IT'S IRONIC. At precisely the moment so many people think that the Republican Party and the conservative movement went off the rails, the people who hate the right the most want to copy it.
Me again, sorry. I just want to remind anyone reading this that I've been saying the same thing for years, now. Granted, I've been saying it punctuated with "motherfucking moronic" and "unbefuckinglievably amoral" -- stuff like that -- but I have been saying it. "Ironic" just doesn't cut it.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the owner of the biggest lefty
(sic) blog [
ED: Daily Kos is NOT A LEFTY BLOG!] on the block - Daily Kos - is their standard-bearer. He prides himself on being an organizer, not an idea man. "They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I'm not ideological at all," he told Washington Monthly magazine.
"I'm just all about winning."
[ED: Emphasis is mine.]
. . .
Chait quotes from prominent netroots figure Matt Stoller's blog: "To the extent that I have a political hero, it's probably Grover Norquist, not Ralph Nader."
Excuse me but...
You DO remember Grover Norquist, right? Maybe this will jog your memory:
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
(NPR)
Norquist co-authored the 1994 Contract with America. The pledge of "no new taxes" that many Republican legislators have signed was his project.
In addition to heading Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist is currently on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association and the American Conservative Union. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and chairman emeritus of the Islamic Institute. He was the chair of the September 2005 convention of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies.
"Cutting the government in half in one generation is both an ambitious and reasonable goal," Norquist stated in May 2000. "If we work hard we will accomplish this and more by 2025. Then the conservative movement can set a new goal. I have a recommendation: To cut government in half again by 2050."
After Bush's election to the White House in 2000, Norquist was the prime architect behind the many Bush tax-cuts
A small controversy erupted after an interview between Norquist and Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air program. In the interview, Grover Norquist compared the morality that allows the estate tax to that which permitted the Holocaust. When pressed, Norquist noted that this was not a direct comparison, but rather a response to what he saw as apathy against a supposed government assault on a small group of citizens. (forward.com)
In other words, Grover Norquist belongs to a very exclusive club, whose membership also includes such vermin as Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater -- and, if he has his way, apparently,
Matt Stoller.
Grover Norquist is the political hero of the guy who runs MyDD, a self-described Democratic blog focused on Democratic politics and politicians; the guy who set up the Liberal BlogAd Network ("Advertise Liberally!"), whose blog also belongs to the Liberal Feed Network, also known as the "Liberal Blog Network."
UPDATE:
Goldberg is quoting Jonathan Chait's article in
The New Republic, titled The Left's New Machine.
For those who prefer not to have to click any link to TNR in solidarity with Markos Moulitsas's one man boycott of that publication in response to their publication last year of Jason Zengerle's article bestowing on him the status of Smoky Back Room Capo di Tuti Capi of the Left Blogosphere (or if you simply prefer not to read the Chait's entire article), here is the immediate context in which Chait included Stoller's statement:
The netroots look upon this great right-wing apparatus with unconcealed envy. Traditionally, to the extent that movements exist on the left, they have been dispersed among single-issue organizations--environmentalists, labor unions, pro-choice activists--that mobilize only when their own pet issues are on the agenda. This piecemeal structure leaves each component group fighting solo battles against a large and cohesive coalition. Also, since there are political issues that do not directly affect the single-issue groups, it leaves swaths of liberal territory unguarded.
The netroots are scornful of single-issue liberal groups--or, really, any liberals at all who are not wholly dedicated to the cause of Democratic victory. As Stoller has written on MyDD, "To the extent that I have a political hero, it's probably Grover Norquist, not Ralph Nader." The netroots' dream is of a liberal army of grassroots activists, pundits, policy wonks, and politicians all marching more or less in lockstep.
Stoller's reaction to the quote:
I guess sometimes unity makes sense from a strategic standpoint, but the lockstep idea is a bit silly. Boingboing, Grist, and DailyKos are very different places, yet it's possible to situate all of them under this big tent. If there is a core philosophy to what I call the 'Open Left', it's a respect for pluralism, openness and participation. We like to hash things out. And hashing things out tends to create a sense of community and natural discipline, since you kind of figure out where the obvious areas of agreement are and move in that direction.
Note: Stoller neither denies having named Norquist as his hero, repudiates it -- nor does he even bother explaining his reasoning when he did so. It is reasonable, then, to assume that Stoller must think there is a prima facie case to be made for idolising Grover Norquist, from the standpoint of a political strategist. Which, of course, there is -- if you possess the brand of arrogance that allows you to presume to speak for all the "netroots" when you say something like this with total sincerity:
"
We don't necessarily distinguish between politics and policy, or activism and journalism, and
we don't pretend that there is an above the fray and an
(sic) 'in the muck.' Most of all,
we respect ideas because ideas, when implemented, have immense power. Ideas matter. Conservative ideas have affected
us personally, whether it was growing up in a suburb or having no health care insurance. And to the extent that you create ideas or appropriate ideas and organize around them, you can build a new society. That's what the right did, which is why
we respect the right."
