Victory 2.0: the Online Realignment

Few books could be more relevant to the current political cycle than Markos Moulitsas’ Taking on the System, a guide to the creation and influence of the netroots on electoral politics. Consider this post a book report. But first, a little story.

In 2002, my belief in our country’s ability to govern itself was bottoming out. I had the distinct pleasure of driving to a meeting in southern Georgia during the midterm congressional elections, listening to the surprising returns as Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Max Cleland and ensuring Republican control of the Senate. Chambliss, as you may well know, ran a campaign best known for ridiculing Cleland’s service to his country, which cost Cleland three limbs in Vietnam. Ol Saxby has gone on to distinguish himself as a deadbeat Bush lapdog with no ideas or credentials to his name. But he stuck with the Rove playbook — marching toward war with Iraq — and back then it worked.

Desperate for some evidence that the entire country (which wasn’t looking any smarter than Georgia voters) hadn’t lost its mind, I turned to DailyKos.com where I found a community of like-minded people reporting on their experiences from around the country. At the time it wasn’t much more than a place to vent, but as the audience grew, their collective contribution to the discussion became smarter, more interesting, and eventually pretty important. By 2003 they were adopting Howard Dean as their candidate and stuffing his pockets with money, a trend that carried over to John Kerry’s presidential campaign in a stunning reversal of the conventional wisdom that had predicted campaign finance reform would extinguish the Democratic Party. By 2005 Daily Kos and other sites were driving news in the mainstream media. By 2006 they destroyed the campaign of probable Republican presidential nominee (and closet racist) George Allen.

Taking on the System is Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas’ take on how this change came about, and what it means. For the Democratic Party, it goes beyond new ways of organizing and raising money, the party’s two biggest disadvantages in the early Bush years. Change has completely altered the landscape of the left and in the country generally. Gone are the ideas that Democrats shouldn’t contest races in some parts of the country because they can’t win; or that Democrats can’t organize a ground game; or that Democrats can’t build grass-roots waves into a powerful movement. Gone is virtually every advantage Republicans had built over the last two decades: money, churches, ground games, stupid media narrative tricks. All that’s left for them is to fight on the issues… and we can see how well that worked out.

Mostly, Taking on the System is a handbook for converting a grass-roots movement into an effective force. Assuming a movement’s ideas have real merit, the book provides a roadmap to getting them across: effective media strategies, ignoring the gatekeepers, taking the gloves off, etc. Somehow this can all be linked to the ideas of Saul Alinsky, though don’t ask me how. Anyway, this would all be very useful, if not terribly interesting, if these various strategies weren’t told through the events of the last six years. Events like Jim Webb’s victory in Virginia, fueled by George Allen’s “macaca moment.” Or Democrats winning back governorships and senate seats in places like Montana, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, and so on. Or the demise of Trent Lott. Or the unmasking of the US Attorney firings, tied to a larger Republican strategy of voter intimidation.

Or the election of Barack Obama. Of course, the Netroots can’t take too much credit; in hindsight Obama was a brilliant candidate running just in time. But it’s no accident that he raised sums of money thought unthinkable just one election ago. Or that he organized a ground game which caught and passed the legendary Republican machine virtually overnight. Or that he contested states the party’s longtime leaders had written off — and then won, or at least brought out enough voters to tip some down-ballot races. Or that he spoke of the campaign belonging to the supporters, not the other way around. Six years ago the country was full of Democratic voters like me, aching to find some way to connect to the party and its candidates, rather than being told to send a check and mind our own business. The Obama campaign seized upon all of these concepts masterfully. Obama ran the first Democratic presidential campaign of the 21st century, the results of which speak for themselves.

At least a sliver of his success is owed to DNC Chairman Howard Dean, who was calling on the party to change its tactics five years ago, a call that brought him and the Netroots together in the first place. And another sliver to the Netroots, who heard Dean’s call, and in the process taught Dean how the internet could revolutionize campaign finance. These are two separate, supporting elements of a much larger event, the election of a truly smart, modern president, but as much as any factor they demonstrate how different elections are now than they were just eight years ago.

One last thought: the most profound element of Taking on the System isn’t so much the electoral stuff, but rather the nature of the internet itself. There is an anecdote early in the book where a rock band called the Arctic Monkeys is asked about their success, driven in part by a MySpace webpage. The band asks the interviewer what he’s talking about. Turns out, fans of the band created a page for them, without their knowledge (not all rockers speak HTML), and had been promoting their music very effectively — no cost to anyone, and without waiting for people to tell them it was OK. In cyberspace, nobody needs permission from gatekeepers like the major media, or a record company, or an entrenched oligarchy of party insiders to launch a movement. If a band’s music, or a politician’s ideas, resonate with people, those people can now connect with each other and organize into something more forceful, or at least fun. America may be larger and busier than it used to be, and we no longer network or form community through our churches and town halls and town squares as much. But to people who’ve mastered the internet, the world can actually become less isolating, and harder for the powerful few to control.