Power to the people with a political takeover plan

IN a given week, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s progressive blog, Daily Kos, receives more than 3 million visits, making it one of the most widely read political blogs in the world, and earning its proprietor regular calls for advice from Democratic Party leaders. Not bad for somebody who just four years ago was a Silicon Valley dropout with no real political experience. Now Moulitsas, along with fellow blogger Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com (the DD stands for “Direct Democracy”), has put down some thoughts in a more traditional medium -- a book.

In “Crashing the Gate,” the two are not shy about what they hope to accomplish: nothing but an all-out “people-powered” takeover of the Democratic Party -- which, they are firmly convinced, is the only way to take America back from the conservatives currently ruining it. “To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson,” they write, “the tree of a political party must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of reformers and insiders.” So begins a chapter titled “Civil War.”

Armstrong and Moulitsas are indeed relentless in their hatred for the “fat, lazy, and corrupt” entrenched class of Democratic insiders, whom they blame for just about all of the party’s failures. A special ring of hell is reserved for the hapless Democratic Party consultants, who not only keep losing, but also get very rich in the process because they work off commissions. “Call it a cash cow, an incestuous circle ... the point is, there is no accountability and the system rewards networking and schmoozing skills in D.C., not performance and results in elections.”

The bloggers are also fed up with their party’s shrill single-issue groups, who just don’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “coalition.” “So it’s not a stretch,” they write, “for demagogic Republicans to paint Democrats as a loose collection of selfish people who are fanatical about their specific cause and have no larger concerns -- for the economy, the military, or the country.” All this, they argue, makes it hard for Democrats to develop their “elevator pitch,” that clear message that will resonate with voters. But Armstrong and Moulitsas argue the grass-roots online community that frequents their ilk of sites (a community tagged the “netroots” by Armstrong back in 2002) is above all that infighting. The “netroots activist,” they write, is “fiercely multi-issue, and focused on building a broader movement.”

Though the old Democratic establishment can do no right in their eyes, Armstrong and Moulitsas gush with envy at what Republican strategists have achieved. President Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, comes across as smarter than God (and able to leap tall buildings in a single thought!). Oh, to have the sophisticated ground operation of the GOP (“four times more accurate than ... traditional direct mail, phone banks, and door-to-door canvassing”). To have their emotion-tweaking political advertising, their massive think-tank/media/talk radio echo chamber, their big-tent approach to keeping rival factions in line, their capacity to nurture their young, even their command of ideas: “[W]hat conservatives have built over the past thirty years is nothing short of brilliant. We can admire it the way we would admire the precision, engineering, and craftsmanship of a stealth fighter.” The amazing thing, then, is that Democrats are competitive at all. But Armstrong and Moulitsas take heart here, because it “means that despite the massive advantages of the right-wing machine and their hundreds of millions of dollars, we are still the party of the people.”

Like Rove, Armstrong and Moulitsas come across as heavily focused on winning, evincing only minimal interest in actual policy. They offer some helpful lessons from state-level Democratic revivals (Colorado: build coalitions; Montana: ignore interest groups except for the NRA; Virginia: target rural communities). But mostly they diagnose and dissect the national Democrats’ stubbornly persistent ineptitudes. Though such critiques are valuable and well documented here, the authors’ remedy -- a bloody takeover of the party by progressive “riffraff like us” -- seems like the easy-to-make outsiders’ claim that “we could do it better” rather than a revolutionary plan for success.

“Crashing the Gate” is brash and infuriating, as it should be. The progressive blogosphere is starting to feel its own strength -- in the continued growth of Web traffic, in its powerful fund-raising capacity, and in the rise of its man, Howard Dean, as Democratic National Committee chairman. As Eli Pariser of Moveon.org’s political action wing wrote in December 2004 (after helping to raise a few hundred million dollars online): “Now it’s our party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.” “Crashing the Gate” is a powerful salvo in that battle. And as such, it commands attention.

Lee Drutman is the co-author of “The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.”