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Edition: Paperback
Format: Index
Pages: 5 3/8 x 8 3/8, 216 pages
ISBN: 9781933392417
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Release Date: 2006-08-24
Crashing the Gate
Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas; Foreword by Simon RosenbergAssociated Articles 1
Announcing Project Bridge the Gap
My Direct Democracy
December 18, 2006
Back in June, a contingent of reformers got their first shot at taking over the Texas Democratic Party. Made up largely of former Dean, Clark, and Edwards supporters, the movement nearly succeeded. We forced a rare runoff, and fell only 3% short in the second round of voting. Although the reform contingent constituted a majority of present delegates, we were outvoted by delegates who held proxy power (ie, multiple votes) for non-present delegates. The loss was heartbreaking for many of us. There were two candidates - Glen Maxey and Charlie Urbina-Jones - who understood that people powered politics is the way of the future. But we were defeated by the old-schoolers who clearly knew how to work the proxy system. Lesson learned.
After the convention, we went home defeated but determined to work for and support our Democratic candidates. The convention was over - it was time to STFU and get to work. Or as Bill Clinton put it, "Fall in love, then fall in line." We were good soldiers, and we expected that our party would support the Democratic slate from top to bottom. Needless to say, the convention loss wasn't our last disappointment of this campaign season.
Now rather than rehash the flame wars that have sprouted up in the Tex-o-sphere post-election, I'm going to indulge myself for a moment and share my theory on why I think these arguments are springing up right now and how I hope we can fix it.
To read more Click Here
Bloggers and Parties
Can the netroots reshape American democracy?
Boston Review
by Henry Farrell
November 2006
The “netroots”—an Internet grass roots that has set out to change the Democratic Party—are often maligned. These progressive bloggers and their readers, who emerged as an influential group during Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, are increasingly depicted as a sinister movement under the dictatorial control of Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of the prominent political blog Daily Kos. The New York Times columnist David Brooks writes that Kos “fires up his Web site . . . and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.” The New Republic senior editor Lee Siegel (now suspended) warns portentously of the dangers of “blogofascism,” a movement bearing worrying similarities to the Fascist forces that transformed post–World War I Europe into a “madhouse of deracinated ambition.” When the netroots aren’t Nazis, they’re proto-Stalinists: Jonathan Chait sees them as heirs of the “McGovernite New Left,” possessed of the same “paranoid, Manichean worldview” and “humorless rage” as extreme-left radicalism.
A victory for people-powered politics
Commentary/Opinion
Chrisitan Science Monitor
by Jerome Armstrong
November 9, 2006
ALEXANDRIA, VA. – With a Democratic victory of this historic size, many will claim success, and that's fine, so let me start by giving credit to the netroots.
But first, who are the netroots? They are the online activists who work to revitalize a Democratic Party that will further a progressive agenda. Unlike the conservative ideologues that have held the trifecta of power this decade, the people-powered netroots herald a much-needed return of non- dogmatic pragmatism to our politics. And that's good news for America, because if we don't provide leadership, the solutions to the world's problems will be decades in the making. Having apparently wrested control of both houses of Congress, Democrats must ensure that this win transforms problems into solutions, and in so doing, builds a lasting progressive congressional majority.
Towards a New Democratic Party
Two bloggers shake up the center-left establishment
Harvard Political Review
by Ben Milder
September 5, 2006
Most of the recent liberal literature on the failures of the Democratic Party has been about as disappointing as the party’s electoral performance. Crashing the Gate rises above similar fare because its authors are not your typical talking heads. Bloggers Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong have an online audience that rivals that of most traditional media outlets. They have crafted an insightful, sensible narrative that does not veer into the overheated rhetoric that plagues much of the media.
Although the title suggests a tome about Internet organizing, the pair actually take a risk and relegate their blogging experience to the back of the book. They avoid any grandiose claims about how their blogs are changing politics, and instead take a fascinating look at the nitty-gritty details of why the progressive political machine isn’t functioning well. Longtime readers of Moulitsas’ Daily Kos blog won’t encounter many surprises, but can still appreciate the distillation of five years of online commentary into a two hundred powerful and breezy pages.
Power to the people with a political takeover plan
Los Angeles Times
Lee Drutman
May 30, 2006
In a given week, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's progressive blog, Daily Kos, receives more than 3 million visits, making it one of the most widely read political blogs in the world, and earning its proprietor regular calls for advice from Democratic Party leaders. Not bad for somebody who just four years ago was a Silicon Valley dropout with no real political experience. Now Moulitsas, along with fellow blogger Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com (the DD stands for "Direct Democracy"), has put down some thoughts in a more traditional medium — a book.
