You should subscribe to Daily Kos by the end of the month -- at a huge savings to you! -- because it is "the blog of record." It is the New York Times of chronicling liberal/left/progressive existence, the Le Monde, the Manchester Guardian. It's the blog that got blogging technology right, the blog that will be around for the next decade and beyond, the indispensable site to which all travelers go. No one knows what surprises Markos might come up with in future years that may be available only to subscribers, but there will surely be some great ones -- maybe a one-time option to change your account name to your real name without giving up your low UID?, I wonder aloud, longingly -- and you will want to be in on them.
Unlike some others, I won't argue that you should subscribe because of the "community." I mean no insult by noting that the community here, great as it is, is not uniquely great. Lots of communities tout themselves as being great -- from other websites to religious cults to service organizations to fan sites to bowling leagues. I prefer our flavor of community, but I can't say it's objectively better than the communities that enrich other people's lives -- with one exception: the Daily Kos community builds the bonds that makes the rest of the site successful.
It's the rest of the site -- the collaborative historical hyperlinked document that we are creating -- that is unique. It is unrivaled; I don't know if it will ever be exceeded. And you, Dear Reader, are part of it. And that is why, if you can afford to be part of it (or if you wish to enter in comments your plea for a contribution), you should be part of it.
What we're doing here is historic. Seriously. Dissertations can and should be written using Daily Kos as primary source material. We chronicle history as it happens -- objectively, subjectively and collectively.
We're the next century's Sullivan Ballou.
Sullivan Ballou, in case you miss the reference, was the "breakout star" -- dead 150 years ago as of this July's anniversary of the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) -- of Ken Burns's first blockbuster PBS documentary, The Civil War. He wrote a letter to his wife, Sarah -- calling it a mere "love letter" doesn't do it justice -- that when read twenty-one years ago sent chills through the spines of tens of millions of viewers. Here, take a look/listen:
(For those who lack video capability, the link to the letter's text is at the first wikipedia link above.)
I admit: we here are not always that eloquent and our cause and determination is rarely that momentous. But, as this letter brings us with startling clarity back to the perspective of a Rhode Island man encamped in Virginia, so, with perspective, will the observation and discussion here bring future readers back to our own times.
That Sullivan Ballou, in his war, did not perceive himself as writing for general posterity is part of what made his letter so deeply affecting. He was writing to someone in particular; that makes it easier for us to see the world through his eyes.
We here today are in our own civil war of sorts, one that also strives to ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." We are fighters in that war; here in this forum we coordinate, communicate, and contend with one another. We leave a historical record behind of what progressive, liberal, leftist, Democratic, centrist, libertarian, feminist, socialist, GLBT, rainbow-ethnicity, scientific, religious, creative types, party flacks, sockpuppets, ranters, trolls and ordinary people were thinking in these times.
There really is nothing else like it anywhere else. Nowhere so large, so broad, so current, so lasting, so erudite, so profane, so mutually engaged on this scale. This site is a living monument to our times -- a readily searchable archive, with fleshed-out real-life actors whose personal and political lives one can follow over minutes, days, weeks, hours, years, and soon enough decades, telling our stories, our joys and our woes, sharing our hopes and disappointments and accomplishments and fears. (And funny cute animal pictures, of course.)
Way before I became a lawyer I was a social scientist -- first a fledgling student and then professional practitioner. From that perspective I will tell you: historians of the future will dive into Daily Kos and swim in it for days. They will have to be pulled out and resuscitated by their robot guardians -- and then will have to be restrained from diving right back in. (And that even without the ability to dive into hidden comments!) Take a step back from the fine-grained closeness of day-to-day events: the diversity of background and tone and the documentary record of interactions that you see here are catnip to any serious student of politics and human behavior. The characters, the story lines, the plot twists -- "and then suddenly Gingrich was leading the race?" -- are astonishing. Swimming in it, we sometimes fail to appreciate this mind-boggling collective achievement.
But isn't this true of every blogging site? No. Daily Kos is special. It is the Rome to which all roads lead. It is the agora where everything is traded. It is where celebrities and politicians sometimes show up but where, unlike the Huffington Post, the pulse is driven to the beat of the common person. It is where the comments outnumber, outweigh, and often outperform the essayists.
If people 130 years from now want to know what progressives and Democrats and such were thinking as the events of our day unfolded, in our own upcoming Battle of Bull Crap, they could hardly do better than to look to what we cover and how we react on Daily Kos.
And you're here, smack in the middle of it. You're part of the monument we are building to our ideals and our times. Had Sullivan Ballou understood what his letter would mean to posterity, would he have been willing to toss the equivalent of $100 into some fund that would eventually go to PBS and keep his memory strong? Would he have donated for a brick with his name on it? Sure he would -- he'd be confused by the request, but once he understood it, he would -- and so can you, if you have the money, and if you don't, you can ask below if someone else will do so on your behalf.
