As I sit snowed in, I find myself pondering the incredible idiocy Chris Matthews displayed earlier this week with his declaration that we in the netroots aren’t “real Democrats,” and that we just like “bitching” from the “back seat.”
What makes me most angry about this dumb-ass diatribe from Matthews isn’t so much the condescension and the vituperation. It's Matthew's inability to grasp the fact that, from an objective standpoint, we in the netroots are just the portion of the base that can network ourselves towards our goals without someone commanding us to do so or directing our every move.
It’s damn hard to find an American who does no online social networking today. Email chains are limited to a small audience selected by the author. Facebook and MySpace are designed to limit the audience to people who might have some personal interest in what the author has to say. YouTube and personal blogs are simply broader platforms, where the audience is self-selecting, rather than limited by the author. DailyKos is just like a webring of personal blogs, mostly centered around politics (with a healthy smattering of personal stories, general interest discussions, and, of course, pooties). We don’t limit the audience, and we encourage a greater level of reader interaction. We are, for want of a better term, a democratic social network.
Now, we’re mostly Democrats, and we’re almost entirely left-of-center. Those who participate here and on other liberal community blogs generally fit that description. We’re the Democratic base vote, we’re the Democratic activist core, and, from time to time, we’re even the Democratic ticket (NYBri and CanYouBeAngryAndStillDream both readily jump to mind as Kossacks who’ve thrown their hats into the ring, and that’s not to mention any of the dozens of candidates and officials from across the nation who post here regularly, including our 2004 Presidential nominee).
So where does the Village impression that we’re somehow outside the party come from? Well, part of it has to stem from the fact that we spent several formative years defining ourselves as exactly that--outside reformers bent on remaking the party to better reflect its core values, and limiting the strength of the entrenched elites who’d forgotten what they were sent to do. We backed our own Team of Mavericks, from Ned Lamont and Howard Dean to Jerry McNerney and Darcy Burner. Kos and Jerome wrote a book called Crashing the Gate about how we were going to seize the reins of the party and steer it down a different path. We built our own candidate slates with Blue Majority PAC and Blue America PAC, and we financed races independent of the party structures with ActBlue.
And why did we do all of this? Because the party was broken. Because the party failed to stand united for any core values, still stuck wandering the wilderness after the drubbing of 1994 and the theft of 2000 (and, of course, the horror of 2001). Someone had to remind our national leadership that they had an actual mission to accomplish in Washington. So we tried to get their attention. Some learned the lesson we sought to re-instill in them, and got on board. Many didn’t, and we found it necessary to fight against them for the soul of the party.
So fight we did. And we won.
Howard Dean became the Chairman of the Democratic Party, largely on the strength of our ideals and our activism. His tenure is likely to be the netroot's greatest legacy from the Bush years, because he helped us from the top to steer the party back to a national force for progress--something we had ceased to be. Thanks to him--and, yes, thanks to us--being a Democrat who supported the administration’s blatant stupidity and extra-constitutionality became the exception and not the rule. We began to speak as a united party to a degree not seen in more than a decade. We were the party of change, all thanks to the forces of change who had taken over the party.
Now that we have control of the government, those who either weren’t on board with our mission to begin with (Lieberman) and those who've failed to grasp that we won control of the party years ago (Matthews) are lashing out at us, trying to pretend that we don’t have a part to play in the process because we’re still outsiders looking in, wanting to take over that which we cannot hope to understand or direct.
What these people don’t get is that we are the party. We’re the ones screaming for health care reform. We’re the ones who decried Bush taking his eye off of Afghanistan in 2002, and fought tooth-and-nail against him taking us into Iraq in 2003, and called for drastic changes in those wars ever since. We’re the ones who wanted a more diplomatic foreign policy. And we’re the ones pushing for ENDA, advocating the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, working for the Employee Free Choice Act, championing protections for rape victims, calling for tighter oversight of contractor abuses, regulating the financial sector, protecting consumers, and enacting solutions to save our planet.
We’re setting the agenda. We’re not winning every fight, but we’re damn sure involved in them all. We have gotten our people to the highest offices in the party apparatus. We have elected our allies to office across the country. We’ve put over $100,000,000 into our campaigns in the last 5 years, in addition to countless volunteer hours, millions of phone calls and door knocks, and a level of technological savvy that made it possible for the Democrats to overcome the cash and infrastructure advantages that kept the GOP in power for over a decade.
What Chris Matthews is missing is that we already won the battle he thinks is still being fought. We won it a long time ago. This isn’t 2005 anymore. We’re not the fringe.
We are the Democratic Party. Its heart and its soul. We are the factory workers, the business leaders, the campaign staffers, the stay-at-home volunteers. The sick and the poor, the rich and the connected. The ignorant and the erudite. We’re all of the party’s components, networked together and capable of finding common bonds beyond partisan affiliation. We empathize, we strategize, and we harmonize.
And to someone who hasn’t figured out what’s happening, we appear to be a scary and chaotic force.
We are a bit scary. But just because we prefer to give our party orders rather than take them from the top doesn’t make us chaotic. It makes us creative. It makes us independent-minded. It makes us passionate advocates for our values and principles, because those things--and not fealty to D.C. insiders--are all that unite us. To those who would abandon or attack those principles, that makes us an enemy. So they paint us as nothing more than angry rabble.
And we are angry, because we’re always angry when our national leaders appear to forget why we let them work for us. And while we aren’t rabble, we’re definitely roused. We pay attention to policy debates and political calculus. We discuss next steps and long-term goals with a frankness and honesty borne out of necessity: the necessity of creating change in our own lifetimes, and the necessity of open discussion among peers seeking common goals.
We are plugged in to what’s happening in Washington, but we view it through the lens of living in Topeka, and Atlanta, and L.A., and Chicago, and Denver, and Albany, and Orlando, and St. Louis. We see the foreclosure crisis as our neighbors pack their belongings into boxes. We see the health care crisis as our friends and families beg their insurers to cover one more test, one more treatment, one more bottle of medicine. We see our schools as parents and teachers in local districts. We see the war as loved ones of soldiers and Marines, or as warriors who go to the fight ourselves and sometimes don’t return (rest in peace, Andy “G’Kar” Olmsted).
We don’t view politics as an abstraction, but as a means to affect countless lives in our own neighborhoods. And that gives us a sense of urgency that might be hard to understand from the cozy confines of the Hardball studio.
We are the Democratic Party. We are its members, its sometimes leaders, its moral compass, the occasional beneficiaries of its progresses, the constant victims of its compromises.
We are not just sitting in the back seat, bitching, while the grown-ups drive us off a cliff. We’re building bridges across the nation, finding common ground and common purpose, and desperately trying to steer our country in a better direction.
We are the netroots, Chris, and we are the Democratic Party.
We just learned how to type, is all.