netroots
Online Progressive and the Transformation of American
Politics
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EXCERPTS
The narrative goes something like this: the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, in the form of immoderate bloggers lacking in political sophistication, threaten sober, long-standing professionals in their own party in a grand battle over the party’s ideological direction. If the bloggers win, it will come at the expense of the party’s viability because the liberals threaten to push the Democratic Party out of the political mainstream. In this telling of the story, bloggers are characterized as naďve extremists engaged in an ideological struggle with temperate Beltway insiders. They are portrayed as a monolithic lot of young upstarts whose lack of political experience leads them to foolishly demand that experienced pros relinquish the all-important ideological middle ground to an out-of-step liberal agenda. The problem with this story, though, is that it is fiction. There is a battle raging between Internet activists and establishment Democrats, but it is a battle over power, not ideology. There is no ideological orthodoxy online, with progressive activists and the candidates they promote holding a range of views on the issues of our day. Many in the online progressive movement are savvy and sophisticated. What unites them is a common interest in altering the way politics is done in this country by challenging the Democratic Party elite—officials, consultants, and monied patrons—for the purpose of establishing a progressive majority that would deviate in its philosophical principles from the dominant conservative philosophy of the past two generations and Democratic Party regulars who acquiesce to and benefit from that status quo. And the path to that objective runs directly through the mainstream media—vehicles like Joe Klein’s Time magazine—whom they regard as enablers of traditional political arrangements through a flawed but powerful conventional wisdom machine.
When it comes to technological advances with the potential to influence politics, every major invention since the emergence of the republic has met with utopian-sounding declarations of the coming of a new dawn along with doomsayers predicting the end of humanity. The telegraph, radio, and television were all championed in some quarters as technological solutions to the problems facing a society strained, respectively, by territorial expansion, immigration, and urbanization. Whereas John Dewey imagined the radio would engage people in civic and political pursuits, futurists such as Alvin Toffler believed television would unite the nation in a teledemocracy that would look something like a big, wired New England town meeting. Then again, critics like Walter Lippmann strongly doubted that radio would be an effective vehicle for educating masses of people, and at each turn new technologies raised anxieties about potential rips in the social fabric. The Internet is no different. There are blog triumph lists whose voices can be heard on the web declaring a new age of cyber community, whereas others decry the increasing isolation and fragmentation of society as people sit alone at home and type on computer screens to others who largely agree with them. Then there are those who just think the Internet won’t matter much either way. The discussion eerily echoes the fault lines surrounding four earlier technological breakthroughs—inexpensive printing, the telegraph, radio, and television—when each of these innovations was new. If, in these earlier cases, technology failed to attain the utopian heights of its strongest supporters, it is also the case that each of these technological advances factored into the most important political transformations in our history. But each transformation looked quite different from the high-minded civic expectations of technology’s greatest promoters. Radio may not have produced a civic culture, but it did play a role in the development of the welfare state. Instead of television reproducing the New England village green, it enabled a string of politicians to manipulate emotions in the successful pursuit of their agendas. The law of unintended consequences can be greatest when we don’t have a clue as to what a new technology will bring about. One important common thread shared by these four technological innovations is that each played a role in securing a dominant place for a new political regime. In no case was technology the sole cause of political change, nor did technology make political change inevitable. Instead, communications technology and political regimes have grown up together, engaging in something of a parallel evolution. Another important thread is that each transformation capitalized on an emerging technology that had existed for some time without making a dent in the prevailing political system. In each case, the difference between technology having a role in reshaping the political order and simply being an ineffectual curiosity rested with an individual, group, or party understanding what made the technology different, then employing the technology as no one previously had done to maximize its political benefits.
The netroots are an open source community; countless individual contributions make possible a sturdy and vigorous presence. If the strength of the Internet is the ability to build relationships, the left blogosphere draws on that strength through an interconnecting set of relationships among contributors. Decentralized and permeable, netroots activism depends on a constant flow of information among bloggers within and among websites. Ideas can originate with regular contributors, some of whom are well known to their readers and to journalists, or with relatively anonymous authors of diaries and comments posted to blogs who can participate at little personal cost. This is a characteristic shared with some conservative blogs but is arguably more critical to the development of a political agenda being created outside established institutions. This is not to say that the conservative blogosphere has not aggressively fought political battles and does not engage in the same type of networked discourse as the left. The right blogosphere can take credit for some high-profile political achievements, not least among them challenging the authenticity of documents used by Dan Rather questioning President Bush’s National Guard service, setting into motion a chain of events that culminated in the dismissal of the CBS anchor from his post. But actively pursuing news stories is different from hosting a movement, and it can be done without the open source structure prevalent on the left. The difference rests in the context in which the two blogospheres operate and their overall objectives. With a more centralized structure that is something of a throwback to the electronic media of the twentieth century, the right blogosphere is Microsoft Windows to the progressive blogosphere’s open source operating system, Unix. . . . Because of its activist orientation and decentralized, open structure, the progressive blogosphere is well positioned to take full advantage of the Internet’s ability to decentralize power among a large community of individuals.
