Salon.com coverage of MoveOn.org
[As I said yesterday, while guest blogging on Seeing The Forest, MoveOn.org, the Dean campaign, etc. are great… but they’re not “progressive”, they’re centrist… a “radical middle” (which at other points has been called “populist”), yes, but not “left” oriented or “progressive”, the way those of us on the ground in the American progressive movement would define it. To me, and I’m not sure why this is, the “left” has yet to really get a hold on how to utilize the Internet to effectively promote its message… certainly, the Green Party hasn’t. Is it technophobia? Ignorance resulting from lack of familiarity? Institutions built around older organizing models? who knows… but we need to get past that, and quickly. -Thomas]
MoveOn moves up
O’Reilly, DeLay and the GOP have declared war on it. But the online citizen movement grows richer and stronger by the day.
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By Michelle Goldberg
Dec. 1, 2003 | Bill O’Reilly wants its nonprofit status revoked. Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie sees it as part of the “Democrat plan to subvert campaign finance laws.” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s office plays phone pranks on its staffers. A piece in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine worries: “It could bypass the mainstream media, sneak around campaign spending limits, and become its own powerful channel for Leftist communication, indoctrination and mobilization.”
Clearly, MoveOn.org has arrived.
[…]
… Though its tactics might be insurgent, MoveOn’s political orientation isn’t far from the center of the Democratic Party. The group sees itself as representative of the new silent majority, average Americans abused by right-wing ideologues who claim a monopoly on national definition. Its support suggests just how many people in America have felt voiceless and yearned for some way to make themselves heard.
“MoveOn has been tagged in mainstream media as a liberal activist group, when in fact the positions they’ve articulated have tended to fall more in the center,” says Jonah Seiger, a visiting fellow with the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “Their birth was a moderate position on the Clinton impeachment — censure the president and move on. It wasn’t ‘This is all bullshit and we shouldn’t do anything,’ and it wasn’t ‘Let’s tar and feather him.’ Their position on the war was also a middle-of-the-road position — give inspectors time. It wasn’t ‘Let’s not be there,’ and it wasn’t ‘Let’s go right to war.’”
[…]
