Editors’ Note

From the July/August 2007 Issue

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


in july 2005, Mother Jones sent a writer to a deep-red district in Ohio to follow a candidate in a special House election. For the millions who had mobilized against George W. Bush, the political moment was one of profound despair. Conservative pundits were crowing about a permanent majority. Democrats needed a Joan of Arc; instead they found themselves stuck between timid and triangulating party leaders and progressives captive to academic disquisition and factional purity. Against all that, Paul Hackett was an electrifying figure. A Marine just back from Iraq, he was an unapologetic, populist Democrat who was prone to saying things such as “Bush is a chicken hawk, okay? Tough shit.” He was, in other words, very much like the progressive bloggers then coming into their own. Like Hackett, these new pamphleteers had been shaped by a lifetime of watching the disciplined, ruthless Republican message machine. Like him, they were voluble, pissed off, and itching for a fight.

In the end, Hackett didn’t deliver the upset that the bloggers who converged on his campaign—setting up their laptops in local taverns and raising almost two-thirds of his $850,000 war chest—had hoped for. But he came close enough to signal the possibility of a new kind of politics, a merger of door-knocking and digital outreach. By 2006, the blogosphere and its organizing and fundraising cohorts (MoveOn, ActBlue, et al.) were forces to be reckoned with, supporting hundreds of feisty Democrats in supposedly impossible districts, and…well, you know the rest.

Of course, blogs—and before them listservs, bulletin boards, and chat rooms—had been around for a while. What changed, somewhere between 2003 and 2006, was that ordinary voters discounted by politics-as-usual began to take part in the rowdy conversation happening online, and some politicians began to listen to it. “Politicians have to understand that the Internet is not just a tool,” Howard Dean told Mother Jones as we pulled together this issue’s Politics 2.0. cover package. “It’s a community of human beings who are tired of what I call the one-way campaign, which began essentially during the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Well, it’s not about communicating our message to you anymore; it’s about listening to you first before we formulate the message.” By which, Dean insists, he doesn’t mean just a new way of poll-testing soundbites, but the radical assumption that the people can, and should, drive the political process.

Let’s assume, for a second, that he’s right. How did this change come about? In part, inspiration came from a generation of coders raised on peer-to-peer networking and hacker zines like 2600 and Phrack. They believed that true innovation wouldn’t be led by top-down commercial enterprises like Microsoft or even Apple, but by an open-source movement that “allows users to create user-generated software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration,” as Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia, puts it (at least as of this writing). The open-source movement gave us nonproprietary platforms, browsers, and frameworks such as Linux, Firefox, and Drupal. But beyond nifty lines of code, there was a much larger philosophical implication: that the masses, given time and free rein, could forge a better, more transparent system.

So the question now is: Can there be such a thing as open-source politics? True believers promise a marriage of freewheeling pluralism and the technological tools to share and refine its goals and strategies. Bottom-up organizing, they promise, will trump top-down messaging; “from many, one” will actually mean something again.

It sounds really appealing. But we live in San Francisco, and saw what happened the last time the tech Kool-Aid was passed around. Innovation was quickly co-opted by the money sloshing about, a sock puppet told us it made perfect sense to ship bulk pet food around the country by air…and, well, you know the rest.

Not only do we have to be wary of the geeks and vcs trying to sell us (literally) on MyDemocracy, but ultimately these are politicians we’re talking about—creatures of spin, beholden to many, sincerity challenged, and risk averse. Who says that “listening to the netroots” is not just another “listening tour”?

And what of the glorious netroots? Already we’ve seen some of these gate-crashers act more like gatekeepers, promoting groupthink, punishing dissent, and growing drunk on the tribute that old-school pols and the msm now provide them. Not only that, but the blogosphere hardly looks like America yet: as Afro-Netizen’s Chris Rabb notes, those “who could afford to sleep on Howard Dean’s couch in Vermont are the same people who can raise the money to build a digital consultancy or a social networking site.” Is democracy’s best hope just another—if somewhat bigger and younger—elite? Even if the online conversation broadens, not everyone in the crowd is wise, as the digital road rage in comment threads so often proves. And if you thought Willie Horton and Swift Boating were slimy, wait till every last racist smear or dirty lie finds its way to YouTube or Digg.

Will we supplant a corrupt elite with a tyranny of the masses? Can revolutionaries hold true to their lofty declarations, or will they inevitably be corrupted by power? These are the questions America has been wrestling with since its founding. Countless elections and 231 years later, one thing we can safely say about Politics 2.0 is that everything old is new again.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate