Nope. No joke. No sarcasm. All true. Keep reading and I’ll make my case.
This is not another diary about impeachment. I’ll be honest, it’s getting to where even I scroll past those (meaning no disrespect to anyone, but one every couple of days would seem to be more than enough, barring any breaking news…). Still, I will use the whole issue to illustrate what I’m talking about because it does so very well.
Now that the whole impeachment thing is front and center, the traditional media are, typically, getting the backstory completely wrong. Since the VT Senate resolution, I’ve heard on at least three separate occasions how this is the latest victory in a movement that began Town Meeting Day. In fact, the whole impeachment thing has consisted of two distinct “movements”, each of which started well before Town Meeting Day of 2006 and have continued in a methodical and considered fashion since. What happened in the Vermont Senate was, after a long courtship, the final successful merging of the two into one.
And it is the one that I was initially involved in – the effort to promote Jeffry Taylor’s “Rutland Resolution” that swept the Democratic Party Infrastructure last year before running into a wall erected by the surpisingly motivated elected leadership at the meeting dubbed the Randolph Massacre. It was this Resolution that focused on the Vermont legislature and put the “Jefferson’s Manual” into public consciousness (while Dan DeWalt was spearheading the non-party-bound Town Meeting resolutions targeting then-US Rep. Sanders). After the “massacre,” proponents kept the matter alive in Montpelier with the help of Rep. Zuckerman (P-Burlington) and a score of other Dems and Progs at the Statehouse, as well as good ol’ online activism.
(It should be noted that Rep. Zuckerman has always stayed very sensitive to concerns that the whole affair not collapse into yet another P vs. D thing, and has demonstrated that sensitivity and wisdom in his recent comments on the Senate resolution, sharply distinguishing himself from others who may have had nothing to do with the whole issue, but who now may see it as an opportunity to try and dishonorably swoop in and score some cheap, partisan points).
The point is that people who are complaining constantly about how “the Democrats” are no damn good and the Party is just a corporate flack are not seeing the forest for the trees; the original “Rutland Resolution” movement as a local example and the explosion of political blog activism on the national scale are Democratic Party phenomena.
That’s not to say they haven’t spread beyond that. To be effective, the “Rutland Resolution” impeachment movement needed to merge with the non-partisan Town Meeting movement. The left political blog phenomenon is still dominated by Dems, but others have emerged.
But the point is that they started from the Democratic Party grassroots – and the combination of creativity, vision, determination, commitment and empowerment implicit in each should make two things clear: one, that this is not your parents’ Democratic Party, and two, that it’s a Party very much in flux.
Political Parties, despite their rhetoric, have generally been (beyond the most local level) top-down affairs. There are those who call the shots by virtue of their offices (or their proximity to offices) and the ones who nod deferentially. Most of the nodders can find themselves migrating towards the higher strata if they have enough sense of self and ideas of their own to slide into leader roles (although that sense and those ideas can’t conflict *too* much with those already in the drivers seats).
Given that lefties tend to be a grumpy lot, this paradigm tends to create flashpoints and conflicts. In the Dem context, those flashpoints can lead often to one of three things:
- Some passionate lefties taking it on the chin and coming back, but jaded and with significantly muted vigor and vision.
- Some passionate lefties deciding “to hell with it all” and leaving the political realm entirely.
- Some passionate lefties deciding that it all sucks and they just want to start their own party.
This third one is particularly interesting because it perpetuates a mirrored dynamic between the Democratic Party and left-wing third parties, whereby the Dems tend to have all the people who actually understand how government works and know how to shape progressive policies, but have little or no actual visionary leaders, while the third-parties are peopled by often impatient, wannabe leaders all slamming into each other but with very little mechanical understanding of government between them.
What it also leads to is everyone intensively demonizing everyone else to such an extent they can’t even see straight anymore.
But I digress again; the point is that we’re seeing leadership, vision and creativity coming from grassroots Dems across the country and running up into that same old top down leadership structure we see in the Democratic Party (as well as the Republican and Progressive Parties). But instead of hitting the ceiling and shattering into the three pieces outlined above, these kinds of movements are proving more cohesive than much of the infrastructure they’ve come into conflict with. They hold on, and in holding on they grow, until they begin to transform the entire Party as an institution.
And that transformation manifests in a lot of ways. Everything from pushing the counter-beltway Howard Dean into the DNC chairship, followed by bloggers actually defeating entrenched old-school veterans for seats on the Democratic National Committee, all the way to the “50 State Strategy”‘s recent electoral successes and the steady, undeniable shift in the public policy debates to the left in the last year.
The point is that if anyone can look at what’s been going on in public debate locally and nationally in the last couple years and try to say that all the world’s problems are because of “the Democrats,” then that person is either a fool, or is being willfully ignorant as to who “the Democrats” are.
As much as we all tend to wax worshipful of autocratic or dictatorial institutions, the fact is historically that they never last. Democratic institutions on the other hand do. Things are changing in the institution that is the Democratic Party. More and more D’s are seeing the Party as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, the way too many Republicans and Progs see their own Parties. But the most important change has been the development of that most critical of elements to a truly Democratic institution: that is, the capacity for self-criticism, self-examination and self-adjustment. With these come real strength and the ability to grow.
Which is exactly what we’re seeing: growth. The Democratic Party is the first American Political Party to enter institutional adolescence. So long as we don’t get scared and go hide in the closet, that means we can be the first Party to reach political maturity as well.