Progressive Path

Following on the heels of the various discussions that have been going on around here over the past couple of weeks regarding how the progressive net roots can best assert itself within the current political climate (third party? reform the Democratic Party? progressive coalition?), Peter Daou has written a great follow-up to his recent essay, The Triangle: Limits of Blog Power that applies the construct he laid out therein in a new piece, The Triangle: Obama’s Diary & Netroots Disenchantment, written as a response to a dKos diary by Senator Barack Obama, Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

First, the root deficiency of Democrats with respect to message is not that Democrats don’t match Republicans blow for blow (as Obama puts it, “energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion.”) It’s that they fail to project core convictions. What passes for Democratic conviction today is a mutated form of “press release speak,” the political version of an evolutionary dead-end, a soulless evocation of ideals and principles devoid of the visceral connection with a human heart that gives it meaning.

Press release speak is endemic in the Democratic leadership, but it is absent in the blog world, which explains the appeal of blogs to rank and filers. That’s not to say that Democrats don’t give the occasional stirring speech, but the Democratic establishment sorely lacks a modern-day Martin Luther King, someone who speaks words so unfeigned, so blunt, so true that by sheer force of will their words move public opinion and rouse people to action.

[…]

In my previous ‘triangle’ essay, I discussed the political landscape from the perspective of bloggers. Looking at it from the perspective of party officials like Senator Obama, perhaps there’s a different message to be taken from the netroots. Instead of decrying the supposed tendency of the online community to “brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country,” they should realize that what netroots activists really want is leaders who will fight like warriors for what’s right and just, leaders who will shed the Beltway-speak and the focus groups and the strategists and advisors and tell Americans why progressive ideals are ethical ideals, American ideals. Stop listening so hard to what people tell you they think and teach them how and what to think. Don’t sit back while the right creates conventional wisdom and then fashion your policies around it, use the netroots and the media to build a triangle that reshapes conventional wisdom.

This is exactly what I’ve been shouting about since I started this blog. On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King told the country that he had a dream. It’s time for the American Left to announce that it has a vision—a vision of an America in which every American can realize his or her dream, whether that dream is to find a job, free oneself of the chains of poverty, get married, go to college, or take advantage of any of the other opportunities that ought to be available to every citizen of this nation. Not everyone announces his or her dream in such stirring style as did the Reverend King, but everyone does have a dream, and our passionate, authentic vision must be that every person has the same chance to make it reality.

It is a national conversation waiting to be had, and it is ours for the taking, if only we will commit ourselves to having it.