Noon Postscript: After the Withdrawal
(And, yes, Tweedle Change and Tweedle Experience will have to earn my vote ... I am not voting "against" in a primary, that's for the GE)
Why am I burning the midnight oil on the weekends coming up with tools like turning YouTube playlists into Video CDs?
Populist movements don't build themselves, they grow from a process of people learning how to support a series of populist campaigns in a populist way, rather than as passive consumers of candidates produced and marketed to win the greatest market share in the electoral marketplace.
It doesn't matter what the "horse race" outcome of the campaign is, if we fight the campaign. Fighting it, we learn how to fight. Learning how to fight political battles, we become citizens again. Becoming citizens again, we reclaim the Republic that lies dormant beneath the bread and circuses of modern American society.
Picture Credit: David Leeson (#8)
Backwards : Upwards : Forwards
(the next installment to Why Burn the Midnight Oil for Edwards? ... installment 3 will be here ... you guessed it, shortly after midnight)
One serious confusion in some progressive populist thinking has been a misunderstanding of the role of the progressive blogosphere as a tool for building a progressive movement.
However, as a progressive populist, looking at the passive-voice descriptions that "populist messaging fails because there is not a populist movement" ... I feel like jumping up and down and yelling, "read your history books you idiots!"
A populist movement is not created in coffee house discussions, whether live or online ... it is created in the process of fighting for things, and in the process learning how to engage in a political fight and transform ourselves from political consumers to citizens of a Republic.
And without populist messaging leading the way, there will be nothing to take to our fellows when we get out amongst them.
So while, on the one hand, the well financed and well organized Obama effort to co-opt the progressive blogosphere and neuter its ability to have an impact would seem to be working ... that is not a serious concern. The real action is getting out amidst our fellows and letting them have the information that is not carried on the Mass Media. The blogosphere is just a place to come to after the day's work, to hang out and chat with fellow activists.
As Edwards loses "oxygen" in the media, his supporters see it, and scramble to see what they can do. Much of the effort would seem to be pointless and wasted effort ... but there are so many different efforts that some of them work, and those are the ones that are propagated. And as in many cases of early innovation, we have to make many efforts, all of which have a low chance of succeeding, in order to actually have a strong chance that some of them shall succeed.
And, no, its not enough to provide "oxygen" for a bonfire ... not at this point in time. But its enough to keep the fire burning, which is something that would not have been technologically feasible just four short years ago.
And the tools and the political environment have come together in a particular "pre-change" moment ... because, in part, a growing number of people are realizing that the Climate Crisis is really, truly serious.
When we see "Politics as Usual", such as Senator Obama co-sponsoring the flawed Lieberman-McCain global warming bill on introduction, to gain "bipartisan cred" ... and as part of that "bipartisan cred", snubbing the superior Boxer-Sanders bill until he decided in early May that he needed more protective cover ...
... and we look at the magnitude of the gap between the politically possible and the urgently needed ...
... then it is clear that any vote that does not change the boundaries of the politically possibly is a wasted vote. So vote for the "New and Improved" candidate, or the "Experienced at Making the Same Mistakes" candidate ... but its like voting for Nader in the General Election, its a wasted vote. Actually, its arguably worse, because it doesn't even work as a protest vote.
Vote for Edwards, give Edwards delegates and keep Edwards in the race when the Media knows in every fiber of its being that the Edwards campaign will fold up its tent ... and that is a vote that has the opportunity to do some good.
How can we doze through another marketing exercise to chose which candidate to "buy" from amongst the two that raised the most money from the corporate executive elite?
How can we sleep ... when our beds are burning?
And finally, a word from our sponsors ...
The Letter P, for Progresive Populist
The Number 3, for 3 Democrats bringing pledged delegates to Denver (NB. But not as many for the Progressive Populist candidate as I had been hoping to see)
The start of the $200,000 day! (NB. I will not pull this contribution logo or link down just because someone other than the online supporters who originated the campaign ask me to do so)
And ourselves:
Postscript: After the Withdrawal
I do believe that what I said at Midnight still rings true today.
The obvious gets repeated and repeated endlessly as a political tactic to neuter the danger represented to the establishment by the progressive blogosphere.
That obvious is, "one candidate cannot take on the system while running for office".
However, any one candidate running for office gives us one more opportunity to take more actions to undermine the current system.
The serious answer to that obvious statement is, "but a movement can, if it can find a candidate willing to take on the system".
The blogosphere is not, of course, a movement. It is an environment in which some missing pieces of the puzzle can be provided, but the real movement requires us of that we leverage those pieces and get out there among the people, face to face, peer to peer, live, and bypass the Mass Media information blockade.
We had a chance this time ... Edwards did everything that we could have expected of a candidate, and in some cases more ... and we blew it. So the thing to do is to pick ourselves off, dust ourselves off, and start all over again.