the reliable establishment institutions like the foregoing would ultimately come around to their position relies on the premise that the truth ultimately matters. In the long, long term it does. In the short 2-4 years of an election cycle, it does not. So, the spin and carefully orchestrated messaging of the conservative movement grew powerful enough to stop Clinton, move him to the right, then impeach him. In the aftermath of the 2000 election, it became apparent that enough of this messaging had permeated the mainstream media and the public at large that the unconstitutional theft of an election would just be another scandal, not a giant deal. It was time to do something.
In the wake of 2000, a generation of liberals awoke to the reality that it wasn’t just their style of politics that was losing, but the entire infrastructure dedicated to their message. Why this hadn’t occurred to them during the 1980s, or why no one had noticed the buildup of partisan Conservative institutions after 1964, is for someone of that era to answer for.
I was on the cutting edge of this work as well; much more intimately, in fact. I founded the chapter of the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy at my law school. I debated the Federalists. I saw my chapter’s postings around school be stolen or covered with obscene pro-conservative graffiti. It was very tough to be liberal in late 2001.
At the same time, other important liberal institutions rose up. Air America, to put liberal talkers on the radio. The Center for American Progress became the liberal*movement*’s think tank (and gave birth to the fame of Atrios blogger Duncan Black). Though far from complete or powerful even now, the groundwork for a meaningful religious left has been laid, though it is still disproportionately Jewish.
But the most noticeable counterpunch came from the blogs.
It was the counterweight to conservative-dominated talk radio before Air America and a big part of it afterward. But more importantly, it was bloggers that pointed out how the “so called liberal media” had been corrupted by the need to profit, and took a no holds barred approach to criticizing their coverage. Yes, not everything you read on a blog is true; but everything that is true is almost certainly pointed out in a blog. The former is still true of the traditional media, but the latter is not. The traditional media had a tendency to severely underreport or not report the truth in the 2000s. It’s not so much that they were reporting lies as truth (though they did xerographically report the lies of others), but more that they simply were cowed by the conservatives. Reporting the “truth” meant criticism of the ends-justified means used by Bush to defend America.
The rise of liberal institutions was created in the same righteous indignation that the Conservative institutions were. They also rose during a period of an almost total eclipse of their power, just like the Conservatives.
But what is brewing in the snap-your-fingers instant flash of the Internet age is a scary answer to the question as to whether these liberal institutions have produced elected leaders that are utterly unable to transition from opposition to governance, which was the ultimate and essential failure of the conservative movement.
Almost instantly after he reached 270 EVs on Tuesday night, the opposition blogosphere began new uproars over the appropriate staffing of an Obama administration and howls of protest at the impending selection of Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff. Already, these opposition-born institutions are showing that they are going to, at best, have trouble supporting the sausage-making of a liberal agenda more than painting a utopian picture on a blank slate in opposition. This same problem had a lot to do with Ralph Nader’s popularity in 2000, which was enough to be a necessary but not sufficient cause of Al Gore’s defeat. Worse, in 2000 these institutions didn’t exist. Will they create an anti-Obama frankenstein that is more like Ross Perot than Ralph Nader in 2012?
And the 2006 Democratic Congress does not appear to be an encouraging answer to the question of the guerillas ability to run the capital either. This is because the Democratic Congress is a dangerous blend of old school holdouts whose seats are so safe they have little if anything ever to fear, and who come from the pre-institutional, establishment era, and the new group of opposition-born members. There are not many members of the Democratic caucuses in either house whose seat they took from the Republicans during the Clinton era.
The old group are likely to reject a forceful Obama program, or amend it to death; the latter are all too likely to reject it as not radical enough. The former group wouldn’t move to impeach Bush when the public supported it; the latter did it before it was shown to be accepted by the public and could have damaged the party’s prospects of retaking the White House.
The bloggers will likely support the more radical group of Congressmembers who can cling to their utopian opposition style within the majority by offering amendments that will get rejected. These opposition minded bloggers will most likely not be able to learn vicariously that the progressive agenda moves forward much much faster with a Democrat than without one. Unfortunately, some aren’t even old enough to remember that that’s what Clinton did in an era of conservative ascendancy. When he and Gore weren’t liberal enough, they cast them away. Again, it’s unknown how this will apply in the liberal institutional era. Not being conservative enough did hurt Bush in 1992, but even the most ugly conservative bloggers came around to reluctant support of McCain in 2008.
I’ll use the analogy of airspeed versus groundspeed. If your airspeed is 200 mph in a 100 mph headwind, you are only going 100mph groundspeed. Clinton faced a massive, organized, and ruthless headwind, yet still had a positive, if small, groundspeed.
Obama has a tailwind, much of it from the liberal institutions and their supports, including the bloggers. Whether that wind stops blowing or changes direction altogether is too early to call.
But as Alex Bennett pointed out during the election, he wouldn’t lose his shtick if Obama won, because others, he will always be too far to the left, but also because he’s not part of a liberal institution that would check his criticism, like Air America. I’ve heard comedians worry that without Bush they’ll lose their shticks too.
The question is whether or not fear of losing their shticks will cause them to put self over cause and begin a self-immolating criticism of Obama before he has even taken office. So far the signs don’t look good. Maybe things will improve when the Right starts its first bona fide attacks on Obama as President and people get defensive. We’ll see.
But if the last 8 years don’t give you pause about “heightening the contradictions” and their cost, then nothing ever will.