The Stoopid Netrootz

I had the pleasure of attending a dinner last night with, among many labor leaders and other bloggers, Matt Stoller of MyDD, who wrote the most provocative post on the Internet this week, although I don't think it needed to be.

Over the past nine years, a series of shocks to the country have radically changed the contours of our political debates. In the 2000 election, the Presidential debate involved sweater hues and snowmobiles, ‘lock boxes’ and ‘fuzzy math’. Virtually nothing in that election prepared any but the most cynical political observers for the massive security failures, electoral fraud, the creation of the beginnings of a police state, the loss of two wars one of which was sold under false pretenses, and the destruction of a major American city – all tragic events which have not only occurred on the watch of some very bad people without adverse consequence, but have all increased the power and wealth of those same people. America is a very different place in 2007 than it was in 1999.

This series of events has done something specific to a relatively apolitical white liberal class that had been somewhat absented from the public debate since the early 1970s. It made us angry, and has created a movement.

This argument (which I like to call "the most obvious argument in the world," a reflection of realities in the country today) shouldn't have caused the dismay that it did among certain facets of the blogosphere and particularly the intellectual class. Matt has a roundup here. But the one critique that really got everyone going was this one by Max Sawicky, who used the topic to deride anyone who's ever read a blog or written a comment.

The "Internet Left" is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party [...]

Think of how today's media characterizes "angry bloggers" and the netroots, and consider whether TIME Magazine-type descriptions of SDS or SNCC would have been accurate. In TIME Magazine, then and now, you do not read about class politics. You learn about Stokely Carmichael and Al Sharpton, not about Bill Fletcher or Adolph Reed. You hear about protectionism from the Buchanan right, never from the global justice left.

In TIME Magazineland, the latter 90s and "welfare reform" were triumphs of Clintonomics, not the targets of withering critiques.

The contemporary "Internet left" is not very left. It is vociferous, partisan, and alert to opportunities to nail Republicans and Joe Lieberman. And there's nothing wrong with that. But left? Please.

* The netroots criticized the Iraqi effort a) for not gaining the support of the U.N.; b) for not armoring the troops sufficiently; c) for not proving the existence of WMDs; d) for not proving connections to Al Queda; e) for not using enough troops. Can we presume that if George H.W. Bush had been there to get the support of the U.N. and prove Saddam had WMDs, an invasion would have been justified?

* The netroots have no political economy, except to join the blather about the unbalanced budget and the national debt. It did a fine job opposing Bush's Social Security privatization, but will it support Democratic efforts to fix a program that is not broke? By contrast, the direct action forces have been mobilizing against the emergent neo-liberal/free trade economic dogma for a decade.

* The 60s left read Marx, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Lukacs, Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, C.L.R. James, Ernest Mandel, Joan Robinson, Herbert Marcuse, Michael Harrington, Saul Alinsky. What does the netroots read? Don't Think of an Elephant?

The piece just oozes condescension, but instead of mocking that I want to address the two visceral points that sprung from me upon reading this drivel.

1. There's this notion that people on the Internet exist only on the Internet. The idea that there's this cultural and socio-political vaccuum, out of which sprung all these tabula rasa Democrats who never read a book of political philosophy or economic progressivism in their lives, is insulting and ludicrous. Chris Bowers takes a whack at this as well, and I'd like to do the same. I read Marx and Lacan and Barthes and Toril Moi and Chomsky and George W.S. Trow and reader-response criticism and Marxist-feminist critiques and "The Fair, The Pig, Authorship," and Tocqueville and Rousseau and Kant and Nietzsche and The Baffler, and I talked to Vietnam vets who came into our History lectures, and I subscribed to The Nation and Mother Jones, and I saw Manufacturing Consent and Medium Cool when I was 23. I did the vast majority of that in college, when you're supposed to. There is intellectual underpinnings to today's political debates, whether it's overt or not.

2. There's this other idea that if you engage in actually strategizing to impact change then you've poisoned the well, then you've sold out to the man, then you aren't part of the cultural elite who are REALLY down with the movement. Trying to win doesn't disqualify you from being on the "Left," whatever that means. It means that you actually try to win. If the late 60s are the apotheosis of the leftist movement in this country, then I want to thank all of those leftists for Nixon, Reagan, and the theories that brought us the supreme executive power of the Bush years. Today we apparently have this intellectually bankrupt movement, this nascent upstart, and in a few years, it's produced this "new middle".

...Democratic Congressional leaders say they are committed to governing from the center, and not just on bread-and-butter issues like raising the minimum wage or increasing aid for education. They also hope to bring that philosophy to bear on some of the most divisive social issues in politics, like abortion.

In their first days in session, Senate Democratic leaders reintroduced a bill that they said was indicative of their new approach: the Prevention First Act, which seeks to reduce the number of abortions by expanding access to birth control, family planning and sex education.

This is something that the elitist "New Left" was never interested in finding, preferring that their arguments be their own intellectual reward. It didn't help anybody who was suffering, didn't put food on a plate, didn't stop a war (no matter what the baby boomers would say). I think this is the mentality that allows progressive organizations, so many of which grew out of that time period, to get away with not paying volunteers for their service. "A true leftist doesn't NEED money for the cause,"

Sawicky tried to kiss and make up, but the truth was told the first time. Leftists of the late-60s, ivory tower stripe have nothing but contempt for success, or even striving for it. Call it jealousy, call it sublimated frustration. But it burns my ass that I somehow have to become a credentialed member of the Left in order to curry favor with these folks. The good works aren't good enough. Actually making the effort to move the country in a new direction, not good enough, either.

(and for the record, the current makeup of Congress is as close to the coalition that rioted the WTO in Seattle in 1999 as we've seen in generations, and it's already paying dividends by forcing trade agreements written with the neoliberal consensus in mind to be torn up. That's the result of a progressive movement which is giving people like Jose Bove what they desire instead of Rahm Emanuel. There's major work to be done, but it beats re-reading my thesis on the distribution of capital in 1840s Europe again.)