Chait On The ‘Netroots’: 1

by

by hilzoy

Jon Chait has written a very interesting article on “the netroots” in TNR. There’s a lot in it that’s good and very insightful, and it’s worth reading in its entirety. I do, however, have a few fairly serious disagreements with it, which I’ll spell out below the fold.

(Actually, I only get to one of them.)

First, Chait draws a distinction between “the netroots” and what he calls “the wonkosphere”:

“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.”

I don’t think this distinction holds. There are some blogs that I think of as part of a ‘wonkosphere’: blogs written by experts in a particular discipline, concentrating on their sphere of expertise. Examples include economics blogs like Brad DeLong, MaxSpeak, and Angry Bear, law blogs like Balkinization, public health blogs like Effect Measure and the Pump Handle, Middle East blogs like Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, and so forth. These blogs do an immense service by making the views of genuine experts in various fields accessible to anyone who cares to read them.

But this is not what Chait seems to mean by ‘the wonkosphere’. At least, I don’t see how it can be, given that the main examples of ‘wonkosphere’ bloggers that Chait cites are Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall. Personally, I really, really do not see what exactly the big distinction between, say, Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall on the one hand, and Atrios on the other, is supposed to be.

Involvement in politics? For sheer impact, I think it’s nearly impossible to beat Josh Marshall’s campaign against Bush’s attempt to “reform” Social Security. Does that somehow not count, on the grounds that it wasn’t electoral politics? That would be a pretty strange way to draw the distinction. It’s not as though Josh was content to debate ideas in the abstract, without doing such grubby practical things as compiling lists of Congressional representatives who were wavering on Social Security.

Willingness to ask for political donations? This hardly seems like a massively important distinction, especially when you consider that a lot of the allegedly “wonkospheric” bloggers have clear political favorites, and that no one who manages to find, say, Kevin Drum’s blog is likely to have difficulty finding Wes Clark’s campaign donations page.

I know I’m not one of the bloggers Chait was writing about, but: which group do I fit into? I do involve myself in politics. I have asked for donations, though I try not to do this very often. (The only times I can recall asking for money for political candidates, as opposed to obscure battered women’s shelters and the like, involved candidates who were running against politicians whom I took to be much more than usually bad. Curt Weldon and Duke Cunningham are the examples that leap to mind.) I think if you pay attention to the actual criteria Chait puts forward, I’m in the netroots rather than (?!) the ‘wonkosphere’. But I find a lot of what Chait says about “the netroots” to be flatly false about me, and also of a lot of the people he seems to be discussing.

Frankly, I think that any distinction that puts Atrios on one side and (I assume) Matt Yglesias on the other is either artificial or unimportant. I think that Chait probably leans on this distinction because writing a magazine article about something naturally leads one to try to categorize things. But this, while understandable, is a temptation that it would be better to resist in this case. To my mind, one of the essential features of the liberal blogosphere is its variety. Zillions of blogs have sprung up, written by zillions of different people with different ideas about what they’re doing. Moreover, there is no equivalent of “getting a column with the New York Times” for bloggers (with the possible exception of being voted in as one of the front-pagers at dKos) — no position that you can get that ensures that a lot of people will end up reading your work.

I mean, that’s sort of the point of blogs. Since there are almost no barriers to entry in blogging, there is no shortage of bloggers who think they have something interesting to say, even if we restrict our attention to blogs that get at least several hundred hits a day; and whether anyone reads a particular blog depends entirely on that person’s individual decisions about whether or not it’s worth spending their time reading our work. That being the case, it is unlikely that the blogs that turn out to be successful would fit neatly into a categorization like the one Chait employs.

But that, I think, is also a much more interesting fact about the blogosphere: the fact that it is tremendously varied, because it is driven not by any set of decisions from above, but by demand from below.

Fundamentally, Chait’s piece reads to me as though someone from a country with a command economy were trying to make sense of a free market. He is looking for categories of goods that reflect the sorts of basic decisions about what to offer that he “knows” must be there, and in the process misses the real story, which is just this: that the sorts of goods available do not reflect any such centralized vision.

