They don’t have to.

Yeah, I know, conservatives aren’t techno-savvy, they’re too hierarchical, etc, etc.  But here’s the thing: If there were boatloads of campaign cash out there for progressive candidates, if our party leadership were relentlessly progressive and kept the caucus together on key votes, if there were a vast echo chamber of left-wing talk radio and think tanks and newsmedia promoting all the issues and stories we care about… I wouldn’t be here right now.  I wouldn’t need to be.

We netroots have to be active, and generous, and loud, because we’re all we’ve got.

Marx and Engels

Oooh, The Austin Statesman writes that Pelosi is so left-wing she’s practically (D-Beijing.) I think "journalist" Patrick Beach just made a commie joke, without having any clue as to what a communist is. Or even a socialist. If only Pelosi were even half that left wing, but alas America has one socialist in any position of power, and zero communists.

Americans wouldn’t know a socialist if one gave them universal health care and a functional education system.

Formerly known as the Yearly Kos, Netroots Nation gathers this weekend for its third annual convention in Austin, Texas. In just three years the event and the blogosphere itself have become a prominent part of our political conversation. The mainstream media and the candidates too are paying close attention. Last year, of the Democratic candidates, everyone but Joe Biden made an appearance at the convention. From Howard Dean’s virtual rise and fall to Barack Obama’s web savvy campaign the net has been hyped and some would say over-hyped.

Tonight on GRITtv Sam Seder, host of the Sam Seder Show on Air America, Robert George a columnist for the NY Post, Justin Krebs of Living Liberally, and Katie Halper, a blogger and co-founder of Laughing Liberally discuss how progressive bloggers can influence the ’08 election and what will become of the netroots if Obama wins.

Friendship by Ikhlasul Amal

The week of Netroots Nation 2008 seems an odd time to ask whether friendship is passe, because the convention marks the coming together of a historically unparalleled national network of progressive activists – many of whom have become fast friends.

But it’s easy to forget that friendship – an open and trusting, reciprocal relationship of trust and support – might just be the most revolutionary institution of them all. Aristotle thought so. So did Emerson, who wondered why no one had ever thought of basing a nation on love.

Countless authoritarians have done everything they could to disrupt solidarity and bonds of affection among the people they ruled. They seem never to forget that friends are their enemies.

Adam Smith thought a free market, one uncontrolled by selfish authorities, would facilitate conviviality and friendship. Smith, like Aristotle, thought friendship central to the pursuit of freedom. Smith didn’t foresee that the myth of the free market would play a key role in alienation of humans from each other, that runaway consumerism would make such things as friendship secondary to the pursuit of capitalist dreams. The Joneses were to be kept up with, not befriended.

The demands of election cycles and the urgent needs of the people often make us so goal oriented that we forget the key to success might be sitting next to us, sleeping with us, helping us find jobs, mentoring us, calming us, or rousing us to the barricades.

If the question above causes you to think, "Oh no, not another romantic and utopian paean to the past," then I suggest that such a hard-bitten, post-modern reaction proves the point. I’d also add that Derrida wrote extensively about friendship and politics. No one accuses him of being a utopian.

Here is an unhappy truth from my life in politics, which includes several years as apolitical journalist, a few years as a legislative staffer, a few more as a Democratic campaign manager (for the late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, among others), a political consultant, author, and activist.

Friendship is viewed as a luxury of private life, not a commonplace virtue of public life. Putting friends first usually means putting careers second, and that’s a sin in today’s world. I say today’s world, but this risk occurred to the ancients as well, and in America, our resistance literature is full of the concern. One could argue that the Adams-Jefferson letters are more like a poem about friendship and politics than a collection of prose letters.

Anyway, the risk of alienation is no longer a risk. It is a fact. Most of my friends and colleagues are forced by the commercial circumstances of this political age to put their incomes way ahead of personal loyalty or moral consistency. This doesn’t make for fast friendships. Or, in the end, very happy lives.

Who hasn’t felt this pressure? It was oppressive here in Texas when some of my friends and business partners – among them Mark McKinnon and Matthew Dowd, with whom I’d worked for several years – decided to abandon the Democratic effort and go to work for George W. Bush.

