Amen.

Amen

Amen

AMEN!!

Amen, and I continue to put my money where my mouth is, including $50.00 a month to building progressive infrastructure as you requested, contributions to dozens of Congressional and senatorial candidates, and five grand to the Blue America Pac specifically to run ads to support the John Laesch campaign against the meat puppet.

I'm now in $2300.00 to Barack Obama's campaign.

Please ask the choir to say a prayer for me if my wife ever finds our how much I have spent trying to save America.

of blog fights, too.

Whether or not folks are actually being "excluded" in some meaningful way from participating at a blog (I tend to discount such complaints), many will believe they are being excluded, and they will either end up melting down, or simply packing up, leaving, and blogging elsewhere.

I guess I was just thinking of this because I was reading TalkLeft earlier.  :)

been involved in, nothing has been more consistent, nor depressing, than the arrival of DC based consultants on a grass roots based campaign.

There is absolutely a class war between the envelope stuffers and the consultants.

I have been seeing the same 25 yr old Yale graduates arriving from DC for decades now.  They are all the same: ambitious, arrogant, and patronizing.  Their only charm is how transparently on the make they are, and how bad they are at hiding it.

I can take some of this: much of politics is driven by personal ambition.

But what REALLY drives me crazy is that they are ignorant of the local situtation.  Franklin wrote of Adams "what he does not know he does not suspect exists".  And so it is of them: what they do not know about local politics they do not even know exists.

These 25 yr olds live their lives like seasons: most move on shortly to law school or business school or daddy's hedge fund.

Occasionally, when this happens, this envelope stuffer gets his revenge when he finds that the same arrogant consultant is now merely a lowly law school student looking for a job.  This has happened several times.

I do think it is important to preach to the choir for the reasons you say, but it is also important for the choir to be able to sing to a larger audience, preferably more or less in harmony, and with a few new hymns from time to time, so that we can get enough adherents to move the denomination to have a better message and better representatives.  

Beautifully stated.

The difference between 2007 and 1997 is staggering. I still remember the sense of total frustration, impotence, and isolation that my husband and I felt during the endless years of Clinton witchhunting. That was followed by the stunning outrage of the Supreme Court installed presidency in 2000. After Kerry's defeat there was still a blank space in terms of aroused activists with a lot of energy and no constructive place to expend it. But things really began catching up then and now there's all kind of options available to progressives who want to make a difference politically, on an ongoing basis.

I can't claim to be a true activist. I'm a political junkie versus a campaign volunteer. We have a small business that absorbs most of our energy. And frankly, we feel that we need our politics to remain private as we have republican as well as democratic clients. (Our business has nothing to do with politics.)

But! Now, I get quick access to action items that make me feel that I make a difference. I make phone calls and send emails to key figures at key times (such as calling Harry Reid's office and arguing for pulling out of the FOX debate).  I pass info. onto friends/family who aren't junkies, but rely on me to keep them posted on critical issues.

And, instead of feeling isolated and frustrated, I feel energized.

Amen!

Amen is right.  It is about time the Democrats came home.  

Please note that the reason I believe the conservative netroots are not as energized as the progressives is because the conservatives have the very effective megaphone of talk radio from dawn to dusk daily. Although the Clintons defeated (in elections) this media in the 90's, they have not yielded but continue to crystalize and re-inforce the conservaive backbone to the extent that they have stayed with Bush even in the face of a disastrous Iraq war. Conservative talk radio is primarily responsible for raising the negatives of prominent democrats such as Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore with no effective counter-weight from progressive media. Soon they will do the same to Obama and John Edwards. I see the progressive netroots as a likely counter-weight to talk radio but the audience is presently limited - although growing. Besides, progressive netroots are quick to tear each other down in a manner not imaginable of conservative talk radio against another conservative. For example, Shawn Hanniday is parading conservative candidates on his talk radio show asking soft ball questions and allowing each candidate to express his views in the best light. His radio show then returns to bashing Hillary, Democrats and liberals. They are now getting around to Obama in order to raise his negatives as well since the think they have peaked on Hillary's. No similar critical examinations (or bashing) of Rudy, McCain and Romney to dust up the glow in whichever republican emerges as their candidate.

We progessives see class differences in our views and preferences while conservatives by and large don't. We progressive tend to attack each other more stridently than we do the real enemy - the conservatives. Example is the Iraq war. Instead of raving against the Republicans for enabling Bush to perpetuate this war, we blame Democrats for not getting the votes to stop the war. We don't do the math to see that Republicans are the real obstructionists but we target the very few Democrats who would not improve the voting math to pass a meaningful anti-war bill. The attention and pressure need to be on the Republicans every which way.