In "Crashing the Gate," the two are not shy about what they hope to accomplish: nothing but an all-out "people-powered" takeover of the Democratic Party — which, they are firmly convinced, is the only way to take America back from the conservatives currently ruining it. "To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson," they write, "the tree of a political party must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of reformers and insiders." So begins a chapter titled "Civil War." ...
"Crashing the Gate" is brash and infuriating, as it should be. The progressive blogosphere is starting to feel its own strength — in the continued growth of Web traffic, in its powerful fund-raising capacity, and in the rise of its man, Howard Dean, as Democratic National Committee chairman. As Eli Pariser of Moveon.org's political action wing wrote in December 2004 (after helping to raise a few hundred million dollars online): "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." "Crashing the Gate" is a powerful salvo in that battle. And as such, it commands attention.
The Hope of the Web
New York Review of Books
By Bill McKibben
April 27, 2006
When, less than a decade ago, the Internet emerged as a force in most of our lives, one of the questions people often asked was: Would it prove, like TV, to be a medium mainly for distraction and disengagement? Or would its two-way nature allow it to be a potent instrument for rebuilding connections among people and organizations, possibly even renewing a sense of community? The answer is still not clear— more people use the Web to look at unclothed young women and lose money at poker than for any other purposes. But if you were going to make a case for the Web having an invigorating political effect, you could do worse than point your browser to dailykos.com, which was launched in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.
The site, which draws more than half a million visits each day,[1] has emerged as a meeting place for a great many ordinary people (i.e., not only politicians, journalists, academic experts, issue advocates, or big donors) who want to revive the Democratic Party. Obsessed with developing strategies for defeating Republicans, the site was much involved with the campaign of Howard Dean for the presidential nomination and carrying on his forthright opposition to the Iraq war. Its sophisticated technological structure, assembled by Moulitsas, has allowed its viewers to raise money for favored politicians, rethink and debate issue positions, harass lazy or ideologically biased journalists and commentators, and even help break stories that the mainstream press managed to overlook. In doing so, it has explicitly tried to chart a new future for the Democrats—the subject of the book under review—and implicitly suggested new possibilities for the American political system that might help it break free of the grip of big money. It also raises large questions about the future of journalism. In my view, nothing more interesting has happened in American politics for many years.
Get to the point
The Economist
Apr 12, 2006
JEROME ARMSTRONG and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, two giants of the American liberal blogosphere, have written a punchy book on political tactics that may enjoy a second wind if the Democrats triumph in November. Mr Armstrong started MyDD.com and now advises Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia and moderate Democratic presidential hopeful. Mr Moulitsas runs DailyKos.com, which receives up to 1m hits a day.
The authors cast themselves as outsiders fighting the Washington establishment, but they are hardly ideological purists. They spear the abortion-rights camp, environmentalists and Big Labour, accusing them of putting their own interests first. They also condemn the party's obsession with “swing states” rather than cultivating a national strategy that reaches out to all voters. Finally, they stress another lesson of 2004: Republicans ran advertisements that were more emotive, and their strategists used more sophisticated data and technology to reach all voters, including independents and Democrats. By contrast, Democrats focused only on their own base, saturating broadcast television rather than exploiting other media such as cable television and talk radio.
Party Crashers
Two Bloggers in Search of a Democratic Renaissance
The Stranger
BY Eli Sanders
April 6, 2006
The top liberal blog in this country, DailyKos, is run by an activist named Markos Moulitsas Zúniga. His site gets more than a million unique visitors every day, a number greater than the circulation of most major daily newspapers in America. Traffic at DailyKos grows by 5 to 10 percent every week, and at that rate, the number of daily visitors to the site will soon dwarf the weekday circulation of the New York Times (currently about 1.1 million). If one looks at the entire liberal blogosphere, which encompasses DailyKos and about 70 other well-trafficked progressive blogs, one finds an apparatus that is now capable of reaching more people than the Democratic National Committee.
It is, therefore, not an idle threat when Zúniga and his coauthor, Jerome Armstrong, the founder of the liberal blog MyDD.com, write in their new book, Crashing the Gate, that Democratic leaders had better listen to what the laptop liberals are saying.
"Our message is simple," the pair write, addressing party leaders in D.C. "You can get out of the way or work with us. Trying to stop us is a losing proposition."
