I have been considering attending the Netroots Nation conference this year. I have participated here at DailyKos since 2006, but I've never gone to one of the conferences-- I have just never really sought to build personal relationships from this forum. But after going on five years and reading thousands of diaries and probably tens of thousands of comments, I've seen some of the same usernames so many times that I just have that vague itch, that desire to put some faces and voices to the names. (And despite the criticism below, I am still considering attending.)
I happened to notice today that they had posted the panel topics for the conference. So I clicked over to look through them, to find sessions of interest to me.
Within 15 minutes or so of reading through titles and descriptions, I had begun to notice what i consider to be a glaring weakness in the agenda.
What struck me right away was the absolute dearth of what I would consider to be "issue" panels. For example, I found:
One panel on health care.
No panels on entitlements, Medicare, or Social Security.
No panels on tax policy, or the budget, or deficits.
No panels on housing policy or foreclosure.
One panel on the War in Afghanistan. No other panels on our other wars, our military, or, for that matter, any foreign policy matters whatsoever.
On education, science, basic infrastructure, energy, the environment, the courts, and other issues that I would consider core democratic priorities-- priorities that we will likely be fighting for in the budget battle that apparently won't be subject to a panel discussion at NN11-- there are but one or two panels.
No panels on global warming. Has global warming ceased to be a core issue for progressives? I know progressives who believe that this will be the single most important issue facing us within our lifetimes.
Of a list of categories of issues that I came up with, only civil liberties and worker/class issues receive what I consider to be adequate representation among the panel discussions.
On the other hand... there's 8 panels on social media and/or blogging... and 29 additional panels on politics: tactics, organizing, and building narratives, countering right wing spin, and so forth.
My question is this: if we aren't up to speed on the issues, what are we blogging about? What are we building a narrative around? To what end are we organizing? How do we evaluate candidates?
Now I fully recognize that this is a political conference, and political strategy will, and should, be discussed. But I believe that politics should be first and foremost an ongoing discussion of real-world problems and solutions. Discussion of real-world problems and the role of government in solving those problems should therefore dominate the panel discussion topics at this kind of conference.
And guess what-- if you have issue panels, there will be plenty of political discussion anyway. For example, in discussion of issues in a political context, very naturally the conversation will turn at times to how the facts can be talked about in ways that are advantageous to a favored point of view, and that's perfectly fine-- so long as the discussion is based on solid fact and evidence, and we aren't forgetting that this is all about problems and solutions.
When the starting point of our internal discourse is tactics and narrative rather than problems and solutions, the tail is wagging the dog. Truth becomes secondary, evidence is ignored when it is not useful, and the focus on solving problems is lost.
If you want to see what happens when narrative, spin, and tactics drive politics over issues, just peek over the divide into the Republican Party. Over there, narrative and spin drive the agenda to such a high extent that only those issues that can easily be spun get any attention. It's all about what will play well: what will win. If an issue can not be spun to political advantage, it is most often simply ignored. Republican-run government, therefore, doesn't even recognize certain problems, much less solve them.
I've argued variations of this point of view before, and I've usually heard in return something along the lines of, "Well, you've got to win, or discussion of your priorities doesn't matter." That is true. But somehow I am skeptical that the magic key to unlock the big win is going to reveal itself in all these panels discussing new media, social networking, and narrative building. On the other hand, I do think it would be helpful for attendees to be hearing from experts on important issues, and discussing their own views. I believe that better informed progressive activists will generate better progressive political arguments which will lead to better outcomes in elections.