And more about the future and coalitions

A Gathering Swarm

Now when we see fewer and fewer post-mortems and discussions on what and why went wrong it is time to start noticing the analyses of future outlook. There have been numerous questions asked about the future of all the groups that played such an important role in this election cycle. I remember nervously hitting refresh button on MoveOn.org or ACT pages as if I was looking for some new calls for action, or perhaps a simple reassurance that they are going to stay and continue their work. But the frustration was probably too high immediately after the election and it took few more days or weeks before we started getting notices from these groups while they were re-assessing their condition and future plans.
It has been suggested that the Republican victory would have really positive impact on the forces of the left. Ironically enough, it is clear by now that the president became truly unifying power for the fragmented liberal and progressive sections, more than anything else in recent history. As the article notes:

In this, Bush accomplished something remarkable: He coaxed the two divergent strands of the left, or liberalism, or progressivism, or whatever you want to call it, into the same insurgent republic and opened up the prospect of a historic resurrection. He convinced old-school Democratic wheelhorses and newly inspired activists, old pros and young amateurs, union faithful and vote mobbers, that if they did not hang together they would most assuredly hang separately.

Coalitions were forged not only among the activists, but also among wealthy liberal donors, who impressed by Rob Stein's "power-point presentation" embarked on building financial machinery to counter the one built by the right during past three decades. The names of Soros, Lewis and Rapaport started appearing in the press more and more in conjunction with the "Phoenix Group" or "Band of the Progressives". The future of this enterprise in the event of Democratic victory was also questioned.
This article from Mother Jones picks up that thought and tries to expand the discussion. The author provides some history on collaboration (or lack there of) between core liberal movements and ideological groups.

Call these two forces the machine and the movement. Since the 1960s, the enfeebled Democratic machine and the marginal movement left had encountered each other -- if at all -- with acrid suspicion. They cracked apart 40 years ago, when college students who distrusted power went south to join blacks in overturning white supremacy while Chicago's Mayor Daley, a believer in power if nothing else, led his white, working-class base in fighting against Martin Luther King, and, later, against those same students as they revolted against the war in Vietnam. Because the Democratic Party didn't manage to amalgamate old and new politics -- cut to footage of Mayor Daley's gleeful cops smashing away at long-haired demonstrators -- it was crushed by the law-and-order alliance of old Republicans and resentful segregationists.

That certainly sounded as a far cry from what happened this time around:

So, in 2004, a vast and ragged regeneration movement met a Democratic Party straining to be reborn, and the two forces, instead of looking askance at each other and wondering how best to beat each other into dust, decided to buddy up, not only to reinvent politics -- no small task in itself -- but, really, to redeem America (although this movement's language, unlike the other side's, was rarely comfortable with that sort of religious lingo).