Bob Fertik is taking exception to my assertion that the netroots have no legislative agenda except net neutrality. In response, he wrote a post listing 140 items that he'd like to see enacted, and his readers combed through and picked the top 20. I'm glad to see that net neutrality is on there, and I was probably not totally correct to say that's our only clear agenda item. Still, this is worth thinking through.
There are a few reasons that net neutrality is on the netroots legislative agenda. One is quite obvious - without NN, we couldn't do what we do. The second is not so obvious, and that's the organizing work that has gone into this issue. There is a genuine popular movement to expand and clarify the internet's legal and technological status. From DJs to video game players to sportsbloggers to small businesses, the movement to keep the internet neutral has used this people-power to fight on a Federal level and on state levels. And now we're going to go on offense. But this isn't because it's the right thing to do, or because the Democrats win. It's because there's a genuine popular movement organizing around this political change, and there's a clear consensus around the issue, and it's all backed by a strong and broad coalition of which the netroots is only one piece.
So I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about power and why we're going to be disappointed by this Congress. As much as we might want to see a good number of great and good policies passed, electing a Democratic Congress means only that the Democrats control the legislative agenda. It does not mean that great and good policies will be enacted. While Speaker Pelosi is going to be enormously influential, power in our political system flows from the people. Specifically, it flows from organized groups of people willing to force politicians to do the right thing through systematic pressure on various institutions.
I would love to see voting reform as one of the first items tackled. This is true for tax reform, global warming, health care, etc. But making this happen is not a matter of electing a group of people and then presenting them with laundry lists of policies to enact. I mean first of all who gets to write the list? Look at how ridiculous is the scramble for credit over this election. In a year where we picked up state houses, Secretary of State offices, Governorships, the Senate, the House, and dogcatchers, somehow Rahm Emanuel or Chuck Schumer are the geniuses? Frankly if you're going to give credit to one person, you might as well give it to Bush, since he persuaded the American people to vote against him.
We can argue that the netroots helped elect this Congress, and we did. But Ned Lamont's victory on August 8, which put Iraq firmly on the agenda, also happened because of Ned Lamont's wealth. Should he get to write the agenda? As much as I trust his judgment, the answer is obviously no. In fact, agendas aren't simple to write. They aren't a list of things that ought to be done because they are good and great. They are the result of lots of groups fighting and organizing with each other to build coalitions that will put forward solutions to our nation's problems. One of the last steps is to put that issue on Nancy Pelosi's agenda.
The netroots is not a top-down institution managed by say, Atrios, who dispenses robot ponies only to those who please him. It is as much an organizational platform, one of many in our society, that you can use to push for policies by building coalitions. When I wrote that the only netroots-specific agenda that we have is net neutrality, I didn't mean that we don't want a higher minimum wage or labor protections or to stop global warming. What I meant was that pushing for any of these requires building a coalition, and that's a LOT of work. It's work we haven't done. That's not to say others haven't, or that we won't help with policy outcomes we agree with. It's just that in terms of what we've done to put policy on the table, net neutrality is there.
There are other pieces of legislation that could see movement without that much work. The Bankruptcy Bill, or the Torture Bill, or various other awful Bush-era bills, have constituencies that could be organized against them, and some of these constituencies are online. There are a lot more agenda items we could organize, in fact, and I hope we do. Getting something to Congress is really the last step.
And so while Nancy Pelosi is soon going to be very powerful, in some ways she will only be choosing from among legislative options presented to her by the efforts of organizers and the will of the people. I'm not sure we're ready to force our leaders to do the right thing, because we haven't been organizing effective coalitions for some time. We're getting better very quickly, and I imagine that 2008 is going to be very strange, and we'll see a better and stronger progressive movement every day going forward. This means that it's our job, each and every one of us, to organize coalitions to make this country better.
When Howard Dean said 'you have the power', he was right. They work for us. They really do. And they know it. But there's a lot of work to do before something becomes a priority. Let's take New Orleans, which is a dead city that needs to be rebuilt. That's not on Bob's agenda. Should it be? Well, sure, but then again, that's kind of my point.
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