They had their reasons. I don’t want to analyze their politics or character. I just want to point out that the opportunity to make a buck, the possibility of celebrity, and the nearness to power are all accepted as more important than friendship, loyalty, or moral steadfastness. Not that their move was a betrayal of our friendship. No, the competitive, commodified political world we inhabited together had already made true friendship a difficult thing to achieve.

Most on the fast track know in their hearts that they will be measured not by their loyalty or their friends, but by whether or not they’ve made the necessary fortune to quality as an elite, to join the club.

The elected official defeated at the polls because he or she stood up for his or her friends is called a loser, politically naïve, or ineffective. The alpha and omega of peer judgment in politics is electoral success. Friendships that facilitate that success, fine. Those that don’t, adios.

The alienation is not limited to politics, of course. How many have worked for a boss who constantly and aggressively disrupted friendships among his employees?

It’s curious that the decades of accelerated retreat from the virtue of friendship were also the years of the "buddy" movie, of Fab Fours, of a TV show called "Friends." There’s no hiding from the fact that many male-oriented buddy movies had other things going on. Misogyny, for instance. There are other social and political issues raised by this phenomenon, too. Nonetheless, I think these cultural expressions can be viewed as a collective dream of solidarity.

We miss one another. But what would it mean to make friendship the key virtue in our politics?

Consider first why those in authority don’t want it to be so. Because for most of the world’s leaders today, including most of those here in the United States, authority is a one-way street, and it must be respected above other, more horizontal relations.

Want to scare the hell out of Karl Rove? Refuse his terms. He hates the idea that we are loyal to one another. In fact, I think in his specific case the community spirit of the late 60s and early 70s threatened him so greatly that it helped launch him on his path of destruction.

We should pause just briefly and consider that the health of our friendships has more revolutionary potential than all the genius framing and strategic thinking we could ever do. How so? Because we are in a battle for democracy. And democracy is about acting upon our shared responsibility. It is not about the pursuit of selfish interests. It can only exist if we recognize that we are in it for each other.

In other words, democracy and friendship arise from the same ethical root: responsibility for one another. Not, as Hannah Arendt worried, the loss of self in the other, but actualization of the self as a friend of others.

Many in the new progressive movement understand this. Living Liberally is, if they will pardon my intrusive analysis, more or less founded upon the recognition of the virtue of friendship.

We need more of it. Much more. So, this week, when you see a friend, recognize the revolutionary power of the relationship. We have nothing to lose but the chains that hold us fast in our isolated cells.

This is the photo, taken by Matt Ortega at the Drinking Liberally party on Thursday night at YearlyKos and I think that this shot of a random party moment tells you more about the real convention than a thousand WaPo hit pieces ever could.

There’s Rafael Collazo from Brown Planet on the far left, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas in the foreground, Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, and that’s me peering out from behind Amanda and litbrit just to the left of me. You will notice that the “middle aged white males” are only conspicuous here in their absence.

Granted, there was a certain contingent of Suits at YKos, the sort of Matt Bai crowd. They mostly seemed to keep off to themselves, though, doing their White Men in Suits thing, buzzing around the candidates and their coteries like bottle-flies, trying to climb up the arseholes of other White Men in Suits, as is their wont.

The real convention looked more like this, and these are the kinds of scenes that people like Fox News and the DLC really don’t want you to see. They’re making every effort to portray the Netroots community as a bunch privileged, segregated, ideological whackos, when in fact the absolute opposite is true. At YearlyKos, I watched a polyethnic, gender-diverse, smart, talented bunch of young Americans work, drink, laugh, and hope together.

This is the real face of the New Democratic Party.

More than half of Americans between 17 and 29 years old — 54 percent — say they intend to vote for a Democrat for president in 2008. They share with the public at large a negative view of President Bush, who has a 28 percent approval rating with this group, and of the Republican Party. They hold a markedly more positive view of Democrats than they do of Republicans.

There’s a new Democratic Majority coming. Young men and women from all different races and backgrounds, all different orientations and outlooks, all different religions and belief systems. And this time, they’re all traveling together.

This is the last thing the Loyal Order of DC Fossils wants to see cresting the horizon because they know, when all the “minorities” band together, we’re the majority, and to them that’s a deeply dangerous cultural awareness. And it’s that very knowledge that the roly-poly little Caligulas of the Beltway élite have been fighting tooth and nail since the dawn of the rich, white Reagan 80′s.

