netroots

Update II: Matt makes a fair point in the comments that I've misquoted him, conflating a number of bad votes into "MoveOn." He's right, though I still think my point holds. Even on all those war issues, YDA is fundamentally not a single issue advocacy group, they exist to see progress on a wide variety of issues as well as perform GOTV and build local Democratic infrastructure.

Update: Over at the YDA blog, Cani has posted some of the overwhelmingly postive feedback they have received from their members.
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At Open Left, Matt Stoller is picking a fight with the Young Democrats. At issue is a letter sent by YDA to its membership, thanking the Democratic Congress for achieving progress on many issues of concern to young voters (as cataloged in a report by Speaker Pelosi). Stoller's issue is that the letter was sent at the same time that the Democratic Senate was Sista-Soujaing MoveOn (and by proxy, the anti-war movement) for an ad it published leading up to testimony by General Petraeus.

Stoller's beef is that this demonstrates a lack of coherent strategy on the part of YDA, and that their "letter to congress" represents an unhealthily sycophantic allegiance to the Democratic Party. In a pretty over-the-top move, he's calling for their funding to get cut. That's a huge overreaction and Stoller's argument is narrow in that it is limited to this one event and misses the fact that, while many YDA members are against the war, YDA as an organization has different goals and objectives that only partially overlap with those of MoveOn.

The Young Democrats main objective is not to carry water for MoveOn, but rather to engage young people in Democratic politics, keep those members excited and engaged, and to push the Democratic Party to pay attention to young people. This has been unphill battle for YDA, and for many youth institutions. It's hip and popular to talk about the power of Millennials and the civic engagement of young voters these days, but even a year ago most Democratic Party insiders were extremely skeptical as to the value and reliability of the youth vote. Despite our contributions and gains in 2006, that is still the case in some areas where YDA chapters fight with the local parties.

Earlier today, I spoke with Tony Cani, the Political Director for the Young Democrats. Cani acknowledged that the lack of progress on the war is disappointing, but, given the mission of the Young Democrats, it was important to send a message to their members about the many positive policy outcomes of their work (in helping elect a Democratic congress, and in particular on the Cost of College Reduction Act). The fact that the Speaker's report specifically targeted young voters was in itself a big victory for those who are organizing Millennials on behalf of the Democratic Party, and one that can serve as a strong motivational tool for members of the Young Democrats who will be out walking canvasses, making phone calls, and pulling levers at the Ballot box for Demcorats in 2008. These are important developments if your goal is to strengthen the power of young people within the Democratic Party.

That said, YDA made a communications gaffe here. I don't want to deny or minimize that. This was a strategic error in so far as YDA should be on board with the progressive movement, and supporting MoveOn should be a no-brainer for an organization whose constituency is vehemently anti-war. But this incident is part of a larger problem: There is very little cross over and coordination between the netroots and progressive youth institutions. Not just on the war, but in general. This lack of coordination is the real concern here, and we're not going to make any headway on it by having the blogosphere muttering "damn those idiot kids" or by pulling funding from a youth organization that has done excellent work in turning out young voters and raising the profile of youth within the Democratic Party establishment, has made huge strides in building infrastructure for young people in Democratic politics across the country, and begun to revive what was long a stagnant and moribund brand among young people.

Right now, we in the blogosphere shouldn't be pointing fingers, but rather asking ourselves why so few young people participate in our online discussions and why this gap exists between progressive youth institutions and the netroots.

Right now, youth are clamoring for change in Washington and flocking to the candidacy of Barack Obama. Yet very few of these young progressives seem to realize or care that such a movement for change began years ago precisely with the rise of MoveOn and the Netroots. Why? One reason might be tone and tactics - young voters today, while they support Democrats by large margins, are tired of partisanship, and the blogs are engaged in partisan bloodsport with the GOP and recalcitrant Democrats like those who voted against MoveOn. In contrast, Obama's "post-partisan" rhetoric appeals deeply to Millennials and they would rather throw their weight behind that effort than throw their lot in with the bloggers. Another reason, suggested by Cani during our conversation, is that the blogosphere itself, despite its open forums, may till be too linear a medium for a demographic that prefers much more open and social forms of online communication.

Whatever the reason, both sides need to do a better job reaching out and coordinating with one another. Bloggers like Stoller and others who are nodes in the netroots communications network should be asking how they can make sure that groups like the Young Democrats are on message next time something like the MoveOn resolution fight emerges. And groups like YDA need to do a much better job of monitoring what's going on with the netroots on a wide variety of issues, not just the war, and connecting their members to that activism. If we are not all talking to one another, there's very little chance that our message will be strategically coordinated.

