Blogs and the Democratic Party
Cross-posted to the TPMCafe “Democrats Table.”
As political blogs have become more influential over the past few years, hostility between several of the most popular left-leaning blogs and the Democratic Party has grown. This is more than the usual tendency of the left to fracture. What we’re seeing with the rise of blogs is a competing power center, and rather than embrace this new source of power and energy, the Democratic Party has been doing its best to run away from it. Glenn Greenwald explains the situation well:
With very few exceptions, national Democrats in Washington see the blogosphere as composed of uninformed, ranting, dirty masses who need to be kept as far away as possible. While they are willing to take your money, many of the Beltway Democrats see the vibrant activism in the blogosphere as some sort of an embarrassment, while others see it as a threat to their feifdoms. As The Times’ review of Crashing the Gate makes clear, national Democrats — although they don’t seem to know it yet — don’t really have the option anymore of ignoring the blogosphere. Its power is growing inexorably and is going to influence the country’s political debates one way or the other…
[Glenn explained to a Senate staffer] …that there is a bursting and eager energy among the literally millions of people who write and read blogs to take meaningful action against the Bush Administration. The people in the blogosphere are highly motivated, informed, and politically engaged. Activating that energy and having national Democrats work cooperatively with the blogosphere (rather than ignore it or scorn it) could make an enormous difference… It is monumentally dumb not to embrace the one mechanism which has the ability to unleash genuinely impassioned, mass citizen action.
[Glenn was rebuffed by the Senator's office]…This response is not uncommon. Many – if not most – national Democrats really are afraid of working with actual citizens, and are particularly afraid of having any involvement at all with the blogosphere. It’s as though they think they need to remain above and separated from the poorly behaved, embarrassing masses. They actually have been scared away from working with the very people who they are supposedly representing and who are on their side.
Bush followers, along with their media allies, recognize the lurking power of the anti-Bush component of the blogosphere and — for that very reason — have been expending considerable efforts recently to demonize it as nothing but fringe, extremist lunatics who are political poison. Rather than combat that demonization, national Democrats — as usual — have meekly acquiesced to it — even internalized it — and are now intimidated to go anywhere near one of the very few vibrant, living and breathing instruments of political activism available to them.
There’s more to this than the Democrats just being intimidated however. What’s happening now between the Democrats and the blogosphere is just the latest example of a pattern in US political party dynamics that goes back at least 100 years. I sent Glenn an email recommending he take a look at the book “Why Americans Don’t Vote” (there’s an updated edition titled “Why Americans Still Don’t Vote“) by political scientists Piven & Cloward. They persuasively argue that both parties have consistently preferred stable and reliable constituencies, even if it meant remaining in minority status, to the risks of bringing new, unpredictable voters into the fold. The parties are even more resistant to the idea of working with new centers of political power – like the blogosphere – which they cannot control.
There’s an interview with Piven that provides a parallel example – Democratic officeholders’ lack of genuine enthusiasm for making voter registration easier:
It’s a long-standing pattern in American electoral politics that the parties compete as much by trying to keep people from the polls as by trying to bring them to the polls. That proposition flies in the face of a kind of truism that’s taught in political science classes that competitive parties try to enlarge turnout. This was a proposition advanced by a very eminent and brilliant political scientist named E.E. Schattschneider. He thinks that it was party competition that led to enlarging the electorate in American political history. That was true for a little while early in the 19th century. But by the end of the 19th century, the parties had discovered another way of competing, by disenfranchising groups that wouldn’t vote for them, by keeping them away from the polls, by making it harder for them to vote. We know it’s true in the South, where blacks and poor whites were kept from the polls, but it was true in the North as well.
We can still see this in electoral politics. In our book we tell the story of our efforts to win agency-based registration to make it possible for people to register to vote when they used other government services. That reform was eventually embodied in federal law in the National Voter Registration Act, known as motor voter. We worked at that reform for 15 years. At the beginning, we thought that liberal Democrats would be our allies because, after all, if we made it easier for poor people and working people and blacks and Hispanics to vote, they would vote for Democrats, so why shouldn’t Mario Cuomo or David Dinkins be on our side? They have the authority to order voter registration in state or city agencies. But they weren’t on our side. They mouthed our principles. They said they were on our side. They slapped us on the back and issued orders, but they didn’t see to it that those orders were implemented. We think it’s because of the destabilizing impact that a large influx of poor and minority voters would have not only on the chances of Mario Cuomo, but on the entire Democratic establishment in New York State, and ditto for David Dinkins and the entire Democratic establishment in New York City.
We also tried to get interest groups like the unions or the social service agencies to work on this, but with very desultory responses. They were willing to support us in principle, but they were not willing to use any organizational capital to see to it that voter registration was offered to people who used the services in social agencies or in the agencies where unions were strong. In both of those instances, organizational maintenance concerns were preeminent. They didn’t want any of the backlash they might experience if they were to make it easy for poor and minority people to vote.
This analysis can be extended to the blogosphere. Not only are blogs energizing new voters, they are raising money and independently promoting their own agendas, and the Democratic Party has no control over them. On the one hand, the blogosphere can bring in voters and money, but on the other, it has the potential to upset the power structure of the Party, which means the current leadership could lose its control of the party organization if it embraced the blogosphere. The Party leadership would prefer to maintain that control, even if it means being relegated to long-term status as the minority party, rather than run the risk of losing control for the sake of winning and becoming the majority party.
