In Praise of Mighty Markos
Love him or hate him, you have to give Kos his due, argues PJM columnist Max Sawicky. He has, indeed, reinvigorated the Democratic grass roots - not with ideology but with clever use of new tools to take full advantage of the Republican crack-up and the resulting shift in the political spectrum.
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Contrary to what the title might lead you to believe, this column is not easy for me to write. The truth is, I can’t stand Markos Moulitsas. I’d tell you why, but who really cares? Nobody, least of all Markos himself. The politics of it all is more to the point. Markos IS the center now, because George Bush, by virtue of his excellent policies, has moved American politics several notches to the left.
Want proof? Ask any Republican with hopes of election in 2008 how he or she feels at the moment.
The older among you will appreciate this more. Let’s take the wayback machine to 1965. We didn’t have the Internet, but we had pundits. The difference, one of them, is that the sort of people who now dominate Big, Old Media were seen as extremist kooks. Cal Thomas is my favorite example. He couldn’t get arrested back then. Don’t forget that Barry Goldwater, well to the left of many Republicans today, was buried by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Richard Nixon raised social spending more than any Democrat, before or since. Principles may be eternal, but barring the utterly extreme cases, in politics “left” and “right” are always defined relative to something else. Compared to Nixon, Bill Clinton was a conservative.
How far left is Markos Moulitsas? I’m on the National Executive Board of Americans for Democratic Action, liberal ilk central. Our founders helped drive Reds out of the AFL-CIO. From where I sit, Kos is not very far left at all. This is a guy who had a man-crush on former governor Mark Warner of Virginia, who said in a different life he might have joined the CIA, who wrote a piece on being a “libertarian Democrat.”
What about the politics of Daily Kos? It’s easy to mistake partisanship — vigorous advocacy on behalf of a political party — for ideology. They are not the same thing. To be sure, the Kossacks are dead set against the war in Iraq, but after that, what have you got? Would they be against wars under other circumstances? I think it’s hard to say.
What about on the domestic front? I’m an economist, so I keep a lookout for material in that vein. Who were the economists at the Kos gathering? Some guy from France I’ve never heard of. The eminent Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, a very smart guy advising Obama, but in no way a man of the left. Frequent Kos contributor Hale Stewart, a.k.a. “Bondad,” also a fine fellow but with no trace of progressive economics. Atrios, a recovering economist who practices it infrequently. Where’s the socialism? You can’t find it.
Markos inveighs against the DLC, but he has also savaged Dennis Kucinich. It happens that DLC alumni (e.g., Robert Shapiro) are speaking at the convention, and one of the Kos collaborators is Simon Rosenberg of the neo-DLC New Democratic Network. Suggest in a Kos thread the idea of ditching the Dems for something to their left like the Greens and brace yourself for the avalanche of raspberries.
Aside from the anti-Bushism, Kossacks, like Democrats in general, are a diverse lot. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi would like to help reelect people in the most marginal, conservative swing districts as well as the true believers of liberalism. This dilutes to the point of invisibility any unifying ideology, much less a liberal one. The Kossacks have a similar catholicism.
Don’t get your hopes up about Democrats getting McGoverned by association with Kos. Michael Moore hasn’t hurt them yet either. There is a lot to criticize their politicians for, but one thing they have is good antennae. They are not going to jump on a sinking ship. (The real putz in this vein is Bill O’Reilly, who, by his antics, are giving the Kossacks a bonanza of publicity.)
More than anyone besides Bush and his disastrous war, Kos has reinvigorated the Democratic grass roots.
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19 Comments
mishu:Kossacks want to nationalize the medical industry like some tin pot Latin American dictator. They believe that making money off of the “people’s suffering” is evil therefore doctors and nurses must be slaves. Pardon my reductio ad absurdum.
Aug 8, 2007 - 5:02 am Fred Beloit:Sure Max. I have noticed that Joe Lieberman is still in office in spite of Kos. This bolsters your contention that: “He helped invent new political tools that everybody is scrambling to understand and adopt.” Scramble on folks.
Aug 8, 2007 - 5:31 am Miracle Max:Dems and Kossacks are all over the lot as to what to do about health care. A single-payer system, for instance, is as radical as any of them are going to get, and that involves no more than nationalizing most of the health insurance industry, leaving the vast bulk of providers of health care wherever they are now.
Aug 8, 2007 - 8:56 am deep6:mishu: how about actually reading posts by the primary diarists on health care policy, such as nyceve or Dr. SteveB, or by front pagers such as mcjoan or devilstower?
Had you actually done so, you’d realize there is a large debate in the community, focusing on whether it’s realistic to assume we can remove insurance companies from the health care game, whether single-payer is best, whether to model a US plan on a system more like France’s or Great Britain’s where there is also private care available for people who can afford it…. The debate goes on.