The today's Chicago Tribune is running an in-depth look at the Obama policy team today, leading with the observation that a not-insubstantial portion of campaign's advisors are old-hands from the Clinton Administration. That would seem to run counter to the campaigns' rhetoric that Obama brings change and an outsider perspective.

Barack Obama's presidential bid may have a well-cultivated insurgent feel, as the candidate both benefits and suffers politically from a relatively thin record of experience in Washington.

But the swelling team of policy advisers who have joined his campaign shows a politician grounded in his party's intellectual mainstream and well-connected within the capital's Democratic establishment.

Now, I believe that young voters are intelligent and informed, but I don't expect that they are also policy wonks. Knowing who's on a candidate's policy team is pretty esoteric stuff, even for the most hard core political junkie or activist. But I have to ask, would Obama's young supporters even care about this if they knew? I don't think so.

Young voters are progressive. Of that, there is no doubt (just look at my post from this weekend if you need a refresher). But just how progressive are they, and how is that manifesting itself in this election cycle? How deep are those commitments and what is required of candidates to meet them?

Recently, Young Voter Strategies released new polling data (pdf) noting that Barack Obama was the #1 choice of 33% of 18-29 year olds in the Democratic primary. Yet when 2nd and 1st choices were tallied, the more centrist (and certainly inside-the-beltway) Hillary Clinton surged into the lead among young voters, with 48% of the vote compared to Obama's 43%. Now, this is a bit of a leap since we don't know from what candidates Clinton and Obama are pulling their second-tier support, but if almost half of all young voters are happy with a Clinton nomination as their second choice, it doesn't seem to far fetched to concluded that young supporters wouldn't much care that Obama has built a centrist and even somewhat entrenched policy apparatus stocked with ex-Clintonites.

There are likely a number of factors at play here. I don't think you can discount the fact that both Obama and Clinton would break significant glass ceilings. This country is still really racist and sexist. It might very well be that having a black man or a woman be president is significant enough in and of itself to satisfy the desire for change among large swaths of the youth electorate. That both candidates are Democrats who are likely to significantly shift American policy also helps, but the degree to which that policy is shifted doesn't seem to matter. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that Dodd and Edwards, two of the more progressive candidates in the race who are taken seriously by the media and the political class (sorry Kucinich), get almost no support as first choice candidates from young voters.

So just how progressive are young voters? In poll after poll, they are supportive of Democratic policies, but maybe that is not a commitment that extends all the way down to the nitty gritty at the policy level. In a two-party system, you only get an either/or choice, and when it comes down to brass tacks, the policies of the major Democratic candidates are very similar compared to the GOP alternative. All are promising some form of universal health care coverage, better environmental stewardship, a restoration of civil liberties, and a significant draw-down in troops levels in Iraq. Perhaps a shift in power from one party to another, and a shattered glass ceiling that has long held back sidelined groups like African Americans and women, is enough change to satisfy the Millennial voter.

Hi, my name is Wes Morgan. I’m an online organizer with U.S. PIRG, currently based in Denver, CO. I graduated in 2003 from Calvin College with a degree in computer science (and a minor in Spanish). Currently I’m directing a program called Code for Change. Code for Change brings together young programmers (students and recent grads) to work on open source software projects that help build progressive infrastructure. For example, this summer we’ve been adding new features to CiviCRM, part of the CivicSpace project.

There are few things that give me more hope for the future of progressive politics in the U.S. than the Internet and the rise of the netroots. The fact that regular folks like us can use the Internet to speak out, take action, and organize others to do the same is amazingly healthy for democracy. We should hang on to this for dear life.

Sadly, as most good things are, the Internet is under attack by those who wish to bend it to their narrow special interest (usually profit-driven) purposes. Net neutrality is the label we’ve given to the fight against this attack, and it is critically important that we win it. U.S. PIRG has a page with information and actions you can take on net neutrality, and Mike Connery also has some great ways to help out in a recent post to Future Majority. However, when we define what we mean by “net neutrality,” we’re usually only talking about one aspect of what’s required to have a free and open Internet. I would argue that there are three equally essential pieces to this puzzle.

1. Open networks (traditional “net neutrality”)
2. Open standards governing how the networks operate (and interoperate with each other)
3. Open software implementations of those standards (open source)

More after the jump.

