Blogging about blogging.
The ultimate in solipsism.
Nevertheless, this passage, quoted by some DNC operative, jumps out at me from Ben Wallace-Wells' new Washington Monthly piece on Kos:
“Because of their generation and because they're Silicon Valley guys who were focused on other things, Markos and the netroots guys, their political consciousness basically begins with maybe the impeachment, and then Florida, and then Iraq, and his sense of the parties is basically, we're liberal and they're conservative. And so all of these fights the Democrats have been going through for 30 years, and the Clinton, New Democratic thing—Markos just doesn't really get it. He hasn't been reading The New Republic and The Washington Monthly forever. He just sits there and thinks, Why the hell are these guys running things? They back losers!”
I'm a Kos alum and an avid reader of American blogs, but I still don't quite know for sure whether the "netroots" (hate that word; hate it) are more like a new generation of yuppies or a new New Left...or some relatively incompatable mix of the two. Pace Wallace-Wells, even among the most stalwart anti-consensus-libralism types you meet in blog comment sections, it's often hard to tell whether the demands are just for a tougher partisanship or for fundamental ideological reallignment. A lof of the independent liberal bloggers, most of the people on my blogroll for instance, seem like fundamentally moderate, new-economy types (like Kos himself). Ezra Klein is literally a neo-yuppie. Digby used to be a "card carrying New Democrat". On the other hand, there's a pretty universal demand for party cohesiveness and for promoting big robust remormist ideas across all the blogs, the feeling that politics ought to be a battle for something big. And there's definitely a taste for partisan warfare that was missing from the tenets of 70s-80s accomodationist neoliberalism or from the classic mid-century liberal consensus before that. The only difference is, most of the old accomodationists seem to agree with the new sentiment. These are partisan times everywhere.
It isn't just the blogs. You observe the same phenomenon with the liberal political magazines. Today, there's not really much that much difference between the editorial tone of Washington Monthly (or even TNR, save Peretz and Kaplan) and that of The American Prospect. Even The Nation and Dissent and Mother Jones are more consensus-liberal than they used to be. The basic tone across all the liberal-Democratic magazines is one of determined pragmatism mixed with a demand for clarity -- the story of the 2004 election. If you browse the back-issues from 1997 or even the summer of 2000, you find things pretty different: the more liberal journals knee-deep in the fights among the different shades of the left and the mainstream media and specialized neolib or lib-neocon journals basically ignoring them. It's too much of a slog to go rooting for examples, but the recent (as in the last-five years) Eugene McCarthy revisionism that Ezra wrote about -- from McCarthy as symbol of liberal eloquence and recissitude to McCarthy as symbol of liberal self-destruction -- is a good one. Mickey Kaus was onto something when he moaned not long ago about neoliberalism not meaning anything anymore, at least not something terribly distinct (that Kaus himself can't coneviably be thought of as part of the liberal mainstream anymore is par). The events of the past decade seem to have had the effect of pushing the more left-liberal journals to the right and the more conservative-Democratic journals to the left. The bloggers are, if anything, the audience and critics and in some cases, the farm team, for these publications; I don't see us as representing a break with this. If anything, we probably confirm it.
Which makes the taste for battle, including intercenine battle, a little awkward. Wallace-Wells remarks unflatteringly on Kos' would-be battle royal with the DLC. He points out correctly that the DLC has also changed its tune (if not its spots) in keeping with the times, making Kos' threats look petty as well as grandoise. It's not just the young liberals (though a lot of bloggers are young and have been shaped by the draconian, black-and-wite partisan issues of the past decade) who were shaped by impeachment, Florida, the 911 aftermath, the Iraq War. It's everybody on the left. This is our recent reality. And it's heightened not just the will to win but the will to fight back (not always complementary things). So we blow up at dissents from the partisan line -- even dissents that, in a historical context, are minor: Jonathan Chait's anti-Dean lobbying; the DLC's support for the latest bankruptcy bill (versions of which Democrats have routinely voted for over the years; and which were raised to the status of a liberal bete-noire by a TNR editorial and the advocacy on Josh Marshall's blog -- Marshall, recall, claims to have left TAP only five years ago because he was too centrist for the editors' taste); Lieberman's support for the war. Much of this may be good; but it's also new. The standards for being a liberal, or an elected Democrat, in good standing are tighter and maybe higher than they were before.
Maybe Kos is right not to trust, or indulge, the consensus. Either we're witnessing a new, pragmatic, sweeping center-left philosophy across the US left (puntuated by dissenters of course) or we're indulging the sort of phony, feel-good crap that asskickers like Kos are supposed to hate: deep ideological divisions being papered over in the name of showing a good face. Maybe all this will shake out -- the new yuppies and the new New Lefties; the American Prospect and the New Republic into our warring camps -- once the Democrats regain some power and have to big making choices that aren't just about stopping bad Republican-backed things from happening. It'll be interesting to see.