It is in their best interests to try and turn us on each other and drive us apart. Bear that in mind when you read every word of Netroots coverage in the mainstream media. They don’t entirely know what we’re doing yet, but what they do know is that they desperately, desperately want us to stop.

Today the folks from ONE are announcing the results of a new poll they commissioned to look at the attitudes of both Democratic and Republican voters in New Hampshire and they wanted the Firepups to get a preview. The results are fascinating – the poll points to a rather unexpected agreement across party lines. As the summary notes:

Although these two groups of voters are politically opposite on many issues, there is agreement that the United States has both a security and moral interest in playing a leadership role in helping to improve health, education, and economic opportunity in the poorest nations in the world.

Here are a few of the poll’s findings:

• Nearly all Democrats (97%) and 70% of Republicans agree that America’s standing has suffered in recent years.

• In addition to a strong military, Democrats (91%) and Republicans (78%) agree that the United States also needs to improve diplomatic relations by doing more to help improve health, education and opportunities in the poorest countries around the world.

• Both Democrats (81%) and Republicans alike (70%) agree that reducing poverty, treating preventable diseases and improving education in poor countries around the world will help make the world safer and the United States more secure.

• More than nine in ten Democrats (93%) and 84% of Republicans agree that when millions of children around the world are dying from preventable diseases and hunger, we have a moral obligation to do what we can to help.

• Similarly, Democrats (90%) and Republicans (85%) agree that it is in keeping with the country’s values and our history of compassion to lead an effort to solve some of the most serious problems facing the world’s poorest people.

• When it comes to addressing these issues, Democrats (86%) and Republicans (67%) agree that it is important for Presidential candidates to discuss their plans for addressing global hunger and poverty issues in this campaign.

• Additionally, eight in ten Democrats (81%) and Republicans (80%) agree that the next President should keep the commitments made by President Bush to prevent and fight the spread of AIDS in Africa.

This sure looks like a mandate for the next president to take a vigorous stance on behalf of the poor – and an opportunity for our candidates to reach out to voters of all persuasions to work for a new foreign policy which addresses real global needs. Let’s make sure they notice!

One way you can do just that is by signing up for the ONE Vote ’08 effort – and don’t miss the campaign’s cool candidate tracker.

I’m planning on posting a lengthier piece (or set of pieces) about my Kos experience later this week as a guest-blogger at Brilliant at Breakfast, but here are some quick takes:

Obviously, it was a major thrill to find myself at one point sitting between Digby and Glenn Greenwald, talking in real time. I’ve met blog-friends before in Connecticut last summer and DC during on election night, but this was a whole different deal. There was time to sit and talk and joke and compare notes. Greenwald is a delight in person, so sharp, so on point, and hilarious. The air around him seems to crackle and snap with wit, and while I expected to be really intimidated, I was immediately at ease in his presence.

Same goes for Digby, who I wanted to leap on and hug and squeeze and call her “George”, although by the time I joined her and Christy late Saturday afternoon for a chat in the hotel bar, both of them were looking kind of hugged out. Apparently a lot of people feel the same way I do about Digby, and for someone who has only recently shed their veil of anonymity on the web, I think the constant squeezing was starting to wear a little thin.

I had some real fun at Ari Melber’s panel with Mike Allen from the Politico, Jay Carney from Swampland, Jill from Feministe, and Glenn Greenwald. Oh, and the Sampland party was a great party, by the way.

If you’ve never been to a party before.

It was way, way, way too many people packed into a very small space. I’ve been to dorm-room beer and nitrous parties that were less uncomfortably crowded. The din was ear-splitting as people got liquored up and shouted to hear themselves.

Wonkette was there holding forth about something with a cocktail in hand, surrounded by an eager throng of men in suits. I thought about going over to her and saying hello, but I realized that she might tape it and publish the whole conversation on line and then I could end up seeing the whole thing re-enacted with some cokehead in a cheerleader outfit playing me. No, thanks.

I walked by Karen Tumulty just in time to hear her say, “Tumulty! No, Tu-MUL-ty!” which was handy right then because I couldn’t think of her name either. Joe Klein must have been a no-show because I never saw him, although he is very small, so he might have been under a napkin or stuffed into Ana Marie’s Kate Spade clutch.

