Here's a free link for people interested in TNR's new cover story on the netroots movement by Jonathan Chait.
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Chait on the Netroots
01 May 2007 09:17 am
Comments (44)
Same old, same old. He's said it all before, and it's sounding stale these days. Really, liberals are just as much chickenhawks as conservatives because liberals supported the Afghanistan war? Grasping much?
BTW, I'm not a fan of the comment format whereby the name of the commenter appears above the comment with a colon. I often use that to address other commenters (ie, not with my own name), so it looks confusing to me.
This is really lame. But since this is your blog, it should be pointed out that Chait completely draws the wrong conclusion from MY saying he didn't like to say he was against gun control. Chait said MY didn't want to look like he was a "ideological defector" with the rest of the "netroots." But as anyone who reads the blogs knows, the netroots is not even particularly pro gun control. Atrios barely says anything for gun control. Kos is always proud to say how many pro-gun nuts he supports. And Talk Left is one of the pro gun nuts.
Page 4: At the narrow level, the netroots take part in a great deal of demagoguery, name-calling, and dishonesty....
Was the veneration of Sheehan intellectually shabby? Without a doubt. Was it, considered as a whole, a bad thing? That is not so clear.
At the end of this reformation, what will the left look like? It will look a lot more like the Republican machine that prevailed in Florida. It will be nastier and more ruthless, and less concerned with intellectual or procedural niceties.
Not quite as bad as I thought. The assumption that the old DLC Democratic Party was incapable of demagoguery, nastiness and dishonesty is false, of course, but the demagoguery, nastiness and dishonesty were mostly confined to bipartisan, triangulating attacks against other Democrats.
Of course, one would not really expect young Master Chait to talk much about the role of his daddy Martin Peretz in the last twenty years of political history.
Was there anything I missed on pages 3 and 4?
I thought the article was really good and was glad you linked to it.
Whether or not we want Democrats to become like the Republican party is a serious question. Republicans have been better at winning elections lately, but I think it's correlated that they have been worse at governing.
Well no, John; just a re-hash of all the mis-fired criticisms of the netroots that Chait has made previously in TNR and elsewhere. Kos has no philosophical content, only rage, etc. Also, I didn't catch even one reference to media opposition as a unifying and foundational feature of the netroots, which seems a pretty substantial oversight to me.
I'm curious about what typical TNR readers think of the article.
There's an interesting wrinkle in that he's not only triangulating against the blogosphere but also a bit against his fellow TNR folk. We see the entire passive concession of points (e.g. that sometimes Democrats' bipartisanism has hurt them) and ground to the the netroots, while at the same time trying to stake out some higher ground above the fray, all in the hope of ineffectively advancing his own agenda. Namely, triangulation for the sake of triangulation.
Do we need a new term for this? Quadrangulating? Squaring? I don't see how it's sustainable in the long term, though.
From p. 3:
"The bloggers closed ranks around the Edwards campaign, some even [my saints! - MW] claiming that Salon had gotten the story wrong," Salon's Joan Walsh later reported. To Walsh and other journalists, the relevant metric is true versus untrue. To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful.
The Salon incident doesn't exactly prove that activists care about political helpfulness and journalists care about truth; because it's entirely possible that Salon did get the story wrong. AFAICT they only have anonymous sources within the campaign for their fired-then-rehired story, and no independent confirmation has ever come out for it. (The piece Chait quoted doesn't provide any on the first page; only a claim that bloggers knew but weren't telling.)
The piece still seems much more fair than I expected, but this is really drawing a false equivalence between the netroots and the reality-free conservative movement.
I see that Chait's target audience has sent its representative. Welcome, Tony!
Chait's Norquist smear seems to have worked with Tony. Certainly it's true that the party out of power misgoverns less. (The Natural Law Party has a pristine record that way.)
But there's still something ludicrous about a TNR lackey pushing civility.
I uh, thank you? I’ve been posting at MY for years, really. Hardly “sent”.
Anyway, despite random factual errors that don’t really pertain to the central issue of the story, what’s wrong with it? Do you disagree that netroots try to imitate the post-Goldwater conservative rise? Because Chait found many examples of bloggers saluting that rise, and I’m sure even a little effort could find many more.
