The Rise of Kos

After reading some of the comments in my last post, this Newsweek article about Markos "Screw them" Moulitsas Zuniga summons an eerie analogy. It brings to mind a previous unhinged and unstable power-seeking radical who, through a combination of perfect circumstance and unrelentling psychotic ambition, rose to power. The similiarities in are in fact startling.

July 3-10, 2006 issue - Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is sitting on his back porch in Berkeley, Calif., listening to the hummingbirds and explaining his plans to seize control of the Democratic Party.  ~The War's Left Front

It is mainly the 'unhinged-ness' that gives this analogy plausability. After having progressive candidates and causes defeated in election after election, the left is taking on the same inferiority-fueled demands for power that marked the startling political rise of previous radical fringe groups through history.

For instance, it is said that one of the key factors cited in Hitler's rise to power were the effects of the humiliating defeat of Germany in WWI. This humiliation was part of the impetus for the formation of the Nazi party. An obscure and radical fringe group, the Nazi's soon attempted to take power rather than wait for power to be given them democratically.

It is one week after YearlyKos, the Las Vegas conference of progressives that Moulitsas sponsored and promoted heavily on his popular liberal blog, DailyKos.com. Every major media outlet in the country had attended the conference, detailing the spectacle of Democratic bigwigs (including the party's Senate minority leader and four of its leading 2008 presidential aspirants) embracing Moulitsas as the guru of an activist movement they were eager to exploit. With the conference, Moulitsas says, his movement had finally proved its relevance to the party. "We're not sitting around waiting for the so-called professionals to give us power in the party," he tells NEWSWEEK. "We're taking it for ourselves."  ~The War's Left Front

Fueled by bitter resentment and radical partisanship Kos sees not a political contest between opposing viewpoints but true mortal enemies to defeat at any cost. Fringe groups like the Nutroots need scapegoats on which to justifying their need for power. Thus the vast right-wing conspiracy is blamed for destroying the earth, creating poverty, treason, just about anything you can think of.

The Daily Kos blog lost many of its political advertisers after Moulitsas published a controversial blog post in April 2004 about the non-US military Blackwater USA employees that he described as merceneries that were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, saying "Let the people see what war is like. This isn't an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush's folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. (sic) They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them." John Kerry's website removed a link to Daily Kos. The next day, Moulitsas said he was wrong to make those comments, and over time, Democratic candidates returned to Daily Kos. Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and many other Democratic Senators, Congresspeople, Governors and candidates now post there regularly.  ~The War's Left Front

Yes folks, the digital brownshirts are all wearing Kos pins.

It can no longer be said that the DailyKos site is 'unrepresentative' of the democratic party either. Not with Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and, "many other Democratic Senators, Congresspeople, Governors and candidates," posting regularly at his site.

As public support for the war began to slip, Democratic leaders began turning to him for help. Dean hired him. And after John Kerry's defeat in 2004, party leadership invited him to speak to Senate Democrats about how they could better use the Internet as a fund-raising tool.  ~The War's Left Front

And yet there is that pesky instability problem that should concern Democrats but does not seem to yet.

Already, the strain of the spotlight is beginning to show in his growing belligerence and paranoia. When Kosola broke, Moulitsas e-mailed fellow progressive activists, wondering who might be shopping the story. "I've gotten reliable tips that Hillary's operation has been digging around my past (something I confronted them about, btw, and never got a denial), and you know the Lieberman/DLC/TNR camp is digging as well," he wrote, referring to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and The New Republic. (Aides to Senators Clinton and Lieberman deny the allegations in the e-mails.) ~The War's Left Front

What's next? A beerhall putsch? Surely not, but who knows? If past behaviour is any predictor of future behaviour then we have to be alert.

The talk of the blogosphere last week was "Kosola"—allegations that Moulitsas wrote favorably about candidates with whom he or his close friend and coauthor Jerome Armstrong had financial relationships. Moulitsas swore the charges were baseless (Armstrong, too, has denied impropriety), but they clearly got under his skin. When The New Republic's Web site published an e-mail from Moulitsas to a group of friendly activists urging them not to talk about Kosola and thus "starve it of oxygen," Moulitsas went berserk in a blog posting, accusing the venerable liberal journal of treason. By the weekend, Moulitsas's allies were sending each other e-mails infected with the paranoia of revolutionaries who've gained power too fast: How should they deal with traitors? How much openness could they handle? Which fellow travelers could they really trust? ~The War's Left Front

The extreme left-wing is now the mainstream of the democratic party. Never mind that elections are lost one after the other. Hitler lost elections too. Which is why they finally had to resort to other more direct action to save the Republic of Germany.

And this is where Kos comes in. He's said that this is a war. As Anne Marie Cox relates in a Time Magazine article, Markos has another thing in common with Hitler: previous army experience and a need to run a quasi-military political organization.

Moulitsas will cop to setting the unabashedly belligerent tone of Daily Kos, right down to the design, which he calls "combative." Its logo is a silhouette of someone charging with a flag, and "the whole military theme of the site is very on purpose." Moulitsas spent part of his childhood in El Salvador during the country's civil war and was an Army artilleryman in Germany for three years, a background that, he says, makes him comfortable with throwing verbal bombs as well. "I'm not The Nation," he says. "I'm not afraid to use swear words. If people want calm, high-minded debate, this is not the site for it." Called in to mediate disputes among community members, Moulitsas has all the patience of a drill sergeant. "I get it all the time: 'Such-and-such was mean to me,'" he says in a mock whine. "I feel like I'm in high school. Suck it up, this is politics." More to the point, "This is war."  ~Time.com

Cox goes on to mention the sort of Kos Mein Kampf, "Crashing the Gate," where they detail all the scapegoats who are ruining America. "The authors save their sharpest knives to go for the jugular in their critique of Republican ideologues who are now running—and ruining—our country."

Well, it's not a perfect analogy, but you have to admit that there are some strong correlations.

[H]egemonic Word count: 1227

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