I ate a few pieces of really bad sushi (Hey, I was hungry and who knew when the next opportunity to eat would be?), then went outside with Chicago Dyke to smoke a cigarette and drink a coca-cola. It was there that we realized that we’d rather repeatedly slam our fingers in a car door than go back into that maelstrom of noise and chaos. What would be the point?

I have to agree with Teddy about the convention center itself:

What did I like very little about YKos? — location, location, location. A venue with $4.50 pint bottles of water and three-dollar bananas; miles to walk between events on hard marble and concrete; with no commons to sit, meet, and chat except an outrageously priced restaurant and a bar; completely disconnected from the city where we’re located — well, it is entirely beyond me.

For people like our own Texas Betsy, who was alternating between crutches and a wheelchair, it was impractical at best, excruciating at worst. People were literally exhausted from all the walking and stair climbing.

The other thing was, as Jane pointed out earlier, the expense. I know that my budget for the rest of the month has taken a major hit. The whole thing would have been fine if I was some staffer from Newsweek or CNN who has a bottomless expense account, but I’m just a blogger from Georgia with a job in public radio. Nine bucks for a pack of smokes or twenty for a personal pizza is a bit beyond my means, which is why, unless some measure is taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen next year, Chicago will be both my first and last YearlyKos adventure.

It’s good to be home, and really good to “see” you guys. Did you miss me? I wish I’d gotten to spend some more time with readers. There were a bunch of people there I never even got to meet.

There’s much, much more to tell you, but this post has gotten long enough. I’ll let you know when my long piece goes up at Brilliant at Breakfast.

TRex was out late last night, and looked like it. I tried not to ask questions.

The Presidential Forum turned into a bit of a rollicking affair. Did y’all watch it? I sat with Christy and Digby and Taylor Marsh. It’s hard to know what nugget to pull out, but this time, at least, there was some give and take exchange among the candidates and some live, spontaneous disagreement over substantive issues.

I spent a lot of this morning talking with immigration coalition people, from the foundations world and from labor, about how to change the national conversation in favor of real human rights through contemporary media and the blogs. This is an organizing issue, and hopefully, it may begin to be addressed.

I’ve met a bunch of members of our community and it’s been really fun to hear people say hello, stop me as I’m walking around, and even pronounce my nickname right (“Pach” rhymes with “watch.”)

Duncan is laughing at me for having to get a post up because we’re late. He just sat down next to me and is looking, as always, sly smarter than me.

What’s on your minds this afternoon?

After panels had concluded yesterday afternoon, and the FDL caucus that wasn’t really a caucus but was more of an “Oh, THAT is Redshift!” sort of meet and greet had concluded, a bunch of us went downstairs to find some food and beverages. The Hyatt that is attached to the convention center has a nice seating area both inside and out on a lovely, breezy patio.

And there is a pizza place that makes yummy thin crust pizzas that is adjacent to this, but it was packed full of YKos attendees. So, we improvised.

After pooling everyone’s money together, we got several pizzas and picked out a couple of choice tables on the patio. I sat by RevDeb and Kathryn in MA and Jessica (I think — oh, I hope I got that right, she’s a hoot and she works with Kathryn), and Scarecrow. Did I mention that Katymine brought me a fantastic cookbook back from her vacation in Crete? She’s giving me some copies fo photos that she took, so we’ll all get to go on vacation vicariously at some point during a Pull Up A Chair. (How fun is that?!?) Down the table from me a bit was Emptywheel and Siun and Virginia from the One Campaign and Ian Welsh and the fellow who developed of the Spotlight Project (that we love here at FDL, but whose name I’m blanking on because I’m so damned tired — James?  Mark Steckel). I know I’m missing people — it was two large tables full of some very fun folks, so my apologies in advance if I’ve forgotten to add someone to the list.

I had run into Markos earlier on the way to the patio and caught up a bit with him. His gorgeous wife — who runs MotherTalkers — is here with their two cute kids. Apparently the new dinosaur exhibit at the Field Museum is fantastic. Maybe I can find some time to slip over and see it while I’m here — and pick up a little something for The Peanut while I’m at it. She loves all things dinosaur.

