By the Netroots

“One doesn’t get the sense that the Democratic Party agenda is being set here,” a staffer at a progressive political action committee told me. It was the opening morning of the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, and we were sitting amid a sea of booths and tables—just over one hundred in all—that stretched the length of the warehouse-sized convention hall. Over the course of the next few days, thousands of attendees would wander around the room, mingling with the research groups, political consultants, advocacy organizations, and grassroots media outlets that had set up shop at what the Washington Post once called “the activist left’s largest annual gathering.”

The conference schedule was packed with over one hundred panels, trainings, plenary sessions, and keynotes, and in each of these rooms, the stakes of our “unprecedented” political moment were thrown into full relief: every day, the Trump administration accelerates its crusade to overhaul the federal government, often in gleeful violation of the law, all while many elected Democrats stand idly by, grousing about institutional norms and the apparent unintelligibility of the word oligarchy.

As the hours passed on that first day, I kept returning to that staffer’s observation. It’s a dispiriting claim—and what’s worse is that it’s not only true, it’s markedly understated. Insulated from the consequences of its repeated failures, singularly fixated on self-preservation, and pitifully unpopular, today’s Democratic Party leadership is indifferent—if not openly hostile—to the issues and strategies outlined at Netroots. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for one, is “very frustrated” by Netroots-aligned groups like MoveOn and Indivisible who have had the gall to demand a more aggressive opposition to Trump. Yet it’s the grassroots activists, labor union officials, party volunteers, policy researchers, and progressive staffers who convened in New Orleans that are the only forces working to keep the party from sleepwalking into utter oblivion. Their success is far from assured.

The “netroots”—a portmanteau of “internet” and “grassroots”—came to describe a loose political formation that coalesced in the early 2000s. During those years, the Democratic Party found itself in the wilderness, helmed by leaders still drunk on Third Way Clintonism and steamrolled by a Bush administration riding an authoritative post-9/11 mandate. Aggrieved by the Democrats’ repeated capitulations during President George Bush’s first term—the calamitous invasion of Iraq, a historic rollback of civil liberties, and a looming threat to privatize social security—a group of liberal activists began agitating against the Democratic Party in new, and potentially insurrectionary, ways. 

This growing discontent coincided with strides in technology that transformed political organizing. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign—which harnessed a robust digital operation to pull in an unprecedented flood of small-dollar donations—is regarded as a crucial inflection point. But perhaps equally important is the emergence of the political blog. Thousands of them sprouted up throughout the aughts to react to news stories, debate policy proposals, and strategize opposition to the Bush administration; occasionally, they’d even post political scoops. Blogs like MyDD, Crooks and Liars, and Eschaton provided an opportunity to circumvent a hostile legacy media ecosystem, one that tarred progressive voices as unserious.

But none of these sites came close to matching the influence of Daily Kos. Launched in 2002 by Army veteran and lawyer Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos quickly established itself as the nerve center of the netroots. By January 2008, it boasted 22.8 million monthly unique visitors, far outpacing its rivals. But Daily Kos wasn’t merely a blog—it was a digital watering hole, a site of liberal identity formation that cohered millions of online activists onto an agenda of resistance to the Bush administration. Its targets, however, went beyond the leaders of a Republican Party they viewed as equal parts bumbling and intrinsically evil. The Democratic Party, content to play dead until Republicans self-destructed, came under frequent fire as well.

The success of Daily Kos made Moulitsas something like a crown prince of the netroots. Along with Jerome Armstrong, the founder of the blog MyDD, Moulitsas authored the 2006 book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, a text that came to be a manifesto of sorts for their fledgling political movement. Most interesting are its critiques of the modern-day Democrats, a party deeply “unsure of itself, lacking the expression of any core principles, and devoid of any institutional machinery to develop and promote its agenda. Democrats have utterly failed to offer a compelling alternative to Bush and his Republican acolytes, oftentimes parroting Republican positions on any number of issues in the mistaken belief that it might help them capture centrist or independent voters.” They continue, “The party’s stakeholders resist being dislodged from their entrenched positions of wealth and power. Even as a marginalized minority, they won’t surrender their fiefdoms without a fight.”