Saving Democrats From Themselves
Wired
By Joanna Glasner
Apr, 04, 2006
For a book that dismissively dubs members of the Bush administration "fiends," a new tome by two left-leaning bloggers devotes a lot of ink to admiring the modern Republican Party's political machine.
Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga praise the GOP's ability to mine voter-record data, build think tanks, influence the media and other stratagems for winning elections in Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics.
But their kind words end after kudos for the tactics. Moulitsas Zúniga, namesake of the top-ranked political blog Daily Kos, and Armstrong, founder of the pro-Democrat blog MyDD, fill much of their 182 pages of often scathingly direct prose with barbs at what they call "a morally and economically bankrupt Republican leadership" and insights about how Democrats can boost their victory record.
Hiding in Plain Sight
National Journal
by Charlie Cook
April 4, 2006
Why Democrats, and others seeking to understand Democrats, should read "Crashing the Gate" is simple. The world and American politics are changing, yet the Democratic Party is not. As the "in party," there is less of an immediate imperative for the GOP to change, so the revolution in that party is probably a few years off, but it is also overdue. For Democrats, though, the revolution is here and now.
Crashing the Gate: Markos and Jerome Tell it Like it Is
Daou Report
by Peter Daou
March 30, 2006
Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zuniga) and co-author Jerome Armstrong are receiving much-deserved accolades for their new book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. True to form, the pair takes direct aim at the structural flaws, strategic failings, and ideological timidity of the Democratic establishment. It isn’t a blanket condemnation - several courageous Dems are praised - but it is an unflinching look at the Party through the eyes of two netroots visionaries. While Republicans are by no means spared, it’s the brutally honest look at the Democratic establishment and progressive infrastructure (if such a thing exists) that makes Crashing the Gate an essential read.
Some of the key attributes of the progressive blog and online activist community are a confrontational disposition, pride, realism, intellectual candor, and scorn for those who fail to recognize that strength is not defined by focus-grouped policy positions but by fierce devotion to principle. Markos and Jerome reflect that blogospheric disposition and mince no words in their assessment of the current political landscape.
Why Can't Democrats Win?
The New York Times
by Peter Beinart
March 26, 2006
... As a critique of how the party organizes itself, "Crashing the Gate" is persuasive. The authors detail how unmeritocratic the world of Democratic political consultants actually is. They argue convincingly that the party hasn't adapted to a newly diffused media environment, in which campaign messages must be far more narrowly targeted than in the past. They call on single-issue groups to abandon their litmus tests and band together in common cause. They even criticize liberal organizations for not paying their employees a market wage, and thus failing to nurture political talent as effectively as their counterparts on the right.
... Armstrong and Moulitsas may well be right that the next great partisan transformation will be theirs. In "Crashing the Gate" they have written an insightful guide to how the Democratic Party can retake power. Now all they need to do is figure out why it deserves to.
Rallying E-Progressives
The Oregonian
David Sarasohn
March 26, 2006
Decades after the fall of the Solid South, Jerome Armstrong sees a place for Democrats to build a new stronghold:
Cyberspace.
It may not have any electoral votes, but it has a lot of voters -- and, every day, more political activists.Armstrong, who runs the liberal political blog MyDD, has joined with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, creator of Daily Kos -- the most popular political blog on the Internet -- to write "Crashing the Gates: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics." It's an indictment of how the Democratic Party does business, and a vision of a new politics rising out of keyboards all across the country.
"Whether the stagnant establishment wants it or not, the new progressive populist movement will reclaim the Democratic Party as the party of the people," the book declares. "Our message is simple: You can get out of the way or work with us. Trying to stop us is a losing proposition."
Unexpected Guests: Two political bloggers crash — and trash — the Democratic Party
San Francisco Bay Guardian
by Tim Redmond
March 29-April 4, 2006
"Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is not an imposing person. When I met him earlier this year in a Berkeley restaurant, he was polite, friendly, and almost soft-spoken, not the sort you would picture as a firebrand screaming from a soapbox in the town square or a warrior assaulting enemy headquarters with a battle-ax.
But soapboxes are different today, and modern wars, particularly political wars, are not fought with blunt instruments. And Moulitsas, who runs the world's largest political blog, DailyKos.com, is one of the leaders of a political revolution within the Democratic Party. So is Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD.com and the person who coined netroots to describe how the online world is transforming American politics."
