I have seen a disturbing trend recently that is really bothering me.
Some people on this site and elsewhere have been increasingly alarmed by the circular firing squad and constant criticism of the President and Congress by progressive bloggers and progressive opinion-oriented news hosts.
The response by those being critical is that it is not the fault of the bloggers and commentators that the base is disengaged.
If progressive blogs and opinion shows are not trying to form public opinion, then why exactly do they even exist?
Continued below.
During the past several years, progressive blogs and news shows were where many of us went to get critical information about the Bush administration, and to form action plans for taking back the Congress and winning the White House. Bloggers refer to themselves as the "netroots" or sometimes as "the base."
Those self-described terms give a pretty good insight into the way bloggers view themselves. If you are the "roots" or "base" of a group, then you see yourself as critically important for the structure and support of your group, in this case Democrats or Progressives.
However, when things start to go bad and self-reflection of where things have gone so wrong begins, those same "netroots" are quick to state that they cannot possibly be part of the problem.
Which is it? You can't be both. You can't simultaneously be the "roots" of anything and at the same time claim to not be part of the problem.
It is deeply ironic that those who make a living or form a hobby out of criticizing elected officials become defensive when criticism is levied at them. The netroots claimed to be shapers of public opinion when things were going their way, but now the wheels are coming off the wagon and the attitude now is "hey, don't blame me."
If a voter wants to find good news about the administration, where do they turn? The mainstream media has not done a very good job of covering politics in a generation. They are so concerned about appearing "liberal" that they have largely dropped any truth-telling in favor of presenting "he said/ she said." So no hope there. If a voter then goes on the Kos or Huffington Post, they will find article or diary upon article or diary complaining that Obama is spineless and the Congress incompetent. And they will find the same on right-wing blogs. So what is a voter to think, if left and right are saying the same thing and the mainstream media is passive?
I have found most of the good news about the Obama administration buried in the business or science section of the paper. Occasionally a diary will pop up here, but on many occasions I've found something worthy of praise from the liberal side that was met with crickets as the firing squad about healthcare moved into Round 267. Stricter enforcement of labor laws, making funding decisions based on science and not ideology, overseas diplomatic successes all go uncommented on while another diary saying how personally disenchanted someone is with Obama gets 400 or more recs.
And so here we find ourselves, facing a potential catastrophe in the mid-terms. People upset about Obama's "lack of leadership." Well, let me tell you, no one leads in a vacuum. Effective leaders channel movements that already exist. Civil rights, women's rights, the union movement all came from the ground up and politicians chimed in very late, when change was inevitable.
If you think that getting out the vote is the end of the process, you are dead wrong. It's just the beginning. Changing hearts and minds is something that each of us has to do, every day. We cannot in good faith demand things from our politicians without creating the groundswell of support ourselves at home. How do we do that? "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." We have focused very much on the second part of that quote in making our requests of politicians, but what of the first? From each, according to his ability. Surely among our numbers are writers and singers, advertising executives and union organizers. Surely among us are people who sit on Chambers of Commerce and city councils. We say we've been working for health care reform for 40 years? Bullshit. We haven't. For 40 years we have voted for officials who we hoped would deliver reform, true. But where is the public movement? Where s the between-elections concerted effort to show how reform affects us all and not just those without coverage? What are each of us doing according to our ability? Feminists and civil rights leaders and labor leaders wrote essays, they made films and fictional novels and sang songs about how the status quo hurt everyone, about how badly change was needed. They succeeded in weaving the need for change into the very fabric of our being. Those fighting for gay rights are slowly doing the same. Where is our movement, for healthcare, for better labor laws? If there has been a sustained decades-long concerted effort to shape public opinion on worker's rights and healthcare, I have missed it.
Do you think that our only ability is to complain about our elected officials online? I don't. The online left coalesced around being against Bush. Now it's time to coalesce around being for something. And being for something does not just involve brow-beating our elected officials. It means going out there and doing the work to win over the public.
Are we up to it?