Not Just Hollywood Writers
It’s always hearting to read constructive and hopeful posts, at MyDD.com and elsewhere; posts about how eager many of us are to help the Dems take the country back — even if it’s one. office. at. a. time. At least this is how I read The Hollywood Mythspiracy diary that’s been on the front page of MyDD.com for much of the day. Matt’s brother and many of his acquaintances, is clear from the diary, want to help the Dems craft resonant messages, which is a good enough and laudable thing to offer on its own right; but, as he writes, Dems have not tapped into the eager resource that exist in young Hollywood.
Now, I know that Matt’s brother’s diary over at MyDD.com does not purport to suggest that having Hollywood writers craft the Dems message (i.e., via speeches, commercials and “narratives”) would be the magic bullet that would end the Dems apparent electoral woes. Clearly, the suggestion/offer made in the diary would only be one small — very small — part of the solution. I write and hope that it would be “only a very small part of the solution” because it must be understood that the long-term health of the Dem party, and of the Progressive movement necessitates the creation of a brick-and-mortar infrastructure to mirror/match/surpass what they’ve got on the right. Additionally, aside from the brick-and-mortar infrastructure, we, the Progressive constituency, have got to demand long-term leadership and vision from elected Dems — and from unofficial leaders (i.e., former presidents and non-elected party officials). For a brief encapsulation of the much needed long-term leadership that we need on the left see Rick Perlstein’s The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo — his essay made the rounds on the internets a couple of months ago.
There’s such a thing as a Progressive philosophy… at the moment we simply want to win; so, we’re content with merely being partisan and will support a candidate that stands up to the right… but, at least I am, we’re ideological and have a strong sense of the rough outlines of our progressive values and ideology, even if these are not being articulated nor defended in the mainstream media by a recognizable leadership — much less by elected Dems. Our Progressive ideology, though, needs to be nurtured over the long-term if a movement is to rise from our ranks to challenge the right and, too, to move the nation’s center back to the middle (and, one would hope, one day, to the center-left).
What prompted me to write this is what I perceived as the undercurrent in Matt’s brother’s diary: an overt reliance on short-term and marketing-driven stylistic responses to the apparent electoral woes of the Dem Party (i.e., as if the Dems’ electoral problems would be solved if only the party made better commercials, told better narratives or gave better speeches. Sure, such solutions would make a difference at the margins in a couple of national races, but we — I think — need more than that.). This is a simplification, I know; it’s just that reading The Hollywood Mythspiracy diary I was reminded of an old Hollywood adage, There are no bad movies, there’s only bad marketing. Such an approach, one that relies too heavily on message alone, is what has weakened the Democratic party and, too, atrophied anything resembling a progressive movement in this country. As critics of the DLC have pointed out, this is precisely what that organization is guilty of: convincing the Democratic beltway establishment to target their message to specific audiences (i.e, the swing voters du jour ), and to mirror whatever the conventional wisdom of the day is on a given subject (i.e, national security, moral values, etc.).
Sure, governing and winning elections requires exploiting short-term strategies (i.e, effective marketing), but wrestling the ideological center of the country away from the right back to the middle will take: building physical networks off-line and creating a message delivery system to compete with the right’s echo chamber. (We gotta build a progressive/liberal competitor to FauxNews, damn it — if only I had a couple of million dollars to build my own media empire — okay, it’ll take more than a couple.)
