Looking to the future: What avenues are open to us?

It's clear that voting hasn't worked for us in a long time. In 2004, even with everything seemingly going in our favor, it still didn't work. Perhaps the American people are too complacent, perhaps the system is too corrupt, or maybe both are the case. But it's beginning to look like we can never count on being able to vote the bastards out.

The party system isn't working for us either. The Democratic Party has been in go-along-to-get along mode since at least 1980. Besides that, Congress is a closed club. You might elect the most wonderful person in the world as a representative, but when they get to Washington, they're the most junior of Congresspersons, with no power and no hope of gaining any except by playing the Washington games. And third parties are even more shut out of the system than junior Democrats

The alternative power bases the left enjoyed in the past -- the unions, the civil rights movement -- are effectively gone. They don't even have much influence over the Democratic Party any more, let alone the nation as a whole. New mass movements could yet arise, but that seems to take three things: an underclass with a sense of its own identity (workers, blacks), clear-cut goals (better pay and hours, desegregation), and effective techniques (strikes, sit-ins.)

At the moment, we don't have any of those things. In recent years there have been a variety of progressive causes (environmentalism, gay issues), but none of those has spoken to a well-defined underclass. Their objectives have been fuzzy, and the tecniques used (giant puppets?) have shown no actual power and very little ability to even get widely noticed.

Setting aside for a moment the possibility of new mass movements arising as things get worse, that leaves us with the whole area of grassroots organizing and information. I think this is where our greatest strength lies. Kerry lost this election. The Democratic Party lost big-time. But all of *us* -- whether blogging or posting here at DU or out on the streets and phone lines with ACT and MoveOn -- have only just begun to discover our own strength and ability to coordinate our forces.

The Internet. Peer-to-peer. Cell phones. These are wonderful tools, and we know how to use them. The right doesn't. The right consists of a top-heavy network of well-funded think tanks, astroturf propagandists, and dirty tricksters. Whatever idealism may have existed on the right in the anti-Communist days of forty years ago is long gone, and the current generation of right-wing activists is motivated by nothing but greed and self-interest. They're anti-tax and anti-regulation and pro-privatization, and that's about it. They don't actually stand for anything at all.

We need to keep our sense of ourselves, our ideals, and our sources of power going. There are a number of areas in which we can do that, but the one that is of most interest to me personally is control of the information stream. The cable channels, in particular, are unable to do most of their own news gathering and are all too willing to read press releases from "non-partisan" right-wing organizations instead. In most cases, it isn't that they're biased so much as that they're lazy.

So suppose we on the left form our own centers of research and analysis -- think of them as open-source equivalents of the old top-down Republican think-tanks -- with a capacity for both in-depth investigation and rapid response. And suppose we also work towards insuring that the right-wing spokespeople are identified as partisan advocates whenever they're quoted in the papers or on tv. Those two things alone could do a lot to haul the discourse back in our direction and put progressive solutions to current problems at the forefront of any discussion.

I'm not a revolutionary by temperament, but I am a radical geek. And I'd like to invite anyone else with an interest in geek solutions to the disenfranchisement of the progressive left to join me bringing them to fruition.

(Does anyone know how to set up a wiki? I have no idea how that works, but I suspect it's what we really need. DU is lovely, but the message board format just doesn't work for research and accumulation of resources.)

This is why I'm banging around on the forums today, collecting ideas. You know, I'm a geek by trade and I think technology is how we can turn our country around. We have access to information. TV does not have to control us. The problem is getting this information out to people. I was just hearing from someone that there are grants out there to help get internet access and computers into low-income neighborhoods. This could be used to get people off of cable news and on to the internet, where we can reach them -- those of us, that is, who do not own huge cable news networks.

You're right about the forums. They're great for connecting, but we need a place to catalog and organize the information we get -- and we have a lot of it. The internet, I honestly believe, can help us, ordinary people form our own think tanks. We can get people from all over the world involved.

So, I'm with you! Now, the problem is -- how do we stay connected? :)

was cutoff? Three possibilities: (1) cell phones and (2) mail CD's.
(very inconvenient) and (3) private and clandestine LANS.

Already set up in case someone asked this starroute. No pm's right now it looks like here.

that's where we can expand our base . . .