Back in
August 2009 I wrote about the Village Blogger pressure on progressives:
When will we know whether a firm stand on the public option will mean no health care reform bill and what exactly the best offer will be on health care reform? Well, it sure is not now. Think of Kent Conrad as the party across the table in this negotiation. Or even Barack Obama. How do you negotiate with them? You tell them, and mean it, that you will not vote for a health care reform proposal that does not include a robust public option. You protest that you have already made the biggest concession anyone has made in the entire process - single payer. You ask for their best offer.
Before you ask for anything more show me what you have on the table. Right now, NOTHING is on the table from Conrad and Baucus. NOTHING. There is no reason to be even talking about what the Progressive Block should be considering.
Allowing Ezra Klein to be perceived as the "progressive voice" on health care was a terrible mistake. He simply did not, rightly or wrongly, believe in the progressive position on the health bills. It did a lot of damage.
Also damaging was the incompetence of the Progressive Block leadership. Grijalva and Woolsey are not up to the job. Similarly, progressive activist leadership was bad. Their inability to distance themselves from the Obama White House and the Democratic Party leadership made it virtually impossible for them to best advocate for a progressive vision of health care reform.
Because of that, progressives could never credibly bargain. Glenn notes the spillover over into the once "progressive" blogosphere:
This [progressive capitulation] has been going on forever, far beyond the health care process. After all, aside from contempt for the establishment media, the single greatest fuel for the rise of the liberal blogosphere was contempt for the Democratic Party's corporatism -- i.e., the fact that progressives had no influence within the Party, and Party leaders, TNR-style, spent far more energy scorning the Left than the Republicans. That's what is somewhat ironic about the blogosphere's almost-unanimous support for this health care bill (as well as their increasingly rabid, TNR-style demonization campaign against the handful of people on the Left who actually stuck to their guns and who are thus now viewed as worse than Pol Pot): namely, even if supporting the bill is the right thing to do, this conduct has reinforced and strengthened the powerlessness of progressives, i.e., the very problem the blogosphere was devoted to subverting.
There's a reason why so many progressive Beltway bloggers now turn to the war-supporting, Lieberman-loving, Left-bashing Jonathan Chait as the guide for what All Good Progressives do and think; that's the model that's being strengthened.
(Emphasis supplied.) One of the "epithets" I have employed in the last year is Village Blogger. In my mind, it meant that group of bloggers who has adopted a Beltway Mindset (albeit from a Democratic perspective.) They are incapable of looking critically at the functioning of the Democratic Party Establishment. Because of that, in my view, they could never really be "progressive bloggers."
But as Glenn notes, for now it is hard to separate the Village Bloggers from the rest of the Left blogs. At least on health issues, the cooptation was complete.
Can the progressive activists and the progressive blogosphere ever be a force independent of the Democratic Establishment? Only if some hard thinking and soul searching occurs.
Right now, too many are busy whipping for a bill they had no influence over and which stands as a monument to the failures of progressive bargaining.
Speaking for me only
