So what does it mean to be a progressive in 2007? What do we stand for? What do we believe in?
The extraordinary buzz surrounding Matt Bai’s new book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, has brought these issues to the surface in a way that almost nothing else has in recent years. Yet, rather than help bring clarity to the debates within the movement, Bai only adds to the confusion.
By any measure, Bai, The New York Times Magazine’s leading political journalist, has written an entertaining narrative that combines serious analysis with an often rollicking mix of humor and political gossip. In doing so, he provides readers with a rare and fascinating inside view into some of the key players in the blogosphere, the leadership of the Democratic Party and the secretive world of the multimillionaires and billionaires who are bankrolling many of the left’s most important organizations.
The author tells us that over the past three years, he “set out across the country to find the places where this nascent [progressive] movement was coalescing and to trace its arc.” He then goes on to explain the significance of the book’s title: “The movement that dominates the next generation of American politics will be the one … that articulates some new and persuasive argument for how we meet the future.”
Bai’s quest to see if anyone or any organization has come up with “the argument” (or as he also characterizes it, “new ideas” and/or “one big idea”), seems to be based on a silver-bullet theory of social change. As such, many readers will find Bai’s near-obsessive search for “the argument” to be a one-dimensional way of analyzing what is a complex, multilayered process.
Read the whole review -- reviewer Ken Brociner isn't a fan of the new book.
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