When blogs came along, there were a variety of vacuums in the Democratic party and on the left that people apparently wanted filled. There was a shortage of good political commentary by people who did not bend over backwards to avoid charges of liberal bias; a near total lack of political consultants who were unapologetically liberal and willing to fight hard but fair for what they believed in; a lack of ways of getting involved in campaigns, and of ways to influence those campaigns’ direction; a disconnect between various expert fields and popular understanding of them that cried out to be bridged; a lack of small-scale places where people could get together and have political discussions: a whole lot of voids to fill. Various different bloggers came along and tried to fill different voids (or combinations of voids), with varying degrees of success.

(Daily Kos, for instance, seems to me as much as anything a response to the atrophy of all the places where people could get together and talk politics amongst one another: union locals, Lions’ and Elks’ Clubs, women’s clubs, all those small-scale gathering-places whose vanishing is described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. People want to talk about these things, to share information and learn from one another, and most of the old ways of doing this had withered away.)

— This was all supposed to be a preface to another point, but it’s long enough already, so will have to do for now. I think it’s just a mistake to try to impose categories on the many, many different ways in which people chose to respond to these various gaps. Certainly Chait’s ‘wonkosphere/netroots’ distinction isn’t the right division. (Personally, if I had to come up with one, it would be more structural: I think there are genuine differences between blogs without comments, blogs with comments, and blogs that allow individual diaries (Scoop sites and the like). But those differences follow from the kinds of participation that each enables, and probably also from the character of the people who would choose one option over the others.) And I think it’s not just a little mistake, but one that involves missing one of the main stories about liberal blogs, which is precisely their diversity.

I also think that it enables Chait to make some other mistakes — to say things that are obviously false of the liberal blogosphere as a whole, but that don’t seem so obviously false when applied to a vaguely defined and nebulous subgroup called ‘the netroots’. But that’s for a later post. Work calls.

80 thoughts on “Chait On The ‘Netroots’: 1”

  1. Good post as usual.
    I think Chait misses something that Robert Novak once pointed out. Namely that Centrism is a bias. He said he would talk to reporters who claimed they didn’t have a bias, they were centrists. From Novak’s perspective that meant they had a liberal (compared to him) bias. I think the press has seen centrism as a lack of bias, but it isn’t and it frequently ends up being a bias towards mediocrity.

  2. Great post. This metaphor especially struck me: “Chait’s piece reads to me as though someone from a country with a command economy were trying to make sense of a free market.”

  3. Matt Yglesias responded yesterday to Chait here, and here and here. Eric Alterman also responded.
    Matt’s place at The Atlantic is now up and running, by the way. He also commented indirectly here in a way that bears on the “Al Qaeda in Iraq, Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Other Stuff” thread.

  5. I have no idea how to find it, but I saw an analysis of link structure in the left blogosphere about 2 years ago that backed up Chait’s contention. Basically, you could split the left blogosphere into an “activist” group, which centered on dKos and an “analysis” group, which centered on TPM. There were relatively few links between the two groups. I’m not sure where Atrios was but I think it was one of the bridge blogs which really did link to both.
    As you are now, I was suprised at the distinction because the two groups had and have fairly similar political objectives. The two groups differ in their attitude towards facts and agitating. The wonky side mostly looks for facts and pretty much ignores rants (well, friendly ones at least) while the activist side mostly links to thrilling rhetoric (generally from each other), and includes only enough fact links to convince you they’re not nuts. Both sides link to the other’s top sites, but not to the second and third tiers.
    I haven’t bothered to pierce the paywall to read Chait’s article so I don’t know what he thinks but I think the distinction is based on division of labor and is currently pretty secondary. Reading the two groups, you don’t notice the difference unless you look for it. I think it’s based on a temperamental difference between analyzers and inspirers – analyzers deliberately look for contradictory evidence to selfcheck, inspirers ignore it to concentrate on their goals. People link mostly to sites from people with similar temperaments, so you get a division.
    In the future the distinction might mean more. Potentially the two groups could split if the facts ceased to support what the activists want. At present we’re so in the grip of a group of rightwing cryptochistian crazies that there’s almost nothing the left is agitating for that isn’t a good idea. There is some splitting going on right now as a result of “blogwars” that have resulted from Atrios and dKos dumping a lot of the leftier blogs from their blogrolls and (for dKos) banning several of the better-known agitators. That seems to be more a matter of the agitator side splitting in two, so maybe the final outcome in a less bipolar country will be multiple agitator spheres and a core wonkosphere.
    The wonkosphere is not responding to blogwars because they pretty much didn’t link to the lower-tier bloggers involved and have always produced minimal analysis of the agitators on any level. They are interested in opinion analysis from the MSM, but the left agitator blogosphere is not yet important enough to get much mention.

