Two recent events got me thinking about the online progressive community's achievements since 2000 and how that community is perceived in various quarters of the political and media establishment. The first is Paul Krugman's appearance on the cover of Newsweek -- Krugman is part of the online community insofar as he has been a consistent beacon for progressive bloggers and like many of his media cohorts, is now a blogger himself. The second is news that my friend and former Clinton campaign colleague Judd Legum, founder of the indispensable Think Progress, is running for office in Maryland. The nexus between Krugman and Legum is that they each played a role, albeit a different one, in the web-powered progressive movement that ultimately crushed Bushism and resulted in a stunning reversal of political fortunes: Republicans and conservatives, riding high through the Bush years, are suddenly lost in the political wilderness.
I went back and browsed blog archives during the years when the Gang of 500 fawned over Bush's 'firmness' and the gang of Constitution-bashers in his orbit were running rampant, to remind myself of the pervasive sense of dismay and disgust, the outrage that powered the online progressive movement. It wasn't long ago when Ann Coulter showed up on NBC to gleefully malign 9/11 widows and Bush yucked it up with reporters as the nation came apart at the seams, when Power Line was TIME's blog of the year and outing an American spy was an accepted method of responding to an unfavorable editorial. Needless to say, it's incredibly gratifying to see how far we've come. And at the same time sobering to know how far there is to go.
Credit for this turn of events is rightfully shared across the progressive and Democratic universe, from interest groups and think tanks to public officials, strategists and party leaders like Paul Wellstone, who years after his tragic death remains a progressive icon, Howard Dean, who tapped into the online zeitgeist and electrified the netroots, John Kerry, who battled the indomitable combination of Bush and a supplicant press, Hillary Clinton, who, unbeknownst to many, quietly helped build a progressive infrastructure and single-handedly demonstrated that a Democrat could take the full force of the right-wing attack machine and come out stronger, and Barack Obama, who delivered the coup de grâce to Bushism and who, along with Michelle Obama, has restored dignity to the White House.
That said, I lament the fact that with all the triumphant talk about an online revolution and unprecedented grassroots involvement in the 2008 campaign, the netroots - a relatively small but highly motivated and dedicated band of web-based progressives - have received far less credit than they deserve for their outsized role in initiating a seismic shift away from rightwing extremism, something I wrote about two weeks before the election:
One thing that shouldn't be overlooked [in an Obama victory] is the ragtag group of activists who, from the fear of knowing that America had taken a terrible turn at the dawn of a millennium, embraced a new medium and labored tirelessly, thanklessly, defending the Constitution and the rule of law. Day after day, they congregated on websites, blogs, message boards and any other online forum they could find to write, debate, argue and resist a radical administration and a lockstep Republican Party. ... We should honor the 'ten percenters' who took pride in opposing Bush when his approval rating was near 90%, the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Yoo, Addington, Wolfowitz, Rove and Gonzales holding sway over the nation, with Coulter, Hannity, Savage and Limbaugh spewing hate and liberals labeled traitors.
We should acknowledge that the netroots kept hope alive when our system of checks and balances was in mortal danger ... when civil liberties were fast becoming disposable niceties. We should realize that back when Billmon and Bob Somerby and a gentle soul with a sharp pen named Steve Gilliard were required reading, when Digby was a mystery man and Firedoglake was a new blog with an intriguing name, when citizens across the country began logging on and conversing from the heart, there was no glory in political blogging. There still isn't. No one knew if blogs would become quaint artifacts. Many hoped they would. Blogging was about speaking up for America's guiding principles, liberty, justice, equality, opportunity, democracy.
Of course, no political group or ideology has a monopoly on liberty, justice, equality, opportunity, and democracy. But in the end, online progressives were just plain right about almost everything they fought for -- and against. Witness this recent Washington Post story, Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots, one of hundreds of articles vindicating and validating progressive activists. And yet, despite being prescient, patriotic (in the non-jingoistic sense), and despite gamely taking the slings and arrows of the establishment, the impression of the online progressive community as an angry, undisciplined and unruly mob - DFH's, in the vernacular - hasn't changed all that much in the past decade, despite Democratic victories. In good measure it's a result of inherent hostility to a new medium and fundamental resistance to progress(ives), but to some degree, it's because of the conflation of genuine moral outrage and the hard-nosed tone of online dialogue with the nasty comments of trolls and miscreants, an unfortunate (and often intentional) misconstrual.
In a nutshell, online progressives (and their hubs like Huffington Post and Daily Kos) have borne the brunt of the blame for allegedly poisoning the national discourse, if only because the rise of the online commentariat coincides with the Bush/Cheney presidency. The process of tarnishing a group with the errant actions of a small minority is nothing new. In the Internet age, it occurs whenever the comments of a few intransigent attention-seekers and trouble-makers are used to undermine the entire progressive community. Meanwhile, the stream of venom that emanates from rightwing personalities has been largely overlooked and in the case of Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Hannity and others, embraced by major media outlets.
Does it matter how the netroots are viewed? That's a fair question - perhaps progressives are outsiders by definition and this is just a perennial problem or perhaps the inexorable blurring of old and new media lines and the dramatic expansion of the online commentariat will render the issue moot - but it's still worth noting that the negativity (and downright viciousness) permeating comment threads is an intractable problem that goes far beyond politics and shouldn't be confused with either the authentic moral outrage that fuels progressive action or the blunt talk that characterizes online political discourse.
