Posted on 05/03/2007 3:46:11 PM PDT by RatherBiased.com
Most political activists can point to one catalyzing event, an episode in each of their lives (or, more often, in the life of their country) that shook them from their complacency and roused them to change the world. You can find many such stories if you troll through the netroots, the online community of liberal bloggers that has quickly become a formidable constituency in Democratic politics. But the episode that seems to come up most often is the Florida recount. For instance, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong's book, Crashing the Gate, the closest thing to a manifesto of the netroots movement, begins like this:
Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means. Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side. That was the spark. Fed-up progressive activists began organizing online. Fueled by the new technologies--the web, blogging tools, internet search engines--this new generation of activists challenged the moribund Democratic Party establishment.
The 2000 recount is an apt birthing ground for the netroots. It perfectly fits their view of U.S. politics as an atavistic clash of partisan willpower. And their analysis of that episode, while somewhat crude, has a certain truth. The liberal intelligentsia, and much of the Democratic establishment, tried to hold itself above the fray. During the recount, liberal pundits were concerned above all with maintaining civility and consensus, and they flayed Democrats for any hint of partisanship or anger. (In a New Yorker editorial, Joe Klein scolded that Al Gore "reinforced his partisan reputation by challenging the results in Florida" and cautioned that "vehemence of any sort--ideological, political, analytical--seems ill-advised.") Elite liberal opinion-makers insisted that their side play fair. Gore, they declared, must allow for the possibility that his opponent could win a fair recount, must renounce street demonstrations, must be intellectually consistent--permitting, say, military ballots that did not fulfill the letter of the law to be counted. Members of the Gore recount team like William Daley and Warren Christopher, seeking to uphold their reputations as statesmen, nervously complied.
advertisement
The contrast with the Republican side could not have been more stark. The only complaint conservative pundits had with the George W. Bush operation was that it was too soft. (George Will wrote that there was a "ferocity gap"--but, in a classic case of projection, he insisted that Democrats were more ferocious.) Bush never conceded the possibility that he could lose. Nor did he feel any obligation to maintain intellectual consistency. His campaign demanded the letter of the law be carried out in those instances when it suited his side, and it flouted the letter of the law in those (military ballots, illegally submitted absentee ballots in Seminole County) when it did not. It whipped up a mob to halt a recount in Miami-Dade County that at the time appeared potentially decisive. Conservatives celebrated these developments without a hint of dissent. While Democrats in Washington constantly undermined the Gore campaign by telling reporters that Gore should concede, Washington Republicans maintained ranks. Through their greater resolve and partisan discipline, the Republicans triumphed.
All the lessons the netroots have gleaned about U.S. politics were on display in this noxious denouement, and those lessons have been reinforced time and again throughout the Bush presidency. The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness. Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline.
This, they decided, is what the Democratic Party needed. And, when they saw that the party leadership was incapable of creating it, they decided to do it themselves. "We are at the beginning of a comprehensive reformation of the Democratic Party," write Moulitsas and Armstrong. What they have accomplished in just a few years is astonishing. Already, the netroots are the most significant mass movement in U.S. politics since the rise of the Christian right more than two decades ago. And, by all appearances, they are far from finished with their task: recreating the Democratic Party in the image of the conservative machine they have set out to destroy.
The most significant fact of American political life over the last three decades is that there is a conservative movement and there has not been a liberal movement. Liberalism, to be sure, has all the component parts that conservatism has: think tanks, lobbying groups, grassroots activists, and public intellectuals. But those individual components, unlike their counterparts on the conservative side, do not see one another as formal allies and don't consciously act in concert. Illustration by Harry CampbellIf you asked a Heritage Foundation fellow or an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal how his work fits into the movement, he would immediately understand that you meant the conservative movement. If you asked the same question of a Brookings Institute fellow or a New York Times editorial writer, he would have no idea what you were talking about.
The netroots have begun to change all that. Its members are intensely aware of their connection to each other and their place in relation to the Democratic Party. The word "movement" itself--once rare among mainstream liberals--is a regular feature of their discourse. They call themselves "the people-powered movement," or "the progressive movement," or, often, simply "the movement."
Like any movement, the netroots is a pastiche of people and groups, with subfactions and varying levels of attachment. For that reason, there's almost no characterization that is true of every member. And yet, as movements go, the netroots are relatively coherent and centralized. If you were to trace the history of the netroots, Jerome Armstrong--sometimes called "The Blogfather"--is the place to begin.