  6. Chait actually seems to be drawing a distinction between the angry and the non-angry blogs, only he doesn’t say so.

  7. Crack, listening to Brooks Jackson on Diane Rehm Monday, I was thinking about the bias of centrism as well. It’s not so much that centrism is a position on a scale between conservative and liberal, so conservatives view centrists as liberal while liberals view them as conservative.
    More important, at least for people who are professional centrists (write books like “Unspun” or maintain websites like factcheck.org or spinsanity.org), is that the centrist bias needs to find a left-wing lie or outrage to match every right-wing outrage, and vice versa. The bias is against any possibility that one “side” could at any place or time be genuinely worse than the other. There’s a magical centrist principle at work that guarantees that misdeeds and misrepresentations on the left and right always exactly cancel out.

  8. “I haven’t bothered to pierce the paywall to read Chait’s article”
    It’s not behind the paywall. (Likely Hilzoy would have noted if it was when linking to it.)

  9. “I have no idea how to find it….”
    I might.
    “…but I saw an analysis of link structure in the left blogosphere about 2 years ago….”
    Was it… this?
    Context here; there have been similar — yet different! — graphics and analyses made in recent years, so perhaps you are thinking of another.

  11. … a shortage of good political commentary by people who did not bend over backwards to avoid charges of liberal bias; a near total lack of political consultants who were unapologetically liberal and willing to fight hard but fair for what they believed in; a lack of ways of getting involved in campaigns, and of ways to influence those campaigns’ direction; a disconnect between various expert fields and popular understanding of them that cried out to be bridged; a lack of small-scale places where people could get together and have political discussions
    Mass media and corporate culture had gone far in transforming us all into consumers.
    Blogs have helped to allow some of us to once again be citizens.

  12. The particular categorization of Drum & Marshall in the “wonkosphere” apparently goes back to this American Prospect article by Mark Schmitt.
    Which in turn apparently has its roots in this Crooked Timber post by Henry Farrell:

    It sometimes seems to me that there are two left wing blogospheres ā€“ the netroots centered around Kos, MyDD etc, and the wonkosphere centered around Brad DeLong, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias and others, with only a few connecting threads between them (Duncan Black serves inter alia as a sometimes grumpy intermediary). One talks mostly about the winning and losing of elections, the other mostly about policy and ideas. This strikes me as a very serious weakness indeed; thereā€™s a lot that these people should be talking about together if they want to construct something real and lasting, but theyā€™re not.

    I seem to recall some sort of visual thingy specific to the left blogosphere (not the ones Gary pointed to) that illustrated Henry’s two blogospheres, but that might have been a product of my fevered imagination.

  13. “I seem to recall some sort of visual thingy specific to the left blogosphere (not the ones Gary pointed to) that illustrated Henry’s two blogospheres, but that might have been a product of my fevered imagination.”
    No, I’m reasonably sure I recall it, too; a quick search didn’t turn it up, though, and I’m occupied with other things at present. I rest content with the notion that others besides myself also know how to use search engines, so I look forward to seeing someone else’s results before I contemplate taking a second look.

  14. Steve: Chait actually seems to be drawing a distinction between the angry and the non-angry blogs, only he doesn’t say so.
    My thoughts exactly, although you put it into the words that hadnā€™t really formed yet.
    When I think activist blogs I think FDL, dKos, MyDD, etc. Then I go look for a new Hilzoy post to convince me that all is not lost.

  15. I don’t know. I’m plenty angry but if I were categorized by someone else (well, if I still posted) I think it would be “wonkosphere” for sure. Is Atrios really so much more angry than Glenn Greenwald or Spencer Ackerman? I think it’s more a division of labor: longer posts that tends more towards reporting/analysis v. short, saracastic posts, fundraising, rants, etc. But I don’t know how different my worldview really is from someone more “netroots-y”.
    Of the journalistic/expert types, Drum is fairly mild-mannered, but Yglesias and Marshall aren’t especially so, and TAPPED just varies a lot. Brad DeLong founded the order of the shrill and has how many posts titled “Impeach George Bush and Richard Cheney Now”.
    Stylistically, Yglesias has more in common with TNR writers than with Kos. Substantively, I think it’s the opposite.
    Basically, I agree with Hilzoy. Again.

