Moving MoveOn On
Posted on:: December 23rd, 2004
Chris Nolan publishes the second half of her critique of MoveOn.org at Personal Democracy. Lots of great information and an animosity I don’t share. MoveOn isn’t perfect, and if it were it still wouldn’t revolutionize politics or create a new movement, but I count it as an important ally in our joint struggle. Anyway, the two-part series is well worth reading. (Part 1 is here.)
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Thanks for the reference. This was interesting.
The gist, as I understand it, is that moveon has all the naiveté (I admit: I ran spell check on that) of a startup. Good for them! As we’ve seen, an internet startup has a small, but much-greater-than-vanishingly-small-basketball-star chance of making it. They, by design, exist to change the world. This is seldom done all at once, but moveon innovated on both technique and pluckiness. Sometimes just sheer volume.
Maybe moveon is a prototype for an ‘internet party’ vehicle? Rather than just a fund-raising vehicle or an advocacy vehicle, an augmenting method for actually IDENTIFYING and PICKING (don’t think voting) a person to lead the country? Better than CNN, FOX, ABC… Dean came close.
r
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
David,
I don’t think either part of Chris’ article had any animosity toward MoveOn. The article asked some tough questions about the organization – how can you be bipartisan if you’re so strongly supporting Democratic candidates, is the organization really democratic and grassroots or is it centrally run, etc. Any organization that shies away from questions and criticism is suspect I think. That is, after all, the way we grow and it’s good journalism too.
And let’s not fool ourselves on Dean – for all of the pre-primary hype and exposure he had, he fell apart the second he was exposed to real, on the ground, electoral politics. You can be as angry as you want, but in the end, you have to give people a reason to vote FOR you. Dean, Kerry and the Democrats failed to do this. Had any candidate laid out a positive energizing vision of how the country and the world would be better off if they were elected, they might well have won.
This Chris is a “she”.
Inspirations
The following sites, blogs, and articles have provided ideas and inspiration for Philly Future:
Similar Sites
Slashdot.org
Metafilter.org
About us
Welcome | Manifesto | Personal Democracy Forum Staff | Contributing Editor