Ian Walsh has a post up called "A brief note on why the progressive blog movement failed." Ian's a friend, despite the awkward fact that for a period of time he was my editor, and thus could surely have me assassinated and remain confident that no jury would ever vote to convict.
Anyway the post is thoughtful and deserves a sober, clearheaded response. Which is kind of not at all what we do here, but what the hey.
In the early 2000s progressive blogging seemed like a big deal. At the first Yearly Kos, as it was called then, big name politicians came and kissed our ass. We were covered by major newspaper and TV outlets. Etc…
Today, we are nothing.
The reason is simple: we could not elect enough of our people. We could not instill sufficient fear. We could not defeat incumbents. We did not produce juice.
But was there ever a progressive blog "we"? Back then "we" were all mostly, and rightly, anti-war and anti-Bush. There just wasn't much to fight over amongst ourselves, because we didn't have anything to fight over, and we had one exigent thing to fight for.
"Winning" meant stopping the war and stopping the Wingnut Will to Power. And a lot of us wanted these things, and we went to the Internet, because there was nowhere else to go -- aside from the marches, though even those of us who (like me) went to them realized that was a dead end and wouldn't change anything, but what else was there... except blogs?
So a couple of points. First, insofar as there was a progressive flavor to the blogosphere in the anti-Iraq moment, still, a lot of us fundamentally disagreed with each other on a lot of other points, and what looked like cohesion at the time, wasn't.
Second, and I kind of want to underscore this, progressivism was not a thing AT ALL at the time. I am by nature one gloomy cynical motherfucker, so I was in 2002-3 flat-out shocked that there existed anyone else in the whole fucking country who agreed with me about anything. I got into blogging because I was looking for more This Modern World cartoons, because damned if I could find anything else in any sort of media remotely close to my point of view... and then I found Hesiod, and then Atrios. Never was a Kossack, much, not sure why.
Still, to stress, this haphazard Cedar Yorpantz post-Iraq invasion "find a kindred soul" "progressive-movement" deal just illustrates how utterly buried a real leftist point of view was, only ten years ago. That anything progressive still exists, well, I didn't think this blog lark was ever anything other than a chance to piss off people I don't like, personally.
So (scratching my head a bit) I guess I never expected progressive blogs to do much except at the margins.
So I've never been to a Netroots Nation or anything like that. Ian says:
So progressives have no power, because they have no principles: they cannot be expected to actually vote for the most progressive candidate, to successfully primary candidates, to care about policy first and identity second, to not take scraps from the table and sell out other progressive’s interests.
With respect, you were expecting what?
As I see it:
The Tea Party has up-the-wazoo funding and gerrymandered safe redneck disticts.
We can, at best, make it harder for them to say "fag" or "nigger" or "bitch" in public.
What am I missing?