I do agree.  I think one of the other things that has happened is that though punditry may like to characterize the netroots as the left and the far left, I have to laugh at them.  I and some of my friends who became active via blogs over the last 3 years are the prototypical midwestern suburban moms.  We laugh when they characterize us as far left losers.  

No... the only ones losing out here are the out-of-touch pundits and DC consultants.

This post and some of the diagrams illustrating the relationships between liberal blogs made me think of emergence and self-organizing phenomena. From the wikipedia entry on emergence:

An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties. These are two of the major reasons why emergent behaviour occurs: intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback. The property itself is often unpredictable and unprecedented, and may represent a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities: they are irreducible. No physical property of an individual molecule of air would lead one to think that a large collection of them will transmit sound. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or shoal of fish are also good examples.

One reason why emergent behaviour is hard to predict is that the number of interactions between components of a system increases combinatorially with the number of components, thus potentially allowing for many new and subtle types of behaviour to emerge. For example, the possible interactions between groups of molecules grows enormously with the number of molecules such that it is impossible for a computer to even count the number of arrangements for a system as small as 20 molecules.

On the other hand, merely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to guarantee emergent behaviour; many of the interactions may be negligible or irrelevant, or may cancel each other out. In some cases, a large number of interactions can in fact work against the emergence of interesting behaviour, by creating a lot of "noise" to drown out any emerging "signal"; the emergent behaviour may need to be temporarily isolated from other interactions before it reaches enough critical mass to be self-supporting. Thus it is not just the sheer number of connections between components which encourages emergence; it is also how these connections are organised. A hierarchical organisation is one example that can generate emergent behaviour (a bureaucracy may behave in a way quite different to that of the individual humans in that bureaucracy); but perhaps more interestingly, emergent behaviour can also arise from more decentralized organisational structures, such as a marketplace. In some cases, the system has to reach a combined threshold of diversity, organisation, and connectivity before emergent behaviour appears.

So I wonder if mathematicians would classify the online progressive movement as "emergent". I kind of hope it is, as emergent phenomena exhibit robustness - which would mean we could expect the netroots / blogosphere to exert growing influence,  and more importantly, an ability to adapt to changes in the political landscape in cycles to come. On the other hand, the unpredictability factor cited above means we can't know where this path is leading us ten years from now (and for some campaigns this means they're timid about tapping the netroots)... or it might at least make the ride more fun.

Perhaps people who work on this theory could also explain why the conservative blogosphere doesn't appear to exhibit emergence. I guess the obvious thing is that their side is so centralized / top-down, so focused on message right now. The basic fuel for liberal self-organiziation was frustrated people looking for places to put their money other than the traditional institutions, and were willing to go with new structures like 20 bucks to Dean or ActBlue. Will conservatives get so pissed at their party that they will want someplace else to put their money, and then go ahead and build those sites? Or is there something else about the conservative mindset that precludes them from taking part in emergent institutions?

Jamming with the choir :)

Never have these words been so apropros as they are in Nevada!~! Bloogers are hated here almost as much as repugs.

Chris I like this so much better than the GET THE HELL OFF MY PROPERTY(SITE) post from the other day.  This preaching reaffirms why I as a stay at home mother of 2 turned to MyDD and the like to fill the void of the progressive voice that has been missing from the Democratic Party.  I like another poster am more of a political junkie than activist, but I do donate to Act Blue because I think it is important.  So I too will say amen to this post and the comment of meliou2; keep agitating for change.

Preaching is all well and good.  But preaching is high on exhortation, not information.

And choirs require practice, practice, practice--which needs feedback, feedback, feedback, and direction, direction, direction, direction.  In short, teaching.

Just knowing what's REALLY happening is all we need, usually.  We bring the exhortation ourselves.

It bugs me when people provide unidentified links. Like you linked to "here, here, here, here..."

How about linking to, "Why the net doens't like Hillary, and Moving Beyond the Blogs," or whatever the actual titles of the linked to articles were?

That way I have a bit of an idea what the article linked to will contain. Instead of having me click to all the linked articles to see if there was anything that interested me -- or more likely bypassing them altogether because I don't want to bother going to a new page if I don't know what it might contain.

Just a suggestion.

An interesting piece but I still have to quibble with your use of the term "progressive."  Is that term just a synonym for "Democratic?"  Do you consider Bob Shrum to be a progressive?