  16. Hilzoy,
    I see your wisdom in holding back with respect to the “Culture of Corruption” that is Diane Feinstein. We might as well give her the benefit of the doubt. After all she’s not part of Bush administration.
    From the Hill:
    ā€¦director of the Project on Government Oversight who examined the evidence of wrongdoing assembled by California writer Peter Byrne told him that ā€œthe paper trail showing Senator Feinsteinā€™s conflict of interest is irrefutable.ā€
    It may be irrefutable, but she almost got away without anyone even knowing what she was up to. Her colleagues on the subcommittee, for example, had no reason even to suspect that she knew what companies might benefit from her decisions because that information is routinely withheld to avoid favoritism. What they didnā€™t know was that her chief legal adviser, who also happened to be a business partner of her husbandā€™s and the vice chairman of one of the companies involved, was secretly forwarding her lists of projects and appropriation requests that were coming before the committee and in which she and her husband had an interest ā€” information that has only come to light recently as a result of the efforts of several California investigative reporters.

  17. “TNR writers”
    I persist in being baffled at people — and there are a lot of them — who sees that grouping as homogenous. It seems to have little connection to the reality, which is that TNR publishes a fairly disparate set of writers with a fairly disparate set of politics, views, and styles.
    Certainly far more disparate than, say, either The Nation or National Review or The Weekly Standard, for instance.
    But a lot of folks — and I’m pretty unconvinced that many are actually readers of the magazine or site, rather than people whose knowledge consists of occasional articles they find denounced on blogs — write as if TNR writers consisted of nothing but Marty Peretz clones. Which, as I said, is severely disconnected from reality. (Peretz is a kook, of course, to be sure, and so have been some people he hired — but, for instance, Jon Chait certainly isn’t.)

  18. Hey Bril! Start your own blog. Then you can decide what to talk about.
    I note, though, that you’ve failed in your comment to condemn Al Qaida. Maybe you should call your blog Objectively Pro Terrorist.

  19. bril: Ignorance, not wisdom, alas. I was off at a talk on the implications of Gƶdel’s incompleteness theorem for human nature, and in particular for Chomsky’s view of the mind.
    (Sorry: I just had to say that.)

  20. I’m plenty angry but if I were categorized by someone else (well, if I still posted) I think it would be “wonkosphere” for sure. Is Atrios really so much more angry than Glenn Greenwald or Spencer Ackerman?
    I was using “angry” in the ironic blogosphere sense, kind of like “uncivil.” For better or for worse, it has a lot to do with the number of naughty words you use, among other things. It’s the Powerline standard; you can accuse the other side of the basest sorts of treachery, but as long as you do so in polite, lawyerly language, you’ve avoided the mortal sin of coming across as “angry”!
    And the point is, yes, that there’s very little distance in terms of substance. It has more to do with the blog’s editorial voice than anything. That’s why Chait’s distinction is, at the end of the day, somewhat silly.

  21. It’s probably best not to feed the troll.
    But as a gesture of kindness towards bril: handy tip on being a more effective troller is to not troll with non-sequiturs.
    You’ll find that it can be less obvious that you are a troller if you can insert diversionary material that is on-topic. Hope this helps!

  22. But Gary, that would make him more effective in certain senses of the word, but certainly less effective as a troll. The whole point of trolling, after all, is to get everyone off-topic!
    The thing that amuses me about bril is that he routinely fails to provide links, making it completely obvious that he’s hiding the ball in some completely disingenuous way. Just for fun, I’ll note that his cite above to “the Hill” is actually a cite to an opinion column appearing in The Hill, authored by the chairman of the American Conservative Union. This is still a step up, mind you, from his usual practice of citing no source at all!