Netroot Politics
Slashdot
by Micahel Gracie
March 8, 2006
I picked up "Crashing The Gate - Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics" from the DailyKos website, albeit apprehensively. The Kos community has a "reputation," and some would suspect that any printed material associated with the site would parallel what is said there. Nevertheless, I was curious to hear what Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga would say, knowing they wouldn't have to deal with the instant (and often aggressive) feedback the "Kossacks" dispense. For the most part, I was pleasantly surprised.
Barbarians at the Helm
In These Times
by Christopher Hayes
March 23, 2006
"First they ignore you,” opens Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s new book Crashing the Gates, “then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
If the choice of this epigram from Ghandi seems immodest, its confidence isn’t unwarranted. Moulitsas’ blog, DailyKos, gets 600,000 page views a day; Democratic congressmen regularly post on his blog and Armstrong’s, MyDD; and original netroots hero Howard Dean now runs the Democratic National Committee. The barbarians, then, are already well inside the gates. Hell, they’re practically picking out drapes for the palace.
Book Review: Crashing the Gate
BeyondChron
by Paul Hogarth
Mar. 23‚ 2006
... Moulitsas and Armstrong have written a lucid, concise, and deeply insightful book that exposes the Democratic Party as a moribund Beltway-centered apparatus stuck in neutral with greedy consultants, old campaigning tactics that no longer work, and party elites who grasp their ever-shrinking fiefdom and resist anyone who dares to challenge their authority.
...
As Moulitsas and Armstrong argue at the beginning of the book, Republicans don’t know how to govern – but Democrats don’t know how to get elected. With the help of the liberal blogosphere, we can hope to change the latter. Read Crashing the Gate and you’ll understand why.
Bloggers at the Gates: What Was Good for EBay Should Be Good for Politics
The New York Times
by Adam Cohen
March 12, 2006
After the disastrous 2004 election, prominent Democrats gathered in Monterey, Calif., to discuss what to do next. The organizers scheduled a session on coalition building, but each special interest complained that its issue was being slighted. In the end, the coalition-building session broke up into five separate groups, each focusing on its own issue.
This comically depressing glimpse of today's Democratic Party is recounted in "Crashing the Gate," a smart new book by two leading bloggers. Democrats have complained about their national leadership at least since Will Rogers wisecracked, "I am not a member of any organized political party — I am a Democrat." But in their book, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the liberal blog dailykos.com, and Jerome Armstrong, founder of myDD.com, give these complaints a 21st-century spin.
Backseat Strategists
Washington Monthly
by Mark Schmidt
April 2006
... All four of these books have a staccato, bloggish style, with bullet points and sidebars made up of “myths” and “facts,” “lessons” and “lies,” “heroes” and “hacks.” Ironically, the least blog-like of these, the smoothest and most coherent argument, comes from the two authors best known in the blogosphere, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong. ...
But Crashing the Gate is about more than the joy of the internet. It is about the Democratic Party as a political system: where power is located within it, how it makes its decisions, how it defines opportunities. Moulitsas and Armstrong write that when they started the book, “We figured the entire thesis would revolve around the lack of branding and the lack of a coherent message,” but instead, they wound up writing a book about the structures of progressive politics. And with a clear eye, it sees dysfunction where others just see people saying the wrong things:
Crashing the Gate is a breath of fresh air for the progressive movement
Northwest Progressive Institute
March 14, 2006
Crashing the Gate is a short and powerful primer which explains how the Democratic Party must be saved from itself. My first thought after I initially read it from cover to cover (in one afternoon) was how concise and captivating it was (the book itself is 177 pages - not counting the foreward or the endnotes).
Even if you're a regular reader at Daily Kos, and even if you've read material with similiar themes before (like Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, Brock's The Republican Noise Machine, and AlterNet's Start Making Sense) I think you'll still thoroughly enjoy Crashing the Gate.
Review
BuzzFlash
March 3, 2006
If you are high on the possibilities for the Internet transforming progressive politics, then this is the book of the moment to read.
Any net political junkie knows the success story of the websites of Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (DailyKos). They are a team who have revolutionized the blending of populist content and take-action sites.
Like BuzzFlash, Armstrong and Zuniga are fighting a two-front battle in the battle for democracy and rebuilding a national community. They are, as is BuzzFlash, exposing the rank hypocrisy, greed, and ruinous policies of the one-party Republican government. At the same time, they are trying to implant some spine in the passive-aggressive wing of the entrenched Democratic Party.
Bloggers at the Gate
by Ari Melber
The Nation
February 24, 2006
Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics is both of the blogosphere and beyond it. Writing with the outrage of outsiders and the access of insiders, the two bloggers analyze a Democratic Party they find oddly complacent despite its losing record and tarnished reputation. They argue that the party's most consequential problem is not branding but its sclerotic leadership, quarrelsome coalitions and anachronistic fundraising methods.