Democrats full of self-doubt and introspection and who defend themselves from attacks on the right and left, are going to be better governors. Bill Clinton was a fine technocrat from almost everyone’s perspective, even though he was classic DLC. They aren’t particularly left-wing, but they are overwhelmingly competent and focused.
But they’re also going to win less elections. Now myself I would like to see more Democrats win elections, but I also really really don’t want them to become as hackish as the movement-dominated Republican party is.
It’s a balancing act, a tough choice. Sometimes you have to make hard choices.
despite random factual errors
Some of those factual errors are pretty bad though. Chait wrote "Markos Moulitsas Zniga, then a software programmer living in Berkeley, California" But Kos was never a software programmer. His bio says at most he worked in web designing and marketing for in a tech company. "After law school, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area for a job in the tech industry. Working at a Web development company, he honed the Web design and marketing skills he would use to start Daily Kos in the summer of 2002."
Annoying, but relevant?
I guess even more I'm confused why everyone hates the piece. It's not mean to bloggers. It calls them the most important movement since the Christian Right. It gives far more credence to the blogger critique of the media than any magazine article I've read not written by Matt Taibbi.
There are some bad aspects of the netroots movement, just like their would be of any movement. It's a question of whether they are overall a good thing, and I don't see how anyone could come away from this article thinking "no, it isn't".
Speaking as a TNR reader, I thought it was an outstanding article. In fact, I don't know that any better summary of what the netroots really are and what they do and did exists anywhere. And it's a respectful article, too -- while he doesn't say so overtly, it is pretty obvious that Chait endorses ruthless partisanship.
Really, there isn't a whole lot of difference between Chait (or insert any youngish liberal wonkish type journalist here) and Kos/MyDD/Atrios -- the former actually mourn the loss of pre-Clinton impeachment political/journalistic values (or at least an idealized version of them); the latter could care less -- but both have arrived at pretty much the exact same views on what political tactics are needed right now.
(To Matt Weiner: it is certain that Chait is right regarding the account of the Edwards blogger firings -- Steve Gilliard, who is a member of the backchannel where the blog A-listers coordinate this kind of thing, said so straight out in the comment section on his blog.)
There is a lot that's wrong with the piece. Perhaps its deepest problem is its basic narrative, which showcases a burgeoning ideological and results-oriented movement (the netroots) locked in mortal struggle with an older, purer intellectual tradition (as represented by the DLC and TNR). The problem here is that the latter facet does not and never has existed. TNR is not in an intellectual magazine. At it's best it's a political journal, providing useful facts about our government's operations and operators. Sometimes it's a gossip magazine, sometimes it's an egregious ideological enforcer, but never has it been a policy and intellectual review, existing for the sake of ideas (tens of thousands, once hundreds of thousands, wouldn't read it if it were). It's a concious political entity, trying to influence policy choices. And Chait, a political journalist, would admit as much, even in the moments he's most convinced he's some sort of substantive intellectual.
If there is a conflict here (and there is--although perhaps it's of little import) it is between older, credentialed political agents, used to having sway, and emerging, uncredentialed ones, usurping the former's turf. Those looking to conduct a decent analyis of the "netroots" should begin there. Chait's premise is self-flattering, but basically a non-starter.
I'm not a TNR reader, but I actually think this was a very well-written and (mostly) fair article on the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal netroots. I'd take issue with a few of his specific complaints, and with the slightly condescending tone that seeps into everything Chait writes, but he's a sharp journalist and he has a good grasp of what the blogosphere is all about.
It seems to me that the ruthless partisanship of the Left blogosphere is both its greatest asset and its greatest flaw. As Chait points out, the crowd at dKos and Eschaton sometimes fails to appreciate the reflexive centrist wankery and genuine, well-intentioned criticism from centrist Democrats.
Message control is essential to an opposition party, and the lessons from the conservative movement are valuable. But the conservative movement proved to be abysmal at actually governing, largely because it continued to prioritize team spirit over independent thinking. It's not entirely clear to me whether Kos and Atrios really grasp this second, equally important lesson from the failures of the people they're attempting to emulate.
In other words, not everyone with concerns is a troll.
Steve Gilliard, who is a member of the backchannel where the blog A-listers coordinate this kind of thing, said so straight out in the comment section on his blog.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this. Do you have a link?
OK, I see (and could've seen for myself if I'd gone further into the article, so this is entirely my fault).
