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The field is different, but the feeling... gee, that's familiar!
Edited to add: Heh. This is also familiar -- at least the basic situation. D. and I are not fighting over this because, unlike Dorothea, I don't have a career to compromise, and because D's non-academic job options are about the same as mine right now. But it is still stressful, not knowing where we'll end up next year.
Post-academic stress syndrome, indeed.
Chris suggested an alternate avatar for when I'm not being the clue-sticking avenging raven. It's surprisingly hard to find appropriate equivalents, so this is as close as we're going to get to the Crafty Quizzing Yogini side of this blog.
(It's kinda like me, only I'm not so fierce or busty in real life.)
Note that I still have a clue-stick (or educational pointer) of sorts. It's a bo that I used to use in one of my martial arts classes, and it will break heads if wielded properly.
You are a Random cat! Also known as an alley
cat or a mutt. You aren't given to high-falutin'
ways, but you're accessible and popular. People
love you for who you are, not what you are.
What breed of cat are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
c/o denisdekat
The winter issue of Knitty is here!
Isn't this cool? I made it over at Hero Machine. (One thing about the generator -- it won't save the image for you. You'll need to do a screen capture to save it.)
c/o feministe.
scribblingwoman and PZ get into the act...
Before the election I was an avid reader of a fair number of political blogs, but now not so much. This has been frustrating me, and so I've been trying to figure out why they are so much less satisfying. The conclusion I've come to is that both these bloggers and the Democratic party leadership suffer from similar, and probably related, problems. Given this, looking to poli-bloggers for answers on how to fix Democratic flaws is a largely futile exercise.
One theme that I keep seeing up is the idea that Democrats either lack vision or lack a clear way to market whatever vision it is that they might have. This belief prompts all sorts of discussions about what that Democratic vision might be, or what snappy marketing strategies would be most effective in getting the message across to voters. I find this irritating on multiple levels, but there are two aspects of this meme that I want to whack at in particular.
First, it's not about the "vision." It's about the Democratic leadership's persistent inability or unwillingness to stand up for the needs and values of its constituents. Often this is glossed as wanting to "not stoop to their level" or "maintaining the dignity of the office" or "encouraging cordial relations among colleagues." In other words, it is more important to be "nice" or "polite" than to defend one's interests. Aside from the doormat-like quality of this attitude -- which means always giving up one's own needs in the vague hope of getting some sort of pat on the head in the future -- it sets up a false dichotomy. As anyone who has read Miss Manners knows full well, it is perfectly possible to be polite and still stand up firmly in defense of one's values and those one represents. Indeed, it would be rude not to -- rude to one's constituents, and rude to one's colleagues on the same side of the aisle. There's a reason why Dean and Obama inspire devotion on the part of the liberal public, and it's not just their messages. It's that both men clearly demonstrate that they are passionately committed to their supporters and their causes. So enough about the vision already. What we need more is conviction and courage.
Second, the "branding" part of the argument is irritating. Among other things, it is top-down, paternalistic, and condescending. It reeks of the "elitism" charge so often hurled at liberals and progressives. It assumes that the general public consists of commercial-stupified sheep who will only respond to sound bites and flashy messages. No doubt this does describe part of the population, but does one really want this part to form the base of one's political party? I think not. What you want for your core constituency is, again, people of conviction and courage. Now, people like this are not going to suddenly line up behind a politician simply because he or she has a snappy slogan and nifty logo. They are going to support a person who understands their values and needs and is willing to go toe to toe in defense of them. While much of the popular perception of marketing is along the lines of "build it and they will come" -- that is, design a splashy ad campaign and people will suddenly develop a burning desire for the product -- in reality most marketers look to the people first, learn what they want or need, and then figure out how to use their ads to link those needs to the product.
In other words, an ad campaign for the Democrats is worthless without a clear understanding of the constituencies being targeted, and without a strong commitment to meeting their needs after the election.
