I Got Yer Ideology Right Here

"The Democratic Strategist" Ed Kilgore critiques the Rebuild the Party plan: 

And as you may also know, most of the participants in this debate begin by asserting that the problems of the GOP are not fundamentally ideological, or if they are, it's just a matter of insufficient conservatism, or insufficient consistency. Those would-be reformers like Ross Douthat who suggest the old-time religion of small-government conservatism could use a reformation aren't making a lot of headway. Nobody's much in the mood to topple any Ronald Reagan statues. ...

What jumps out at any reader of "Rebuild the Party" is the virtual invisibility of any ideological issues, and the extent to which the "plan" is a faithful imitation of the nutsier and boltsier sections of Crashing the Gate, the book-length 2006 netroots manifesto written by Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong. There's lots about the revolutionary nature of the internet as a vehicle for organizing, fundraising, and communications; lots about the need for a younger and more diverse generation of activists and candidates; lots about rebuilding party infrastructure and competing in all fifty states.

Our agnosticism in the ideological debate is something we've heard from both right and left, but I think this misses the point. The point of the Rebuild the Party plan, at least to start, is to influence the next RNC Chairman's agenda. And the RNC Chairman's job is a non-ideological one. It is about the nuts and bolts of party building.

Beyond that, we also want to provide a platform for different people in the party to self-organize around their (often ideological) vision for the future. The #1 idea we have posted is "Reach Out to Ron Paul and the Campaign for [Liberty]." The Paulites have used new tools to show activist muscle far beyond their raw numbers, and instead of vilifying them, we ought to be learning from them -- even if you personally don't agree with them.

There is also a natural division of labor. The Next Right is all about where the party goes next -- both from an ideological as well as an infrastructure / movement-building perspective. Rebuild the Party is about infrastructure. And I don't worry about this pre-empting a debate about policy because that argument will more naturally occur in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party. Ed Kilgore's New Democrats rode to power in 1992 on an ideological revival, but no such ideological introspection or self-criticism was present in the Obama victory. 

I just got done writing a post about how macro factors like candidates (and ideology fits in this too) drive elections more than tactics. But it is bupkis to suggest that rebuilding our infrastructure can happen only once we've settled on an ideological direction or a leader. We need to be doing both simultaneously. We need to be building a bigger catcher's mitt to capture the enthusism of a newly energized fastball-throwing base. If that enthusiasm doesn't eventually materialize, we're going to have bigger problems than having worried about infrastructure too much. At least we built something that might be useful down the line.

Yes, Barack Obama was an incredibly charismatic candidate and the environment was against us. But don't ignore the flawlessness with which his campaign captured and reflected back that celebrity. Had Obama's camp not done things exactly right, I could easily have seen them raising $200 million instead of $500 million online. That's still huge, and still more than John McCain would ever have raised, but tactics could well have made the difference -- especially in the primary. What if Obama's money advantage had not been quite so overwhelming and he couldn't have flooded the zone quite as effectively in those caucus states? History could have been very different. Hillary Clinton might not be the one receiving the appointment.