Promote my f****** ideology, kos!

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Saturday August 18, 2007 · 12:50 PM PDT

2007/08/18 · 12:50

My most recent diary (The politics of the market crash) got an excellent welcome by the community and I do hope that this was because of the explicit ideological and policy points it made.

May I be so bold as to suggest that one of the reasons my diaries get recommended so regularly is because ideology and policy are pretty much always present in them? And that the community wants more of that? And, more controversially, that they don't find it on the front page?

DailyKos is explicitly about political process, so the relative absence of policy discussions should not be a surprise. But it's also a community, and the premier meeting place of the progressive netroots. Can it really afford not to take a more explicit, structured, and comprehensive approach to policy?

As provisos, I'll note explicitly:

not everybody on DailyKos agrees with my ideas, and I'm certainly not claiming to represent the ideology of the left, but only my own opinion. But I do think that the debate on these ideas is needed, and that the left should be able, at some point, to stand by a small number of core ideas supported by wide consensus. That consensus needs to be built, and dKos is the ideal place to do so;
I do have my own site, and I do have recognition on dKos (more than I ever dreamt, to be frank), so this is not sour grapes that my ideas are being ignored . They certainly aren't by a significant chunk of the community, which is, again, more than I could have hoped for - and more than I could find anywhere else.
I don't think I am a single-issue activist pushing for my particular hobby horse to be privileged. Again, the topic I'm most associated with (energy/environment) has got good visibility on the site, thanks to the efforts of many others, so this is not about this specifically;
as I always flag, I'm not a US citizen, so I participate to these debates as an interested and concerned outsider, aware of the impact that US policies has on the rest of the world, and bringing in a different perspective, but wary of interfering in a democratic process to which I don't belong. A driving force for me is that the right in Europe is very obviously following in the footsteps of its US counterparts, and that the lefts on both sides of the Atlantic face similar challenges, and can learn from one another - Americans from some "socialist" practices that still exist in Europe, and Europeans from the successful rollback of conservative ideology now underway in the US thanks, notably, to the blogs.

Thus, my point is twofold:

the fight against the Republicans is currently successful because they have been so obviously incompetent, partisan and corrupt, and the Democrats stand a good chance of returning to power on that sole basis in 2008. But it is still not clear to many what they actually stand for, beyond not being quite as incompetent, partisan and corrupt. I'll stipulate that these are good, fundamentally good things, and more than enough to win the next election, but they are not enough in the long term. They are not enough to fight the underlying ideological background, defined by the right over the past 30 years, and they will not be enough to fight the accusations of the rightwing noise machine once the Democrats are back in power. If they still get to choose the battleground ("patriotism", "values", "freedom"), they will win again, soon, as soon as their current incompetence is overshadowed by the future controversies of the day, whipped by their usual talking heads and channelled by complicit pundits. The De,ms need a positive message, one that can get through all the bullshit andthe filters of the traditional media and they need to focus on this quickly. (As I wrote yesterday, the current financial crisis is a perfect opportunity to do so on the economic front).
there has always been a gap between the front page of DailyKos, and the community. Most active community members barely read the front page, and spend most of their time in the diaries. This is where the preoccupations of kossacks are aired, controversies erupt and are discussed to death, and the public opinion of the community is shaped. A few topics are unlikely to ever find any kind of peaceful compromise, but many do, and endless discussions do lead to consensus or at least to a certain wary agreement on a number of core points. But the front page, which is read mostly by passive non-members, plays a very different role. It is the public face of the site, and the only thing that many still-clueless outsiders will read (remember: they only open the front page, and are unlikely, for the most part, to even click on stories to read what's below the fold, let alone to read diaries).
With DailyKos's growing notoriety and visibility in the traditional media, that public role is becoming a lot bigger. That it only very partially reflects what's going on in the diaries is pretty obvious to all regulars. Some think that's fine, and some don't. I'm mostly in that second camp. Many on the site bemoan that too many in the outside world fail to understand that DailyKos is more than the blog of a few writers (albeit with lots of readers), it's a whole community of activists. Well, one way to change this would be to give a bigger voice to the community on the front page.
In the recent past, there have been renewed efforts to front page diaries, and that's the simplest and most effective way to do it. The diary rescue is another real effort, but given its timing and format, I think its (formidable) value is mostly within the community. But what's really needed would be a more systematic and regular effort at synthetising the ideas brought forward by the community. Frankly, there is no better way to vet ideas, proposals or concepts and test their viability than to put them under the eyes of the community. They will be dissected, critiqued, complemented, even complimented, and furthered by loyal, politically-savvy, focused readers with multiple competences and representing many constituencies. Anything that comes out of this process has to be able to stand up and out in the "real world." Analyses from kossacks deserve to be quoted as often as those from pundits and other bloggers, and a regular effort to "extract" the wisdom of the site should be started (to those that reply: just do it, I can reasonably respond that I actually do it on several topics, but again, I don't want this to be about me and my ideas).

The two points above are worth pushing independently, but, combined, they suggest a more proactive policy for the front page, in line with my diary title.

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Promote my f****** ideology, kos!

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