None of it, however, has anything to do with doctor or nurse salaries. The only issue in contention re doctors and nurses, is 1) challenging the right-wing meme that absent HMOs and private corporations seeking profit, no one will want to become a doctor/nurse anymore; and 2) whether a single-payer system should contract with private entities who employ medical personnel, or whether the medical personnel should be employees of the government itself.
Kossacks recognize the *lack* of sufficient medical personnel in the US right now - particularly nurses and general practitioners; the last thing they’d want to do is deincentivize matriculation in medical programs or oppose competitive salaries and high employment.
Aug 8, 2007 - 10:11 am deep6:Fred, if you’re going to drop names, how about mentioning Jim Webb, Tim Kaine, Paul Hodes or Jon Tester? They were all major recipients of netroots funds and benefactors of their activism, and they all scored major upsets in their state victories.
Daily Kos promoted Ned Lamont to run against Lieberman in the primary and the guy actually won. He had little name recognition, his only experience in elected office was as a town selectman - and the guy’s a secular humanist! If you don’t think that’s huge, despite losing to a 3-year senator with all the benefits of incumbency and establishment support, then you must lead a very interesting life.
Aug 8, 2007 - 10:30 am OmegaPaladin:Kos is a good indicator if someone is off the deep end in Leftism. For thank I guess I should thank him.
However, his comments on the war set new lows for Leftists. (as opposed to liberals) Let us not forget his response to contractors in Iraq being killed: “Screw Them.” For his stance on what is by far the most important issue of our time, he gets no respect from me.
Aug 8, 2007 - 11:20 am deep6:Omega - A large majority of commenters on Kos are in agreement with a large majority of Americans on supporting universal health care coverage, a strong public education system, equal rights for women, gays and minorities, separation of church and state, reproductive rights, civil liberties, withdrawing troops from Iraq, supportive of energy independence, solutions to global warming and pushing ethics reform. Thus, his site is mainstream. Daily Kos is the *center*.
To use your phrase, it seems you are off-the-deep end in Rightism.
Aug 8, 2007 - 12:43 pm Ivan Lenin:I agree that Kos is not a leftist. Rather, he is a populist who was able to capitalize on Bush-hatred and unpopularity of the Iraq war. He was able to give “the People” the community-based reality they had been craving since the days of Woodstock.
What Max is missing entirely is that “the People” and “Americans” are not the same thing, which leads him to confuse kos, I mean cause and effect. YearlyKos was attended by a diverse crowd because Kos proved himself successful. He was not, however, successful, because of the ideological diversity of his crowd. He succeeded because of the intensity of Bush hatred. He represents only those who are stuck on Bush - which is a huge number, but not for long. When it comes to anything constructive or positive, he and “the People” have nothing to offer.
Aug 8, 2007 - 1:49 pm dan:I read DailyKos occasionally, and I think they simply represent the present suburban radical chic - that is, minds possessed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, which are quite receptive to the props of 60s radicalism, from which, with small innovations, they utter vindictive attacks on “the right,” “Jews” (oops I mean Zionists), and seem to believe every claim made about everyone from Hugo Chavez to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is a pretext for a corporate invasion with Special Forces as its financiers.
The majority of Americans does not want “universal healthcare,” they want Healthcare for Themselves. Of course we do - if someone asked, do you want healthcare, for free? you’d say f*** yes I do!
They say 45 million people have no healthcare in this country. Hm. That means, 255 million DO have healthcare in this country. Crisis? Mmm, no I don’t think so. And I don’t have healthcare at the moment either.
But reagrdless, Kos is about vanity and bullshit resentment - as everyone but Deep6 seems to know.
Aug 8, 2007 - 5:52 pm Tom Lee:mishu said, “They believe that making money off of the “people’s suffering” is evil therefore doctors and nurses must be slaves.”
Money is spent to keep people suffering, or at least get anyone but the insurer to pay for treating it. That is the insurer’s ounce of prevention to avoid a pound of cure. If private insurers do not deny care (or at least payment for care given), rates will rise, the healthier plan members will leave, the sicker will stay, so rates will rise, and on and on into a death spiral.
Aug 8, 2007 - 8:00 pm deep6:Dan, you have quite the flair for the dramatic. Too bad it’s all a bunch of crap.
So it’s not okay to fervently dislike, disagree with - even hate - a president with whom you overwhelmingly disagree on major issues? Um, okay. Guess none of that happened with Clinton, Ann Coulter isn’t real, Michelle Malkin’s blog is full of tolerant, compassionate commenters, women bloggers haven’t been threatened and sexually harassed by GOP wingnut minions, Fox Noise is fair and balanced and the world’s one big Republican lovefest for Dems. Got it.
In case you didn’t notice, Democrats took 31 House seats and 6 Senate seats (including Bernie Sanders) putting control of both houses of Congress in the hands of the Dems, an upset *bigger than the Republican Revolution of ‘94*. This isn’t a fad and we’re not the fringe. We’re the people who got it done. We’re the ones who donated until we couldn’t afford Christmas gifts; we’re the ones who got the message out and coordinated cross-country support for local candidates who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten two seconds of time in the media anywhere outside of their home state. Just look at the NH state and federal victories to understand where this could go. And there’s nothing “suburban radical chic” about my home state at all.