So, anyway, we get this pizza, and we are all sitting around chatting…and it hits me that THIS is my favorite part of these sorts of conferences. I’m sitting at a table with some incredible people — folks who are very politically active in their own communities, who work on local and state level politics, and who make the engine of our nation run with the work they do. And they are all such fun people, too.

We must have sat there for more than two hours just laughing and haggling over details about this or that issue, and talking shop about an incredibly wide range of topics.

Siun and Ginny and Ian were talking global economics and poverty at one point, while Marcy and I were haggling over a Congressional hearing that did not go as well as we would have liked. And then Swopa showed up — his flight got in later today — and he jumped right into the conversation without missing a beat while Marcy and I were talking CIPA intricacies from the unsealed bits in the Libby trial. It’s always great to see Swopa, and I’m hoping that he finally got something good to eat after a disaster with an exceptionally charred pizza that he had to take back. (Long story…)

Have I mentioned how much I love these folks? I really do.

I swear, it is just like we have all been family forever. And that goes for everyone reading here as well. Jane said yesterday that you really do feel like you know all the folks so well who talk back and forth with you on the blog because all of the political stuff we talk about means so much to all of us. I completely agree with her.

I had a reader come up to me today and tell me that she had never, ever been politically active. But she read a post of mine during the run-up to the election where I said “so, what have you done today?” and she thought about it and realized she hadn’t really done anything politically, and got to work on a local campaign. She said it has changed her life realizing that she can really DO something to make things better. I cannot tell you what that meant to me to know that. Truly. And it doesn’t seem like we say this enough: So, from all of us to all of you…thank you. For everything.

(Photo via Mr. T in DC.)

Dean let us know that he gets it, that he understands how important this amazing community is and how much it’s changing the way democracy functions in America. He knows how this movement is transforming the Democratic Party and bringing America back from the abyss Bush created and towards which he is still driving us. Dean won the crowd early on, and as they listened many had tears in their eyes, lamenting again what the media did to a man who so clearly saw in 2003-04 where the country was going and tried to warn us. But he was not one of the beltway’s privileged and they got him. But the man was not done.

Dean pulled it all together — the trampling of the Constitution, the disgracing of the Justice Department, the neglect of government’s legitimate and necessary functions, the need for checks and balances, the need to restore our civil liberties and to stop commuting the sentences of people who lie and obtruct justice and betray patriots, the need to end the occupation of Iraq — yes, it was all there in the same terms we use to describe what we see and how we feel about what has happened to our country. But then he let us know, as few other politicians can, that he undertands what we, the blogging community, are about.

He told us about a new DNC project to help local officials defend everyone’s right to vote and how all the voting trends of young people are trending our way and how important it was to reach out to America’s youth, because the political choices they make now can last a lifetime, and they are choosing Democrats and accepting the just vision of American that we worked for 30 and 40 years ago. But he was not just asking for our help or our money, but instead acknowledging that democracy in American is now a two way conversation. Not just politicians speaking to voters and asking for their votes, but citizens using the internet to talk to politicians, directly, personally, with an immediacy and impact that is changing the whole democratic process. We are citizens talking to their officials and candidates and expecting them to engage us in that conversation, and not just at election time, but every day in a continuing dialogue that is breathing new life and new ideas and new energy into our battered republic. Yeah, the man gets it.

And after he’d finished, and brought the house down, and many were thinking “what if . . . ” there were a few announcements, read by a YKos volunteer just before we left.

Announcement: Senator Clinton announced that she will speak to you at the candidates’ forum on Saturday but will not stay for the one-on-one interchange with attendees in the breakout sessions that follow; however, she will send one of her media aides to answer questions.

An immediate chorus of boos greeted the announcement, and as the message sunk in, you could feel the room shift, and it wasn’t towards the woman who wants to be our President.

Yesterday, Chris Dodd went on Bill O’Reilly’s show to face him down, to expose his lies and demagoguery and to send a message to the 1500 people gathered here that he knows how important the progressive blogosphere is. Whether she meant to or not, Hillary Clinton also sent a message that she doesn’t know who we are, what we’re about or what we might mean to the next administration. Dean gets it, Chris Dodd gets it. Does Hillary? You have to wonder.

UPDATE: RawStory now reporting that Senator Clinton will attend the YKos break out sessions. Good for Hillary. Good for the progressive blogs/YKos.