Sinclair and the Blogosphere

Mark Schmitt had some smart things to say about l'affaire Sinclair. Playing off that, I don't know whether or not people will be successful in beating this back or at least making Sinclair pay a price and deterring people from such antics in the future, but the episode shows the importance in politics of having a viable social movement on your side and not just a bunch of disaggregated people who agree about some stuff combined with a handful of professional political operatives in Washington, DC. The existence of real groups in society is important in many ways, as Theda Skocpol taught me, but it's especially important in these sorts of circumstances where only consumer power can forestall the ability of the economically powerful to simply dominate the political arena. But, as Skpocpol emphasizes, progressives have a big problem in this regard. Mass membership organizations like Rotary Clubs and so forth have been on the decline for decades. Perhaps more importantly, so have unions, which were the backbone of the very successful midcentury progressive movement and, in their weakened state, continue to be the backbone of the weakened progressive movement of the late-20th and early 21st century.

On the right, by contrast, you have very viable social networks organized around the churches that white Protestants attend. We have the black churches here on the left, of course, which continue to play an important role, but as long as African-Americans are only around 10 percent of the population, their role will be pretty circumscribed outside of cities with big concentrations of minorities (in such cities -- Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit, etc., they're absolutely dominant, and in more mixed cities like New York and LA they're very influential).

Looked at demographically, though, what keeps the Democrats in play is the fact that while union families have declined as a proportion of the electorate, what you might call "postmodern" white people -- Judis and Teixeira's professionals, Zogby's unmarrieds, Brooks' seculars -- have increased their share and come to be a larger and larger slice of the base of progressive politics. The problem with these people -- people like me -- is that we tend to be radically unconnected from large, formal, social networks. And not in a coincidental way, this characteristic is pretty fundamental to the essence of the sort of person we're talking about. We're younger, more transient, start families later, don't go to church and are generally without strong roots in anything more substantive than an "urban tribe".

This is all fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't work very well for the purposes of politics. Political life in all its manifestations -- voting, volunteering, donating, boycotting, letter-writing, petition-signing, calling up advertisers and hassling them, etc. -- is beset with collective action problems. There's almost nothing anyone who's not super-rich can do to influence the political process that, on its own, will make a whit of difference. All of these activities depend on the notion that if lots of people followed your lead, then something important would happen. But in order to get any of this to happen you need to get a large number of people to behave in a not-especially-rational way, hence the collective action problem. Such problems normally get solved through appeals to group solidarity, but that presupposes the existence of a group. Hence the value of a union hall, a church, or VFW outpost, a Rotary Club, or what have you. The knowledge that there's a group of people out there you identify with and who identify with you can be a powerful force above and beyond the ways in which such groups simply aid communications.

This, I think, is one of the more important contributions blogs -- particularly the amateur blogs -- may make to American society in the years to come. They create a sense of virtual community. You feel that you know the people you read regularly, and the people who participate in comments threads on blogs you read. You're aware of a wider network of people you may read occassionally, or only see on the blogrolls of others. You exchange emails with readers, writers, and commenters. And because the network is merely virtual, it's remarkably robust and stable, staying in place as you move. Between June 2003 and June 2004 I was variously in Boston, New York, Italy, New York again, and then Washington but I was always in contact with a circle of people over the internet. As these networks continue to expand and -- in some ways more importantly -- simply continue to exist and deepen over time, they become more and more real. Even where they're not an important organizing force on their own (the way only Atrios and Daily Kos really seem to be) they provide the underlying infrastructure for transient efforts to gather donations, volunteers, people to hassle Sinclair advertisers, or whatever.

It's a tool, obviously, that's available to the right as well and will be used by them. But it's a tool they need less, since they've done better over the past few decades at having a real social movement anyway. And it's a tool that's less well-aimed at that side's demographics, as you can see from the fact that the right blogosphere tends to propound an ideology -- "neolibertarianism" as Jim Henley puts it -- that's rather different from that of the Republican Party and that's obsessively focused on a narrow band of issues.

Perhaps this is all bullshit and will come to nothing, but I don't think so. Rather, the Dean campaign, despite it's very real limitations, was the start of something important. It showed a bunch of people that there are other people out there who are basically like them and that if they work together they can make a difference. And more important that if they want to work together with other people to make a difference, it's easy enough to find the people to work with. The number of people involved (as the Dean campaign also showed) isn't a majority, isn't big enough to dominate the country, but it is enough people to combine with other progressive constituencies to form a majority. And it should get bigger over time.