Unfortunately, the netroots community has fallen into the same trap: not only are they bi-coastal, well-educated, tech-savvy suburbanites, but they tend to spend a lot of energy on their own preoccupations — seemingly oblivious to the concerns of potential liberal allies. Volumes have been written on the blogs about “Net Neutrality,” Diebold voting machines, Wal-Mart, Arctic drilling, and Guantánamo Bay; and very little on nuts-and-bolts economic, health, racial, and education issues.
MoveOn.org, for example, has recently adopted campaigns on “Net Neutrality,” preserving federal funding of public broadcasting, an Exxon boycott, and voting-machine paper trails. With the exception of Exxon, these are all “process” issues of the kind that inspired McGovern supporters in 1972, and still hold sway with Dukakis-style liberals.
Meanwhile, the ProgBloggers have virtually ignored the fact that the Republican-led Congress just voted itself a pay raise this month — an issue that, according to poll testing by Democracy Corps in Washington, might be the single most resonant issue in the country for Democrats.
No matter how often Democrats are reminded that the South and Midwest were home to the historical progressive movement, they just can’t see past the ultra-redness of it all, says George P. Lakoff, linguist and author of Don’t Think of an Elephant. “[Midwesterners] have an idea of community that is completely progressive,” Lakoff says. “You can talk to them using progressive language — but you have to change what you talk about.”
Instead, they pander — and do it with almost comic transparency. In the South, for example, “Democrats think they can go to the Waffle House and say they love grits and NASCAR. Well, a more effective pander won’t work,” says Paul Waldman, author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.
Netroots activists too often continue the unfortunate liberal tradition of talking at, rather than listening to, regional progressives. Making matters more prickly, they tend to call aggressively for standing by “universal” progressive ideals, for a political purity that not only makes things awkward for flesh-and-blood political candidates — practitioners of the art of compromise — but also makes it easy for the non-latte-sipping self-styled “rubes of the flyover” to dismiss the netroots. Over and over again at YearlyKos, speakers and attendees told the Phoenix that standing on principal — à la Paul Wellstone — conveys strength and trustworthiness that ultimately brings success at the ballot box.
Maybe they’re right, but many Democratic candidates will conclude that in their own districts, a progressive stand on immigration policy, say, or taxes, would be self-destructive. And if the candidate makes that decision, will the netroots abandon their support? Will the donations dry up?
It would help if the netroots made a better effort to connect with the core constituencies of the Democratic Party — without whom Democrats simply cannot win. Likewise, those groups should reach out and share what they know with the netroots. But that’s rarely happening. Big labor, for example, has the most sophisticated information-gathering and message-delivery machinery in the party. Members of Courage Campaign, a California netroots organization, talk about their frustration with the hold labor unions have on the Democratic Party in that state. So now the two are working against each other rather than together. That’s counterproductive. “There is a great deal of communication that needs to happen so the netroots understand who their base has to be,” says Chris Chafe, chief of staff for the UNITE HERE labor union, which represents hundreds of thousands of hotel workers. “We think we have tremendous common ground with the netroots community.”