I'm slowly coming back into the real world. I should be back to my normal schedule in the next day or two. Thanks so much to everyone who guest blogged for me. I've been reading the posts and they were fantastic. Here's my latest piece for MyDD. Also, a big welcome to Annie, our new intern.

Last weekend, I wrote about how the progressive youth movement – its organizations and its individual members – were disconnected from the progressive blogosphere. I got some pushback in the comments and elsewhere about that, with criticism generally raising two questions:

• Why do youth groups need to engage the blogosphere?
• How could existing youth org blogs change to make most effective use of the medium?

There’s no one answer to the first question. Not all youth orgs need to engage the blogs, and for different youth orgs, it would make sense to engage different types of blogs for different reasons. As Matt noted in the comments to my post last year, the blogosphere isn’t any one thing, and lumping all blogs in together and saying that “youth orgs need to know what’s going on” isn’t all that helpful. Reading the Daily Kos every day isn’t going to make our youth organizations or their members any more effective than they already are. There are many types of blogs written for a variety of purposes by a diverse range of people. Some of these will be helpful for youth orgs, some won’t.

The Young Democrats, for example, have chapters all over the country. Typically their work (canvassing and GOTVing young voters) is supportive of local candidacies, and often they work on local issues that can be aided by help from the broader progressive community in that area. It would make sense for local chapters to have their own blog (and in fairness, many of them do) that covered YDA Chapter X’s involvement in their local politics. It would make sense for that blog to be in dialogue with local blogs about local issues. There are partnerships to be formed there, local media narratives to change/establish, volunteers to be recruited, etc. And it’s a relationship that could go both ways, benefiting the local blogs, local progressives, and young progressives equally. Such a relationship would also help de-“ghettoize” youth politics, which is frequently siloed away from the activities of the "adults."

Another organization, The Roosevelt Institution, for instance, probably won’t care so much about what YDA is doing or about local candidates. But they’re probably very interested in what policy bloggers are talking about. Reading Ezra Klein, Max Sawicky, Brad DeLong, etc. would be instructional for a lot of RI’s aspiring policy wonks. In this case, the benefits are educational - reading the blogs and creating a forum for discussion on the organization’s own blog serves to educate all members about the intricacies of various policy issues. It will also probably increase their familiarity with the D.C. policy world.

I’m not going to run through each type of organization and what might work best, but there are clearly benefits to be gained for youth organizations to selectively engage the blogosphere based on their goals. The second question – how can existing blogs change to better serve their members and utilize the medium – is the more interesting one to me.

My thanks to all the guest bloggers who have done a wonderful job covering for me this week. Here's my latest MyDD piece.

On Tuesday I attended the Campus Progress National Student Conference.  One of the panels I attended was "Starting an Online Revolution."  It was not a well-attended panel, perhaps because it was the end of the day, or perhaps because Millennials are so immersed in online media that most people felt their time was better spent elsewhere.  One thing that struck me, as I listened to the speakers and their student questioners, was that not a single person - panelist or student - mentioned the blogosphere.  

This wasn't entirely shocking.  According to the latest Blogads survey, 14-30 year olds make up just 16% of the blogosphere, and I've long noticed that most blogs run by youth organizations are disconnected both from each other and from the larger blogosphere.  Campus Progress and Young People For both operate their own internal blog communities, but the content on these blogs frequently runs days (sometimes weeks) behind the regular blogosphere chatter, and rarely responds to what the larger blogosphere is discussing or writes in any way that would indicate the users even read the major progressive blogs.  

In some respects, the lack of interest and effort is understandable.  More young people are politically engaged online through social networks than through blogs.  Students and other young organizers need to go where their peers gather, so much organizing takes place on those sites.  By working on and through social networks, youth organizers are building another branch of the netroots and bringing their fellow Millennials politics.  That is good, and nothing I'm writing here is meant to denigrate that or suggest that it is work that should not be done, or even made second horse to greater blogosphere participation.

On the other hand, the disadvantages are readily apparent.  Youth organizations are not adequately preparing their members for participation in the new political landscape.   There is a political literacy level that is not being met.  Local blogs are increasingly an important piece of progressive infrastructure, and if young organizers aren't reading the major blogs, I'm guessing they're even less likely to know about (let alone how to approach and partner with) local blogs that might be an information resource and outlet for their local activities.  These organizations are also losing the valuable echo chamber/media amplifier and (psychological, intellectual, monetary, volunteer) support network that blogs can provide.  

In short, the progressive youth movement is almost completely disconnected from the progressive blogosphere.  There is very little (it would be hyperbole to say "none") connective tissue between these two subsections of the netroots.