Big Thinking on the Netroots

I'm reading Jonathan Chait's big article on the netroots, and a few things jump out at me. He seems to be ghettoizing the netroots as something that solely happens on national liberal blogs, when in fact there is MoveOn and DFA and PDA and Progressive States and dozens of email groups that aren't clickable or linkable, as well as the fast-growing network of state-level blogs.

This part is kind of funny...

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.

...considering I went to school with Chait and he's the same age as Markos.

But overall, I would say that it simply doesn't work to characterize the netroots in any meaningful way because it's too big. Those 500,000 unique daily visitors to Kos have 500,001 different opinions. There are certain points on which there is general agreement - the out-of-touch Beltway media, the wrongness of DLC-style shifts to the right, the need to compete everywhere and organize at the grassroots level, etc. But I would argue that those means are put to far different ends depending on the blogger. And they're all parts of a whole: Media Matters and Orcinus couldn't be more different, yet they're part of the same cause, essentially. And the idea that "thou shalt not criticize the Democratic Party or Democratic candidates" is just not true; I do it almost every day.

A lot of this article feels like a defense of the DLC and a conflation of movement progressivism with movement conservatism. There are similarities in terms of organizing, but I think that's as far as it goes. The guy who's writing this wrote "Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe" online in 2003, and yet he's the one arguing against participatory journalism and arguing for "intellectual honesty" (because that was such an honest enterprise). This idea that Chait, or those who he speaks for in the article, are somehow more intellectually rigorous than netroots who hold fast to some mythical ideology is just untrue. And the idea that Chait is criticizing those who don't "take the facts wherever they go," given the whole Dean-o-Phobe thing and that he still talks about liberals like they're George McGovern incarnate, is just laughable. This article is full of little biases like this.

But the bit on Swampland and the evolution of Joe Klein is pretty good, Unfortunately, I wrote it three months ago.