"I haven't seen an agenda this exciting since my last League of Cities meeting," said Ed Kilgore as we walked to … well, I can't quite remember which of the YearlyKos's dozens of panels we were walking to. It could've been Friday's examination of telecommunications policy. It could've been the panel on trade theory in a globalized economy, or the one on the relative virtues of single-payer health care systems and multi-payer structures, or the one on electoral reform.
This is the great secret of the netroots: For barbarians, they sure are boring. The loudest boos of the conference came when Bill Richardson proposed that we amend the constitution to mandate a balanced budget. As The Politico's Ben Smith wrote, it had to be "the first fiscal policy booing on record." This is a crowd that truly believes in the importance of counter-cyclical spending.
I don't point this out to poke fun at the netroots. Wonkery does my heart good. But the intense focus on the innards of public policy actually gives a more accurate impression of the netroots' true nature than the usual examination of some blog commenter's curse words. The netroots are disproportionately rich, educated, and technologically adept -- they are, in demographic terms, technocrats. And technocrats don't crash gates. They write memos. They are far more comfortable improving from the inside than agitating from without. Which is why the media's habit of painting the netroots as some sort of emergent special interest, with these conventions acting as their trade meeting, has always been a bit off, but never more so than now.
The netroots are not like the unions, or Wall Street, or the NRA. They are not a singular entity with a defined set of interests that they seek to advance by manipulating the political realm. The netroots are more like a division within a company. They conceive of themselves, as Howard Dean liked to say, as "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." The resonance of that phrase among what was, at that time, an emergent and angry movement was always more profound than observers gave it credit for. It'd be like a group of programmers at Apple Computer getting fed up with the company's inattention to core products and starting a combative, internal group called the Macintosh wing of Apple Computer. They may Think Different, but at the end of the day, they're part of the company, and they see their prospects as dependent on, and aligned with, the success of their employer. So too with the netroots, who pick intra-left fights not because they see their own interests being threatened, but rather because they perceive their party being betrayed.
This year's YearlyKos convention -- the last which will carry the "Kos" name in the title -- saw the netroots settling more comfortably into this role as a division of the Democratic Party. They hosted the party's core special interest groups, giving Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, one of the lunch keynotes. They made peace with the media, recruiting New York Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai, whose presence as a representative of the dreaded MSM provided much of the first YearlyKos's frisson, to moderate the presidential candidates' forum. They extended an open hand to some of the party's more establishment intellectuals, giving Council on Foreign Relations fellow Peter Beinart, whose tenure as editor of The New Republic was marked by vicious clashes with the online left, a respectful and even enthusiastic welcome in the "Next Progressive Foreign Policy" panel. Time Magazine threw one of the best attended parties of the week; they ironically winked at their status as mainstream media whipping boys by titling their bash "Say It To Our Faces," and the netroots, munching on their potstickers, winked back. Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the original hero of the netroots, gave the opening keynote. If you squinted, you could have easily assumed yourself at a DNC meeting, albeit one with a lot more orange (the banner color of DailyKos).
There are two ways to understand the Big Tent philosophy that dominated the convention. One is to call it capitulation. Under this interpretation, the blogosphere has lost its way. They're too taken with being feted by those in power to retain their traditional independence. They've gone corporate. Stopped being cool. Their first album was, like, so much realer, man.
The second is to recognize it for what it was: convergence. Life in the Democratic Party is less fractious than it was a couple years ago. Peter Beinart has apologized for his support of the Iraq war. Howard Dean is the Chairman of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton reshuffled her schedule to not only attend the presidential forum, but also anchor a breakout session before, where she, as always, expressed support for universal health care and opposition to the Iraq war. When Bill O'Reilly attacked the convention for "spreading hate," Clinton sent top spokesperson Howard Wolfson out to defend it, and Senator Chris Dodd went on O'Reilly's show to scream back. It's easier to feel like everyone's on the same team because, in fact, everyone's acting as if they are. The netroots felt the need to shun and fight some of these voices only so long as they threatened their vision of the Democratic Party. As they've drifted into alignment with "the Democratic wing" and accepted much of its critique, however, that's less necessary, and so their role among the netroots now mirrors that of their role within the party. Their actions this week were the same as they would have been at a DNC conference.
Similarly, life in the blogosphere is less exotic than it once seemed. Time's offer to let the attendees say it to their faces was redundant: The attendees could already say it to their faces, on any one of Time magazine's many blogs, which come complete with comment sections. When media critic and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald met for his much-anticipated clash with The Politico's Mike Allen, Allen spent most of his opening remarks praising Greenwald's work -- and his paper sent staff blogger Ben Smith to cover the conference. Tensions between the media and the blogosphere still exist, but it's harder and harder to tell where one ends and the next begins.
This was the context of the convention, and the resulting drawdown from DEFCON One allowed the participants to settle into a more natural rhythm than the past few years have accommodated.
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And when technocrats relax, they get … technical! Thus, the presidential candidates weren't grilled on how bad Bush was, but what their strategies were for health care reform, and whether their commitment to deficit reduction would crowd out their calls for social investment. Panels were filled with power points, and the power points were filled with graphs, charts, and trend lines. This was "red meat" in the form of regression analysis. It was the work of analysts charting the performance of and possibilities for their company, not revolutionaries wielding pitchforks. And that's how the attendees liked it.
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