Letters to the Editor
Ben Alpers
Published Letters: 75 Editor's Choice: 2
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Is Fred Hiatt on the White House Payroll?
[Read the article: Fred Hiatt defends the administration's mild, restrained secrecy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It will be interesting to find out, if and when the internal records of this administration finally see the light of day, whether Fred Hiatt--and others like him--are being paid by the White House for this kind of "analysis." It's of course possible that they don't have to be paid. But we know that this administration is perfectly willing to buy opinion from members of the press. And at this point I wouldn't put it past Hiatt to take such money...in the interest of National Security, of course!
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Who Are These People...And What Do They Believe
[Read the article: The National Review mind]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glen, you write that...
These truly are the people who have been running our country for the last six years.
I actually think that these people have enabled the people who've been running the country. To use Bob Altemeyer's terms, the folks on the cruise are Right Wing Authoritarians, the folks running the country are those who score high on the Social Dominance Orientation school. The two groups feed off each other, but they're not identical.
As for Jonah Goldberg's definition of "ruthlessness," it really boils down to what has become known as the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, the idea that foreign policy basically comes down to nothing more or less than national willpower. This is a bizarre, and ultimately rather masochistic, fantasy, that tends to lead those who believe it to constantly berate their fellow countrymen for a lack of will, because that's the only possible reason that their crackpot foreign policy schemes could be failing.
Would it be going to far to say that their fantasy would be a Triumph of the Will?
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"Netroots" Far Too Wedded to Democratic Party
[Read the article: Democrats' responsibility for Bush radicalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What Glenn writes here...
There are many mythologies about what are the defining beliefs and motivations of bloggers and their readers and the attendees at Yearly Kos. One of the principal myths is that it is all driven by a familiar and easily defined ideological agenda and/or a partisan attachment to the Democratic Party. That is all false.
The common, defining political principle here -- what resonates far more powerfully than any other idea -- is a fervent and passionate belief in our country's constitutional framework, the core liberties it secures, and the checks and balances it offers as a safeguard against tyrannical power.
...may accurately describe the motivation of some individual bloggers. But it is simply not an accurate description of the institutions that make up the most important "progressive" blogs. Read the mission statements of the largest blogs on the so-called left of the blogosphere. They are, one and all, institutionally committed to the Democratic Party.
The largest progressive blog of all makes this abundantly clear. Here's the way Daily Kos describes itself in its FAQ, quoting site founder Markos Moulitsas:
This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we're all still in this fight together. We happily embrace centrists like NDN's Simon Rosenberg and Howard Dean, conservatives like Martin Frost and Brad Carson, and liberals like John Kerry and Barack Obama. Liberal? Yeah, we're around here and we're proud. But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory. And since we haven't gotten any of that from the current crew, we're one more thing: a reform blog. The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It's one between establishment and anti-establishment factions.
The purpose of DailyKos is partisanship, plain-and-simple. Anyone with a "D" after his or her name deserves support, regardless of his or her ideology, even if he or she supports torture and the destruction of the constitution.
These close institutional ties to the Democratic Party have even been explicitly praised by bloggers Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers in their 2005 report for the New Politics Institute "The Emergence of the Progressive Blogophere."
While I agree with Glenn that, as individuals, most progressive bloggers are deeply committed to the Constitution, their willingness to sell their political soul to the Democratic Party, right or wrong, has helped create space for the destruction of our Constitutional system of government.
The progressive blogosphere badly needs to grow up and realize that the Democratic Party is only as useful as its ideology, which at this point is nearly as harmful to the republic as that of the GOP. Progressives, online and off, need to be able to build institutions of power outside of the major party duopoly.
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Not All Politics is Electoral Politics
[Read the article: Democrats' responsibility for Bush radicalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Less support for Democrats does not necessarily mean more support for Republicans.
For starters, many of the most powerful political movements in U.S. history---abolitionism in the 19th century, the labor movement in the first half of the twentieth century, the black freedom struggle in the middle of the twentieth century--were principally non-electoral in nature. They put pressure on both major parties by changing facts on the ground. Ultimately, they became strong enough to find some electoral expression in one of the parties. But they did not start as partisan, or even electoral, movements.
Secondly, it's high time that we abandoned our eighteenth-century, first-past-the-post system of voting in favor of some form of proportional representation or single-transferable voting system. Such reforms can be made at the state level without touching the federal constitution. The fact that the awfulness of the GOP in any way serves as a powerful argument to support the awfulness of the Democrats is an indictment of our system of government. The system is broken. Let's fix it.