WITHOUT IDEOLOGY PROGRESSIVES HAVE NOTHING. THEY MIGHT AS WELL BE THE DLC OR JOIN THE CONNECTICUT FOR LIEBERMAN PARTY

All through 2006 I was raving about David Sirota's brilliant book, Hostile Takeover. I hope all DWT regulars have had a chance to read it by now. I want to start 2007 raving about Sirota's first blog of the year. It's a cautionary tale in the well-crafted guise of a book review. He's reviewing a 2 year old Richard Viguerie book, America's Turn Right.

I keep hearing people on our side, people with great intelligence, great energy, great ideas, great initiative screwing up badly on a crucial point. They think the role of ideology is unimportant in the new politics. It isn't. And I'm glad to know I'm not alone in my thinking.

One of the major misconceptions on the left is that all we need to do is build nebulous "infrastructure" for the Democratic Party and all of our problems will be solved. Just fund more 527s, more GOTV operations and more think tanks to better "package" the same GOP-lite prescriptions of many Democrats in Washington and eureka!-- America will be fixed. This "infrastructure" mantra is repeated ad nauseum to the point where it's become a cliché-- from professional Democratic consultants to big donors in the Democracy Alliance, all we hear is "infrastructure"-- never ideology. But as Viguerie shows, that's exactly how liberals lost the last thirty years, and how conservatives-– shunning such an outlook-– came to prominence.

Sirota is very impressed how right-wing purists like Viguerie savaged their ideological opponents inside the floundering and nearly meaningless GOP. Viguerie writes that "Conservatives mastered the art of discipline-- of being able to purge elements from the movement that might hinder it." Sirota, who was a key participant in the assault on disloyal and treacherous pseudo-Democrat, Joe Lieberman explains that what Viguerie is laying out is that "intra-party ideological battles, far from weakening a party, can strengthen it by building a movement for said party to take electoral advantage of."

This frightens Democratic careerists more than anything. And it cripples them. Democratic leaders in Washington and the left establishment bureaucracy of the insulated liberal Beltway organizations find it totally unacceptable "for anyone in politics to actually believe and feel passionately about their convictions to the point where they may actually fight really hard to make an agenda reality." Vague platitudes will never get a refined, milquetoast John Kerry elected, not even against a proven failure and fraud like George Bush. It is this attitude that leaves us with "leaders" acceptable to the anti-Democratic DLC (be it a Lieberman or a Biden or a Clinton-- either one-- or a Bayh) or, worse, predatory careerists like Emanuel.

I'm so glad the Democrats took both the House and the Senate in November. Progressives' best chance for furthering their values are through the imperfect Democratic Party. But when I was working on helping a few Democrats win their elections I wrote a number of pieces on how the Democratic Party would be far better off winning a majority in the Senate without the Lieberman-like Harold Ford. Yes, I was overjoyed when the Democrats took the Senate and the Blue America PAC stepped in in the last 3 days to help push Jim Webb, an actual moderate, over the top, but what made the overall victory sweeter is that Democrats will not have Ford, another self-serving power-monger with reactionary tendencies, wrecking the Democratic brand for his own craven, non-ideological purposes.

Sirota is looking ahead. "As the 2008 presidential campaign gears up, all of the organizations and voices outside the Democratic Party Establishment will face a very clear choice. Will this constellation-- the unions, the environmental organizations, the Netroots, the Democracy Alliance, etc.-- be merely a microphone for the anointed candidates and policies of the moneymen, consultants and professional ladder-climbers inside the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C.? Or will this constellation be the building blocks of a progressive movement that is rooted not exclusively in partisan loyalties, but in a common agenda?"

You know where DWT will be.