... Armstrong and Zúniga have written the rare polemic that focuses more on fostering innovation than defending a particular worldview. They decline to outline a progressive policy agenda and humbly reject attempts to anoint themselves leaders of their website communities, let alone the netroots. Instead, they are trying to develop a decentralized progressive movement that draws strength from its members and has no traditional leaders to be co-opted. It is an admirable vision of "people-powered politics," and one that the Democratic Party sorely needs.
Review from Alternet
By Jules Siegel, Cafe Cancun
February 2, 2006
The founders of the Daily Kos and MyDD blogs argue in their new book that Democrats aren't losing on the issues -- they're losing in the ground wars.
"Crashing the Gate" is a manifesto aimed at fixing the structural defects that have caused the steady decline of Democratic power since Lyndon B. Johnson abdicated in 1968. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga brilliantly exploited bleeding-edge technology to create a new kind of interactive political media that brought open source journalism to the ordinary internet user. They helped convert the netroots (the digital equivalent of grassroots) into a $40 million ATM for the Howard Dean campaign.
Their book is at once awesomely inspiring and profoundly depressing. Devoting themselves almost entirely to analysis of political technique rather than ideology, Armstrong and Moulitsas describe the massive superiority of the Republicans in creating and deploying political infrastructure, the greedy incompetence of the Democratic consultants who enrich themselves while losing again and again, the fanatic single-issue pressure groups that have made it impossible for the Democratic party to present a unified, disciplined public image.
Netrooting in the Grass(Roots)
EpluribusMedia.com
Aaron Barlow
January 19, 2006
... So this isn't a book that tells people what to do, but one that points out problems and describes what is actually being done to solve them. There is little new here, little that many of us haven't been feeling and seeing for quite some time now. But this is a book of clarity, unclouding the muddied thoughts that keep people like me from speaking forcefully to the people hijacking things like that `Support Cindy' rally for their own agendas. It may be "by" Armstrong and Moulitsas, but this is "about" all of us in the contemporary progressive movement, presenting what many of us are already doing in plain, unvarnished language and offering itself as a platform for further discussion and greater, more effective activism.
As such a nexus, this "simple" book may be one of the most important that has come out of the progressive movement in over a decade.
Crashing the Gates Review: How the Democratic Party Can Change Its Pronouns
MyDD
by Matt Stoller
January 10, 2006
One difference between a Democrat and a Republican is that when a Republican criticizes his party, he uses the pronoun 'we'.
This points to a basic dynamic - there are two ways to criticize someone. You can kick 'em in the pants or you can kick 'em in the teeth. And while I've read a LOT of screeds about the Democratic Party leadership, and written some myself, what Markos and Jerome succeed at doing with Crashing the Gates is delivering a big kick in the pants for a party establishment that has sunk into a static culture of grey mush. There are going to be a lot of people who say that you shouldn't listen to these guys. They're new. They don't know anything about politics. They are bloggers. The book isn't heavy enough. Whatever.
Don't listen to this nonsense, because it is nonsense. I've showed it to some experienced political operators who have retained their sense of independence, and after reading snippets of it they smiled and noted, 'Finally somebody said it.' Most frequently, they are referencing the chapter dealing with consultants. But consultants, as Markos and Jerome show, are only one piece of a party that is struggling with a broken-down party machinery. They astutely note that the party itself is a series of closed loops. Closed funding loops, closed personnel loops, closed consultant loops. If you're on the inside, you make money, win or lose. If you're on the outside, thank you for your check/effort/vote and have a nice day. The party of the people is now in some ways the party of greying liberal insiders. Fortunately, Markos and Jerome wrote about the flip side, which is that GASP some Democrats are doing well. Yes, in some parts of the country Democrats are even, um, what's it called again, um, I think it starts with a 'w', oh yeah, winning.
In other words, Crashing the Gates is the start of a conversation. It will unleash a torrent of stories about how badly the party has been managed, who's at fault, and why the Democratic Party keeps losing, as well as possible recriminations towards those who according to DC-logic should have kept their mouths shut, but blabbed to Markos and Jerome instead. Still, this is a conversation us Democrats need to have, because it's already happening in the corners of offices everywhere, but since it's not openly discussed we're not fixing the problems as fast as we could. Any number of people within the party could have written a book like this years ago; it is a testament to the blogosphere that the people who did write it were bloggers.