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"In this article, the authors compare the practices of discursive production among top U.S. political blogs on the left and right during summer 2008. An examination of the top 155 political blogs reveals significant cross-ideological variations along several dimensions. Notably, the authors find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation. Blogs on the left adopt different, and more participatory, technical platforms, comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites, include user blogs, maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content, include longer narrative and discussion posts, and (among the top half of the blogs in the sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization. The findings suggest that the attenuation of the news producer-consumer dichotomy is more pronounced on the left wing of the political blogosphere than on the right. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals, whereas the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. The cross-ideological divergence in the findings illustrates that the Internet can be adopted equally to undermine or to replicate the traditional distinction between the production and consumption of political information. The authors conclude that these findings have significant implications for the study of prosumption and for the mechanisms by which the networked public sphere may or may not alter democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere. "
"Our starkest, most objective finding is that the left and right wings of the blogosphere adopted significantly different technological features and platforms. More than 40% of blogs on the left adopt platforms with enhanced user participation features. Only about 13% of blogs on the right do so."
"In their 2009 book “Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality,” Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs put together survey data and make a convincing case that this cynical story is not a fair summary of public opinion in the United States. Actually, most Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—support government intervention in health care, education, and jobs, and are willing to pay more in taxes for these benefits."
"The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics by veteran political reporter Thomas Edsall, suggests that’s a mistake.
Writers both friendly and hostile to the banking establishment have focused on the continuity at some high levels of policymaking. Ben Bernanke has stayed on as top central banker; Timothy Geithner slid from the New York Fed to the Treasury after Obama’s inauguration; TARP was a bipartisan collaboration between Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush, continued by his successor. Various former investment bankers have shuffled in and out of office in Washington. Lost or marginalized in these tales is the extraordinary partisan political mobilization of the past several years."
"To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship. "
"To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship. "
The dream of realignment has become the enemy of such compromises. It inspires politicians to claim sweeping mandates from highly contingent victories: think of Dick Cheney insisting on another round of deficit-financed tax cuts in 2003 because “we won the midterm elections” and “this is our due,” or the near-identical rebukes that President Obama delivered to Eric Cantor (“Elections have consequences — and Eric, I won”) and to John McCain (“the election’s over”) during the debates over the stimulus and health care.
"You don't need look far to see that consensus in action -- just check out the current debt ceiling brouhaha. Paraded around by carnival barkers as supposed proof of unprecedented division and rancor, the moment's manufactured crisis in Washington actually exemplifies all the hallmarks of transpartisan consensus, as the Democratic president and the Republican congressional leadership essentially agree that Social Security and Medicare should be slashed, corporate taxes should be cut, taxes on the wealthy shouldn't be significantly raised and defense spending should face only minimal reductions. The only real "debate" is about the specific numbers -- not about whether such an extreme set of priorities is the proper way to balance a budget."
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Recall, for instance, recent news out of Connecticut -- a state of Big Money politics that's also home to many major multinational corporations. Thanks to intense third-party organizing and pressure by the Connecticut Working Families Party, this same corporate-dominated locale legislated the nation's first statewide law forcing companies to provide paid sick days to employees.
In New York, the home of the financial industry behemoth, the Working Families Party is now regularly billed as one of the state's single most powerful political forces. Over the years, it has played a critical role in everything from halting unbridled gas exploration to raising the minimum wage to reducing consumers' utility bills to taking on the real estate industry's most rapacious practices.
In Oregon, where the Working Families Party has only recently started organizing, the fledgling third party led a campaign to end the state's dependence on Wall Street with a proposal to create a state-owned non-profit bank. Though the bill ultimately failed, the party managed to power it through a series of legislative committees -- and the proposal will likely be back in the next session.
And, not to be forgotten, is Vermont -- the state that recently made national headlines as the first in America to successfully go up against the for-profit health insurance industry and begin legislating a single-payer system. That's the same state that is home to the Progressive Party, which regularly elects its candidates to municipal and state legislative office.
"One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic)."
"One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state - a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society's winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net - morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It's only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That's what lies behind the modern right's fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty."
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In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.
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The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. - 1 more annotation(s)...
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The movement to reinvigorate citizenship had roots in academia. Harvard's Robert Putnam identified the decline in political participation as a symptom of a broader collapse in civic organizations. In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, he drew on survey data showing declines in membership in local organizations like the Elks lodges to argue that "social capital" -- the resources that enable trust and cooperation -- was drying up. Benjamin Barber of Rutgers and later the University of Maryland was among many who advocated for efforts to strengthen civil society, the realm of life between government and the market. James Fishkin, now at Stanford, sought to construct models of informed deliberative democracy. Harry Boyte of the University of Minnesota argued for expanding opportunities for public involvement in community decisions. Putnam's Harvard colleague Theda Skocpol described the shift from political organizations based on active local participation toward large and distant direct-mail membership groups, dubbing this shift "diminished democracy" in a book of the same name.
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Technology and partisanship aren't only increasing participation. They're also leading to a burgeoning of public debate, albeit not the kind that Fishkin and other academics imagined. Political blogs don't fit well with deliberation theory. They are rough, raucous, and vigorously partisan. Yet they have been far more successful than any deliberative experiment in encouraging wide-scale political participation and involving large numbers of people in real and lively democratic debate. Successful deliberative experiments have typically been small-scale, leading to real doubts about whether they can be scaled up to even the level of a state. The distributed conversation of the blogs, in contrast, involves millions of people, arguing vehemently about politics and other issues in interconnected forums of debate.
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