UPDATE #3, Sunday: I just wrote a followup diary which, I hope, is more focused. It's titled: DailyKos Mission: Battle of Progressives vs Pragmatists )
(UPDATE: #1. Comments helped clarify that I'm speaking really of the content-flow on the Recommended Diary list, vs the Diary List at large. It's a huge difference, and I should have said so, and made that clear. thanks for the comments. #2 Ooops. I also mis-spelled astroturf, and besides, barb didn't like it or think it appropriate, so I removed it)
This is a simple commentary, from a mile high view. In the early days of DailyKos, participants were more than likely to be part of Howard Dean's new grassroots progressive movement than staffers and volunteers from the DLC machinery.
That has changed. Many things change. Change is okay. But it's often useful to simply note that change, as a frame of reference for where we're heading.
Over the past nine months in particular, first as the Democrats came fresh off the Nov 06 wins and now finally had acquired some power, up through the past 3 months, when the approval ratings of this same Congress have plummeted due to non accomplishment of the two main promised Democratic points of action, the activist progressive voices on DailyKos have become aggressively challenged to the point now that it appears the more establishment voices have succeeded in assimilating and drowning out the progressive agenda.
Quite simply, anyone who had the ecstatic experience of being part of something completely organic, the Dean campaign, largely driven bottom-up by creative grassroots given the ground-breaking authority by the Dean campaign to take ownership and initiate practically anything, knows that our entire intentions, fueled by Dean's courageous and confrontational vision of how to take back America, were well beyond simply putting a Democrat into the White House:
The Mandate included as a powerful prerequisite, or co-requisite, to take back our Party. For a year Dean made speech after speech; sometimes his language was blatant and direct; other times it was implied. But for anyone who didn't experience it first-hand, the mandate was to push out the entire DLC centrist-appeasement element of the Democratic Party, take out the entire beltway-consultant appeasement machinery, and replace it with shiny new progressives, and turning the entire establishment on its head -- replacing the top-down command & control culture to one of more innovative collaboration -- one where citizens had an equal role in the process. Not just ATMs and rally attenders and door knockers and tablings volunteers and order-takers, but participants in the running of the campaigns, and more important, participants in the development of political agendas relevant to constituents. Not just blog-savvy parrots of a candidate's pushed-down "visionary" agenda.
Much has changed. What was an insurgent campaign born of citizens fed up with the status quo of lobbyists running Congress, fed up with the knee-bucking Democrats who lacked moral backbone to stand up for what was right and fully take on the perpetrators of real evil in this very country, has now matured (if that's the word) into more of an extension of mainstream politics. Campaigns are not just internet-ready, they've fully internet savvy -- with graduates of the Dean Campaign fanned out to all the cutting edge new campaigns, starting with all the elements that have now become standard -- online fundraising, including benchmark challenges, houseparties, meetups, video messages, blogs, action-initiatives, candidate speaking out directly on the website, as a means of rapid response.
Something very different between now and then: the seeding of thought and the coordinated rapid-response systems that have campaign volunteers and staffers attempt to shape, control, influence the impression of candidates in the composite arena of one of the most influential websites in the world.
We didn't have that then.. not in an organized way. But today, from my view, I see the site easily 70-80% driven by the various swarms of candidate supporters.
And what's gotten lost and covered over are the progressive objectives that were part of the retaking of power back from Republicans.
Here are just a few strong progressive voices I see less of these days -- though one can argue they're still here, and they are:
clammy
thereisnospoon
buhdydharma
OPOL
(much longer list; some are working on complementary websites or projects including web radio)
But this is what I find -- and I could be wrong.
I think you could pretty much overlay the PAST frequent impeachment diarists, the diarists outraged by the Iraq debacle now extending into year #6, the diarists outraged by the gutting of the Justice Department, outraged by the caving on Habeas Corpus, outraged by the outing of a CIA operative as political punishment, outraged by the RNC's GWB43.com backchannel communcation system installed and in use since 2001, outraged by Pelosi's lack of leadership, outraged by domestic spying and loss of rights -- you can overlay the diarists of these passionate issues -- with the kossacks who place a high premium on a Democratic Party that is absolutely on a progressive keel -- moving into modernity -- not backwards in time to a more centrist, appeasement-based party that courts the Center at all costs for election -- progress be damned.
The strong progressive voices like those at the Next Hurrah, Firedoglake, Booman Tribune, as well as the firebrand voices that could be counted on to have easily 3 diaries a week -- they are here with much less frequency. It's as though the progressive agenda at DailyKos has practically been vanquished.
Not extinguished. But being pushed into the backgorund more and more, incrementally, by the PINOs -- progressives in name only, and the astroturfers deployed by the campaigns to flood the site with topics, comments, diaries that push the viability of that particular candidate over that of the others.
That's inevitable. And to be expected as the web has become legitimized as a powerful medium garnering more eyeballs, in some cases, than some cable TV shows.
But astroturfers (I'm curious who first coined this? I know kos uses it, but not sure who gets credit) are more interested in using the web as simply an extension of communication tools in order to advance candidates to office.
It mattered in 2004 whether or not the next President was going to be Progressive. We never saw what could have happened since the DLC-centric Party orchestrated to take out Dean, and we got instead the usual stooge deemed by the Beltway Boys & Girls to be "electable". ... To predicted results.
Judging by the emerging dominant voices from the astroturf rooting here at DailyKos, "progressive" positions are quaint and ethereal things, and are meaningless in the grand scheme to "elect a Democrat".
I don't know if my observations and intuition are accurate, but I've had conversations with lots of the gang from the 03 election period. It's very different.
At YearlyKos in Chicago, I was sort shocked to see so many "Dean" pins and badges and hats -- and I saw some of the real "certifiable" progressives -- like Terri in Tokyo -- who'd flown from Tokyo to Chicago - just as she'd flown from Tokyo to Des Moines in January 2004. Not because someone pumped up the crowd with rhetoric saying how impt it was for her to be there. No. Very different. Out of pure enthusiastic energy born out of a passion for CHANGE. Not out of pushing someone's candidate. But the MISSION to elect real strong progressives, and build a quorum from which to start aggressively making America what it should have been for past two decades...Not with crafted language and the 24/7 weathervane of what do I say to this group vs this other group. Clear aggressively American policies that have been thwarted by the fear of the old Dem machinery who are still pulling the levers.
What was interesting is when I spoke to Terri and noted "I saw a bunch of Dean folks here", she said "Oh honey they are mostly Dean people -- those are the people who come to events like this".
I couldn't make that statement since I had gotten there a day later and had not had the same face-to-face time she'd had to scope out the attendees. Clearly she didn't mean everyone there was a Dean progressive, but what WAS clear is that this was not a crowd of PINOs from the new astroturf assembly line.
For all the Dean Progressives, let's do what we can to support the initiatives of the DailyKos progressives... Buhdydharma is pushing an economic boycott on Nov 6. And he's collaborating with a bunch of dKos regulars to appeal more directly to the real progressives -- at Docudharma. Clammy and thereisnospoon are heavily investing in web radio projects. I'm working on Video Townhall Network -- and a cross-site project management tool called the interorg.
While the value of the Mothership is clearly high, I feel it's important for the Real Progressives to find each other and collaborate. Because one thing is certain:
Winning over the now infested Moderate Dem DailyKossacks is an impossible task. They are on a different mission all together.
rh+