Roots of the Netroots

One of the odder developments from my time as a blogger/internet poster is that writers like Joshua Marshall of TPM, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic (TNR), and Mickey Kaus of Slate have become household names in my mental house.

I'm not sure that's a good thing, but I'm willing to live with it for now.

Chait has a big article out on netroots politics by which he largely means DailyKos with its 500,000 hits a day (a couple of which are from me).

Chait gets some parts of the netroots story right. By the time, Gore lost the 2000 election, audiences for new liberal blogs like Kos and Atrios were highly frustrated with the Democratic establishment of Clinton officials, consultants, pollsters, and journalists at places like the New York Times and TNR.

And the blogs were right.

Democrat elites were worn out by the fights over Bill Clinton and dominated by their fear of the activist right. They played defense on issues like abortion, affirmative action, and military spending, listened more closely to Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge than their own constituencies, and triangulated themselves so much that they no longer stood for anything but compromise with the right.

As a result, internet activism has been about making American left just as tenacious and energetic as the right. Here Chait has some more insight. In fighting the right, net activists like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga at Kos and Matt Stoller at MyDD (where I have a diary) view conservative activists like Grover Norquist as both role models and enemies. Norquist has been especially effective at uniting the vast right-wing apparatus of Republican officials, big money donors, evangelical groups, business lobbies, and pundits around a common conservative agenda. Net activists are trying to do roughly the same thing.

I see this in myself as well. I have always had a lot of respect for the political creativity of Tom DeLay who was always coming up with new ways to create and press advantages for the right. The same was the case with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Rush Limbaugh and the evangelical right. They were united in purpose and tenacious in their everyday politics. Outsider that I am, I always believed that anyone who wanted to oppose the right had to take them very seriously.

Having had some real insight, Chait then goes off the rails as he seeks to defend the Democratic journalism establishment against the liberal bloggers.

Chait sets up a dichotomy between the "non-partisan" approach of outlets like TNR and Slate and the relentless "partisanship" of the netroots.

It doesn't work that way.

By the Gore/Bush election of 2000, the "non-partisan" outlets had become the left-wing of the right-wing media machine and were too dumb to realize it.

The formula for both TNR and Slate was first to take right-wing personalities, proposals, and criticisms of the left and reformulate them in liberal political language. Then, "liberal" and "neo-liberal" writers like Michael Kinsley, Jacob Weisberg, and Mickey Kaus would make the right-wing case against "liberal orthodoxy" to their liberal readers. Conservatives like Norquist or Mitch McConnell were always "not as bad as you might think" while liberal figures like Al Gore and John Kerry were always "too ridiculous to be taken seriously." Liberal proposals always got nit-picked while right-wing proposals were always "interesting."

The effect was that "liberal" journalism was just as critical of liberalism as the right-wing media machine but in different, liberal, terms. Political debate was reduced to two poles--the conservative attack on liberalism from the right and the liberal attack on liberalism from journals like TNR and Slate. Worse, the mainstream media stopped inviting "real" liberals to forums and debates and started treating people like Slate's Michael Kinsley as the only voices on the left. The ultimate result was a "liberal media" that was promoting a right-wing agenda but wasn't smart enough to know it.

Chait doesn't realize this any more than Jacob Weisberg or Mickey Kaus at Slate. But the result is that Chait's "liberal intelligentsia" has become irrelevent to either liberal opposition to the Bush administration or liberal politics in general. They've been displaced by liberal bloggers. What politically aware liberal would look for information or opinion from TNR at this point. For the war, they'd go first to Juan Cole at Informed Comment. If liberals wanted to know about the 2008 election, they'd go to Kos, Atrios, or MyDD, and if they wanted to check out the latest on the federal prosecutor scandal, they'd click onto Talking Points Memo. All the liberal blogs do extensive media criticism with Glenn Greenwald being the most determined and tenacious.

Jonathan Chait sounds like he would like TNR to find some footing in the more partisan left-wing journalism and commentary being produced by the netroots. But Chait won't succeed until he realizes how much he has contributed to the recent domination of the right in American politics.