How much intellectual depth there is can be debated -- there are a lot of quite substantive posts with some intellectual heft in the various diaries that are often quite widely read -- but we were comparing Kos's site to a rally, which hardly qualifies as deep intellectual rhetoric.
As for folks at Kos being in the Dem mainstream, it depends on how you define it. A lot of posts and diaries are quite radical. Barak Obama had a personal post on the site defending the Dems approach on Roberts and many of the readers kicked the hell out of him. Many are dismissing him as a DLC hack.
So if one of the most progressive votes in the Senate gets attacked as too rightwing, you are playing a bit of semantic games to say that the sentiment is all in the "Dem Party mainstream." Some of it no doubt is and Kos himself is no radical, although a very progressive Democrat, but he's attracted a far range of debate to his site.
-Atrios is -a good guy too, as well as a real intellectual (he tends to hide it), -but like Markos he's only a limited number of degrees to the left of the -Dem Party center. He makes up for it in militance. -THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!
But you keep talking about Kos and Atrios as individuals, but as least in the case of Daily Kos, Markos is just one person, very important one obviously, but the site is a far larger community of discussion, information and organizing.
And his skill in pulling together that broad, diverse community who, from radicals to more mainstream Democrats, almost all oppose the war-- that's a significant organizing success. That's not mere media savvy but organizing savvy.
Militance may not be enough, but that's my general problem with a lot of left action as well. It lacks strategy to attain more radical goals. That's in many ways my problem with big marches-- they give the illusion of radicalism without actually threatening the powers that be in any serious way.
-- Nathan
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Nathan Newman Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 1:22 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Kos on Marches
----- Original Message ----- From: Max Sawicky <mailto:sawicky at epinet.org>
-Kos is a fine fellow, but he has become a campaign consultant and media entrepreneur, -and their business is to figure out -how to manipulate public opinion.
-He has never been an organizer, as far as I know. But all of that is utterly -divorced from what is involved in building a radical movement that -puts forward new ideas and that engages and changes hearts and minds. -That's not his business.
Max, Kos is definitely not an organizer in the traditional sense, although his work has been far more than traditional media. He has used technology to create a community of people in constant dialogue who are organizing day-to-day with each other for social change. He has nearly a million people visiting his site every day, with thousands posting messages, discussing strategy and planning actions in response to that discussion.
A whole range of organizations and organizing efforts have spun off directly from his site with his assistance. Folks around the site are holding a massive founding convention next year, the Yearly Kos, and other organizing campaigns have been launched not just for political candidates but for a range of other campaigns were legislators have been lobbied or corporations targetted.
There goal is explicitly not merely information but to influence action in support of their agenda.
So why doesn't Kos and his compatriots count as organizers?
And the idea that media has nothing to do with "new ideas" or engaging "hearts and minds" is kind of bizarre. Not all of organizing is about the media, but many people saw the marches on Saturday were about influencing the media and the public through the media.
Kos's whole orientation on providing alternative information on the war has been to effect that public "hearts and minds." Information is a key part of organizing, so creating some complete separation between media work and organizing makes little sense.
At Bard College, where I'm teaching a couple of course this semester, the big banner recruiting people to the march said, "The Iraqis watch TV, let them know we care." That's a nice reformulation of public opinion but it's still a media strategy. And many people going to the march-- as was evident afterwards by comments discussing how the media treated the march -- were oriented to effecting the media.
Kos doesn't want to run any particular organization -- he's not a bureaucracy builder, which I think is a problem in some ways for his goals, but he's definitely an organizer in the sense that anyone who brings together people who had not been together before, and encourages them to take action with greater unity-- that's an organizer.
Nathan Newman
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