Four years ago this month, the worldview of conservatives began to collapse with Hurricane Katrina.
The reliance on leadership, the rhetoric about drowning government in a bathtub, the assumption that government was more a hindrance than a help, it all came together in the figure of Michael Brown. "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" became the epitaph of the movement.
The Netroots rose as a direct consequence of Bush-era failure. The idea was that people, ordinary people, could get involved in politics, could take power on behalf of intelligence, and prevent new Katrinas from happening.
But a Katrina is happening right now, testing whether that movement, or any movement dependent on volunteer activism, can long endure.
That crisis is health care reform.
The hurricane in this case consists of Astroturf groups, bankrolled by health insurers, who are going around the country disrupting attempts by Democrats to hold town hall meetings on the subject. Like Katrina, this weather front was predicted, yet sites like DailyKos still remain, like Brownie, dumbfounded by it all.
The response so far. A TV ad attacking the Republicans and their industry allies.
Supposedly bloggers like Kos, Firedoglake, and the Huffington Post have developed this enormous army of activists, and the Obama campaign turned them into a fighting force for change. Yet what was organized as a bottom-up movement has instead become a top-down affair, with A-List bloggers speaking truth to power but the army following it acting powerless.
It is past time for this movement to go back to its roots and stop pretending that a single election is transformative. The press hates you. Washington hates you. Call the wahmbulance.
On the TV, Chris Kofinis has offered some good ideas. Start each meeting with personal testimonies from local people impacted by a lack of care or coverage in the current system. To that might be added, have a sign-in sheet outside each meeting that people must sign to get in, check their IDs and if they're not from the member's district don't let them in.
But this is supposed to be a grassroots movement. Now that the grassroots are needed where is the movement? It's in TV studios or in Washington, waiting to go into a TV studio.
Unless the "momentum" of the last week is turned around health reform will be lost for a generation, and those in the Netroots will deserve most of the blame. If you talk about bottom-up power and then rule from the top-down, the contradiction will kill you every time.
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