It was exactly 20 years ago, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.
It was 2002, when most everyone had lost their minds in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Conservative voices dominated both their burgeoning media bubble and traditional news outlets as well. The “liberal” voices, you might recall, were Alan Colmes—Sean Hannity’s punching bag on their Hannity and Colmes Fox News show—and Time columnist Joe Klein, who was scolding anti-war liberals saying that all reasonable people knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
I may or may not have thrown sofa pillows at my TV. Multiple times.
If you’re frustrated at today’s Democratic Party, remember the problem is mostly two of them: Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. In 2002, we had Sens. Joe Lieberman, Conrad Burns, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and Max Cleland. If you don’t remember or don’t know who they are, just imagine them all being like Manchin. Some of them, like Lieberman, were worse.
On policy, this Democratic Party wasn’t just happy to warmonger on Iraq, but it thought that civil unions—a bullshit semantic same-sex alternative to actual real marriage—was a craaaazy idea that would alienate most of America. They were happy to cut Social Security, but not as much as Republicans. On issue after issue, their operating position was always “like the Republicans, just not as bad.” Triangulation! Weirdly, those who wanted Republican-style governance opted for real Republicans time and time again. Eventually, all those Democrats above became obsolete, most of them at the ballot box.
We had a shitty Democratic Party and a frat boy idiot of a president rushing us into an unnecessary war of choice. I started Daily Kos not because it would help transform Democratic Party politics, but because I needed to rant. Indeed, one of the early Daily Kos tag lines was “rants and raves on the state of the nation.”
Original Daily Kos banner.
“Daily Kos” was a placeholder name. I couldn’t think of anything better. “Kos” was my army nickname, and the pseudonymity protected me in my day job. Not from my boss, who knew what I was doing, but from my co-workers, who might not understand that despite my prolific (work-hours) blogging, I was still the most productive member on the team (according to that boss). I picked the orange color palette on purpose. Every other liberal blog was blue, and used the same boring Blogspot templates. I wanted to stand out, for people to remember where they had read that pithy hot take. Orange did the trick, and it perfectly matched the cool stock image I found for the site banner.
Me and months-old Ari, working night and day on Daily Kos, 2003.
My day job was a web development shop in San Francisco, so I had basic HTML skills at a time when HTML was actually basic. I was able to evolve the site with new bells and whistles while many of my blogging contemporaries were stuck on their basic templates. And then I gave it my all, obsessively dedicating countless hours to writing and promoting (gotta get on the Yahoo directory!) and tweaking the site’s backend code. I can’t pretend my schedule was most conducive to my health or family, but I was driven by sudden purpose and powered by this amazing community that suddenly found its home at Daily Kos.
I started with a pre-packaged community, which had jumped from site to site (like Yahoo Groups and then a couple of early political blogs). This was a multipartisan community, and it would eventually blow up and get pushed out by frustrated owners, so after getting kicked out of the political blog MyDD, they found their way to Daily Kos.
I had been part of that community for several years, and I had seen the problem: No one wanted to deal with bad-faith conservative assholes. So the first thing I did when they showed up at Daily Kos was declare the site a partisan Democratic one, and invited everyone to stay so long as they understood that framework and respected it. Some conservatives stuck around for a while, but most were gone in short order. Finally, liberal political junkies had an online community to call their own, and that sense of shared purpose fueled its early growth, as did the Howard Dean movement that latched on to Daily Kos as its platform of choice. (This was before Facebook, remember.)
Daily Kos version 1.0.
For many bloggers, commenters were a pain the ass, and many shut down their comment sections. Me, I couldn’t believe how fucking cool it was. I could write about any topic—trade wars or a House race in the middle of Indiana—and there was always someone smarter than me in the comments adding extra context, flavor, and when necessary, fact checking and correcting. For many with outsized egos, that was hard to handle. For me, I was deeply in love. I set about finding the best commenting tools for this growing community.
Here is the original archived version of Daily Kos. So primitive, right? It lasted two and a half years until I came upon a platform called “Scoop,” which powered an early internet community called Kuro5hin (like “corrosion”). Scoop had a diary function, which we all know and love as the community blogging tool. But I didn’t intend to launch with that diary functionality. I just didn’t know how to remove them from the platform’s complicated and byzantine settings and code. I thought, “I'll figure that out later,” as the old site was buckling under increased traffic.
Daily Kos 2.0.
I launched the new site, and within 10 minutes the diary section was populated with curious community members poking and prodding the new tools. It was very quickly apparent that those diaries weren’t going anywhere, and that they would be a centerpiece feature for this site’s community. Over the years, many have lauded me for my foresight in empowering the community long before social media platforms made it the standard. And every time someone does that I laugh, because it was all a happy accident. Had I been better versed technically, diaries might have never existed. But if there’s one thing I’m really good at, it’s recognizing an opportunity and I jumped at it.
Since those days, Daily Kos has gone through multiple platform updates to keep up with growth and engagement. And we always center the community during those efforts. It’s literally my favorite part about Daily Kos, it’s what sets us apart from other liberal media outlets, it’s what makes us special, and what makes us impactful. Check out these 20-year stats:
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Total number of comments: ~71,895,060
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Total number of currently published stories: 1,412,538
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Total number of story recommends: ~52,675,000
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Total number of groups formed: 1,374
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Email activism list with over 3 million members
These days, the Democratic Party might be in better overall shape, but we face a grave threat to our nation’s democracy. The Republican Party spent these last 20 years consolidating its gains with white rural Americans, and has leveraged our system’s systemic bias toward rural, small, white states to give themselves unfair advantages in the Senate and the Electoral College. The House is gerrymandered heavily in their favor. They’ve stolen two Supreme Court seats to finally get the conservative majority that can destroy so many of our cherished rights—while protecting the gun lobby and its enablement of tens of thousands of murders and severe injuries every year. Racism is no longer hidden in the shadows, activated by dog-whistle language. It’s now proudly out and open. The last president wanted his vice president hanged for refusing to go along with his coup attempt. Voting rights in red and battleground states are under severe assault, targeting core Democratic constituencies that already struggle to engage in the political process.
The difference between winning and losing this November is monumental—the difference between losing more rights and potentially our democracy, to having a filibuster-shattering majority that would make D.C. and maybe Puerto Rico into states, at least tempering some of the pernicious biases of the Electoral College and making the Senate a more equitable, effective chamber. Holding both chambers of Congress and eliminating the filibuster could even bring about desperately needed Supreme Court reform, expanding the court and perhaps instituting term limits.
Daily Kos at 20 is as relevant as it’s always been: a hub for political engagement and activism. We are going to organize these next five months as if our nation’s very existence depended on it, because it does.
For however short or long a time you’ve been here, thank you for being part of this fight. Thank you for your loyalty at a time when social media has mostly destroyed the web and sites like this one. Thank you for supporting independent media when consolidation and brutal advertising economics wrought by Google and Facebook have laid waste to all but the biggest media conglomerates.
But most of all, thank you for fighting for our country’s future. I never expected Daily Kos to be more than my own personal rant space, and what it has become … I couldn't have even dreamed I’d be so blessed to be in the company of the best, smartest, most patriotic, passionate Americans around, both the 90+ employees that make this place hum, and the millions that receive our content daily, whether at the website, by email, on social media, or via our podcasts..
I love you all. Twenty years of Daily Kos couldn’t have happened without you.
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