If you want specifics: Chait's Norquist comparison was nasty and overblown, his smug magisterial tone was highly annoying coming from an overpaid tool whose track record is mixed at best, and his description of the pre-netroots Democratic Party was dishonest. The DLC party was about selling favors to big business, enforcing a blindly hawkish message, and keeping the left at bay. It wasn't about civility, high principles, and thoughtfulness.
DLC Democrats would rather control a weak losing party than be a faction within a winning party, and in the 2000 election they got their wish. But in the 2006 election the Democrats dumped Lieberman and gained control of Congress. Chait is trying to reposition himself in the new landscape, but he isn't going at it right, and there are those who are disinclined to try to help him out much.
Lousy article. The implied contrast between the intellect and thoughtfulness of the "centrist" establishment and raw partisanship from the netroots is extremely propagandistic. The fundamental problem is that Chait is not willing to confront the intellectual dry rot that set in among the moderate Democratic center, going back to the 90s.
Ack!
Among the most revealing is the netroots' incessant use of the words "meme" or "frame" to describe ideas. It is a formulation that assumes that establishing the truth about an idea matters less than phrasing the idea in the most politically effective way and repeating it as much as possible.
Two stunning gaffes in an otherwise smart piece:
- Lakoff's discussion of framing is entirely about values, not about subverting the truth. If anything, framing is the study of finding the truth in a blizzard of words. It's discussed almost exclusively to understand our side's basic philosophical underpinnings, like mutual responsibility.
- "meme" is most commonly used pejoratively to describe RW falsehoods and propaganda. David Neiwert increased the use of the word in his discussions about transmission of fringe ideology into the mainstream, i.e. Ann Coulter.
Chait is dead on that the netroots admires the conservative movement's productivity, but is wrong that both sides having the simiar starting points. The conservative movement recognized that it was foreign to mainstream culture and needed to change society. OTOH, modern liberals do not rally around anything other than mainstream values (the most revolutionary liberal idea is universal health care - supported by most Americans, and all other industrialized countries).
Netroots liberals have a simple proposition, that all we have to do is show some backbone and articulate our values.
If Chait read Lackoff and Webb side by side (Elephant and Born Fighting), he'd see this. If he just read Lackoff, he'd see this.
Okay, he went over the deep end at page 2 1/2. Jon, Jon, Jon. Adjust your meds please.
I don't have time to read the piece at present, but if I recall some of the quintessential netroots characters are quite open about their advocacy of Norquistian tactics. I vaguely remember Matt Stoller having a debate with Ezra Klein maybe last year about that very issue. Also, Kos is openly nonideological, or at least non-detail-oriented on ideological matters. I don't see how pointing this stuff out can be construed as any sort of smear.
Hey Matt,
I am kind of shocked that Chiat and the TNR audience still think in terms of left and right. Do people still think like this? I don't think people in the blogsphere refer to it except in the context of when alluding to "the right wing media machine".
The old right-left terminology just obscures the actual mechanics of the political process. If anything the "left blogsphere" is a term to describe the people who aren't part of the lock-step "right-wing machine". I think new terminology would go a long way to helping Chait and his readers out of their self imposed mental block.
As someone above noted, the article is a mixed effort. It's an attempt to give a fairly abbreviated and unified view of broad phenomena -- as everyone here surely knows, Kos is not Brad DeLong is not FireDogLake is not Froomkin, etc. Chait doesn't say enough about any one blogger to really hit the mark, and his efforts to lump Left Blogosphere together often don't ring true. (Nor is it even clear what he's lumping -- early on, he seems to exclude Josh Marshall, but later he uses MY as an example.) And then he has too many themes to work with: the conservative movement as compared to the netroots, the Democratic party establishment vs. the outsiders, new media vs. old media, and probably some others I've forgotten.
DLC Democrats would rather control a weak losing party than be a faction within a winning party
Note that this is precisely what Tony V said he would prefer.
Now, don't get me wrong-- I dislike Petey-- but one thing he's right about is that while that DLC can deal with a losing Democratic party, working people can't afford the extra years of Republican rule that would ensue because we couldn't come up with winning candidates who can't build sustainable party movements. The Chaits, the DCLers, and the Liebermans are arguing against a political aesthetic they find distasteful. They'd rather lose in a finely tailored suit rather than win if it meant wearing jeans and getting a little dirty.
