The Material Basis of the Netroots
I'd sort of tuned out of the big netroots navel-gazing fracas at TPM Cafe because things were getting ugly, but Matt Stoller's essay is actually quite good and mostly things I agree with, and Mark Schmitt adds some very valuable further nuance to that story. In keeping with brother Sawicky's injunction that we all become more theoretically informed, I suppose the somewhat different spin I would put on this story is to make it a bit less idea-centric and focus, Marx-style, on material causes. One of Schmitt's points is that a lot of netroots-type activity echoes the organizing of Citizen Action and other goings on in the late 1970s and the 1980s. What's more, institutions with origins in that era have tended to play a role in most of the efforts that one associated with the netroots. Finally, as Schmitt observes "these organizations never reached anything approaching the scale they aspired to . . . only in recent years have some of these organizations really stepped up and lived up to the promises made for them in the 1970s and 1980s."
The question, obviously, is why would that be? The answer, it seems to me, is a combination of demographics, economic change, and technology. Over time, the ranks of the professional class have grown and professionals have more and more seen their interests as no longer aligned with those of the managerial class. Thus, the kind of people who were the demographic base of these earlier organizations are both more numerous and more inclined to get involved than they were twenty years ago. What's more, you're talking about a type of person who's intrinsically difficult to mobilize.
The easiest way to mobilize or organize people is to find that they're already organized -- into a union local, into a rotary club, into a church, into a VFW brance, etc. -- and then you simply try to mobilize the existing organization. The progressive white professional class, however, has suffered from notable lack belong to things (bowling alone so to speak) and here's where the internet comes in. By lowering communications costs, information technology has made it much, much easier for people to get in touch with one another, to feel some sense of common purpose alongside other people, generally speaking, easier to mobilize. So suddenly you're seeing a sort of agenda and a sort of approach to things that's been around for a while and that's had some success historically, start to develop more success and to see the prospect of even more successes in the future.
Comments
This is smart and to the point.
The interesting thing is that professionals displayed this lack of political organisation despite the fact that to be a professional - unlike a manager - requires membership of professional organisations. Lawyers, doctors, scientists and so forth do of necessity 'belong to things'. But these professional organisations have rarely seen themselves as mobilising outside the area of their economic interests, with some exceptions for 'internal' political factors (how law firms should approach affirmative action etc). They've never allowed themselves to be a permanent parts of the Democratic party machine like the UAW or other working class organisations. So these new organisational technologies are in some ways freeing liberal professionals from the conservatism of the organisations of which they are already required to be members.
Such a smart insight. I seem to recall that on bloggingheads, you noted the DLC competed for precisely the same members. Also smart. Sometimes you're worth the price of admission.
This is one of the more intelligent additions to this whole debate.
Just chiming in to agree with everyone else that this is a superb and well written piece of analysis.
It might be worth thinking more about the professional/managerial class distinction, which I'm not sure is that clear. I think within educated white collar workers in general, we've seen a pretty massive increase in income inequality. Some highly educated white collar types (e.g. teachers, social workers, government employed doctors and lawyers, specialized and well educated nurses, some middle managers who are still in cubicle-land) are basically middle class and have to face serious concerns about health insurance costs, whether Social Security will come through for them. Others have blasted off into the income stratosphere and these issues are not bread and butter for them anymore. My impression is some of the energy behind the "netroots" come from that first group of well educated people who are still middle class, and realize, "holy shit, if Bush destroys the fiscal capacity of this country on wars and giveaways to the rich, I'm not going to be able to afford retirement".
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