  23. Gary, it’s usually sound advice, but when a drive-by is already gone, the harm isn’t all that great.

  25. “The whole point of trolling, after all, is to get everyone off-topic!”
    Yes, but the way to do that is to be more subtle, or at least more interesting. A completely blatant troll gets no substantive responses, such as here. An effective troll will derail a conversation without anyone even realizing that that was the point.
    Matt, I could track down a non-broken link to what you were trying to link to, so as to be able to read it, but I’m feeling lazy, so could you perhaps post one, if you feel so kind?
    My usual cut&paste:
    Here is a handy guide to HTML tags.
    You can use “find” to go to “link something.”
    Here’s how you link (you can copy this and paste it as necessary, if you can’t remember): <A HREF=”URL”> </A>
    Put words as necessary between > <

  26. The link provided by Gary Farber is the one but you really have to study the lefties (blue) carefully, with a cheatsheet of who’s who, to see the split. I remember it being easier to see but that’s the passage of time for you. Here’s a MyDD link, which was my original source, with the summary of the split. Bowers defines it as “academic” vs. “activist” and that might be the best split, especially with the recent shifts in some of the group blogs.
    I think Atrios bridges the gap because he’s more of an aggregator than a content source. His bridge shows they are closely allied, just with different foci.
    The “angry vs. non-angry” split may be going elsewhere. The ranters have been to a large extent ejected and delinked from Kos and MyDD. Kos in particular has a much more hardnosed feel than it used to. I no longer have to point out that Hillary Clinton is substantially to the left of Republican Senators like Sessions and Dole (I used to. Seriously). They’re still at TalkLeft though. My Left Wing is the new center for the angries.
    Changes notwithstanding, even the new, milder Kos pushes pretty hard for the party line. I also often find Hilzoy a comparative breath of fresh air even though I’m pretty liberal now.

  28. There’s a magical centrist principle at work that guarantees that misdeeds and misrepresentations on the left and right always exactly cancel out.
    I think the press has seen centrism as a lack of bias, but it isn’t and it frequently ends up being a bias towards mediocrity.
    I’m not sure how you’re defining centrism. Personally, I’m a pragmatist, trying to figure out what is in the best interests of the country. Given that the best answer isn’t always consistent with the ideologies on the right or on the left (and often neither), does that make me a centrist? I’ve always thought so. The above quotes show how easy it is for some people to label, lump and then dismiss centrists, when centrists are the group most likely to actually have their own thoughts about an issue.

  29. looks like someone went and changed the HTML ObWi spits out… suddenly bril’s not talking about pie anymore !
    curses.

  30. One important point when trying to categorize the blogosphere, is that the main blogs (MyDD, Swing State Project, etc. )that make up what’s considered the “netroots” are essentially spinoffs of Kos. Bloggers that started out as frontpagers or commenters or frequent diarists at dKos, and became popular enough there to hang their own shingle.

  32. “(MyDD, Swing State Project, etc. )that make up what’s considered the ‘netroots’ are essentially spinoffs of Kos”
    Y’know, I’m extremely far from expert on this whole “netroots” thing, but I recall that Jerome Armstrong had been running MyDD as an astrology/business advice blog, and then turned it political, and this Kos guy started posting there, and got popular, and started his own blog.
    How do you remember it in the version where MyDD was spun-off from DailyKos?
    On the substance of this whole debate, I’ve previously expressed a view of confusion as to exactly who is and is not a participant in the netroots, but for all that I retain some feeling that there’s a lot of vagueness there, and a lot of self-promotion, I don’t think noting a mild and vague distinction between blogs that are more focused on being analytic in a mode that is historically journalistic (Kevin, Matt, Brad), and blogs that are primarily focused on political action and organizing (MyDD, blogs that primarily focus on electing people, and activist electoral politics, etc.), is at particularly wrongheaded, or without validity.
    Naturally, many political blogs don’t fit well into just one category. Most things don’t, as a rule, fit well into just one category. That doesn’t mean categories are totally useless, just that we shouldn’t over-use them.

  33. Hilzoy,
    Re: the implications of Gƶdel’s incompleteness theorem for human nature, I sincerely hope the talk went something like:
    1. Human reasoning is unsound, so who cares whether it’s complete or not;
    2. Taking a strong functionalist view of the brain, the brain’s Gƶdel sentence is unimaginably complex and therefore has no real implications;
    3. Huzzah, that was quick.
    4. Drinks for everyone.
    Otherwise, I hope you at least caught up on some sleep.

