Progressive Nation 1.0

By Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop. Posted June 13, 2006.

This past weekend's wildly successful YearlyKos Convention proved beyond a doubt that the Progressive Movement has dramatically changed the landscape of American media, politics and culture. As such, the Progressive Movement is now poised to revive an American future suffocated by the hostile takeover of the Radical Right.

But what is the foundation of this new movement? What is the core principle or core value driving events like YearlyKos--a core idea that speaks with such power to an ever-increasing cross-section of Americans?

The answer is: trust.

Trust at the core

With few exceptions, of the remarkable things about the media coverage of the YearlyKos Convention has been the inability of journalists to capture in writing the significance of the event for those who attended. They missed it.

Take a look at this clip from Maureen Dowd's op-ed Bloggers Double Down, for example, which is representative of the type of approach that journalists took to the event:

I tracked down the cult leader, wading through a sea of Kossacks, who were sitting on the floor in the hall with their laptops or at tables where they blogged, BlackBerried, texted and cellphoned -- sometimes contacting someone only a few feet away. They were paler and more earnest than your typical Vegas visitors, but the mood was like a masquerade. This was the first time many of the bloggers had met, and they delighted in discovering whether their online companions were, as one woman told me, male, female, black, white, old, young or "in a wheelchair."

Let me just say that I am a big fan of Maureen Dowd, maybe even a groupie. And I was more than a little chuffed to see her sitting at the table next to me when I attended the "pundit training" workshop she also mentioned in her article. But as I read Dowd's description of YearlyKos, I wondered how two people could be sitting just a few feet away from each other yet be so far apart.

Maureen Dowd's description of "the mood" being "like a masquerade" is not mean-spirited or hurtful or in anyway worthy of condemnation. It is just not an accurate description of the "mood" in the room.

The attendees at YearlyKos were not just happy to put names with faces, but were deeply moved to be for the first time standing in a new community built entirely on trust.

"To be here is to be a part of something that we have built," is not an exact quote, but is my synthesis of what I heard and what I was told by just about everyone at the YearlyKos convention. "We did this," is another.

During Harry Reid's evening address to the convention, and during Joe Wilson's remarks, and during Wes Clark's remarks, and during just about every event--formal or informal--in the entire conference, attendees were expressing the same thought, the same idea, over and over and over again: America is suffering from fear, and we have built a movement based on trust to make things better.

Why, I wonder, did this simple basic idea not appear in the established media coverage that was welcomed to YearlyKos and treated with such open respect and admiration throughout the weekend?

Journalists, it seems, are not quite ready or not quite able to write about the real story of our movement--which, at its core, is not about ice-sculptures at parties thrown by political candidates or about press training given to convention volunteers. The real story is how successful this movement has been having been built on a foundation and theme of trust.

Who we are and what we can expect

Having read that passage from a leading journalist who attended the YearlyKos Convention and attempted to describe what it was about, consider this quote from Gina Cooper, Executive Director of YearlyKos:

I said in my closing remarks Saturday evening that this convention was built on a foundation of trust. Markos set it out when he first created the structure of our community where we riff raff are trusted to create our own content and manage our own community. In return, the community trusted us by investing and showing up. And speaking of trust…now that Hyperbolic Pants Explosion's camera has been returned nothing at this convention was stolen. I mean, of course, we're not like that. But can you imagine any other event with over a thousand random people from anywhere and everywhere coming together and nothing being stolen? I mean, yes, that's how it should be, but we all know that how things "should" be and how they "are" are two totally different things. So a minor detail, yes. But once again an example of who we are and what we can expect even on the smallest of levels.

Jeffrey Feldman is Editor-in-Chief of Frameshop.

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