What initiatives will you be supporting? We don't yet know what, but we can have a sense of how well. My favorite example of this site's accomplishments is one that is in some ways the least typical and most audacious: how Markos slam-banged his way into the polling industry. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, a completely insane idea, yet Markos and his misfit gang have shaken up the field in terms of the questions asked and the transparency with which it asked them. Daily Kos has made it much harder to be a lousy pollster (or at least to get away with it.) It is harder to be corrupt and secretive -- especially since Markos found out that his initial pollster was faking data and summarily smacked him into the next time zone and found a better one. It is harder to present biased questions and frames without challenge -- and, often, correction. It is harder to be Scott Rasmussen, because we're onto him. Markos is improving an entire, critical area of political science (and political practice.) You should want to support that; you should want to be a part of it. That golden badge on your account is your badge of honor.
And that's just one small part of the site, one example of where the money goes. Daily Kos shakes things up. And you were here at the right time to see it come into its own.
As a writer, along with whatever else I am, I realize that I want to leave a mark. In some sense, that is why I have been on Daily Kos all along. I was writing my own memoirs here, my diary in the traditional sense, my own epitaph, and (in my worst moments) my long rambling depressed apologia. As a writer, activist, and human being, I've been writing to tell people who might someday care, such as my grandchildren, if they wonder why I put my time into politics more so than amassing a forture: this is what I was and why. This passing observations, containing bits of my personality, they will tell you what I thought and what I cared about. Writing here, I was fully my intellectual and emotional and political self, as I wanted to be remembered. I sense in my fellow members of this community that many of us are doing the same -- and many do so fantastically well.
Why should that be done here, though? That's easy: where better? Where, in fact, even halfway as well?
Think about it. Facebook? Twitter? Ephemeral. One's own sad lonely blog? For most of us, ignored and often abandoned. A more doctrinaire forum -- center or left? To me, less interesting. The comments sections at Slate, Salon, TIME, the New York Times? No, no, no -- most of them too ephemeral, with one's own contributions too hard to dig out, too restrictive for us to show the world who we are, who (someday) we were. Would you want to entrust your deepest and most personal thoughts to the letters section of your local paper? To Redstate? Please, no. To TPM, with its lack of creature comforts for readers? Even to, bless their hearts, to the simple Haloscan sand dunes of Atrios and Digby?
No! This is it. This is the blog that will be left standing, thanks to Markos's demonic organizational and marketing skills, when all else may pass from the internet. This is the blog that finds the best ways to communicate faster and more effectively than anyone else and that gobbles them new technologies most voraciously. This is the blog that has thought out how to last, that has shown the survival ability to skitter towards sustenance and away from danger each morning before most sites have opened their eyes. The people here are great. But lots of people are great. This site, the structure of this site itself, is unparalleled.
This is the vein that future historians of our era will mine because this, and not the New York Times or any other pretender, is the newspaper of record for progressives. That is not just for progressive thought, but for progressive people -- our personalities, our interests, our jokes, our opinions, our concerns, our fears, our voices, our selves.
This. Right here. This. Accessible from just about anywhere. Organized with a searchable archive that could quite reasonably last a century and more, adapting to new technologies every year without losing a grip on its (post-Scoop) past. Here. This. Now. Us. You.
Future political historians: read Daily Kos. You will see what concerned smart and caring individuals were thinking, floridly, a fountain, a firehose of thought. You want to know what a libertarian progressive was thinking during the Obama Administration? Find one, follow his trail. You want to know what a dedicated Obama supporter who had originally favored Hillary was thinking in the months leading up to the election? She's laid it all out for you. You want to know how political leaders communicated specifically for progressive audiences? Here. Permanently. You want to know the fissures in the movement and what brought us down sometimes and what glued us together when? Primary source material, ye future Ken Burnses. You want to study human interaction in this subculture, future Margaret Meads. Meet your database: rich, ripe, and right here.
And now Markos wants your stinking hundred dollars, a deal at twice the price, so that you can abide in this land of everlasting ephemera, this amber sap collecting the pollen and the chitin of ideological ferment, this strange x-ray of a society's soul. He wants your hundred dollars.
Give it to him. Ask for a loan; ask others here to donate for you. Get that permanent badge. Get in on this moment of history. He wants some of your money? Well, he's earned it. We're making, breathing, excreting history here. You were here at just the right time to see it happen. You were lucky. You are here at the paper of record when you could still choose to make it yours for a lifetime.
But only for another couple of weeks. After that, it's year by year. Don't regret what you failed to do this month. Don't fail to ask for help doing it. We've been known to help.