In 2006, Daily Kos hosted its first YearlyKos conference, which drew readers and bloggers from across the country to partake in a “three-day blur of workshops, panels and speeches about politics, the power of the Internet and the shortcomings of the Washington media,” as per the New York Times’ dispatch. Despite the outlet’s frequently critical posture toward Democrats, major leaders of the party, sensing the emergent power of the movement, marched into Las Vegas to hold court with the activists skewering them online. YearlyKos, reads the Times’ coverage, “seems on the way to becoming as much a part of the Democratic political circuit as the Iowa State Fair.” The 2007 YearlyKos conference invited even more fanfare and media coverage, thanks to the litany of presidential hopefuls in attendance looking to curry favor with the gatekeepers of the netroots base. Even then-Senator Hillary Clinton, largely reviled by the crowd (at one point, earning boos during a candidate forum), dropped by to perform the necessary genuflections. “We provide bodies, we provide troops on the ground,” as Moulitsas told the Chicago Tribune at the time. “It’s a more activist audience.”

When it came to Barack Obama, many netroots activists were unconvinced: they were wary of his top-down campaign structure, his reliance on high-dollar donors throughout the early part of the primary, and his general political caginess. As his campaign progressed, it became clear that Obama posed no threat to the status quo of Democratic Party politics. Netroots Rising, an account penned by two netroots bloggers in mid-2008, describes the prevailing mood of the time: “Democratic presidential campaigns showed no sign of . . . running people-powered campaigns. Rather, the people running Democratic presidential campaigns seemed happy to achieve a mere semblance of such openness.”

Ahead of its July 2008 convening, YearlyKos rebranded to Netroots Nation in an attempt to broaden its scope, and transcend its affiliation with Daily Kos. Obama, by then the presumptive Democratic nominee, opted to skip the conference, but he was well-represented by a gaggle of campaign staffers. “Most of the discontent,” reported the New York Times, “stems from [Obama’s] vote to give legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that participated in the Bush administration’s warrant-less wiretaps, after he had said he would filibuster it.” Yet despite the movement’s apprehensions, leaders of the netroots were careful to situate their posture as generally non-adversarial, perhaps in hopes of being taken as good-faith governing partners. “We’re not going to pretend that just because he’s Barack Obama, his actions aren’t sometimes problematic. But that doesn’t mean we’re abandoning him or that we won’t vote for him,” Moulitsas told the Times. This posture would eerily foreshadow the trajectory of the netroots in the years to come.

The netroots’ interventions, which pioneered politics at mass digital scale, were unique and advantageous in the mid-2000s. But digital outreach soon dissolved into mainstream practices of politics: elected officeholders, party officials, and aligned political professionals had taken stock of the netroots’ technological innovations and saw a model they could replicate—even if they weren’t as interested in the movement’s political commitments. Once Obama was in the White House, many netroots activists found themselves employed on Capitol Hill or elsewhere in our nation’s capital. “If you were a blogger or activist in 2006 or 2007, you might have actually gotten a job working in the White House, or for some newly elected senator, or maybe a liberal advocacy group,” Justin Krebs, founder of what is now called Living Liberally, a national network of political social clubs, told me on the convention floor in New Orleans. “Suddenly after 2008, every organization and politician wanted to build out a digital program, and who better to do that than a blogger or activist?”

The career of Josh Nelson, a progressive political operative and conference regular, exemplifies this transition. After running a successful environmental blog in his early twenties, he was tapped to lead digital communications at the Alliance For Climate Protection, an environmental group led by Al Gore. “Many of us just needed a stable income and health care,” Nelson told me at the conference. I asked him if the added institutional weight and inertia made it more difficult to criticize the Obama administration. “Of course it did.”

As the political ground shifted underneath their feet, netroots activists were effectively given two options: play ball with the new administration or risk withering in political obscurity. Figures like Moulitsas opted for opportunistic reinvention, even if it came at the expense of the politics they’d once championed. Throughout both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries, Moulitsas repeatedly condemned Bernie Sanders’s campaign, trotting out every tried-and-true smear to denigrate the Vermont senator. This is despite the fact that Sanders, in many ways, embodied the netroots’ approach to Democratic Party politics laid out during the Bush years, and made explicit in Crashing the Gate—grassroots-powered, principle-driven, and unafraid to pick a fight.

Moulitsas’s groveling took a risible turn in early 2019, when, in the aftermath of the “Blue Wave” midterms, he launched a “Roses for Pelosi” campaign to “thank our new House speaker for her incredible leadership!” Daily Kos readers coughed up enough money to send twenty-five thousand roses to the Speaker’s office—though only some ten thousand ultimately made it. A photo snapped that morning tells the entire story: a self-satisfied, grinning Moulitsas clutches Pelosi’s hand while she looks on, stupefied, clearly at a loss for words. The years spent chastising do-nothing Democrats—years that were almost entirely spent with Pelosi at the head of the Democratic congressional delegation—were all forgotten.

