If I were over at the DNC or the RNC right now, here's what I'd be doing.
I'd have some sophomore interns -- it hardly matters whether they're college sophomores or high school sophomores -- monitor this site very closely. Whenever anyone posted an idea for political reform -- or even a comment on someone else's idea for political reform -- the sophomores would be under instructions to disagree with it in the most disrespectful, know-it-all tones they could manage. Naturally, they would do this anonymously. And the point would not be to influence the actual substantive debate in any way; indeed, I might have two anonymous sophomore interns sitting in adjacent cubicles and flaming each other. The object would be to convince anyone taking a look at Unity08 that it will just be the same old politics -- people constantly ignoring big questions of principle to focus on petty resentments; ignoring the choices we face for the future so that they could revisit quarrels long past. This, I would reason, would be likely to kill off Unity08 in its infancy by playing to despair rather than hope -- tapping into the power of the "dark side," if you will.
Are they doing this? I don't know, but after spending a little time on the Shoutbox, it looks to me like either they are doing this to us or we are doing it to ourselves. Why? Why all the anonymous trashing of people with whom we (presumably) share some interest in reform? It's of course quite healthy for us to have a variety of different views about any given issue, and even different views about which issues matter. But it seems to me our discussions at this point should be driven by a desire to find common ground. Finding things to disagree about was easy enough without Unity08; it is the opportunity to find things to *agree* about that is so precious here.
We can do this. We can clean out the barn any time we want, because it's our barn. But the secret ingredient, the one that has always been missing from independent politics, is cohesiveness. If we can't make "unity" a reality rather than just a clever name, we'll go nowhere.
So my plea, to everyone who cares about this movement, is to engage at the level of ideas. Leave the snarkiness to the people who've managed to lower our level of political discourse so far. Let's do this better, and let's start by treating each other well.