A few minutes googling ezra klein + matt stoller + norquist turned up a large number of anti-norquist statemets and no positive ones. JP's vague memory is all that we have so far.
Okay, I slogged all the way through.
Chait misses the cornerstone of the liberal blogosphere, media criticism - not the RW type designed to tear down the LA Times and CBS, but the type to demand a better press. If he misses this fundamental force, it's easy for him to fall into the pox-on-both-houses both-sides-are-lying-propagandists line.
If you want find liberals' heroes, look at the straight news reporters at KR DC. Look at the NYT and Miller for a counter example. It's about the certain knowledge that honest reporting is antiseptic daylight.
We rooted for Salon because they were the only operation with with the balls to run with the FL voter purge story. We were sickened when the WaPo and LAT ran the same story six months too late.
We rooted for John Marshall and Eric Alterman because they were 1) competent, and 2) willing to pick up big obvious stories the establishment media decided not to discuss. These were the guys who floated stories that people like Todd Purdam said were outside the bounds of the East Coast media social circle.
And where is Josh Marshall now? Chait should have a moment of clarity and see that both sides are not the same. The left does not stoop to the right's level, and even now, it takes a proudly self identified liberal to do honest reporting.
Chait is not unaware of the media criticism ("working the refs") angle -- he cites the effect the liberal blog criticism had on the writing of Joe Klein, he cites the way conservative movement treats their partisan hacks versus the way the "liberal" media treated Syndey Blumenthal. In the audio interview also available to TNR subscribers, Chait goes further, citing a long time liberal blog criticsm -- the fact that TV talk shows always pair hardcore right wingers against mushy, civil moderate Democrats, and he knows how this works against the left.
Chait is also aware that not all liberal bloggers are the same -- in the above mentioned audio interview, he says that there is an activist wing and a journalistic wing, but also correctly notes that the journalistic wing occupies a mushy space between activism and neutral journalism -- and by implication certain conlusions can be drawn that describe both groups.
The conclusion of that audio interview is that he (and Foer) agree that there needs to be both an activist, if hackish, netroots in addition to liberal journalism (like TNR, or so they would think). A correct, if banal, conclusion.
Josh Marshall at his worst is significantly better than TNR at its worst, and Marshall's best stuff (or Greenwald's, or Alterman's) is as good as TNR's best stuff. That whole premise of Chait's is phony, and it explains his silly arrogance.
There are some good points to Chait's article, but I think the basic problem is the agenda he has for writing it. As others have noted in comments, Chait identifies with the democratic establishment that is threatened by these independent forces. The netroots are pushing for a different kind of party- one where some of the current power brokers would wield less power. I think its more about influence than a preference for style.
So he makes some effort to be fair, differentiating Kos from the 'wonkosphere'... but he misses the point in how these separate groups do not aim to mimic the republican party machine. The problem with the republicans is that there is no wonkosphere as such. There are merely think tanks that exist to do research that supports republican projects. The fact that there are liberal public intellectuals out there who do not have the Kos 'I just want to win' mentality is important. They may identify with the movement, but message discipline is not their thing. But at the same time, having figures like Kos is important in the modern political environment.
So Chait does summarize and describe the liberal netroots to some extent. But his overall message or insight is pretty much bogus.
[H]e misses the point in how these separate groups do not aim to mimic the republican party machine.
IMHO, his article tries to hard to play up the "netroots are the new Norquists" angle, rather than trying to identify and explain that which is entirely new about the blogosphere.
Unlike my proofreading, he tries too hard.
A few minutes googling ezra klein + matt stoller + norquist turned up a large number of anti-norquist statemets and no positive ones. JP's vague memory is all that we have so far.
I may have been thinking of David Sirota debating Mark Schmitt two years ago.
Also, in a non-debate-with-Ezra context, Stoller says here: "To the extent that I have a political hero, it's probably Grover Norquist, not Ralph Nader, and a lot of the new progressive organizers I know model themselves and what they are doing after the right-wing's collaborative model rather than the left-wing single issue mindset."
"Here's a free link for people interested in TNR's new cover story on the netroots movement by Jonathan Chait."
Thanks.
You know, I might even go as far as agreeing with Chait that American politics would be better if there were no Daily Kos and no Rush Limbaugh. I don't accept for a moment the equivalence between the two that Chait posits, but the harm done by the loss of Kos (and the whole netroots tendency) would be outweighed tenfold by the gain of ridding the world of Rush (and the whole right-wing noise machine).