“Often, when people talk about the netroots movement,” Nelson continued, “they assume that everyone stood on the same progressive principles. But the truth is that some activists were ideologically progressive, while others just wanted Democrats to do politics differently.” Those two groups, he sighed, “had very different goals in mind.” And as the gap between Obama’s Democratic Party and its activist base widened, Netroots Nation increasingly became a site of confrontation.

In 2014, a group of anti-deportation protesters disrupted then-Vice President Joe Biden’s keynote speech. He addressed the protesters directly from the podium, telling them, “I respect your view, and I share your view,” even encouraging the Netroots audience to applaud them—as they were escorted out by security. The following year’s conference, which took place as the presidential primary picked up steam, marked another important juncture. Clinton, perhaps fearing a reprise of her previous appearance, opted to skip the conference, while both Sanders and former Maryland governor and momentary candidate Martin O’Malley attended. The two partook in a joint candidate town hall that, within minutes, was derailed by a group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, who called on Sanders and O’Malley to address what they’d do about police accountability and racial justice. O’Malley bumbled through a response before exiting the stage (at one point, affirming that “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter,” to a chorus of jeers), while Sanders doubled down on his platform of economic justice, maintaining that black communities would benefit immeasurably from his social democratic agenda. Krebs sees this incident as decisive. “Netroots Nation,” he told me, “made a choice to side with activists over institutions, and as a result some institutional players started pulling back from the conference.”

Even if Netroots Nation has become irrelevant to what Krebs called “the D.C. chattering class or power elite,” he thinks the conference still remains an important venue for activists to coordinate. Indeed, there was a strong contingent of local organizers in New Orleans—representatives of organizations that subsist on underpaid skeleton staff, shoestring budgets, and volunteer labor. I heard from activists working to abolish the death penalty in states across the South; radical faith leaders fighting to end the American-abetted genocide in Gaza; immigrant rights advocates based in Texas and Arizona navigating the horrors of our nation’s border regime. And a number of training sessions offered practical guidance on advancing progressive change: in one, Starbucks Workers United activists described their process of social and power mapping to win union drives; in another, a group of experts described how to protect against growing threats of infiltration by right-wingers and federal authorities; and in a third, activists detailed the power of economic boycotts, and how to execute them successfully. These sessions were particularly interesting to observe—unburdened by the niceties of liberal-progressive discourse, and unafraid to articulate the limits of working through established channels of party politics.

But this activist vanguard sits awkwardly alongside the contingent of the netroots that’s more friendly to the Democratic establishment. It was certainly visible in a lot of the conference programming, which tacked toward the technocratic. There was a litany of panels led by consultants and “messaging gurus,” intended to reframe “the conversation” to maximize “storytelling” potential. The Center for American Progress—which recently appointed Antony Blinken, one of the architects of U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza, to its board—led a training session along these lines, as if the problem afflicting our politics were messaging, rather than the current configuration of power. It’s also something I witnessed during the conference’s opening keynote addresses: Louisiana Democratic State Senator and New Orleans mayoral candidate Royce Duplessis, for instance, offered a series of platitudes about “meeting the moment” and “get[ting] to work.”

This tension speaks to the broader challenges facing the party. Save for a handful of successful primary challenges, the progressive foot soldiers of the Democratic Party have yet to find an effective means to hold party leadership accountable—even though 62 percent of Democratic voters want to see them replaced. The likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries seem content to continue cashing checks from large corporate interests and spewing the same old vacuous rhetoric while the Trump administration exercises the levers of power in a way they simply wouldn’t dream of.

On the penultimate night of the conference, I found myself at an after-party sponsored by a new liberal firm that deploys “ethical AI designed for causes and campaigns.” While in line for drinks, I tried to probe a group of friends and former colleagues, eager to get the “pulse” of these last few days. But beyond sharing innocuous gossip, no one seemed particularly interested in talking about the conference itself—they seemed exhausted, professionally and personally, by the state of American politics. Trying for another approach, I asked them, more generally, what they thought needed to change about the Democratic Party’s orientation toward its base. Some uncomfortable laughter led to a brief moment of silence, and then we changed the subject.