This morning I posted a couple of comments suggesting that, if Progressive Democrats intend to move the Democratic Party Left, we must immediately begin mounting primary challenges against those Democratic incumbents who betray us on core issues like protecting the social safety net. Then I went to Naked Capitalism and saw a link to Ian Welsh's most recent piece, a brief essay entitled, "A brief note on why the progressive blog movement failed," which I reproduce in part:
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. ...
Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate’s skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate’s policy. Identity is more important to them than how many brown children that politician is killing.
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.
The Tea Party, say what you will about them, gets a great deal of obeisance from Republicans for one simple reason: they will primary you if they don’t like how you’ve been voting, and they’ll probably win that primary. They are feared. Progressives are not feared, because they do not believe enough in their ostensible principles to act on them in an effective fashion.
That is why the progressive revolution of the early 2000s failed. If you want the next left wing push to succeed, whatever it is called, learn the lessons of the last failure.
(Note: I poured years of my life into the movement. Its failure is my failure, and I take no pleasure in it at all.)
(Edited to avoid the fair use restrictions, I hope.)