University of Maryland professor Peter Levine has some interesting things to say about the liberal blogosphere in response to bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s new book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics:
I should also note that 2006 is the perfect year for the Kos approach. The main issue really will be incompetence and corruption in one-party Washington, and people (some people) really will vote Democratic simply in order to check and oversee the Republicans. This is one year when it may work simply to attack the incumbent party and promote an alternative set of players.
But that approach didn’t succeed in ’04, and it won’t work in ’08. The reason, in my opinion, is a basic imbalance between liberals and conservatives. For a long time, there have been more of the latter than the former. […]
To be sure, what “conservatives” believe has changed over time. Today, most self-described conservative voters favor Social Security, Medicare, the right to interracial marriage, and free-speech rights for gays–all positions that conservatives opposed forty years ago. Liberals have won many struggles.
But there is not a majority in favor of ambitious change in a liberal direction, whereas there is a majority in favor of the kinds of policies that Republicans favor (which include Social Security and Medicare, along with tax cuts, school prayer, and government surveillance of communications). Real social change requires either new policies or new arguments, not just more aggressive competition.
Go take a look at the graph that accompanies his post on his blog showing that there are more self-identified conservatives than liberals. There’s plenty of folks here in DC who believe that shift is due either to the Right Wing Noise Machine or the Conservative Infrastructure, pouring their energy into new, liberal, think tanks, PACs, leadership programs. However it occurs to me a lot of other things have changed in our society since the 70s … not simply the rise of an identifiable conservative political machine.
“There’s plenty of folks here in DC who believe that shift is due either to the Right Wing Noise Machine or the Conservative Infrastructure, pouring their energy into new, liberal, think tanks, PACs, leadership programs.”…you mean new, conservative think tanks, I assume?? (heh)
As the birth rate for liberals is substantially lower than that of conservatives (especially social conservatives), I expect that demographics will tilt the balance substantiallt to the right in a few years.
I think the problem is that people are confusing “Democrat” with “liberal.” Now, even the successes of Howard Dean and Kos, they are hardly the same thing.
The other problem is that the Democrats aren’t hitting hard on the issue that resonates with all Americans–health care and economics. People might not give a rat fuck about Iraq, gay marriage, or anything else, but they care about increasing gas costs. They care about stagnant wages. They care about ballooning health care costs. They care about the lack of resources for retirement.
I think what we need is a third party movement that successfully fuses economic conservatism (low taxes, cutting deficit spending, eliminating government waste, encouraging investment) with social liberalism (abortion and civil rights protections, a free press, comprehensive education for all children, environmental safeguards).
Even the most conservative RWNM lover wants a good life for his family and his kids. The trick is to make them see that they’re getting fucked by the Bush regime as much as any liberal–maybe more, because we never drank the Kool-Aid. ;)
Pingback: S. S. Trudeau » Blog Archive » The Kos Approach