The netroots were a force in the 2006 elections, which served as a turning point in netroots political effectiveness and a harbinger of the successful 2008 cycle. In 2006 the netroots came of age, recruiting and supporting long-shot candidates who were able to take advantage of a favorable political climate and contribute to the size of the Democratic wave in House, Senate, and nonfederal contests. To the extent that hybrid campaigning made the difference in narrow Democratic victories in Montana and Virginia, a case can be made that Internet-based campaign practices delivered the Senate for Democrats. Small-dollar contributions supplemented traditional big-dollar fund-raising avenues and distributed campaign cash to long-shot candidates, some of whom competed effectively. Internet-driven support at the nonfederal level helped progressives win in traditionally non-Democratic states, in the process building a farm team of progressive candidates who will utilize Internet-based campaign methods to run for national office in future years. That being said, progressive bloggers as a group are circumspect about their accomplishments, and some remain skeptical about the extent of the blogosphere’s political influence. On making campaigns competitive, they point to a few salient races where netroots candidates overcame distant odds to win elections, like the Webb, Tester, and Lamont races in the U.S. Senate. One Texas blogger listed five state legislative races made competitive by the work of progressive bloggers. But they were careful to acknowledge the limitations of their efforts, noting that even in the case of Lamont’s Internet-powered challenge to Lieberman, the netroots could help to make some elections competitive, but they couldn’t do it by themselves (as evidenced by Lamont’s loss to Lieberman in the general election). One blogger noted that “the larger the race, the less substantial the effect.” Others added that bloggers can create early buzz, help raise money, quickly disseminate ideas, and efficiently and effectively connect candidates and voters, but they “cannot by themselves close the deal.”
As an emerging medium, the Internet presents a challenge to the political narratives heard in the mainstream media (or, as progressive bloggers call it, the MSM). But the traditional media presents an even bigger challenge to progressive bloggers, who work tirelessly to reframe story lines that they feel undercut progressive objectives, reinforce conservative perspectives, or are factually incorrect. What’s at stake in this effort is how the broader public thinks about the problems of our day, their causes, appropriate solutions, and the relative appeal of liberal and conservative ideas. This makes the battle over news narratives a struggle for power with mainstream opinion leaders over how the electorate will assess political problems and solutions. Although netroots bloggers clearly seek to promote a progressive perspective, the ideological benefits that accrue to them through framing the news can be realized only by first succeeding in a tug-of-war with reluctant journalists and politicians. Several themes emerge when looking broadly at the narrative elements that progressive bloggers seek to change in mainstream political coverage. Clearly, they want to change the way major policy initiatives are discussed. They want to redirect political narratives away from inside-baseball horse-race coverage toward a more substantive understanding of the costs resulting from political choices. They hope to reframe the discussion of public opinion to position progressives in the mainstream. They object to stories that balance progressive positions with conservative positions when they feel that such equal balance does injury to progressive ideas. And they really object to lazy journalism.
Progressives join together in a manner befitting the decentralized bottom-up structure of the net, something they don’t see happening on the other side of the ideological fence. To those engaged in Daily Kos and elsewhere in the progressive blogosphere, participation comes with an element of shared identity. It is by any conventional definition a community. From Howard Dean’s Blog for America in 2003 through today’s Daily Kos and other progressive blogs, the experience of netroots involvement brings to some participants a sense of gratification normally reserved for everyday real-world affiliations with family, friends, and social organizations. This gratification has to be viewed as a desirable and important outcome in its own right, separate and apart from whatever impacts the netroots have on the political world. The existence of others—more to the point, the knowledge that others exist— generates the incentive to participate, just as the feelings of goodwill that derive from virtual human contact nurture and perpetuate these interactions. The result is something larger than its individual contributors, something impossible to imagine without the unleashing of Internet technology. Daily Kos and other interactive progressive weblogs may be the product of countless thousands of people typing in front of countless glowing screens. But they are not blogging alone.
It’s natural to wonder, when reflecting on the trajectory of past political transformations, how difficult it was to recognize in real time those moments that would come to define a new era. In one respect, it’s easy to get an impressionistic sense that something significant is changing, especially when a new technology works its way into mainstream political discourse. So it was in 1952, when Eisenhower’s television ads marked a clear and jarring departure from the whistle-stop campaign just four years earlier. But it would be four more presidential cycles before the transformative power of television would make itself known, and by that point television was such an established institution that Nixon’s ingenious use of the medium to weave fictional political narratives could easily have gone unnoticed by a public already jaded by decades of prime-time programming. The Internet may well follow the path blazed by television broadcasting. By the early twenty-first century, the World Wide Web had already gone from being dismissed as a curiosity to being embraced as a political necessity. By 2000 every serious candidate had a website. By 2003 the Dean campaign had demonstrated that under certain conditions it was possible to engage in large-scale online fund- raising. By 2004 a few candidates and journalists tried their hand at blogging. By 2006 bloggers were engaged rather than dismissed by mainstream journalists. Then, in 2008, Barack Obama ran a watershed campaign, the first successful hybrid presidential initiative. Whether or not this represents the turning point in the emergence of the Internet era will depend on how Obama uses the Internet to govern and whether subsequent campaigns echo his methods and success. Prior to Obama’s victory, this sequence felt more like the progression from stump speeches to television spots rather than Nixon’s great revelation about selling fiction as truth under the guise of message control. Yes, there were candidate websites, but most of them treated the Internet like it was “TV with keys.” Most never invited Internet patrons to act on behalf of the campaign (other than asking for money). Yes, mainstream elites had engaged the netroots but on their own terms. The Internet had garnered general recognition and has become part of American political and social discourse. But following the political earthquake of 2008, has it revolutionized the form and function of that discourse? From a netroots perspective, the answer would have to be “not yet.” Netroots activists have not succeeded in upending the Democratic Party power structure. They have not succeeded in replacing Beltway punditry and the values of objective journalism with blogger commentary and values. They were not fully integrated into the Obama campaign, for all its organizational brilliance and understanding of how to maximize the Internet’s political power. But the signs of change are there. |
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