In 2001, Armstrong began publishing a blog called MyDD, or "My Due Diligence," which made prognostications about political events and stocks, sometimes based on astrology. (As one astrological newsletter wrote, "Astrologer Jerome Armstrong notes that Ixion and Quaoar are following close in Pluto's wake in early Sagittarius, and connects the rise of the political version of religious fundamentalism with the astronomical exploration of the Kuiper Belt in 1992.") By 2002, MyDD allowed readers to post their own commentaries, and it began to take off as a locus of activism for Howard Dean supporters.
One frequent guest commenter on MyDD was Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, then a software programmer living in Berkeley, California. Moulitsas quickly developed a following and started his own liberal blog, called Daily Kos. In the years since then, Daily Kos has exploded in size, long since eclipsing MyDD (which has forgotten its financial/astrological origins and now stands for "My Direct Democracy"). Daily Kos now attracts more than half a million visits per day.
The next most influential netroots blog is probably Eschaton, written by Philadelphia economist Duncan Black under the pseudonym "Atrios." There are countless other blogs in the netroots orbit, including Crooks and Liars, Americablog, FireDogLake, and on and on.
Some of these sites have unique stylistic features (Crooks and Liars has lots of video clips, FireDogLake has on-the-scene reporting from such events as the Lieberman-Lamont race or the Scooter Libby trial) or a particular slant (Americablog tends to focus on gay rights issues). But, despite differences in ideology and style, these blogs share a basic orientation: liberal, partisan, and strongly critical of Bush and the Iraq war. Between them, and many smaller blogs, they have attracted what amounts to a mass following.
Outsiders often use the terms "net-roots" and "liberal bloggers" interchangeably, but they aren't exactly the same thing. The netroots are a subset of the liberal blogs, constituting those blogs that are directly involved in political activism, often urging their readers to volunteer for, or donate money to, Democratic candidates. Other liberal bloggers, sometimes called the "wonkosphere," advocate liberal ideas but do not directly involve themselves in politics. Most of the popular sites in the wonkosphere are maintained by academics or (generally) young liberal journalists, such as former American Prospect staffer Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo or Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum. The quality of these blogs varies immensely, with the best ones offering a level of reporting and analysis far better than typical mainstream media fare. While journalistic liberal bloggers are not directly part of the netroots, the two groups generally regard one another as allies and criticize one another tepidly if at all.
Two deep, organic bonds hold together the netroots. The first is generational. Netroots activists tend to be in their thirties, like Moulitsas and Black, or younger. Even those who are older, such as Armstrong (who is in his early forties), often developed a strong interest in politics only recently. Nearly all of them, then, share the common experience of having their political consciousness awakened and shaped by the Bush years.
Their newness makes them outsiders to the game. They are, by their way of thinking, self-made men and women who pulled themselves up from obscurity by dint of pure merit. They see the Washington establishment, by contrast, as a kind of clique, filled with mediocrities who attended the best schools or know the right people. The netroots shorthand for this phenomenon is "Washington cocktail parties"--where, it is believed, the elite share their wrong-headed ideas, inoculated from accountability. "They still have their columns and TV gigs," Moulitsas wrote on his blog last December, describing the Beltway elite. "They still get treated with reverence by the D.C. cocktail party circuit."
In point of fact, the most successful bloggers have been pulled into the warm embrace of the political establishment. Moulitsas consults regularly with influential Democrats in Washington. Presidential candidates hire popular bloggers or court them with private dinners. Last year, numerous top Democrats trekked to Las Vegas to attend YearlyKos, the liberal blog convention, where they sucked up to the attendees as relentlessly as if they were software executives. The climax of the proceedings was a party for bloggers thrown by thenpresidential hopeful Mark Warner, costing more than $50,000 and featuring chocolate fountains. None of these things, however, have softened the netroots' sense of grievance and exclusion.
The second bond is a shared political narrative. This is not exactly the same thing as a shared ideology. The ideology of the netroots is, indeed, somewhat amorphous, as liberal bloggers themselves often point out. A major source of the ideological confusion is Moulitsas himself, who is almost comically lacking in philosophical depth. In one oft- discussed blog post, he described himself as a "libertarian Democrat" and proceeded immediately to outline a philosophy that was pure traditional liberalism. ("A Libertarian Dem believes that people should have the freedom to make a living without being unduly exploited by employers. ... A Libertarian Dem gets that no one is truly free if they fear for their health, so social net programs are important to allow individuals to continue to live happily into their old age.")
