Crashing the Gate is a shot across the bow at the political establishment in Washington, DC and a call to re-democratize politics in America. This book lays bare, with passion and precision, how ineffective, incompetent, and antiquated the Democratic Party establishment has become, and how it has failed to adapt and respond to new realities and challenges. 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. Written by two of the most popular political bloggers in America, the book hails the new movement of the netroots, the grassroots, the unorthodox labor unions, the maverick big donors that is the antidote to old-school politics as usual. Fueled by advances in technology and a hunger for a more authentic democracy, this broad-based movement is changing the way political campaigns are waged and managed. A must-read book for anyone with an interest in the future of American democracy.
About the Author :
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga served in the U.S. Army for three years and later earned two bachelors degrees from Northern Illinois University and a law degree from Boston University. After moving to California to work in the tech industry, Markos started DailyKos.com in May 2002. His blog has had a meteoric rise and now gets more than a million unique visitors each day, making it one of the most popular blogs in the nation. Markos lives in Berkeley, California.
Jerome Armstrong, a pioneer of the political blogosphere, founded one of the first political blogs, MyDD.com, in 2001. The person behind the netroots strategy that used blogs and meetups for Howard Dean's campaign, Jerome works as an internet strategist for advocay organizations and political campaigns. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
Review :
"In fact, there's something remarkably bracing about the authors' approach. The Unified Theory of Progressive Revival may remain the Holy Grail, but while pursuing it, why not start attacking the small systemic dysfunctions that cripple the movement's effectiveness?"--In These Times
"Power to the people with a political takeover plan," Los Angeles Times review by Lee Drutman-In a given week, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga'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-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 Zuniga.
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.