Talk about a disconnect. But Stoller isn't an anomaly. His mindset insofar as presuming to speak for all bloggers to the left of centre and his rationale for "respecting the right" to the extent that he wishes to emulate them in any way, let alone in their strategies and tactics for organising a party and winning campaigns and policy battles for and within that Party closely resembles that of Markos Moulitsas and many other members of that rarified, dominant set of A-List bloggers in the "left blogosphere" constantly (and infuriatingly) referred to as "liberal" by the corporate, mainstream media.
Not that it's an accident; Moulitsas and Stoller deliberately misled and misdirected their audiences as they started out on their blogging endeavours, the better to reel in all those alienated, aimless, angry, directionless liberals in America who felt all alone and craved connection with others who felt like them. To the liberal dying of a thirst, for a reality-based community, Daily KOS and MyDD must have seemed a heavenly oasis in an endless stretch of neoconservative blather. If you'll pardon the mixed metaphors, the Big Boys of Blogging happily fanned the flamed of their audience's desire, using code words like "progressive" and "people powered politics" and "take back the Democratic Party."
But surely, had there been any fine print to read and anyone had taken the time to peruse it, a significant number of the idealistic bloggers who flocked to community blogs like DKos and MyDD might have taken great offense at being told that the best way to fight the Republicans is to become the Republicans. That ideology isn't important, winning is.
Of course, in more recent times, having become safely entrenched as the "Establishment" of the "left blogosphere," Moulitsas and Stoller (and, presumably, their fellow Big Boys of Blogging, most notably Jerome Armstrong, John Aravosis, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Atrios) obviously feel slightly freer to let down their guard and show their true feelings about just exactly what "Crashing the Gate" really means to them.
Apparently it means "You gotta beat them at their own game." Or, "Become that which you purport to loathe in order to defeat and supplant them."
What happened to the goal of dismantling the DLC? I never saw the parenthetical "...and then take their jobs and become the DLC ourselves." Did "Take back the Party" really mean "Take back the Party and change absolutely nothing?"
Goldberg continues:
In one sense, this is just plain bizarre, akin to a pro-life, right wing church lady naming Gloria Steinem as her political hero. From another perspective, it makes some sense. The "New Right" of the 1970s and 1980s took many organizational pointers from liberals. So it's only fair that liberals return the favor. And besides, if you believe liberal propaganda about the awesome power of the Republican noise machine, why not become a bizarro-world Norquist who uses his powers for good instead of evil?
Yeah, except the powers of Norquist & Company aren't good for anything but evil.
Or, as Goldberg puts it:
Well, one answer is that it's a stupid idea. Chait is a thoughtful critic of the netroots, but he shares with them a common false assumption: that conservative victories are the result of PR campaigns, partisan discipline and organizational guile. For the better part of a decade now, liberals have been trying to re-create the media of the American right - talk radio, think tanks, etc. - without spending much effort trying to replicate the message. Democratic gurus continue to claim that if they just repackage their old ideas in pretty wrapping, they'll win all day long.
The conservative movement was a response to generations of growing statism at home and abroad. From the Progressive era to the Great Society, government seemed to be expanding in tandem with the threat of communism. The conservative project was first and foremost an intellectual one because, as Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell has written, it takes an ideology to beat an ideology.
BINGO
Sorry, boys, but you cannot play at politics the way you play fucking Parcheesi. Sure, you may win a few here and there, but if the idea is to take a Party and make it into a winning machine, there is only one way to do that (one way, that is, if you want to retain any last SHRED of your fucking SOUL):
You have to BELIEVE in something. You have to have principles, values, morals, standards, beliefs -- in other words, pal, you gotta get yourself an IDEOLOGY.
Now, the conservative -- or the neoconservative, or the paleoconservative, or the fascist, for that matter -- ideologies happen to be a perfect fit for their tactics, their strategies, their "winning formula." But I can guaran-goddamn-tee you, there is no way that a Democratic Party of progressives, liberals or even moderates can adopt the Republican Party playbook as its own and avoid becoming a clone of that Republican Party.
Think of it this way: Say a demure, sweet, shy, quiet, chaste, church-going young woman finds herself in a bind and in desperation joins the ranks of the whores on Sunset Boulevard, gradually dressing, talking and acting like her fellow whores. Despite her initial promise to herself that she would still be herself, that this was only temporary, that she would keep her private life separate from this... eventually she stops going to church. Eventually she stops wearing her old sweater sets when she's not "working." Eventually, her former qualities of shyness and chastity, demure sweetness -- well, it's hard to maintain her chastity when she's giving $25 blowjobs parked in strangers' cars in dark parking lots; and after a few weeks of losing tricks to the louder, more aggressive girls on her block, she ditches the demure act and gets down and dirty with a quality "Hey baby, wanna date" sales pitch of her own.