Nevertheless, this passage, quoted by some DNC operative, jumps out at me from Ben Wallace-Wells' new Washington Monthly piece on Kos:
“Because of their generation and because they're Silicon Valley guys who were focused on other things, Markos and the netroots guys, their political consciousness basically begins with maybe the impeachment, and then Florida, and then Iraq, and his sense of the parties is basically, we're liberal and they're conservative. And so all of these fights the Democrats have been going through for 30 years, and the Clinton, New Democratic thing—Markos just doesn't really get it. He hasn't been reading The New Republic and The Washington Monthly forever. He just sits there and thinks, Why the hell are these guys running things? They back losers!”
I'm a Kos alum and an avid reader of American blogs, but I still don't quite know for sure whether the "netroots" (hate that word; hate it) are more like a new generation of yuppies or a new New Left...or some relatively incompatable mix of the two. Pace Wallace-Wells, even among the most stalwart anti-consensus-libralism types you meet in blog comment sections, it's often hard to tell whether the demands are just for a tougher partisanship or for fundamental ideological reallignment. A lof of the independent liberal bloggers, most of the people on my blogroll for instance, seem like fundamentally moderate, new-economy types (like Kos himself). Ezra Klein is literally a neo-yuppie. Digby used to be a "card carrying New Democrat". On the other hand, there's a pretty universal demand for party cohesiveness and for promoting big robust remormist ideas across all the blogs, the feeling that politics ought to be a battle for something big. And there's definitely a taste for partisan warfare that was missing from the tenets of 70s-80s accomodationist neoliberalism or from the classic mid-century liberal consensus before that. The only difference is, most of the old accomodationists seem to agree with the new sentiment. These are partisan times everywhere.
It isn't just the blogs. You observe the same phenomenon with the liberal political magazines. Today, there's not really much that much difference between the editorial tone of Washington Monthly (or even TNR, save Peretz and Kaplan) and that of The American Prospect. Even The Nation and Dissent and Mother Jones are more consensus-liberal than they used to be. The basic tone across all the liberal-Democratic magazines is one of determined pragmatism mixed with a demand for clarity -- the story of the 2004 election. If you browse the back-issues from 1997 or even the summer of 2000, you find things pretty different: the more liberal journals knee-deep in the fights among the different shades of the left and the mainstream media and specialized neolib or lib-neocon journals basically ignoring them. It's too much of a slog to go rooting for examples, but the recent (as in the last-five years) Eugene McCarthy revisionism that Ezra wrote about -- from McCarthy as symbol of liberal eloquence and recissitude to McCarthy as symbol of liberal self-destruction -- is a good one. Mickey Kaus was onto something when he moaned not long ago about neoliberalism not meaning anything anymore, at least not something terribly distinct (that Kaus himself can't coneviably be thought of as part of the liberal mainstream anymore is par). The events of the past decade seem to have had the effect of pushing the more left-liberal journals to the right and the more conservative-Democratic journals to the left. The bloggers are, if anything, the audience and critics and in some cases, the farm team, for these publications; I don't see us as representing a break with this. If anything, we probably confirm it.
Which makes the taste for battle, including intercenine battle, a little awkward. Wallace-Wells remarks unflatteringly on Kos' would-be battle royal with the DLC. He points out correctly that the DLC has also changed its tune (if not its spots) in keeping with the times, making Kos' threats look petty as well as grandoise. It's not just the young liberals (though a lot of bloggers are young and have been shaped by the draconian, black-and-wite partisan issues of the past decade) who were shaped by impeachment, Florida, the 911 aftermath, the Iraq War. It's everybody on the left. This is our recent reality. And it's heightened not just the will to win but the will to fight back (not always complementary things). So we blow up at dissents from the partisan line -- even dissents that, in a historical context, are minor: Jonathan Chait's anti-Dean lobbying; the DLC's support for the latest bankruptcy bill (versions of which Democrats have routinely voted for over the years; and which were raised to the status of a liberal bete-noire by a TNR editorial and the advocacy on Josh Marshall's blog -- Marshall, recall, claims to have left TAP only five years ago because he was too centrist for the editors' taste); Lieberman's support for the war. Much of this may be good; but it's also new. The standards for being a liberal, or an elected Democrat, in good standing are tighter and maybe higher than they were before.
Maybe Kos is right not to trust, or indulge, the consensus. Either we're witnessing a new, pragmatic, sweeping center-left philosophy across the US left (puntuated by dissenters of course) or we're indulging the sort of phony, feel-good crap that asskickers like Kos are supposed to hate: deep ideological divisions being papered over in the name of showing a good face. Maybe all this will shake out -- the new yuppies and the new New Lefties; the American Prospect and the New Republic into our warring camps -- once the Democrats regain some power and have to big making choices that aren't just about stopping bad Republican-backed things from happening. It'll be interesting to see.
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