On Sept 28, blogger extraordinaire Kos, wrote the following about the fairly large anti-war rally in DC (Sept 24, 2005):
Peace protests and the new media environment
by kos
Wed Sep 28, 2005 at 10:47:17 AM PDT
I’ve been critical of peace protests in the past […]. This time, however, I wasn’t feeling animosity for last week’s protests. I was feeling something akin to apathy.
[…]
The lack of focus is maddening, obviously. But my biggest problem with anti-war protests is that they’re obsolete. What do they accomplish?
[…]
And we don’t need marches to let the country know that people are turning on the war.[…]
People marching on the street? Boring. Unless you 1) have violence, or 2) crazy people making crazy speeches. It’s a lose-lose situation, and at best a single news cycle story.
[…]
The Right, except for the crazy anti-abortion protesting crowd, focuses its efforts solely on influencing media coverage. And it’s paid incredible dividends in the past few decades. We need to follow suit, rather than continue the same activism tactics of a century ago.
[…]
Ultimately I was agnostic over the march this past weekend because I can appreciate that people want to gather to fight for the cause, I appreciate that they want to feel like they’re doing something.
My question, then, becomes whether the money and effort people expended getting to DC to march might’ve been better spent in other forms of activism — letters to the editor, contributions to anti-war candidates, politicians, and organizations, calls and letters to their elected officials […]
Today (Jan 30, 2006) he writes:
by kos
Mon Jan 30, 2006 at 03:53:52 PM PDT
We lost the cloture vote, but that was — despite some of your best wishes — a pre-ordained conclusion. But that doesn’t mean we lost on the bigger picture.
What you guys accomplished the last week was amazing — the outpouring of emails, letters, faxes, and phone calls was unprecedented for the netroots and particularly surprising given how weak our issue groups organized against Alito. We should’ve played a supporting role to strong efforts by NARAL, People for the American Way, and others. Instead, we ended up being pretty much the entire effort.
But say what you will about blogs and the netroots, we are not effective organizers for this type of large-scale effort, with an opposition wielding tens of millions of dollars. That we got this much accomplished in the fact of that is simply incredible.
So we are now on the map. The Alito vote may have fizzled, but you better believe the Dem establishment knows we exist.
Hmm… is it necessary to add a comment here, or perhaps just highlight the inadequacy of such thinking with a quote from the very same Kos post, misappropriated for my purpose:
In addition (this isn’t an “either/or” situation),
On another note: elsewhere on his site Kos confesses to his Republican campaigning past while other parts of the site ridicules “hippies” (while dispensing advice on what to do and not to do at the boring irrelevant DC march). The irony highlighted by these two excerpts can serve as a good starting point on why the left doesn’t hang together in the USA.
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3 Responses
[…] Yet another example of what I was point to in my post on the Kos take on peace marches. There are genuine reasons to split with Democrats, liberals, etc — Leiberman is a good example. But this sort of stuff seems to be muscle-flexing more than reasonable differences. […]
[…] Recently, I posted about Max being dropped by dKos and a bit earlier about Kos opinion on peace marches. At that time, I had no problem with Kos in general but found some aspects of his approach (and his rhetoric) disturbing. More on his attitude has emerged (follow the Bitch|Lab blog link quoted below to read direct Kos comments on the dearth of minorities/women in the blogosphere, and from there on about affirmative action, etc) that casts further doubt on Kos’ credibility as a true progressive. […]
[…] What is Max’s beef against the young Turks? I am guessing he is unhappy with their apparent attitude that they have the whole leftist enterprise covered (from activism to theory). Instead old Max finds that they are ill-read if at all (and extends that point to suggest that they have little coherent theoretical understanding and analysis of their positions and the things they, or rather the Left, should work against or for), and they are not very left at that (as attested by the unbridled enthusiasm for Democrats — which seems to exceed that of a Democratic convention speaker, Al Sharpton, who memorably quipped: we want to see how far this donkey can take us — and election politics and activism). Further evidence is not hard to come by, ranging from Kos’ attitude towards marches and the activists involved (”boring”, “obsolete”) to Duncan Black on Chomsky (Google it. I refuse to link to random blather!). The “netroots” wants the old Left (the 60s left in particular?) out of their way in a hurry, but as Max outlines, what is the alternative they offer to the many facets of old style organising and activism? […]