Whatever unfolds here in Boston, the long-range most important story of the week has already been written.
The piece by Matt Bai in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, “Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy,” introduces to broader public view an effort to which liberal donors, Washington Democratic insiders, and some other random progressive types have been privy for a little while now. You should certainly read the piece if you haven't already. And while Bai is a terrific magazine writer who wrote a mostly terrific piece, weaving many threads of a complicated story into a smart and straightforward narrative, I think he gave slightly short shrift to the core story here, which is this: If the effort Bai's article describes ends up working -- and ifs like this one always belong in large type, especially where the too-often oxymoronic terms “progressive” and “organization” are concerned -- it could change American politics as dramatically over the next 30 years as right-wing activism has changed the country in the past 30.
The basic story, for those of you who don't feel like clicking on the above link and plowing through a few thousand words of copy, is as follows. Rob Stein, once an aide to then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Ron Brown, shook off the miserable hangover of the 2002 elections and roused himself to do something no one had ever bothered to do: He studied the history and the anatomy of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
It started in 1971, when an official with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fretful over the nation's course, asked a friend of his in Richmond, Virginia, to offer some advice about what conservatives could do to loosen the quasi-socialistic noose (from the chamber's point of view) then hanging around this great nation's neck. The friend produced a brilliant memo that called, essentially, for wealthy conservatives to invest many millions over many years in creating a multitude of think tanks and grass-roots groups and media outlets that would promulgate their message. And that, to make a long story short, is how conservative ideas that three decades ago were considered fit for some planet other than Earth became, as the political scientists say, normative today. (This friend, it's interesting to note, was Lewis Powell, who wrote the memo just a few weeks before being nominated by Richard Nixon to sit on the Supreme Court, which he duly did for the next 15 years.)
Stein put together a PowerPoint presentation summarizing this history and showing flowcharts of all the groups and all the money they spend, where the money comes from, and how they all work together to achieve their goals. I've been fortunate enough to see it. It's an astonishingly detailed and clear look at how the money is raised and exactly where it goes. The goal of Stein -- along with Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network, who has been Stein's chief collaborator in this effort -- is to do the same thing on the progressive side.
The Times Magazine piece is built around the construct that the success of such an effort, should success indeed result, will inevitably redound to the detriment of the Democratic Party. Bai makes a plausible case as to how and why this might happen: If big-money donors start giving to the Phoenix Group, as the Stein-Rosenberg operation has dubbed itself, they may be less inclined to give to the party and its candidates. Furthermore, because several of the major money people involved in the effort are not Democrats with a capital “D” but liberals or progressives whose allegiances are more ideological than party-based, it may come to pass that these money people will, in effect, replace the party. They -- and the think tanks and other structures they fund and create -- will do what the party and its leaders used to do, even to the point of setting broad policy and political goals that the party, in its neutered state, will have no choice but to follow.
Well, maybe. Being a magazine editor myself, I understand that editors always push writers to play up the conflict, and it's a practice of which I generally approve. But one could just as easily see this going precisely the other way. After all, has the success of the right-wing think tanks hurt the Republican Party? Hardly; the GOP is more powerful now than at any time since our two major parties formed their current identities 70 or 80 years ago. The groups of the right have provided a philosophical framework for Republican politicians and tacticians to operate from; it's hard to see how they've hurt their party, from either an ideas (policy) or power (political) perspective. Stein says he wants to do the same. “Energizing the Democratic Party is what this is all about,” Stein told me Sunday.
The right-wing groups have, however, made the GOP rigorously homogeneous (and extremist and polarizing), and the Times piece raises the specter that this process could duplicate itself on the left if Phoenix succeeds. Again, could be. But that strikes me as a long way away. Either the party's liberals or centrists would need to achieve clear dominance over the other side, and that is not happening anytime soon. Stein, for his part, takes pains to note that the right is in fact not homogeneous, that five or six different strains of conservatism exist, and disagree about a lot of things. But their genius, he says, has been in “tolerating ideological differences. … That's the challenge for us, and that's what's been so remarkable about their methodology.” Bai's piece raises legitimate concerns about some clashes that may occur down the road if Phoenix grows as planned. But those will play out in phase three or four. That phase one is even happening heralds a new way of thinking about ideas and their dissemination on the progressive side that is many years overdue.
“The real story here is that [the right] has reimagined a political machine,” Rosenberg says. “It was their imagination that allowed them to build this enormous infrastructure. And this is a period where we need imagination, capital, and strategy.”
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor. He writes a weekly column for the online edition.
