The Centrifuge Project
A centrifuge is a device to spin things away from the center in order to consolidate them.
Like a centrifuge, the purpose of this blog is simple: to serve as a means of communication among bloggers and other activists who are resisting the efforts of the Democratic "establishment" (including, IMNSHO, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and Hillary Clinton and her supporters) who are trying not merely to outshout, but to muffle, the progressive voices in the party.
In my view, the "triangulated centrism" strategy has failed. We've lost Congress and the last two Presidential elections under their leadership -- yet the "Dem establishment" already is manipulating the upcoming Congressional races in fundamentally undemocratic ways by manipulating access to contributors, data, and publicity (witness the selection, rather than election, of Sherrod Brown as nominee over Paul Hackett, Bob Casey over Chuck Pennacchio, Tammy Duckworth over Christine Cegalis). And the same crowd (we need to pick a name for them other than "centrists," because their alignment is less of an issue than their autocracy; suggestions?) is working hard to establish the DLC and DCCC as the center of power in the Democratic Party to the exclusion of the more small-d democratic, more inclusive Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Purely as a way of introducing myself, here are links to a few of my posts, in chron order, that show how I've been approaching these issues:
The Enemy Without, The Obstructionists Within: Party Centrists Privatizing, Monopolizing Access to the Grassroots
Democracy, Plutocracy, Aristocracy: Same Diff.
In the Company of Ghosts
What We Stand For. Again.
The Big Question
An Overlong Dissertation On Courage, Strategy, Populism, and Respecting the Base
Lies, Democratic Unity and the Real Path to Power
"The Democrats' Disciplinarian"
Swing Voters Aren't Necessarily Centrist Voters
Strangely enough, our position is eerily reminiscent of that faced by conservative Republicans in the early 1960s. The mainstream party was too centrist for their tastes (the top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower was 90%, and he had no problem with that), and the party's rejection of Barry Goldwater in 1960 angered them. Most Republicans, and most Americans, considered conservatives to be silly, politically naive extremists. The word "conservative" was an epithet; Eisenhower called himself a "liberal." It's a mirror image of the situation liberal Democrats are in today.
Those 1960s conservatives systematically went about gaining power, first gaining control of the Republican Party, then influencing the media and eventually public opinion to move the center of discourse to the right, and finally leveraging those gains into complete control of the government. It took them twenty years to place Reagan in office, a decade more to attain a conservative Congress, and yet another decade to hit the trifecta, gaining control of all three branches of government at the same time. (Why do conservatives hate Clinton so much? Because he was the only thing blocking their goal to control the entire government, to which they felt entitled.) Their success was predicated on two virtues: (1) an emphasis on motivating and empowering their base rather than taking the base for granted and focusing on swing voters, and (2) a willingness to strategize and invest for the long haul -- the courage not to quit.
I don't want to emulate conservative Republicans' narrowmindedness, their intolerance of centrist views altogether, or their Machiavellian disdain for both truth and the good of the nation. The architects of the conservative Republican bloc are, at heart, bad people with bad ends. But I admire, and am willing to learn from, their doggedness and their strategy. Conservative Republicanism is the most successful political movement of the second half of the twentieth century, and it would be foolish not to pay attention to the lessons it can teach.
I've established this blog as a forum to start a comparable movement in reverse. It's designed to be relatively private: Searchability within blogspot and weblogs notification are both disabled. I haven't, and won't, claim it on Technorati. It has no ads and no blogroll. Eventually we may limit commenting privileges to members, but for now I figure we should leave it open to encourage people to join the community. At some point we may want to migrate it to some completely private place. No one should refer to it in a public post. People may stumble across it accidentally, but for now, relative anonymity should be enough to talk in relative freedom. (Please give me any other suggestions you have on how to keep it as private as possible without making it unusable.)
And it's definitely not "my" blog. Anyone who belongs here should be able to post and comment freely (shoot me an email, vichydems [at] disputesolutions.org, if you'd like to have posting privileges). I don't even know where to go from here, other than to suggest that:
(1) We should notify each other whenever we write posts on our "real" blogs that address anti-DLC and free-primary issues, so that others can cross-link to them. (Conservative Mick Stockinger at UNCoRRELATED makes a great point, quoted in today's Blogometer: "If the left took time out from patting themselves on the back for their prodigious comment streams, they might recognize something ominously important about their conservative brethren--we don't comment, we link. Its such a subtle difference but with enormous importance.")
