Salon.com News | MoveOn moves up: "'One of the things MoveOn has done that is really interesting: They've been able to engender a radical support for a practical solution,' Seiger says.

That is partly because Boyd and Blades, whose company Berkeley Systems was best known for creating flying toasters screensavers, think like businesspeople rather than ideologues. In fact, they never planned to get into politics at all. Boyd says that if it hadn't been for the impeachment, 'we wouldn't have gotten involved in politics. But at a certain point, you can't look away. You wonder about what was lost and what we could lose if we don't step forward.'

Their sense that American politics had run off the rails began during the impeachment, but was driven home after the 2000 election. During the recount, the right mustered mobs, but Democrats were oddly quiescent. Gitlin, the Columbia professor, held a count-the-vote rally the Monday after the election at Manhattan's Federal Building. At its peak, there were 300 people.

MoveOn was among those that failed to act. 'We totally blew it,' Boyd says now. The reason wasn't a lack of passion -- it was a kind of disbelief that American democracy could go so awry.

'There was tremendous energy within our base, but we didn't engage because I thought for sure that the system would work, that the wheels would turn and a fair result would be found, and I was wrong,' he says. 'And we now know that the system, to be fair, has to be people screaming on both sides.'

Yet MoveOn aspires to more than just partisan shrieking. The organizers insist that the movement is, at its core, centrist, and that MoveOn speaks for the untapped majority of Americans. Of course the group has defined itself by opposition to Republican Party initiatives like the Clinton impeachment and the war, but its ideology is arguably closer to the mainstream than Bush's is. "

I like this take on democratic action--that the system requires "people screaming on both sides." MoveOn.org's t-shirts (evidently) further this by saying that "Democracy is not a spectator sport." We all hate the screaming and frustration at times, but perhaps we have to be reminded that conflict is at the core of democracy.