The strongest part of the book is their chapter on consultants. This will almost certainly be what gets the book noticed outside of our own blogger circles. Their criticism of Democratic failures is unsparing, and their stories of how the DSCC routinely undercuts local campaigns is but another example of the way the Democratic Party has actively disparaged and fought its base. Clearly a grassroots movement to retake the party and reinvigorate its fortunes cannot succeed until the consultants are put out of work. However, in the authors' formulation, it is other, locally-based consultants who are more preferable for campaigns than the DC consultants. This approach doesn't offer much guidance, or even a place, for grassroots activists and ordinary citizens themselves.
Jerome and Markos' point about institutional support should not be lost in the rush to hang the consultants, however. They make a good argument that the conservative approach to developing talent - career-long support, paying living wages, setting up sinecures for talented and promising writers in order to allow them the freedom to develop and articluate ideas - is more effective for the individual and for the movement than the penurious approach that progressives often take. Rebuilding the party requires not just active citizens and good ideas, but material resources, and a commitment to develop activist potential. There is no shame in saying that activists should not be asked to live on faith alone. Their criticism of the 'psychic wage' (a clever borrowing of the famous DuBois phrase) would have been stronger had specific foundations and individuals been called out, as were specific consultants.
While the chapters on consultants and infrastructure may garner the book attention among established Democratic circles, it is the chapter on the single-issue groups that I bet will be best received by the blogosphere. This was the case in an earlier review of Crashing the Gate published on ePluribus Media by Aaron Barlow. Barlow commended the authors for taking on the single-issue groups who peddle special interests and pet issues (frames that are Republican in origin and generated to discredit Democrats; Markos and Jerome repeatedly adopt such frames - one wonders if they read their Lakoff that closely), and opens his own review with the familiar tale of an anti-war protest that saw a series of speakers take the podium to exhort the audience to care about their own cause.
For Markos and Jerome, such instances are perfect examples of how these single issue special interests have ruined the Democratic Party brand. I find that difficult to believe, particularly since in the case of antiwar protests, they would not have existed at all had it been up to the Democrats. Antiwar activism has routinely been denigrated by the Democratic establishment. To blame antiwar activists for Democratic failures, then, is to me simply appalling. Had Democrats either taken the lead on opposing the war, or done their jobs and not voted for it in the first place, the single-issue approach the authors find so frustrating wouldn't have happened at all.
Furthermore, in the case of the antiwar protests, the parade of speakers is necessary to gather institutional support for such a protest. When a coalition of groups comes together, part of the compromise is that each sponsoring group gets a chance to speak. If Democrats don't like this approach, then they need to organize their own rallies.
Markos and Jerome are less concerned in this book with antiwar activism and more concerned with party organizing. Here, their point must be conceded before it can be criticized. It is absolutely true that the single-issue groups have failed to advance their policy interests in the last ten years. The authors approvingly cite the famous 2004 study by Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "The Death of Environmentalism" (pdf link) and extend its analysis to that of other issue groups as a whole. I agree that these groups need to rethink their approach, and begin to work together, across policy lines and issue boundaries, in order to craft a common strategy.
One has to be careful to not allow an attack on specific groups and organizations to slide over and become an attack on people who take those issues seriously. While neither Markos nor Jerome explicity makes such an attack on people, their use of language - speaking of these matters as special interests (a Republican frame) and as pet issues (another Republican frame) can have that impact, especially if this book is uncritically used to frame the discussion. Democrats take issues like the environment and abortion and labor rights and ending racism and health care and peace extremely seriously, as well they should. Any Democratic strategy must also take them seriously.
What we do want, and what the authors seem to desire as well, is for these groups to craft a strategy that is holistic in nature. To come together to support candidates who share all values (The authors suggest that the 2004 Colorado elections were a good example of this approach). And to come together to explain to Americans why their core issues of concern are not separate, but are fundamentally, even inextricably, linked - why you can't have successful labor organizing without addressing racism, why you can't fix the environment without talking about foreign policy, why you can't provide universal health care and at the same time say it's OK to deny women abortions, as someone last weekend tried to convince me you could.
In short, that strategy needs to directly address what is routinely derided by Markos and Jerome in this book: ideology.
The American political landscape is littered with the bodies of Democrats who believed you could build a governing majority without worrying about ideology. Pat Brown, Lyndon Johnson, even Jimmy Carter to some extent, found out the hard way that as a Democrat, you ignore debates over ideology and deeply-held beliefs of your voting base at your peril. Ideological splits cannot be forestalled by appealing to party unity or by trying to silence dissent - they can only be resolved by working through the issues themselves, rather than ignoring them and allowing them to fester.
Markos and Jerome's dismissive attitudes of ideology are more than politically shortsighted. Their attitudes, I would suggest, stand in the way of a reconstruction of a progressive message. To the authors, ideology is a term that is always defined as a negative. Ideology divides, never unites. It alienates, never amalgamates.
We should instead understand ideology as the essential glue that keeps a movement together. Ideology doesn't have to be a Marxist-Leninist party line. It can instead be something like the New Deal's liberalism. The "free soil, free labor, free men" ideology of the 1850s Republicans. Or it could be the ideology of today's conservatives. In each case, ideology was defined simply as a common, coherent set of basic ideas that tied interests and policies together.
The problem then is not that we have the wrong ideology, or people adhere to too many ideologies, but that we simply do not have an ideology at all. Our lack of ideology means we find it difficult to articulate to the American people what we believe in and what we stand for - and it makes it easier for individual Democrats to hold opinions that are inconsistent.
