Progressive Power
News: The New Democrat Network wants to harness an "efficient market for progressive politics" to launch a new kind of political venture. But could progressive politics prevail in such a market?
July 27, 2004
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For anyone who has ever resided or spent time in Boston, the transformation wrought by the Democratic Convention is startling in its reach. Walking in the theater district yesterday morning I saw, adjacent to The Lion King and across the street from Much Ado About Nothing, a marquee reading: “A SALUTE TO REP. RICHARD GEPHARDT.” (Business at the box office window was not brisk.)
I was just then on my way to a nearby hotel, where, in the elaborate first-floor ballroom, scores of besuited Democrats were gathering for what can only be called a “power breakfast.” I don't mean this in the common, cliched sense, in which the term (or its variants: “power lunch” et al) applies to a gathering where powerful people are present, or where important decisions are made. I mean a gathering the entire purpose of which is to harness the power of the participants, albeit toward an end still to be determined. The primary goal, in other words, is the formation not of an agenda but of a network. Over yogurt-covered raisins and biscotti, the Democrats at the breakfast were not intending to cut backroom deals -- far from it: the meeting was open -- but rather to draft plans for a new -- and "progressive" -- backroom.
Such idealistic mafia-making is, I've discovered, one of the Democratic convention’s most popular pursuits. Throughout the Boston metro region, eager Democrats are out at caucuses and coordinating councils and coffee klatsches. The task is undeniably urgent this election season, given the Republican right's stranglehold on all levels of government; and in their shared hatred of the Bush right, at least, the leftist and centrist Democrats have (for the time being) found a common ground to network upon.
It made sense, then, that the morning’s program in the ballroom began with a sobering assessment of the enemy’s forces, laid out in what has been straight-facedly described around Boston as the week’s most-touted PowerPoint presentation. Entitled “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” the presentation had been the centerpiece of a lavish cover story in the previous day's New York Times Magazine, on the subject of the emerging Democrat “money men.” The event had been organized by the New Democrat Network, the ne plus ultra of the Times’s money-men. The NDN is designed as an umbrella funding organization for innovative Democratic groups, built, as they put it, on the “venture model” -- meaning venture capital, from which industry many of the NDN’s heavies hail. Like investors picking high-growth start-ups, NDN donors advance “seed money” to projects, programs, and groups aligned with Democrat causes.
In his now-legendary presentation, Rob Stein -- himself a private-equity investor by trade -- laid the problem before the attendees. His delivery was forceful, his tone suitably dire. He traced hundreds of millions of dollars of conservative money as it accrued to the right’s web of think tanks, advocacy groups, media. His implication, of course, was clear: We need one of these. He spoke matter-of-factly of the “capacity gap” between “the infrastructure that progressives have and what conservatives have built.” After he described the right-wing’s Leadership Institute, where 36,000 young conservatives have received ideological training, he scored the biggest applause line of his presentation when he promised: “Within a year, we’re going to have a Leadership Institute.” After his presentation, I raised my hand and asked him: How did he think a progresive message machine would differ from the conservative one? In fact, might not progressive ideas be inimical to the very idea of a message machine? He agreed that the new institutions “must be built with progressive values,” but added: “In the twenty-first century, it is impossible to promote a belief system without some sort of support network that is institutionally aligned.”
But what, exactly, is the progressive “belief system”? Or, more precisely, how can it be distilled into the sort of brief digestible mission statement, like that of the Heritage Foundation -- “to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense” -- that, as Stein points out, is shared roughly verbatim by almost all the organizations in the conservative cabal? This, Stein said, would be determined in the process itself, through a dynamic that he likened repeatedly to a financial market: “a capital market for ideas,” “an efficient market for progressive politics.” His point was that if donors fund the machine, the message will simply emerge, like some sort of ideological equlibrium between supply and demand.
As the program ended and the besuited Democrats rose to mill about, I was left, with some unease, to ponder the notion of an “efficient market for progressive politics.” What politics would prevail in such a market? And how progressive could they possibly prove to be?
Bill Wasik is a senior editor at Harper's Magazine. He is covering the Democratic National Convention for Motherjones.com.