(2) We should all continually suggest names of other bloggers and activists who might be good additions to this discussion, and if the consensus here agrees, invite them to jump in; and
(3) We should continually invite discussion about where to go from here.
So: where do we go from here?
Like a centrifuge, the purpose of this blog is simple: to serve as a means of communication among bloggers and other activists who are resisting the efforts of the Democratic "establishment" (including, IMNSHO, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and Hillary Clinton and her supporters) who are trying not merely to outshout, but to muffle, the progressive voices in the party.
In my view, the "triangulated centrism" strategy has failed. We've lost Congress and the last two Presidential elections under their leadership -- yet the "Dem establishment" already is manipulating the upcoming Congressional races in fundamentally undemocratic ways by manipulating access to contributors, data, and publicity (witness the selection, rather than election, of Sherrod Brown as nominee over Paul Hackett, Bob Casey over Chuck Pennacchio, Tammy Duckworth over Christine Cegalis). And the same crowd (we need to pick a name for them other than "centrists," because their alignment is less of an issue than their autocracy; suggestions?) is working hard to establish the DLC and DCCC as the center of power in the Democratic Party to the exclusion of the more small-d democratic, more inclusive Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Purely as a way of introducing myself, here are links to a few of my posts, in chron order, that show how I've been approaching these issues:
The Enemy Without, The Obstructionists Within: Party Centrists Privatizing, Monopolizing Access to the Grassroots
Democracy, Plutocracy, Aristocracy: Same Diff.
In the Company of Ghosts
What We Stand For. Again.
The Big Question
An Overlong Dissertation On Courage, Strategy, Populism, and Respecting the Base
Lies, Democratic Unity and the Real Path to Power
"The Democrats' Disciplinarian"
Swing Voters Aren't Necessarily Centrist Voters
Strangely enough, our position is eerily reminiscent of that faced by conservative Republicans in the early 1960s. The mainstream party was too centrist for their tastes (the top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower was 90%, and he had no problem with that), and the party's rejection of Barry Goldwater in 1960 angered them. Most Republicans, and most Americans, considered conservatives to be silly, politically naive extremists. The word "conservative" was an epithet; Eisenhower called himself a "liberal." It's a mirror image of the situation liberal Democrats are in today.
Those 1960s conservatives systematically went about gaining power, first gaining control of the Republican Party, then influencing the media and eventually public opinion to move the center of discourse to the right, and finally leveraging those gains into complete control of the government. It took them twenty years to place Reagan in office, a decade more to attain a conservative Congress, and yet another decade to hit the trifecta, gaining control of all three branches of government at the same time. (Why do conservatives hate Clinton so much? Because he was the only thing blocking their goal to control the entire government, to which they felt entitled.) Their success was predicated on two virtues: (1) an emphasis on motivating and empowering their base rather than taking the base for granted and focusing on swing voters, and (2) a willingness to strategize and invest for the long haul -- the courage not to quit.
I don't want to emulate conservative Republicans' narrowmindedness, their intolerance of centrist views altogether, or their Machiavellian disdain for both truth and the good of the nation. The architects of the conservative Republican bloc are, at heart, bad people with bad ends. But I admire, and am willing to learn from, their doggedness and their strategy. Conservative Republicanism is the most successful political movement of the second half of the twentieth century, and it would be foolish not to pay attention to the lessons it can teach.
I've established this blog as a forum to start a comparable movement in reverse. It's designed to be relatively private: Searchability within blogspot and weblogs notification are both disabled. I haven't, and won't, claim it on Technorati. It has no ads and no blogroll. Eventually we may limit commenting privileges to members, but for now I figure we should leave it open to encourage people to join the community. At some point we may want to migrate it to some completely private place. No one should refer to it in a public post. People may stumble across it accidentally, but for now, relative anonymity should be enough to talk in relative freedom. (Please give me any other suggestions you have on how to keep it as private as possible without making it unusable.)
And it's definitely not "my" blog. Anyone who belongs here should be able to post and comment freely (shoot me an email, vichydems [at] disputesolutions.org, if you'd like to have posting privileges). I don't even know where to go from here, other than to suggest that:
(1) We should notify each other whenever we write posts on our "real" blogs that address anti-DLC and free-primary issues, so that others can cross-link to them. (Conservative Mick Stockinger at UNCoRRELATED makes a great point, quoted in today's Blogometer: "If the left took time out from patting themselves on the back for their prodigious comment streams, they might recognize something ominously important about their conservative brethren--we don't comment, we link. Its such a subtle difference but with enormous importance.")
