I've been both admiring and scared reading some of the waves of response on DKos to the way that Dean captured only 18% of the vote in Iowa.
Admiring because the postings are a valuable and totally rare public display of how to deal with a political dissapointment. Once again, the internet makes something new possible.
And the number of diaries on this shows how important such a question is - its fascinating to see a process that so often takes place in silence and solitude getting worked out collectively here.
Cause let's be serious: these disappointments are an intrinsic part of what politics
means. We're talking Aristotle and Thucydides here - politics takes place in the world but relies on belief, and the moment when belief clashes with the world is a crucial one in all political, and certainly democratic, life.
But we're also talking about something closer to home: the defeat of Dean in Iowa is scary precisely because it
does move Dean closer to a model that is all too familiar to many progressive Americans: where a collectively-held belief or aspiration - under attack and insurgent - fails to translate. Think McGovern in 72, the late-60s in too many ways to count, Nader in 2000 . . . or think, closer to home, about the hopes for the 2002 midterm election that were totally crushed. And beyond this, think about any number of social movements, union struggles, local elections, etc.
My first diary posting on DKos was called "Hope is not a Plan" and ended, for better or worse, by criticizing left-wing over-confidence:
The path to Republican ascendancy since 1968 is littered with progressive "plans" for ideological transformation that turned out to be based on ungrounded hope.
And I invoke this not in some vain game of "I told you so" (I didn't see nuthin) but because this shit really matters.
In fact, I've learned a lot from the Deaniacs on this site - but alarm bells of all sizes and sounds have been ringing as I see many of the post-Iowa postings. And I want to elaborate now on why these "hopes" for transformation are so dangerous when they're taken as "plans". I'm doing this in the form of three requests I'd like to make to each and every Deaniac:
1.Avoid this crazy rhetoric of certainty - "he will", "we will", "I know". Every time I read a posting that just dogmatically asserts "Howard Dean WILL take over the White House" or "I KNOW that Dean can but Bush" or "We WILL come back from Iowa," my heart sinks. It is so simple to couch these kind of thoughts a little differently - in the language of possibility, opinion, considered judgment - and it makes such a big and important difference. Because this certainty - besides simply being false - is also POLITICALLY wrong-headed, and often leads into a bigger problem, number 2.
2. The shorthand here is Don't Blame the Voter. It is a game, often subtle and indirect, that the left has always played, whenever it drifts from democratic to sectarian. And I see signs of it in the post-Iowa postings. When absolute certainty (Dean WILL win Iowa) clashes with disappointment (Dean got trounced in Iowa), the mind struggles for a way to reconcile these things. And there's a lot of ways around it that are wrong. Perhaps the most common response from die-hard Deaniacs is to say (or hope) that it's simply not important - that Iowa doesn't count for that much. But a second response - and this one might grow after New Hampshire - is to wash one's hands of the democratic process: that it's too corrupt, that the system won't allow Dean to win, that the media prevented him from winning; that the caucus system did, etc., etc. We've all read these postings. And the fatal flaw with this kind of analysis, of course, is that eventually it runs up against the American voter - against the numbers, 11%, 18%, 30%, and 36%, and the folks that stand behind those numbers. It's an incredibly slippery slope, and, very quickly, a nuanced analysis of how the Kerry organization gamed the system in Iowa or media misrepresentations of Dean can drift into a subtle denunciation of the caucus voters themselves (and if Dean continues to lose, the American voters) as fools or knaves. In short, this becomes the attitude: if America's not ready for Howard Dean, then I wash my hands of America. (Or: if our screwed-up system of electoral democracy is not ready for Howard Dean; or, if the democratic party is not ready for Howard Dean, etc.) My heart sinks when I read these posts as well.
3."It's about me." I think there is a certain amount of political narcissism on DKos these days - a politics that argues for supporting a movement as it confirms (or flatters) one's own exact values even if, or as, this movement proves to be unpopular, unsuccessful, "unelectable," or, in other words, unable to sustain itself within a democratic arena. In fact, Dean's
is the campaign that has made its supporters feel best about themselves -- if only because, much more than any other campaign, it invokes and draws on these supporters so insistently. And I think this is really important and praise-worthy. But it's not the final horizon - ultimately this is not about how we feel about a candidate, or even about how we feel about our place within a candidate's campaign (as important as that is): it's about participating in a campaign that needs to be WAY bigger than us, with a coalition just large enough to win in November and get those bastards who are ruining this country out of Washington D.C. It's not something that any of us can say WILL happen. But I think there's a good chance that it WON'T happen if the fallout from Dean's possible collapse leads to a fracturing and turning-inward of the activist left in the country. And in this particular sense, we really DO have the power.
