Tomorrow is the first ever (annual?) BlogLeft mini-conference, a day event in Worcester gathering Bay State progressive, lefty and liberal bloggers to discuss what we do, and how we can do in the future. I’ll be attending, so can give an update in the future. And if you’re interested in more immediate coverage, there will be liveblogging; I think MassMarrier and WalkinBrain will be participating, though don’t hold me to that.
I was worried that my non-lefty positions would wear out my honorary membership in the group of kos-inspired MA bloggers, but now that Ken is saying people who work at Wal-Mart deserve to be paid low wages, the heat may be off me for a little while!
In (sorta) related news, sco points me to Jesse Gordon’s Primer on MA Democratic Party Politics, which includes such useful things as instructions on how to run as a delegate for the state party convention.
But more than the practical information, I find the primer fascinating as a document of intra-party lines and proof that I’m not exaggerating the progressive-hack split:
Almost all members of the Democratic Party will CALL themselves “progressive,” but NOT all members actually are! Some people base their self-description as a progressive on being anti-war, pro-choice, anti-death-penalty, or pro-GLBT-rights — and those are important issues where most members of the progressive movement proudly agree with the Mass Dems leadership. We disagree on party openness.
My initial reaction, is "oh, come now…" Sure, process is a major bone of contention, as Progressives have been excluded by the Hacks. And obviously, progressives are going to find it worthwhile to challenge the party players on these grounds. But ultimately, process is means to an ends, and Progressives differ from Hacks on substance, too. I think there’s some Gordian knot of Howard Deanism to unpack here: the sense the whole world is out to get the true progressives, yet that if the people could just speak, they would rally behind the issues and political analyses that the middle-class progressives hold dear.
Gordon’s analysis underplays an important political fact on the ground; lots and lots of people don’t fall into the Progressive or the Hack camp. Some Democrats, who tend not to be political activists of any sort but who vote all the same, dislike both camps, the first for their self-righteousness and political positions they see as wrong, the second for their tax-friendly impulses and the corrupt tendencies of their machine politics. Others, a much smaller subset that may not be much bigger than me, actively find things to like in both camps but falls squarely in neither.
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