Eventually, she becomes a whore. It's inevitable. If she's lucky, she won't become so depressed and humiliated that the appeal of dulling the pain with drugs pulls her into an even darker loss of self.
If the only thing that matters to those who would become the new leaders of the Democratic Party is winning, then that Democratic Party is lost. Because if winning is the only thing that matters, then everything is negotiable, everything is expendable, anything can be compromised or abandoned. We've seen it too often already; in just the past six years, we've seen genuine liberal, progressive candidates scorned, mocked, abandoned and betrayed not only by the leadership of the Democratic Party but by the so-called "Netroots" and its leadership; one case in particular coming to mind would be that of Chuck Pennacchio versus Bob Casey in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary.
Moulitsas's rationale for supporting Casey can be summed up in these words of his from one of his many "Why can't women see the bigger picture and stop dragging us all down with their "single-issue" abortion whining" posts, this one titled Building the Broader Movement:
"As Reid's votes on virulently anti-choice (and anti-labor, anti-environment) judges shows, it's better to have a Democrat than a Republican hold any seat in Congress.
. . .
... the entire movement benefits from having a friendly party in control."
Funny he should mention Harry Reid's votes on anti-choice judges while rationalising his support of the anti-choice Bob Casey; he posted his little anti-single-issue screed to chastise NARAL and a few other "myopic single-issue" groups who had dared to condemn the Democratic leadership's choice to back Casey instead of Pennacchio in the primary -- because Bob Casey had endorsed the anti-choice Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito.
Bob Casey endorsed very same Samuel Alito who recently joined anti-choice Chief Justice Roberts and anti-choice Justices Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy in voting to uphold a law banning a medical procedure called "Intact Dilation & Extraction," a particularly rare and always medically necessary form of abortion. This decision should be widely regarded as a first step toward the dismantling, at the federal level, of the rights of people to make their own medical decisions without government interference.
In other words, either the would-be leaders of the "netroots" movement to take over the Democratic Party A) have no concern whatsoever about the civil and human rights of all American citizens (for that is what this supposed "single issue is really about), since it is obvious that to dismantle the rights of citizens to make their own medical decisions without government interference is to severely curtail their civil and human rights at a most basic and intrusive level... or B) they simply cannot understand the situation.
So we're talking about a consortium of aspiring Democratic leaders, movers and shakers who can rightly be called either callous, ambitious to a fault, lacking in any moral centre and willing to do anything to win, even at the expense of the values and principles they once purported to hold dear...
Or we're talking about a consortium of vastly unqualified aspirants to positions they do not understand, with responsibilities they could never possibly fulfill, whose actions would have consequences they might never comprehend -- a consortium of little boys playing at being Big Boys, who for some reason think politics is "sexy," who treat it like a game instead of a life and death vocation-- a consortium, in other words, of people who have no business being anywhere near the word "leader," let alone somehow stumbling past the gates and falling into the role of "Party Leadership."
Let's see what Goldberg has to say, in closing:
The netroots crowd seems mostly determined to skip the serious argument part and to settle on the idea that liberals should simply all believe the same thing, first and foremost on the Iraq war. And as important as Iraq is right now, it is hardly a serious substitute for the intellectual catalyst of World War II and the Cold War. Netrooters may have a terrible shock in store for them when the war is over and their reason for existence is too.
. . .
Meanwhile, the supposedly all-powerful Republican noise machine's greatest victory is allegedly the George W. Bush presidency - which he barely won the first time. And, recall, Bush had to campaign as a "compassionate" conservative in order to get as far as he did. If we're so good at PR, why did conservatism need the adjective?
Netrooters want it both ways. The GOP is evil and intellectually bankrupt because it doesn't care about anything but winning. But it would be the greatest thing in the world if Democrats could be just like Republicans!
That doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me.
Well, I disagree with Goldberg's view of the left blogosphere's existence being all about Iraq. I've come to know a lot of bloggers over the past three years and while Iraq is certainly the most pressing issue on the minds of most liberals, it sure as hell isn't the only one. Perhaps Goldberg, like so many in the infuriating Borg that is corporate mainstream media, thinks the Big Boys, like that media paradigm, are representative of the entire left blogosphere in their approach, their opinion and their goals.
If that is what he thinks, he is sorely mistaken; in fact, the Big Boys of Blogging are in the minority in their belief that winning is everything, that there are no "deal breakers" when it comes to the world of political negotiation and compromise. Contrary to that bizarrely amoral and, yes, Republican way of thinking, most of us out here in Left Blogistan are not willing to sell our souls for a seat at the table. Sure, we want to win; but if winning means giving up those principles and values for which we are fighting -- well, that doesn't sound much like winning, period.
Bumper Stickers & MORE
