Matt Bai (A'90, EPIIC '90) Analyzes the Progressive Battle for the Democratic Party in his New Book

Progressives in the U.S. are focused on the immediacy of November 2008, but they don’t like to admit it. The battle between short-term and long-term interests — and progressives’ current obsession with the short-term — is at the heart of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by New York Times Magazine writer and EPIIC alum Matt Bai (A ’90).

This is not a book about next year’s elections, though; it reads more like the work of a historian than one of a political writer. Bai has written the story of two groups of progressives — one group, rich; the other, large — and their inner workings, primarily over the past three years.

The rich group is an ever-evolving mix of Big Money from Hollywood (Rob Reiner, et al.), Silicon Valley (venture capitalists), the East Coast (Wall Street and Old Money), and Eastern Europe (well, just George Soros). The group takes its original name, the Phoenix Group, from the Harry Potter book of a similar name, and Bai describes the members’ conniving and obsession with secrecy as if they would be right at home in the J.K. Rowling series. The struggles between the members — they are eventually called partners in the Democracy Alliance — are much less interesting, though, than their goal: Create a vast, left-wing conspiracy. They have studied, conveniently, with the help of a PowerPoint presentation, and come to revere the modern conservative movement of the past 30 years. Forward-thinking conservative donors created think-tanks and journals and other media outlets to cultivate and insulate like-minded academics. The result: Conservative money changed the terms and priorities of the national policy debate.

Rich people don’t form a club to get money out of politics, though. “There’s very little interest in campaign finance reform,” Bai told me. “It’s almost like saying they’d like to see the end of hunger in the world. All of the energy on the progressive side is trying to match what the conservatives have.”

What all that progressive money was going to do was another story. After the dust settles from all the internecine fighting, the donors end up funding pretty much the same old liberal interest groups and think-tanks run by old Democratic insiders as they would have in their pre-Alliance days.

Bai doesn’t dwell on specific progressive policy proposals or on the academics who might be generating them. His interest is the lack of a national debate about the purpose of the progressive movement. “I don’t think it’s an especially enlightened time in the academic/think tank world,” he said. “It’s all secondary to the idea of how you win or get power. That’s not a movement, that’s a bunch of people in a room.”

Unlike the rich group, the members of the large group Bai describes are much more interesting for who they are than what they’re doing. The power of the list — that is, the value of an Excel spreadsheet to excite a massive audience — has been chronicled in detail before, most notably in any article or book about Joe Trippi or Karl Rove.

What Bai does exceptionally well, though, is describe the dynamic between the leaders of the movement (the founders of DailyKos, MyDD and Moveon.org) and their followers, and their joint struggle to make their movement about, well, something. Bai seems most comfortable bringing out the raw, almost aimless passion of average progressives, whether in suburban Virginia or the Midwest.

He shows the blogosphere and the subscribers to the Moveon e-mails to be not just a bunch of liberal nerds with too much time on their hands. Instead, it is a tremendously diverse group. “If you were just an ordinary angry liberal voter, Moveon was for you,” Bai told me. The result, he said, was a “lobby on an emotion, rather than on a single issue.”

That emotion, clearly, was directed against anything Republican, and it has had an immediate impact on the current Presidential race. “So much of the time is given over to talking about the destruction of the country and the nefariousness of the Republicans,” Bai told me. The message the candidates are getting from the movement — “stand up harder, fight harder,” in Bai’s words — has changed the terms of the race.

This is most apparent in Hillary Clinton’s shift in her stance on the war and Barack Obama’s suddenly confrontational rhetoric, as opposed to his earlier theme of unity. In a telling anecdote in Bai’s book, Obama writes a long letter about bipartisanship and togetherness in response to his online critics, only to be trashed further as an appeaser of the Republicans. The Obama who emerges is almost scared and shell-shocked, but he has to adjust his campaign to the movement. Bai credits this exchange for the Obama campaign’s initial slide. “He’s not talking about the things that actually make him passionate,” Bai told me. “It doesn’t play well with the progressive movement of the party.”

Bai is careful to say that movements in their infancy shouldn't be judged on the basis of election wins and losses. But the movement that emerges from his book is one that is waiting for 2008. Will a Democratic president energize the movement and help it articulate a grand vision to address the nation’s challenges? Or, will the movement deflate without its unifying anti-Bush message?

(Brian Loeb is an EPIIC Alum from 2004, and is currently working for a polling firm in Oakland CA, and deciding on what to study in Graduate School)

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