  35. This “Bril” not only took the unprecedented step of providing a (sort of) source (but still no link), but capitalized his name (possibly what confused the pie-ifier, but probably not). Could we have a fake Bril on our hands? Soon we’ll have parody fake Brils, like the fake Als at Kevin Drum’s place.

  36. That’s a thought-provoking article, and I look forward to the rest of your comments, but I think you’re giving Chait more credit than he deserves overall. That article is largely about the political attitudes of a few bloggers, and most notably of kos the person. Whereas it doesn’t take a lot of time spent at DailyKos to realize that kos’ much-vaunted influence is mostly a matter of being clever enough to stay in front of a very large, very angry parade.
    Markos Moulitsas is a politician, and a damn good one, and I will be shocked if the man doesn’t run for office before he’s forty-five. But Chait’s view is still a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how online communities coalesce.
    Too, some of the stuff near the end really made me go WTF?

    The notion that political punditry ought to, or even can, be constrained by intellectual honesty is deeply alien to the netroots.

    Huh? Examples please. That’s not [just] snarkiness. Chait was observing a few grafs back that Lieberman and Harman are motivated by “conviction,” as though that, rather than the actual outcomes of their actions, were what motivated the netroots’ attacks. Now he’s dismissing the intellectual honesty of a large vaguely-identified class of people without so much as a sentence or two explaining how one goes about measuring “intellectual honesty” in the wild?
    This bit is even worse:

    The prevailing sentiment here, however, is not a distrust of pointy heads. Rather, it’s a belief that political discourse ought to be judged solely by its real-world effects. The netroots consider the notion of pursuing truth for its own sake nonsensical. Their interest in ideas, and facts, is purely instrumental.

    Excuse me? Is it just me, or does “political discourse” have a somewhat different, and occasionally more urgent purpose than simply “pursuing truth for its own sake?”
    If Chait thinks that the primary purpose of political discourse is the “pursuit of truth for its own sake” then maybe he needs to get himself a nice gig at a small liberal arts college magazine, where he can pursue truth in peace and quiet without icky life-and-death issues getting in the way. Talk about fetishizing moderation.
    I agree with Gary that a wonky vs political spectrum is a perfectly plausible way to categorize political bloggers; but I also agree with you that it’s not, in this context, a particularly useful way to do so.
    All that said, I think I understand now why MyDD has never grabbed me even a little bit:

    As Stoller has written on MyDD, “To the extent that I have a political hero, it’s probably Grover Norquist, not Ralph Nader.”

    Ew, yuck. More astrology and less politics please…

  37. hilzoy: I was off at a talk on the implications of Gƶdel’s incompleteness theorem for human nature, and in particular for Chomsky’s view of the mind.
    Are you trying to seduce me?

  39. “Online Communities Map.”
    Yeah, I saw that earlier in the day, when I ran searches for the original graphic in question.
    Usenet looms larger in my own mental image, but I can’t argue that as being close to currently accurate, rather than in my own personal diagram.

  40. Someone who pays more attention to happenings at Kos, MyDD, C&L, then I: one of Chait’s last paragraphs says that the netroots (as Vhait uses it) brought Cindy Sheehan to prominence. I was under the impression that conservatives were far more focused on her than liberals were, using some of her actions and statements to tar others. These aren’t mutually exclusive, it could be that that the netroots brought her to increased attention and that right-wing commentators kept her there. But that’s not really how I remember it. Any help?
    P.S. I left a version of this comment at Yggls’s, but seems more likely to get a response here, since this thread is still active.

  41. radish: Markos Moulitsas is a politician, and a damn good one, and I will be shocked if the man doesn’t run for office before he’s forty-five.
    Heh – only if dKos (the blog) meets with some kind of nuclear accident. Even then there are saved screenshots all around the right-o-sphere. His ā€œscrew themā€ comment alone is good for 10 negative campaign commercials, and then there is the ā€œMentosā€ adā€¦ You canā€™t imagine the glee from the right-o-sphere should he ever decide to run for even dogcatcherā€¦
    On the rest ā€“ I agree with you completely.
    Hilzoy: Chomsky’s view of the mind
    ā€¦ Uhmā€¦. Sputterā€¦ Ackā€¦ Thunk.