But the thing is, Rush isn't going anywhere. If he dies or explodes in scandal, Hannity or some other understudy is waiting in the wings. It's perhaps more than anything else this realization--that the mobilization of the unreconstructed is a permanent fixture in American politics--that separates, not just the netroots, but the liberal bloggers in general, from Chait and his more high-minded comrades.
Excellent article, though I agree with many of the criticisms relayed above.
The New Republic gets a bad rap nowdays (deservedly so), but most of their recent stuff has been very good.
Brad DeLong really lays into Chait. He points out that TNR's highbrow journalism can be really, really, really bad.
Pacific John is right-- Chait casts the netroots as loving propaganda, but he overlooks the context-- the USA story, the Plame story-- they were driven by the netroots, because the MSM has been afraid to criticize the GOP.
Chait overlooks the importance of context. Kos didn't emerge ex nihilo. The GOP has been run by militant extremists like Norquist and Gingrich, and the MSM and Democrats were accomodationist. It was bad politics and bad policy.
The netroots are similar to 1964-era Phyllis Schlafly (a comparison Chait makes) in that both favor opposing the president and Congress; but they differ in that THE NETROOTS ARE RIGHT ON THE MERITS AND THE POLITICS. Note that in 2006, the Democrats won, whereas in 1964, the GOP did not.
Plus, netroots criticism of journalism is about urging them to get it right, and to forgo lazy anti-Dem narratives, as opposed to the "tell me sweet little lies" version practiced by the GOP machine.
While I appreciated the article overall, I was grateful to see they added Alterman and your responses, especially as they require someone to purchase their magazine in order to post a comment - after McCaughey's lying article on the Clinton Plan, they went off my list. What they have done since has only made me dislike them more.
Chait at least recognizes that incivilitiy is bipartisan. I am sick to death of people who complain about blogger incivility and yet were willing to be interviewed by Imus, Limbaaugh, O'Reilly, Beck and their cohorts in vulgarity.
Chait is wrong to equate intense partisanship and the drive to win with lack of intellectual or ideological principles. He mistakes practically for lack of principle. After all, the reason they are pushing the party to the left is based in the principled belief that liberal political proposals such as national health care, signing Kyoto, ending preemptive war, protecting social secturity and so on are good ideas and good for the country, not just political frames to take up or drop as one sees fit.
I thought it was a solid piece. But I was sent here to say that. Nice blog.
"Do you disagree that netroots try to imitate the post-Goldwater conservative rise? Because Chait found many examples of bloggers saluting that rise, and I’m sure even a little effort could find many more."
The netroots are NOT trying to imitate the "post-Goldwater conservative rise." That is pure BS, and the kind of thing that one would expect a hack like Chait to write.
The netroots recognize that the right has been extremely effective in getting its message out and controlling public discourse. But recognition is not admiration -- indeed, there is little but contempt for the right-wing noise machine, and no effort to reproduce it on the left.
The single most important aspect of the "netroots" is the roots part. Unlike the oligarchic right wing noise machine, where ideas come from the top and are carried to 'the little people', the netroots are the personification of participatory democracy --- where ANYONE can have a good idea and find it adopted by the community.
Chait, as part and parcel of the "beltway culture" (notice how contemptuous he is of the critique of "beltway culture" by the left) can't recognize this, and instead superimposes the assinine "netroots want to emulate the right" theory. Chait knows that the influence of hacks like him are on the wane because the internet means that everyone -- including people a lot smarter and uncompromised than Chait -- can have a voice.
Chait is a bad writer and therefore a bad communicator. He uses vague language and makes gaffes, inuendos, and misstatements.
The best communicators are those who can state complex ideas with concision, in simple (but not necessarily simplified, precisely chosen words), doing this presupposes the ability to think as well as to speak (FDR and Abe Lincoln come to mind). It is this skill that inspired Shelley to call poets the unacknowledged legislators of the mind and it goes without saying that PR and journalism schools cannot impart it.
Comments closed May 15, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
OK, I've read the first set-up page, where Chait provides a magisterial and seemingly fair-minded summary salted with occasional snide journalisms and an ominous Grover Norquist comparison. I will now skip to page five, where he presumably will make the kill.
Posted by John Emerson | May 1, 2007 10:11 AM