Peruse any discussion thread on YouTube, blogs, message boards and major news sites and you're bound to find a handful of personal attacks, racist statements, unwarranted insults and so on. This isn't confined to politics - it occurs everywhere. Mean-spirited, obnoxious and indiscriminately hostile comments are a necessary online evil and will always be a (minor) part of the technology-based global conversation. Seasoned web surfers typically tune them out and counsel others to do the same ("don't feed the trolls" is a longstanding proscription). But it's imperative that we distinguish those comments from real and productive moral outrage and to acknowledge that even though anger as a character flaw is ignoble, anger in a moral cause is essential - and laudable. The netroots possess the latter and for a variety of reasons, some of which I've described above, have been tagged with the former.
Paul Waldman elucidated the point in a 2007 piece titled Damn Right, We're Angry:
There's no point in hiding it, no point in trying to explain it away. Yes, it's true: We progressives are angry. And we no longer care if the centrist, moderate guardians of the establishment scold us for it. Our anger is not just some vague feeling whose source we can't put our finger on. It isn't based on absurd conspiracy theories and it isn't illogical. We're angry because of what has happened to our country, because of how we've been treated, and because of the innumerable crimes the conservatives have committed. We're angry at the president, we're angry at the Congress, we're angry at the news media. And we have every right to be.
It's true, we don't like the fact that the most powerful human being on the planet is such a ridiculous buffoon that he can't put two coherent sentences together without beginning to giggle and shimmy his shoulders. But we're not angry because we think he's stupid; we're angry because he treats us as though we're stupid. We're angry that he lied to us, and lied to us and lied to us again. We're angry that when he lies to us it isn't because he's caught up in scandal or got caught doing something he shouldn't have, it's part of a carefully constructed plan to fool the public.
Yes, we're angry about Iraq, and we may be for the rest of our lives. We get angry every day when we open our newspapers and see the photo of another young soldier who died for this, another one maimed for life, another one with a tormented and broken soul. We're angry that America may now be the only country in the world in which torture is an officially sanctioned policy, proclaimed proudly in public. We're angry that in our name prisoners are subjected to sleep deprivation, water boarding and other forms of psychological torture to the point where they are literally driven mad. We're angry that the president has decided, over 750 times, that if Congress passes a law and he doesn't like it, he'll just ignore it.
Granted, that was 2007, and this is a different world. Nonetheless, moral outrage among online progressives is alive and well, as it should be. Pundits and analysts may portray it as a rift between Obama and the left, but that's a hopelessly narrow interpretation. A writer, lawyer and activist like Glenn Greenwald continues to fight for core principles regardless of the party in power. Good for him and for those who know that the progressive movement is larger than any one person or any one era, that to make meaningful progress we have to overcome innumerable obstacles, that it will take countless generations to deal with violence, injustice, hunger, greed, inequality, oppression and the myriad causes of human misery. Our brief moment in history means less in the scheme of things than humanity's unending task of civilizing itself and avoiding self-immolation. That process has been powered through the ages by progressive thinkers and activists, almost all of whom were driven by moral outrage and many of whom paid for their beliefs with their lives.
Speaking of Glenn Greenwald, here's his take on the virtues of public anger:
Only this true, intense, and -- yes -- scary public rage can serve as a check on ongoing pilfering by the narrowed monied factions who control our Government for their own interests and who otherwise have no reason to stop. Who else is going to impose those checks? The bought-and-paid-for, incomparably subservient, impotent and inept Congress? The establishment-loyal, vapid political press? An executive branch run by the very people who are most vested in, dependent on, and loyal to the financial system that produced these disasters? Only a healthy fear of the populace -- exactly what has been missing -- can achieve that.
Obviously, mass rage can entail its own excesses and, and if unchecked, can lead to mob rule, a form of majoritarian tyranny (as Armando notes, its isolated, unrepresentative excesses (death threats!) are already being exaggerated to discredit the underlying anger itself). But we are far, far, far away from the point where unchecked public sentiment plays too great of a role in how our political institutions function. Rather: we're a country that, for the last decade, acquiesced meekly and quietly as our Government transferred huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite; launched a devastating war based on purely false pretenses; tortured, spied on us and literally claimed the right to invalidate law and the Constitution; and turned itself over to the highest bidders.
The overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? The overarching question is: why has there been so little?
Precisely.
It's a worthwhile endeavor to remind ourselves what an exceptional thing moral outrage is, how anger spurs action, and how the netroots used righteous anger to lay the groundwork for a Democratic resurgence. Now we need much more of it, directed at those across the globe who control the levers of power.
As evidence, I challenge you to read this story without becoming enraged at the cowards who perpetrated it:
The video shows a young woman held face down as a Taliban commander whips her repeatedly with a leather strap. "Leave me for the moment -- you can beat me again later," she screams, pleading for a reprieve and writhing in pain. Paying no heed, the commander orders those holding her to tighten their grip and continues the public flogging. A large group of men quietly stands and watches in a circle around her. The woman in the video is a 17-year-old resident of Kabal, in the restive Swat region in northwestern Pakistan. The images, which have been broadcast repeatedly by private television news networks in Pakistan, have caused outrage here and set off bitter condemnation by rights activists and politicians.
If we intend to (re)claim our standing as a moral leader among nations, we need to see a much more forceful - i.e. angry - response to these kinds of egregious acts.
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