Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Matt Bai, in an LA Times column, reveals some reasons for the Democratic Party’s power base getting increasingly Western:

This new progressive movement, which now exerts a strong gravitational pull on the direction of Democratic politics, is a national phenomenon, but much of its financing and intellectual energy comes from the West. The Democracy Alliance, a secretive group of about 100 millionaires and billionaires who have thus far poured more than $100 million into building what they call a “progressive infrastructure,” has its strongest presence in California and Colorado. (Rob Reiner and Norman Lear are among the Hollywood cognoscenti who are “partners” in the alliance.)

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of Daily Kos, the most influential political blog in the country, hails from Berkeley, as do Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, the co-founders of MoveOn.org, and George Lakoff, the linguist and resident philosopher of the movement. Arianna Huffington, namesake of the successful Huffington Post blog, “publishes” from Los Angeles. The Service Employees International Union, the country’s fastest-growing union and labor’s main presence in the new movement, maintains a strong presence in California, where the service economy sustains, just barely, a new century’s diverse working class.

What all of these new forces want is not a party that represents any new ideological vision, necessarily, so much as one that is more confrontational, more principled and more shrewd.

Bai’s column is here. He raises a fundamental question: This Western “progressive” movement is more reluctant to compromise, pushing national Democratic leaders to be more hardline liberal — are voters, as a whole, ready for that? Maybe the progressives are more in touch with the grass roots and average voters. The politics get more and more interesting.