The Netroots
The Bleeding Heart Show recently blogged about the Democratic Party’s netroots and how it could possibly be applied to the Labour Party.
I don’t know if it could work, but there is a single significant thing missing from the Bleeding Heart Show’s analysis that I want to address, and that’s the lack of Democratic Party grassroots. I don’t think it necessarily changes their conclusion, but it needs to be talked about to understand the larger picture.
In the aftermath of Watergate, the Republican Party radically reinvented itself in many ways. A lot of its reinventions are pretty familiar to all but the most casual follower of politics: the Evangelical Right got involved, the South’s incorporation into the Party was completed, but one thing frequently is overlooked, and that was the massive build-up of the Republican Party at the most local and State levels.
The Republican Party built up the grassroots in the 1970’s at local levels: City Council people, State Treasurers, etc., etc., on bread-and-butter issues, like busing, school issues, prayer, and issues that mattered to people at a local level.
The Democratic Party did not do that, and has not done that until the past several years.
While the Republican Party was building up its grassroots, the Democratic Party crumbled. With the collapse of the Clintonian Consensus on how to win elections (triangulation), in 2000, in 2004, and with the demonstration of an alternative model in 2006, the Democratic Party leadership, which was mainly Clintonian, doesn’t have a base.
Enter the netroots. With a Democratic Party from 1992-2006 that didn’t cater to the “Democratic” position on issues (remember, triangulation was to find the traditional Democratic position, the center, and go in the middle of them), true believers of traditional Democratic positions and values had no where to go, until the Internet. With the Internet, the netroots was born, and the bottled up grassroots of the Democratic Party found an outlet.
Results
For the Republican Party, the result of their choice to encourage local and State buildup was huge electoral success from 1980 to the present, dominating State and local governments, State legislatures, Congress (from 1994 to 2006) and the Presidency. The young, local candidates they nurtured in the 1970’s are now mature candidates who run for national positions. Moreover, these guys owe quite a bit to the national Party that nurtured them.
For the Democratic Party, you have a massive fundraising apparatus that is out of the control of the Party, which is particularly fascinating and in contrast to the Republican Party. The netroots has incredible fundraising capabilities, and we’ve seen it do incredible things that the Party could never do.
The clearest example of that are Democratic Primaries (no, not the Presidential ones). The Democratic Party, at a local, State, and National level does not take an official position on primaries. For instance, if the two people are running in a Democratic Primary for a Senate seat, the Party doesn’t endorse one over the other, or fundraise for one over the other. But with the netroots, we see people-powered candidates like Ned Lamont win a Democratic Primary against a sitting Senator, using the fundraising power of the netroots. Similarly, we see candidates like Jim Webb be propelled into the U.S. Senate on the backs of netroots Democrats.
This helps to explain why the Republican netroots isn’t developed. If I’m a Republican activist, there are strong State and local party organizations I can get involved in. There’s no need to snipe at the national Party from the sidelines on my blog: I can go out and shape my party from the ground up, and so they do.
Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy, widely recognized as an attempt to reproduce what the Republican Party did in the 1970’s, will, I think, weaken the netroots. If there’s a competent local and State party apparatus that people can get involved in, won’t they want to join up, rather than comment from the blog sidelines? Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. If the strategy is successful, a lot of the netroots might migrate into local and State party apparatuses, but then again, you might not be able to put the genie back into the bottle.
Interesting article Jeff.
What sort of sucess has Dean had as DNC chairman in rebuilding Democratic structures? Have the state Democratic organisations supported the strategy?
Another question is, given that your argument that the netroots have developed because of a lack of local party structures, we have to ask – do the corporate Democrats in the party really want to give the netroots an oppotunity to organise outside of the internet?
I’m inclined to be suspicious myself.
Bearing in mind that Republicans can’t really shape their party, and that corporate America has played a large part in whipping up the ‘grassroots’ sentiments of the Republican religious and assorted right, I don’t necessarily think that this is a reason why Republican net roots haven’t developed.
Plenty of US Right wingers sit and snipe online. I think the difference is that the right has control of the official media in the USA: they don’t need to snipe because they can turn on Fox and Bill O Reilly will do it for them.
Also, I’m inclined to query the extent to which Netroots has actually triggered a shift in the Democratic Party, and do not agree with the use of Webb and Lamont as examples. Lamont was a billionaire who financed his way into politics, only to lose the election. I don’t know much about Jim Webb but I suspect that if you look at the Electoral Commission website, the donations will be from corporate sponsors as much as from normal people.