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The very specialest blog post: Netroots Nation roundup
By Ned | July 24, 2008
I think I’ve finally organized my thoughts enough to provide a coherent take on my experiences at Netroots Nation, so here we go.
First off, I think the attendees at Netroots Nation represented a reasonable sample of all the different sections of the liberal blogosphere. That’s not to say that every group was proportionally represented, but there was a pretty good balance between, say, the wonkier types, the more organizing-oriented people, the activists on the ground, the campaign operatives, and so on.
As one might expect, that means that the crazy people were represented as well. Despite what Lee Siegel might tell you, they were a very small minority. A vocal minority, but a minority nonetheless. Was I kind of annoyed by the “VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM AND PLAGUE” pamphlets being distributed in the big ballroom? Sure. Just as I was annoyed by the Code Pink people running around the Nancy Pelosi event in their ridiculous Halloween costumes yelling bullshit.
But at the same time, it’s important to note a couple things about the presence of the aforementioned crazy people:
1.) The Netroots Nations organizers vocally registered their disapproval of the Code Pink hecklers. They weren’t present because Netroots Nation endorsed their organization, but rather because the organizers weren’t about to prevent anyone from entering the convention for ideological reasons. That’s a good thing. It’s also why, oddly enough, Bob Barr showed up on Saturday.
2.) I’d say that most of the attendees were as annoyed with the crazy people as I was. Looking at the Netroots Nation Twitter feed during the Pelosi event, a lot of people were begging the Code Pink people to shut up. And when during his presentation, Lessig said something to the effect of, “Vaccines are good and mercury does not cause autism,” he was greeted with thunderous applause from an audience which had been being told otherwise for two days straight by people who didn’t know any better.
This is the way the world should work. The actual extremists were treated like, well, extremists, and despite what right-wingers might want you to believe about the conference, it wasn’t made up of Marxist Jihadists or whatever. In fact, on the panels at least, it might have been nice to actually have some outright Communists, just as it would have been nice to have more centrist DLC types. Neither group was well-represented, although Harold Ford at least had the stones to show up for a panel. As it was, most of the panels weren’t too ideologically diverse, and while that meant I agreed with a lot of what was said by the speakers, it also meant the panels were a little more boring and somewhat less illuminating than they could have been. Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein, for example, are both really knowledgeable people and fun to listen to, but you can only learn so much about the Social Democratic Movement (the name of the panel they shared) when those two are locked in an agreeing contest simply because Netroots Nation didn’t provide anyone for them to disagree with.
Unfortunately, on the panels where there was real debate to be had - Ezra Klein versus single-payer hardliners, Harold Ford versus Kos, Nancy Pelosi versus 91% of America - there were hecklers. Another sizable, and annoying, minority. I’m all for asking the Speaker of the House tough questions, but yelling out “WHAT ABOUT IMPEACHMENT?!!” when she’s in the middle of responding to someone else’s grievance isn’t exactly helpful. Not only does it make the conversation a whole lot less productive, but it reaffirms the most obnoxious stereotypes of left-wing bloggers. To be fair, Pelosi and Ford both dodged a lot of questions, so the fault here isn’t one-sided. But I would have liked to see more actual discourse and less yelling on one side and dodging on the other. With the Ford panel in particular, I left feeling like my time had been wasted, because despite the efforts of Kos and Arshad, the moderator, there was just no meaningful discussion to be had.
There’s one other thing that kind of bugged me while I was at the convention, and to shed some light on that I’m going to have to do something that I never, ever do: I’m going to have to quote Ross Douthat approvingly. On the first day of the convention, serendipitously, he wrote:
…there’s no doubt a touch of concern-trolling involved whenever I fret about how the new progressive ecosystem seems hell-bent on imitating a lot of the things I find unpleasant about my own side of the partisan divide these days - the team-player mentality, the tendency toward cocooning, the obsession with policing orthodoxy, etc.
As if to prove the point, the very next day a prominent blogger told my convention roommate Sahar that the netroots aren’t ideological, they’re partisan.
A couple points on that:
1.) Saying “the netroots are this one thing” or “the netroots are that one thing” is inherently bullshit, and anyone who attended the conference should know that. Maybe there wasn’t a whole lot of argument on actual policy on the panels, but the approaches people take are pretty wildly divergent - a site like, say, Open Left may be more partisan than ideological, but you’d have a hard time convincing me that someone like Amanda Marcotte is a Democrat first and a liberal second.
2.) So in the case of this big name blogger, I think you can assume there’s a small amount of projection going on. A more accurate statement on his part might be something like: “My blog is more partisan than ideological,” or: “My corner of the blogosphere is.” But that doesn’t make the statement much better, because pledging loyalty to a bureaucratic institution first and a set of values second is a fundamentally fucked-up way of looking at politics.
And this brings us back to what Douthat was talking about. Because the right-wing blogosphere does tend to be more partisan than ideological; there’s little diversity on that side, almost no internal dissent or debate, and every couple of years or so there are even complete policy reversals to reflect the new Republican party line. It’s all about being a team player, and that’s why right-wing blogs tend to suck. It makes organizing for the party easier, but is it something I think we should emulate? Hell no.
I’d like to end this on a positive note. This post is pretty critical of a lot of the groups that were present at Netroots Nation, but the fact is that the conference itself was fucking amazing and I had a great time there. This post would be five times as long if I included stuff like, “OMG I MET RICK PERLSTEIN IT WAS SOOOOOOO AWESOME,” but I’m assuming that nobody actually wants to read that stuff. Needless to say though, it happened, and it was indeed awesome.
Topics: The Internets |
July 24th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Good post!