(2) We should all continually suggest names of other bloggers and activists who might be good additions to this discussion, and if the consensus here agrees, invite them to jump in; and
(3) We should continually invite discussion about where to go from here.
So: where do we go from here?
posted by Anonymous at 12:28 PM
1 Comments:
I did another post late yesterday that sets out some more of my thinking on the "big picture" in terms of progressive v. establishment Democrats, and thought I'd share the main portion here:
What's telling about Quinn's article isn't its (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) "Laura" approach or its unsurprising list of Bush's faults. It's the suggestion that senior (read: old) Republicans -- of his dad's generation -- are finally waking up to how truly abysmal the Bush presidency has been for the country and the Republican party. Bush 41 Republicans were greedy, deceptive, smart, and ultimately fairly moderate. Giving political life to Bush 43 -- who is emotionally needy more than greedy, deceptive as only an unreformed alcoholic can be, fundamentally incurious to the point of stupidity, and deeply gullible in his reliance on faith (Christian, ideological, economic, Rovian) over evidence -- was their greatest mistake, and they're finally realizing that fact.
Those older Republicans still possess power. They could be the Democrats' greatest, secret allies. But while it's tempting to hope that the unseemly caution of Congressional Democrats is attributable to their already having made that alliance, we'd better hope it hasn't been struck yet. The old Republican guard can't topple 43 without Democratic energy, and the Democrats can't allow themselves to be lulled into compacency. Drinking Scotch with a former Bush 41 Cabinet member while dissing 43 isn't enough; we need Feingoldian energy plus Republican defections or at least passivity to even think about succeeding.
The stage is set for either a minor and temporary, or significant and enduring, Democratic takeover of both the Congress and the White House. Minor and temporary is enough to start, and it's in play already. The 41s do understand political reality; they know, deep down, that their party must pay a price for having elevated such a dangerous stooge to the Presidency without adequate controls, and being realpoliticians, they won't balk (much) at paying that price, at least in the short term. The price: Democratic control of Congress, if not in '06 then in '08, and possibly a Democratic return to the White House for one term. To take that deal, however, it's not enough for Democrats to lay low while a few well-placed Republican old-schoolers surreptitously undermine their party's Bushian and theocratic elements from their side; Democrats need to give things a vigorous shove from their side as well. Those well-placed Republicans may be willing to do their part. Are the Democrats?
And, looking a little farther into the future, we Resistance Democrats need to prepare for the next war. That war has already started, as the DLC and DCCC work to extinguish progressive voices from the party and consolidate control of the party in corporatist, unipartisan hands in the '06 Congressional midterms. But it won't turn into a real shooting war until after the November elections, when the accommodationist Democrats will make their move to appoint Hillary to the White House with some cooperation from the Old Guard Republicans, who will accept that Bush's failures put the White House temporarily out of Republican reach and who will be willing (good Calvinists that they are) to suffer the relatively mild penance of seeing a corporatist Democrat babysit the White House for one term while they ready Jeb for 2012.
The Game for all Democrats is to accept any allies, even Bush 41 cronies and Democrats with whom they disagree, in the effort to retake one or both houses of Congress in '06 -- and to have the courage and wisdom to do what it takes, on top of those allies' efforts, to win that objective (Feingold's censure resolution, of course, being the obvious start). Then, after next November, the Game for all progressive Democrats will be to take the moderate Republicans' and DLC's bait and reject their hook, by doing whatever it takes to see that a progressive Democrat, and not a regressive one like Hillary, is positioned to profit from the inevitable "bounce" we'll get in '08 following the debacle that is Bush 43.
I know this may be stretching it, but purely for illustrative purposes, the situation is not unlike that America faced at the end of WWII: the U.S. (progressive Democrats) and Soviets (DLC Democrats) were allies until Hitler (Bush) fell, and at that moment became enemies again. FDR's failure at Yalta was his failure to plan ahead for that shift, but we needn't make a similar mistake. In '06, all Democrats are allies. In '08, however, there's going to be civil war. Both those savvy, wizened Bush 41ers and their DLC allies understand that, and are positioning themselves already. Let's be sophisticated enough to understand it, as well, and beat both groups at their own game.
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