Some liberal bloggers have tried to turn this ideological confusion into a strong point: Far from being ideologically hidebound, as their critics often contend, they are ruthlessly strategic political calculators. Moulitsas eagerly touts this line. "They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I'm not ideological at all," he told The Washington Monthly. "I'm just all about winning."
It is true that the netroots embraces political calculation. But the strategies put forward by these activists almost invariably involve shifting the Democratic Party at least a bit to the left. Some of them are explicit about this. "Hiding from progressives and the left will lead to Democratic losses in 2006," wrote MyDD's Matt Stoller last year. "Running as a progressive will lead to victory." One survey of netroots members found that two-thirds wanted the Democratic Party to move to the left.
So the netroots are clearly liberal, and more liberal than the Democratic Party as a whole. Ideology, however, is not the movement's defining trait. What unites them is a desire to replicate the successes of the conservative movement dating back to the 1960s.
When you turn to the '60s to find an antecedent for the netroots, the natural comparison would seem to be the New Left. The parallels are certainly there: Both movements were led by young people and political outsiders, driven by distrust of establishment liberalism and stoked by an unpopular war. But the netroots do not see themselves in the New Left mold. Rather, they see themselves in what was called, in its insurgent days, the New Right, and before that was known as the Goldwater movement.
The intellectual genesis of the netroots analysis lies in a book called Before the Storm by left-liberal historian (and tnr contributor) Rick Perlstein. He argues that the conventional narrative of the '60s pays far too much attention to left-wing activism. After all, he observes, the '60s ended with the left smashed by a rising conservative tide that has continued to this day. The real story is that of the grassroots countermobilization on the right, which took its most public form in the Barry Goldwater campaign. This movement built counterparts to the dominant liberal institutions, slowly took control of the Republican Party from the moderates who had been running it, and jerked the national agenda sharply to the right. Perlstein's book, wrote blogger and George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell in a Boston Review essay, "enjoys near-canonical status among netroots bloggers."
Like the New Right (and unlike the New Left), the netroots is committed to working within the two-party structure. They have relatively little use for street demonstrations and none at all for Naderite third parties. They fervently support Democrats and, with increasing frequency, work for them directly.
Indeed, if there is a single thing that the netroots most admires about the right, it is its philosophical and political unity. There are, to be sure, numerous strands of thought on the right, each of which emphasizes different elements of the conservative canon. But there is far more holding together the conservatives than there is breaking them apart. This has been true dating back to the founding of National Review, with its emphasis on fusionism--the conservative creed uniting economic libertarians and social traditionalists. Religious conservative groups lobby for tax cuts, and economic conservatives support anti-abortion judges. One of the key figures uniting the conservative movement is Grover Norquist, a GOP activist/lobbyist who holds weekly meetings in which conservative activists and intellectuals hammer out a common agenda.
The netroots look upon this great right-wing apparatus with unconcealed envy. Traditionally, to the extent that movements exist on the left, they have been dispersed among single-issue organizations--environmentalists, labor unions, pro-choice activists--that mobilize only when their own pet issues are on the agenda. This piecemeal structure leaves each component group fighting solo battles against a large and cohesive coalition. Also, since there are political issues that do not directly affect the single-issue groups, it leaves swaths of liberal territory unguarded.
The netroots are scornful of single-issue liberal groups--or, really, any liberals at all who are not wholly dedicated to the cause of Democratic victory. As Stoller has written on MyDD, "To the extent that I have a political hero, it's probably Grover Norquist, not Ralph Nader." The netroots' dream is of a liberal army of grassroots activists, pundits, policy wonks, and politicians all marching more or less in lockstep.
The new new left is now the elite, the enemy within defending the ramparts of the federal regulatory apparatus, the mainstream media, the public education establishment, trade unions, and the corrupted, uneconomic, rusting industrial corporations.
A fairly hilarious recount of the Florida votecount fiasco. Is Chait really that stupid?
Looks to me like they've succeeded.
Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means.
A fairly hilarious recount of the Florida votecount fiasco. Is Chait really that stupid?
He can't even count. W had been President for over six years.
The author complains about the projection of others, but suffers from it himself far worse than he seems to realize.
Is fire hot?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.