I finally put my finger on what bothered me about Bob Johnson's diary today bidding buh-bye to people banned or GBCW'd in 2010. It was very well done, and not objectionable in principle, but I didn't like it here and now. A unified community could handle it, but we're not "a" community right now; we're several overlapping and competing ones. Two or more factions have existed for as long as I've been here, except possibly the first half of autumn 2008.
What bothered me was realizing that, without affirmative steps towards change, this is what we, as what we call a community, will be like over the next two years. Squabble central. If DK4 relieves these tensions, it may simply be from impelling disputatious people to gather in different rooms. I can see how less sniping, less warfare, less meta, could appeal to the beleaguered powers that be here. And yet I've realized that the concerns I've expressed here about DK4 maintaining "community" here -- are not really so much for the good of Daily Kos, but for the good of the larger political world.
This is where, if we chose, our broad coalition could learn to get along.
I've enjoyed being part of Daily Kos for the past five years plus, but I think that that's not really why I'm here. I'm here because ya gotta be here, because it's the Greenwich Village, the Haight-Asbury, the Sunset Strip, the Rive Gauche, the Bloomsbury Group, where things happen and evolve.
I don't spend that much time particulating on other blogs other than Calitics, to a degree, but the time I've spent in the past at DocuDharma, My Left Wing, Open Left, Booman Tribune, etc. suggest a much more limited range of ideas and perspectives than one gets here. The different "tribes" have changed over time. We've had Dean and Clark, centrist and leftist (to varying degrees), pragmatists and purists/idealists, institutionalists and radicals, realos and fundis, or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_and_Dionysian Apollonians and Dionysians or or whatever else one might call them, and that's before you even get to differences of specific issues like women's rights, gay rights, environmentalism, labor, and so on. The size of the community means that there is always "someone to play with" with a similar perspective.
On other sites, like in small towns, people have to act differently, they have to get along. I stopped coming to DocuDharma after a while not because I didn't like the people or most of the posts, but because I felt that expressing my honest opinions and making honest challenges even where I mostly agreed in some respects disturbed the sense of community. I was welcome there, but for people who were rooted there it was a respite, where part of the benefit was not having to be confronted all the time. There is a place for that -- but it was not my place. A small town may be coherent, but DKos is a city. That's why people from outside come here: because this is where it is. It is not a particularly "safe space" for anyone. This is where people and cultures mix.
And so we have conflicts. What bothers me is not that such conflict exists; that's inevitable given real differences within the broad Center-Left. The fervor behinds it bothers me a bit -- and especially in my earlier years here I was as guilty of that as anyone. The fervor is largely because people see DKos as a place where, confronted with differing opinions, one's duty is to change minds, as it is in the meatspace political world. People think that changing minds here is useful political practice.
It's not. People are here to share ideas and perspectives and to learn to get along. That's life in the big city.
Daily Kos is not only the marketplace, the big city. It's also one other important thing. It's an epiphenomenon. What happens here, in terms of broad political perspective, is a consequence rather than a cause of what happens in the "real world" of politics and apolitical interaction. On discrete issues, and with dedicated tasks -- fundraising for both candidates and causes, organizing political rallies and canvasses and calling, helping people learn things both political and not -- we can change the outside world. But the overall perspective that people have? We can't change that here.
Converting every single person at Daily Kos to your political view would not change the world. The world is much bigger than the tens of thousands of site members. Changing minds here on a retail level doesn't create wholesale change. You can imagine that there are ripple effects from every change -- from every diary, every comment! -- made here but it's not so much true. People with a radical critique of capitalism are not going to be talking into becoming investment bankers; Third Way members are not going to be dropping out to work in communes. Remember, whatever direction here you're pushing in, someone else is pushing in the opposite direction. You win some and you lose some. What changes the composition of Daily Kos is what is happening in the broader world.
Well, then, what the hell good is it if not for political missionary work, if we can't save some souls through promises and cajoling or humiliation and ridicule? That's easy:
This is a laboratory to learn how to get along within the broad coalition.
In using this as a battlefield where we compete in the push of pike, we fail to use it enough as a kind of ecumenical counsel, and interfaith gathering in which we share information, find commonalities, and learn to get along and -- mirabile dictu -- to get things done. I don't mean just action diaries, I mean getting past divisions.
People you disagree with at Daily Kos are not a forest fire to be stamped out. It doesn't do any good; they are but a reflection of other realities outside the blog. They are people with whom you can and must learn to engage.
We have an election to win in two years -- and every two years after that -- and other elections and causes and actions to engage in between them. We will need two wings to fly.
Some think that this can happen in state, local, or federal parties and groups. Sometimes it can. But before long -- and this has now happened to me in two professional fields as well as political practice -- you get to a point where people are comfortable enough in their lives, and comfortable enough talking freely, where the perspective of the masses will be held in contempt. In my experience in California's Democratic Party, I've been excoriated routinely for being a blogger, paying a price for things said here and elsewhere that I disagree with. At a certain level, people don't expect to have to deal with what and whom makes them uneasy.
But we do. We are confronted with uneasy disagreement all the time, and at our best we work around it. That's why I think that the political blogs -- and most of all this political blog, where unlike HuffPo or TPM readers are not playing so profoundly second-fiddle to those who "create content" -- have a role in rapprochement and and cross-pollination that you just don't see elsewhere. That, I realize, is why I (and I presume others) have expressed such concerns about the siloization possible in DK4. DK4 will be an even bigger and more comfortable city than DK3, but if it allows people too much comfort rather than forcing them to bang into each other and get along, it will be a one with less potential.
I'm a big believer in making lemons out of lemonade, so this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to use a lawyer trick on you. Ready? Here it comes.
One great thing about DK4 is, of course, the ability to create collaborative groups, groups that can work on a diary among themselves before sending it out to the public. That requires cooperation. That's all to the good.
What we need -- and what we may not naturally create, due to the natural tendency to value agreement over conflict -- are heterogeneous groups. We need people who disagree working on the same projects. And I have some projects in mind.
One of them is the "lawyer's trick" I mentioned. In a summary judgment proceeding (a pre-trial motion to dismiss dealing with matters of pure law), two opposing parties will often be told to get together and figure out what facts in the case are. It's a good technique. It narrows the scope of the issues to be adjudicated. Where the two sides can agree that something happened in a certain way, they can proceed to pure disagreements about its meaning and implications.
We need some healing on this site, because getting things working as we'd like over the next few years. So I will be starting a group on DK4 called something like "Undisputed Fact," where people from as politically diverse a group as possible can get together and -- not argue about our values -- but agree on what the lay of the land in the world is, what the facts are. And we'll work from there.
If you're interested in being part of it, let me know.