It’s charming how you can make these critical character pronouncements about either the site or its founder (tough to tell) and somehow that’s just assumed to be truth. “Vanity” and “resentment” aren’t even appropriate terms. Maybe you ought to concentrate less on inane blog posts and focus more on actually reading the sites you criticize - oh, and getting yourself some health insurance. Look out for that flu!
Aug 8, 2007 - 8:15 pm GCA:Nothing new here. In some ways Mad Max confirms what free market libertarians and conservatives have been saying for a long time: the Democrats are purely poll driven, present no coherent alternative to Republican policies, and have no core principles beyond a belief that somehow a big, expensive and intrusive government can fix everything.
A leftward shift? Nah, don’t think anything so coherent is happening. Bush is simply a failed president who could not communicate his agenda to the American people. The Democrats refused from day one of his presidency to cooperate with him on anything substantive, and people are fed up with an imperious congress which happened to be in Republican hands in November, 2006. If the Dems win both the White House and congress in 2008, as appears likely, it will be out of disgust and unthinking blame of perceived power, not the result of any ideological sea change. It won’t take them long, once they have real power, to alienate the American people, all the time arrogantly thinking they were chosen while failing to see their success was due only to Bush fatigue.
The sea change is merely the usual one of style over substance. The Dems just happen to be better salesmen at the moment.
Aug 8, 2007 - 10:36 pm Brett_McS:“Compared to Nixon, Bill Clinton was a conservative”.
Yes indeed, the political spectrum has shifted. To the right.
Aug 9, 2007 - 5:12 am Miracle Max:dan — there is no anti-semitism on DK beyond the miscellaneous stray comment you could find on any open site with big traffic. That’s a bum rap. If I saw any, though I don’t spend much time there, I would certainly take note.
You must be the only person in the U.S. who thinks 45 million uninsured is no problem.
GCA — Dems, like Reps, are certainly interested in polls, but they also have ideological preferences. I happen to think those preferences like a lot to be desired, but there are there. For instance, they are not dedicated to chopping down the public sector by “starving the beast.”
It’s easy to exaggerate the leftward shift. At this point it’s more potential than realized. The point is that the Ginormous Bush Failure has created an opening for real change. Per Brett, we are still to the right of where we were in the 70s, but we are left of where we were in 2002.
I just wish Kossacks would take better advantage by talking more about what changes and less about how much Bush sucks, even tho Bush does suck.
Aug 9, 2007 - 7:19 am John M:Deep 6 — Don’t pat yourself on the back too much for the gains the dems made in congress. From what we’ve seen so far, they’ve managed to outdo even the republicans for cynicism, cronyism and corruption, and they’ve only been in power 8 months. I wouldn’t brag that you “donated until (you) couldn’t afford Christmas gifts” in exchange for this lot. It’s like boasting that you burned down your house in order to get rid of termites.
Aug 9, 2007 - 7:35 am B Dubya:Sometimes the intelligent thing to do, if you are a particularly nasty example of wriggly, multilegged bug, is to stay safely under your rock and hope nobody turns it over.
Center of the party? What a hoot.
Kos and the kids will soon wilt under the attention they will be getting for the rest of the cycle, rather like ants under the focus of a magnifying glass. When the messenger is as creepy as the message, the bug gets stepped on.
Aug 9, 2007 - 8:56 am Terry Gain:Kos are anti-democratic haters who censor people who challenge their insane world view. They are also traitors who hate their own country. They don’t deserve a President as decent as Bush. The Democratic association with these lunatics will provide rich material for the GOP to exploit in 08.
Of course if the situation in Iraq continues to improve at the same pace as in the last 3 months it won’t even be close.
Aug 9, 2007 - 6:46 pm Lieberman Independent:Terri Gain has it right. Go Terri!!
Aug 9, 2007 - 10:34 pm Bamaslama:I’m a Democrat, but not particularly a Kos fan. As a Kucinich supporter, I am offended by his dismissive attitude toward a man who is fighting the good fight for the little guy everywhere. I think national health care is an idea whose time has come. I won’t bother quoted the oft-repeated stats on our world rank and what we pay for it, but it shows that our system isn’t working very well.
Aug 12, 2007 - 7:03 amThe various insurance companies raked in 11 billion last year, while small businesses died like flies. I think a national system would do more to support small business than all the tax breaks in the world. It would also help wages stay abreast of inflation, and make the larger companies more competitive. Other countries constantly beef about our ’subsidized farming’ - because it makes us stronger in the marketplace. Labor might not get such a hard time either, if the companies weren’t looking at such a HUGE increase in wages whenever health insurance gets plopped on the table. I simply cannot see a downside - except to the Insurance Lobby. Well, to quote Kos - “Screw them”.