The strategic importance of kos's Crashing the Gate was the naming of "silo" thinking in progressive politics, and articulating an alternative.
Since the switch to DK4, I don't think DailyKos is about providing an alternative to silo thinking anymore. That doesn't mean that DK4 won't have an important role to play in progressive politics, or that what emerges from how the site evolves won't be awesome or rad or what have you. But, I think it's important to note how fundamental the changes are, both for the historical record, and to keep clarity about what it is that we're trying to achieve here.
Crashing the Gate was a no-holds barred critique of issue-based advocacy:
Single-issue groups not only hurt the Democratic Party in its search for a common identity, but they help provide the Republicans with a treasure trove of attack opportunities. While the Democratic Party should be the party of the people, it has become, with a lot of help from Republican framing, "immoral" abortionists, "extremist" tree-huggers, "corrupt" labor officials, "greedy" trial lawyers, "predatory" homosexuals, and "antiwhite" minority activists. ...
On our side, the issue groups and identity groups are the Democratic Party. And the problem is not just the categories and the segmentation, but the mind-sets they represent - there is too much emphasis on what the Party can do for them, and not enough emphasis on what they can do for the Party.
pages 39-40
DailyKos originally opened to reintroduce some pragmatism and basic electoral sense into the scene. It's had some major successes on that front. Of course, those strategies played out differently in rolling back the Republican insanity of the Bush era than they have in figuring out the best way forward in the Obama era.
A gradual change on Daily Kos has been the reassertion of various groups rooted in identity politics as sources of great political energy, some of which had more staying power than others. Black Kos, Native American Netroots, SheKos, WGLB, among other groups provided forums for people to agitate on behalf of specific groups on Daily Kos. The structure of the old site, however, facilitated a certain balance between groups and a common identity.
Kos is quick to remind us that we can do everything on DK4 that we could do on DK3. That's true. But, it's also true that structural changes have deeper implications than consciously intended, a point kos has also made recently. But, kos went further, from noting the possibility of severe changes, to lapsing into a justification for the abandonment of a central strategic point that made DK effective during the Bush adminstration. It was a space for liberals to come together and form one (disunited, most of the time) front. No more.
Those who want to be balkanized can already do so. And certainly, DK4 will enable them. But the internet enables balkanization. And sometimes, balkanization is not a bad thing. It wouldn't be a bad thing to balkanize the most obnoxious of the Obama Sux and Rox clubs.
While pie-fights can be obnoxious - I've done what I can to stay out of a lot of them - there's a difference between a tactical goal of minimizing polarizing discourse within progressive movement, and a strategic goal of building strong coalitions and an effective movement for progressive politics.
One thread in yesterday's BlackKos drove home the extent to which the site's structure is changing the nature of the action we can do.
At least in pie fights...
...you didn't feel alienated. Attacked, maybe, but also supported. I made many friends through those moments - including some who started out as enemies. It got too much, too coarse and uncivil toward the end. But there was at least some heat.
Here I feel like I'm camped on some melting ice floe in the Bering straights, watching my neighbours drift further away, pitying the forlorn Polar Bears still looking for fish, and worried I might bump into Sarah Palin.
How this all plays out remains to be seen. There's things I'm enjoying about the new look, and new features. There's things I don't like (that the bars in poll results no longer show percentages accurately really makes me want barf while vomiting). Everything in life's a trade-off. The question is, with the encouragement to splinter the site into groups (we are a long way from seeing what that will actually entail), where is the structural feature that encourages and facilitates coming together?