The worm will turn. It always does. We look good now, but I'm here to tell you, just wait

The thing is that for all the liberal kvetching about the Heritage Foundation, the left didn't help the worm turn by spending a lot of money of left-wing think tanks handing out "street money" via left wing foundations to fund liberal journals and internships, and they didn't help things by trying to start a liberal talk radio network. They created new infrastructure in what was at the time untamed, unexplored territory of online organizing.

The right, like the left before it, will try to start a bunch of lame knock-offs of successful liberal online initiatives, and basically these will lamely fester for a while and do nothing productive....

... until some new media area or previously unexplored landscape gets exploited by the right to good effect.

I'm not exactly quaking in fear that ActBlue or DailyKos will get eclipsed by something put together by right-wing activists. I'm worried there's something right in front of us that we don't even notice can be used for political organizing that the right is going to take over and own, and I'm worried that the innovation cycle has become so short that this will happen really quickly and that time will be much shorter than the period between the zenith of conservative talk radio and modern liberal dominance of the internet as an organizing tool.

Agreed. But that's the interesting thing: CAP was very effective, but not as a right wing Heritage. it was Think Progress, the Progress Report, Campus Progress, and the rest of their online activist-y portions that helped. Turned out the left had to build its own infrastructure...

Wait. Bill Kristol actually got something right???

...still, I think the telling thing here is that there's an up cycle, and a down one. Already, I think, it's clear that the ascendancy of "the left" doesn't entirely know what to make of itself. People guess at "what we did right" but I think the current success has a simpler explanation in some respects: we're succeeding because the right essentially talked themselves into a corner. Years of chasing an uneasy coalition between welathy monied interests and lower class values voters has fallen apart over... well, money, and values.

I'd love to say that what we're doing is genius; that what we've been right about all long is suddenly clearly apparent to all. But I think there's way too much self satisfaction in the way events are developing this season, too much certainty and not enough doubt. Perhaps the networks are too cozy (the think tank - lefty mag - lefty blog axis seems small, and narrowing, in many respects), the discussions too limited, the proposals not definite enough. I've long that the GOP's biggest failure was not preparing for success: they ran Congress as if could all be lost in a moment... and then it was. But the Democrats it seem to me, tend again and again to not prepare for failure, the prospect we might lose, that we can, in fact, be wrong.

Which leads me to two conclusions: we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that - like Kristol and his ebb and flow thinking - conservatives get some things right. And second, that while some things that have happened on the left - both in organizing and in finding common ground - have been good, there's a lot more to do. I'm not5 sure we plan to do it. And if we don't, I'm not sure anyone should be surprised when the right pulls itself back together and succeeds, yet again.

It's interesting that the organizing structures are so closely mapped to each party's current brand: the GOP with a "top-down", hierarchical configuration with a handful of foundations leading the way; the Dems with a populist, "bottom-up" approach of self-organization using the netroots.

How will the worm turn next? What does the future hold?

Will a long-term Democratic majority be built by the netroots, only to have power consolidated into the hands of a corruptible few with a populist-led Republican revolution returning them to power? Or is the top-down/bottom-up approach in each party’s DNA? Meaning: the Republicans find a technology or organizational means (Tyro’s “something right in front of us”) suited to their more hierarchical preferences but allowing them to streamline/optimize their approaches.

In hindsight, it does appear the left has built something strong, but as it was happening – just like as the GOP was rebuilding -- there was lots of fog and plenty of detractors. Hindsight, and all…