This brings me to a second category of arguments I keep seeing that are also irritating. I think of them as the "reach out" debates. We would have won, the argument runs, if only we had reached out to the religious/Nascar dads/soccer moms/Log Cabin Republicans/centrist voters, etc. Now, I think the basic impulse is correct -- identify groups that you could serve as a political party and reach out to them. The problem is, the groups Democrats -- and political bloggers -- keep holding up as desirable targets are all defined by either the media or by the right. This strategy is, in a word, stupid. Trying to reach out to groups already partially (or fully) claimed by the opposition party is only a viable strategy if you are positive that your own groups are fully in your camp. Otherwise you spread yourself so thin that it becomes a choice between Republicans, Republican-lite, and a smattering of third parties. Before the Democrats start worrying about Nascar dads, they need to ask themselves what their own desired core groups might be, and make damn sure that they will not defect to a third party out of frustration with Democratic wimpiness and being forever taken for granted.
This is one reason, I suspect, that many Democrats are still obsessing about Ralph Nader, particularly his 2000 run when he and the Green Party "stole" "their" votes. Basically, they like to believe that progressive and liberal voters must "naturally" vote Democratic, even when the party goes searching ever more rightward for new voters. The thing is, there is absolutely no justification for believing such a thing in the absence of concerted, clear efforts to seek out those left-wing groups and demonstrate a party-wide commitment to addressing those groups' concerns.
I was thinking about this in particular when I visited the website of the newly formed "Progressive Democrats." Their basic plan is to reinfuse progressive issues into the Democratic agenda, with an emphasis on environmental, social justice, and civil and gender rights concerns. Now, in a sense, this is a good idea, but, reading their list of objectives, I couldn't help thinking that this was not so much a re-envisioning of the Democratic Party as a form of "Green-lite." What made me even more suspicious of their agenda, and highly sceptical of its ultimate success, was their somewhat haughty dismissal of third parties. This is stupid on two counts. First, left-wing third parties are potentially valuable allies -- as the Greens demonstrated this year by advocating that Greens vote for Kerry and Edwards instead of the Green presidential ticket. Second, the Progressive Democrats are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position relative to both third parties and the mainstream Democrats. If they lean heavily on the progressive end, they will find themselves competing with left-wing third parties for third-party voters while still bearing the handicap of being lumped with mainstream Democrats. Such voters, if faced with a ballot running a Green candidate and a Democratic candidate, will probably be reluctant to trust the Democratic "brand" knowing that the brand includes right-center politicians as well as "progressive" ones, and thus unlikely to jump party lines for that candidate. If the Progressive Democrats instead focus on pulling the mainstream Democrats leftward, then they will need the assistance of those left-wing third parties to demonstrate that a shift away from the center-right is a viable strategy. Finally, if the Progressive Democrats fail to sway their Democratic fellows, they may well find themselves fading into irrelevancy, losing voters to third parties, or forming a third party themselves. As I say, dismissing third parties is stupid, yet the Democrats and their supporters seem to have made a virtual fetish of it.
Which brings us finally to the question of why both Democratic leaders and most political bloggers seem unable to come up with better approaches to the problem of regaining national political power. I think it is because they are too focused on swaying individual voters or peeling them away from right-defined constituencies. They have internalized "every vote counts" to such a degree that they have forgotten that there are such things as progressive groups. Moreover, they have succumbed to the notion that politicians determine policy and then try to sell it to voters. Both approaches are the result of, indeed, elitism, in the sense that both political bloggers and Democratic leaders refuse (or are unable) to believe that ordinary people are capable of acting collectively in their own interest, that it is possible or even desirable for leadership to be defined as responding to the needs of the group instead of as coercing the group to follow the leader where he or she wants to go. There's a reason why MoveOn was -- and still is -- such a success, the same reason that the Deaniacs and the Naderites were so energetic and persistent. It is because they were supported in their belief that they were just as much political actors as their political agents in Washington.
It is ironic, to say the least, that it is the "Democrats" who do the poorest job understanding and analyzing genuinely democratic political action. Until they learn to be truly democratic, at the core and not just on the lips, they will always be the party that plays catch-up. And this Green voter will grow more and more irritated, and less and less willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Two pairs of bluebirds
Land, set the phone wire swinging
The morning's present
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