Those who know me will know that I’m kind of hooked on US politics and the progressive netroots – hence the Daily Kos link on your right.
I think the Ghandi quote was something like “First they laugh at you, then they denounce you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Well, people didn’t take sites like Daily Kos and the netroots seriously back when I became a Kossack in 2005 or so. Then in the run-up to the 2006 house elections the netroots helped to fund a primary challenge against Connecticut Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman was and is a hate figure due to his relentless cheerleading for the Iraq war and his willingness to slam fellow Democrats at every opportunity in order to cosy up to the Bush administration for his own ends. It was a long-shot to say the least, but the netroots candidate won, funded by thousands of small individual donations, and Lieberman was kicked out of the Democratic party.
Lieberman eventually kept his seat as an Independent; but then in 2006 more long-shot, netroots-funded candidates like Jim Webb in Virginia and John Tester in Montana won senate seats. People started to take notice.
Most on the Right and in even in the Democratic party establishment were scathing of the pitchfork-waving “angry bloggers”, or Dirty Fucking Hippies. We were lambasted for interfering with and hijacking the democratic process, when in fact we were embodying it.
Those who had a vested interest in the status quo were not happy bunnies. Others however, like a certain black Senator from Illinois, liked the way that these people-powered campaigns were run. Take millions in small donations from individuals, instead of millions from a few corporate donors. Energise a whole army of volunteers. Build a ground game that would guarantee turnout on election day. Make ordinary people a central part of the political process again.
That certain senator seems to have done OK. We gave him the model and he ran with it all the way to the White House. We won. I use the royal “we” here, of course, as US campaign finance laws prevented me from giving any money or time to the campaign. But I was there online, cheerleading anyway.
So now, some questions. Why up to now have I cared more about US politics than I do British politics? Why was I spending all that time actively engaged in a US grassroots political movement when it’s not even my bleeding country? Is it something about me, is it something about Washington, or is it something about Westminster?
The truth is, I am so bored by UK politics that I have never studied the subject for long enough to be able to say that I really understand our political system. It seems tawdry, predictable, senseless and empty, a surreal charade, an endless performance in which no-one is allowed to stray from the script. This is why an idiot like Boris Johnson is tolerated: he provides the comic relief, a sense of carnival to an otherwise stuffy pageant of purposelessness. There is no question in my mind that the people are missing from UK politics.
So I’m making it one of my bloggy goals to seek out any spark of life that might exist in the UK political scene; any sense at all that lessons are being learned from the Obama campaign, from the netroots, from sites like Daily Kos. I also want to look at the structure of the UK political parties – well, Labour anyway as I nominally care more about them – to see if US models are being mapped across, if not then why not, and what to do about it.
If you’re interested, look out for more posts on the subject. For now I just want to namecheck a couple of people who I’ve come across today on my first foray into this subject matter online:
- Some bloke called Neil at The Bleeding Heart Show wrote this post back in April that has many of the same concerns. Great blog, by the looks of it.
- Andrew Chadwick’s site on internet politics points you in the direction of his pricey academic book and his latest article in the subscription-only dead tree journal Renewal. Thankfully for those of us interested in making the debate more rather than less accessible, there are plenty of useful links and some good commentary.
Good post & cheers for the link. Part of my fascination with US politics is that it’s far, far easier to tell the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’. In Britain it’s not quite so simple; I don’t ever see myself voting for a Tory, but Labour’s done a lot to alienate people who would’ve been natural supporters, and the other ‘left’ alternatives are either too small or so packed with nutters that it’s impossible to get excited about them.
As for a ‘British netroots’, whilst there might never be a true British equivalent of Daily Kos (we’re not a big enough country, for a start), there is another site I write for which tries to do a similar thing. Check it out, if you get the time. (http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/)
I think the reason why US politics is so much more compelling is that there’s the executive branch. When you get down to it, Congress is just as boring as Westminster or Canberra (in Oz). The difference is that they actually vote for their guy in charge, so there’s all this focus on the personalities and photogenicity (ids that a word?) instead of more prosaic political skills like debating and backstabbing and back-room shenanigans.
You’ve got to imagine all that tabloid fascinatino with the royal family, stapled onto Westminster, and yo9u’ve got the US system, I suppose.