Someone like Robert Casey in PA should not exist. He is an example of the problems inattention to ideology creates. It is inconsistent for him to support labor rights and be an outspoken opponent of a woman's right to choose. Yet in this Democratic Party, many of us are told we must vote for him for the sake of victory - never mind the fact that such an approach will only deepen our divisions, make it that much more difficult to articulate that common ideology.
Markos and Jerome mention the Casey campaign specifically, and argue that it is an example of the failures of the Democratic movement - that despite Casey's supposedly strong stance on other women's issues, abortion is wrongly used by some to trump all that. Not only does this indicate a complete lack of understanding of "women's issues" and the multiple ways abortion rights are critical to women, but it also suggests that they are more interested in victory at the ballot box than victory in the broader struggle for American society, for American rights, and even, for American bodies.
Abortion rights are increasingly seen by many Democrats as expendable. This is not limited to pressure groups with a rising impact, like Democrats for Life, but includes other Democrats who repeatedly single out a pro-choice stance as THE primary example of "pet issues" wrecking a movement. Whether at meetups or on blogs like Daily Kos, those who suggest that opposition to abortion rights should sink a candidate are cast as the guilty parties, responsible for the defeat of Democrats. These discussions are often framed by positing a magical Democrat who just happens to be anti-choice; why should any of us stand in that person's way, we're told, simply because they think it's wonderful for women to be relegated to the back allies? Isn't that an acceptable price to pay for victory?
To such thinkers, Markos and Jerome provide succor. They suggest here, as especially Markos often has on his blog, that it doesn't matter what a Democrat believes about abortion - since the party is overall pro-choice, an anti-choice Democrat will vote for Democratic Congressional leaders who will in turn prevent votes to restrict abortion from coming to the floor.
This view is extremely myopic and, as presented in this book, ignorant of context. The authors cite Harry Reid as a good anti-choicer. But Casey is a much more outspoken and ardent opponent of choice and there is no reason at all to believe he will behave like Reid and keep his opinions to himself. Further, Markos and Jerome are seemingly unaware of pressure groups within the party that are actively working to take away choice. Democrats for Life is an excellent example of this. Without a renewed commitment to ideology, an ideology that can tie our progressive principles together and show clearly why someone like Casey is an embodiment of cognitive dissonance, it will become difficult for us to maintain the Democrats as a pro-choice party - something they were not until the late 1960s, and even then, unevenly so.
Markos and Jerome's approach is also flawed on practical grounds. While it is easy to believe that a Democratic Congress would not bring anti-abortion bills to the floor, a Republican minority most certainly would use the amendment process to do so - as they had in the past. The so-called Hyde Amendment, which prevents Medicaid from covering abortion, was passed by a Democratic Congress in 1976 and was repeatedly reauthorized for the next 18 years of Democratic Congressional control. Without a reenergized commitment to and message delivery on abortion rights, it is reasonable to suggest that Republicans would continue to play wrecker in a Democratic Congress. And the more anti-choice Democrats that get elected, the more successful those efforts will be.
Finally, 20th century American political history quite clearly shows that if you build a political movement that seeks to win elections and excludes important groups and issues, it will come back to bite you in the ass. A perfect example is the New Deal and civil rights. FDR was never a strong supporter of civil rights (although his wife Eleanor very clearly was). For FDR to get elected, he had to appease Southern Democrats, writing African Americans out of virtually all of the New Deal legislation and tolerating, if not abetting, Jim Crow.
African Americans supported FDR in large numbers, but only with the threat of street protests could they convince him to desegregate wartime factories, and even that could have been done more strongly. Black voters finally convinced Democrats to move on civil rights in the 1960s, but by then a white backlash had already gelled, and once again unwilling to give more democracy to the grassroots or take seriously ideological debate, Democrats were defeated. (One could make a similar argument about the Democrats' abandonment of many left and liberal constituencies with the onset of the Cold War).
This long discussion of mine on abortion, ideology, and single-issue groups suggests to me another missing piece in this book, which is a clear path forward for the grassroots. In many ways this book seems aimed at the entrenched and established Democratic Party, to try and convince them of the need to peacably open the gates before the gates are crashed. But there is little reason to believe that good ideas alone will be sufficient to force change. What is needed instead is grassroots pressure, a greatly amplified kind of pressure of the sort that has been going on in the so-called "netroots" since 2002. Pressure which, as the authors agree, has been largely responsible for the positive changes in Democratic fortunes during this decade.
Unfortunately, Crashing the Gate, inspired by two people who helped launch that netroots movement, does not offer much guidance on how that can be accomplished. We are told clearly what NOT to do - to not stand up to anti-choice Democrats - but are not told what to do instead.
In the end, this book bears a great deal of the skepticism of popular participation that has characterized Democrats for decades. The single-issue groups Markos and Jerome criticize, for all the faults that the authors rightly recognize, only came into existence because the existing Democratic Party would not listen to or include them initially. The same holds true for antiwar activism. And it is not clear that even if the Democrats adopt the institutional suggestions offered in this book, that they will become any more responsive to us, their voting and activist and financial base. Without a more robust conception of the role and place of grassroots, average folks like you and me, this book's application is limited.
For as Sixties student activists quickly learned, crashing the gate was the easy part. What you did once you got inside proved much more difficult.
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The long-awaited book from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga - aka Kos, the creator of DailyKos.com, where most of us here on MLW got our blogging start - and his collaborator Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD.com, offers a series of criticisms of the state of the Democratic Party today. Some of them, such as their attack on failed consultants and a lack of institutional support for progressive activists, hit their mark squarely. Others, such their discussion of single-interest groups, are deeply flawed. While the book is insightful, controversial, and will be the occasion of welcome debate on a wide range of subjects pertaining to our movement, its lack of historical understanding, analysis of the current context, and above all its inattention to developing grassroots strategies will likely limit its effectiveness as a plan for our future.