  42. To clarify on Markos ā€“ some day he may be the Karl Rove of the left, but he will never ever be dumb enough to run for any substantial public office. There is a ton of material to tar him with.

  43. OCSteve – depends. If there’s any justice in the world*, the very people who would be gleefully ready to smear Markos will be so widely known to be either gullible, or crooks, or liars, that they’d have trouble smearing anyone. The comment “screw ’em” works as a smear only if it is not widely recognized that the mercenaries who were targeted in Fallujah were more than likely implicated in torturing Iraqi prisoners.
    This may not ever be recognized: I don’t know. But the whole bloody dirty scandal of who is responsible for the torture and murder of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere – who did it, who gave the orders, and who stands responsible in the chain of command – this has barely been touched on. It could very well be that in a few years, Markos’ condemning the mercenaries with “Screw ’em” will be impossible to use as a smear, because so many public figures anxious to distance themselves from the use of torture will have said worse.
    *While recognizing sadly that there may not be.

  44. Jes: “screw ’em” is just the obvious starting point. Markos running for office would be manna from heaven for the right-o-sphere. He will never do it and I will happily eat a double portion of crow if he does. Bookmark this šŸ™‚

  45. Jes: “screw ’em” is just the obvious starting point. Markos running for office would be manna from heaven for the right-o-sphere. He will never do it and I will happily eat a double portion of crow if he does. Bookmark this šŸ™‚
    Okay. I found some good crow recipes after the 2006 elections, so I’ll pass them on if necessary. šŸ˜‰

  46. I see your point OCS, but would just say this. He’s a young man, and there are going to be plenty of twists and turns in the road ahead. We just can’t have any idea where all the various players are going to be 20 years hence, and what society will think of the earliest days of political blogging, and the by-then-well-established death of privacy. If he’s got a good vision, presents himself as mature and articulate, and if the stars align in other ways, I don’t see that this remark, or much else, would prevent him from winning a seat in the House, or getting a non-Cabinet Executive appointment. Years from now.

  47. “it is not widely recognized that the mercenaries who were targeted in Fallujah were more than likely implicated in torturing Iraqi prisoners”
    Where are you getting this one, Jes? There are certainly contractors implicated in the torture scandals (I actually have tbe privilege of suing some of them) but that does not mean every contractor is and I’m not aware of any evidence or even specific allegations against those guys.
    On the question of Kos running for office, I agree with Charley.

  48. Katherine: and I’m not aware of any evidence or even specific allegations against those guys.
    Ah. Well, I recall reading (at the time it happened, and not by anyone who pretended to any special informatiom about it) that the four mercenaries who were killed in Fallujah in March 2004 did appear to have been targeted, and not just killed because they were Americans who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it was suggested that they were linked with a military unit who had been responsible for rounding up people in Fallujah for interrogation.
    The mob in Fallujah could have got it wrong – that’s the trouble with mob executions. But unless you yourself are certain that all the mercenaries who were responsible for torturing Iraqi prisoners are now known, and the four mercenaries killed are known not to have been among them, then it does remain as a question: were they killed only because they were American mercenaries, or were they killed because they had been recognized by Iraqis as among those who had tortured prisoners?

  49. I like to have stronger evidence that someone was involved in a crime than the fact that they were lynched.

  50. Katherine: I like to have stronger evidence that someone was involved in a crime than the fact that they were lynched.
    The question remains open, though. In a court of law, everyone has a right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. This is not a court of law. Mercenaries involved with kidnapping and interrogation cannot be assumed to be innocent of torture, even if they were themselves murdered by an angry mob. Do we know for sure that the mercenaries murdered in Fallujah were not in any way involved with the kidnapping and torture of Iraqis?

  51. No. So? What’s your point? Do you have any positive evidence that they were so involved (a link would come in handy here)? Heck, do you have evidence that these Blackwater contractors were involved with kidnapping/interrogation, as opposed to convoy escort? (ISTR that it was CACI rather than Blackwater which was involved with interrogation).
    Shorter version: I don’t see how you’ve at all answered Katherine’s basic lynching point.

  52. CharleyCarp: We just can’t have any idea where all the various players are going to be 20 years hence
    I see your point. But I also expect Oppo research to keep pace with the times.
    Beyond the long tail of dKos ā€“ he strikes me as a man who wants to be the power behind the throne. