MoreOn MoveOn
A pretty good article on the phenomonon of MoveOn. Also, there's an interview with the author on today's version of NPR's "Here and Now."
posted by Dumplingeater @ 3/04/2005
3 comments
Liberal Malcontents
We're liberal, and we're malcontent.
3 Comments:
Good article. They're the values of an educated, steadily employed middle and upper-middle class with time to dedicate to politics -- and disposable income to leverage when they're agitated.Hmm, are we looking in the mirror? But what does it all mean? You can't just tack right because what's the difference between that and giving up? So does that mean you develop a vision that appeals to the center? But did the right do that? It seems to me the right used a lot of techniques but they didn't tack left and they didn't appeal to the center. They moved everything further right. How?
Some thoughts: Moving rightward worked for Clinton in the short run -- it seemed -- but we may be paying for that now. Progress made as a result of the moving-right strategy turns out to have had no sustainable "competitive advantage." And maybe Clinton's success was really more based on the fact that he wasn't a complete loser (ala Gore and Kerry), than his policies per se -- which if they were successful, were probably so just in that they prevented moderate Democrats from being picked off -- not because they swayed conservative voters to come over to the light-side. I think the Democrats who were prone to bailing are gone already. If there are still fence-sitters leaning towards the dark side, good riddance, don't let the barbed-wire tear yo' ass on the way over.
The more I grapple with these questions, the more convinced I become; the point isn't to pick off a few fence-sitters, it's to come up with real economic policies that will appeal to the non-voting public, get out and promote those policies face-to-face, and then get more people to the polls. (Election reform and media access are lynchpins.)
Look at the numbers measuring support among union members -- they're a very similar demographic to many non-voters who aren't unionized, they fall into the "Red State" "values-oriented" profile -- yet they got out and voted and voted Democratic in overwhelming numbers -- because they clearly saw a link between voting and their economic interests. Support for specific foreign policies, "values" issues, etc., will follow -- just as voters on the right followed when Rove et al. used the abortion and gay rights issues to marshal support from previously non-voting conservatives, then leveraged that support to amass foreign policy "political capital." So sayeth the Dumplingeater.
And another thing....
As I see it, the problem with MoveOn isn't their positioning in the political spectrum, but their top-down approach and their isolation from the proletariate (as the article does a good job of describing). And so.....(I feel like a car salesman) the anwer is...."Neighborhood Networks," -- the goup I've been working with that is an extension of MoveOn, with a similar intent as MoveOn's most recent iniative (you probably got an e-mail about hosting "house parties,") but which is a distinct entity. I'm going to forward e-mail to Vic, Art, and Meta regarding NN, anyone else interested (does anyone else read this dreck?), let me know.
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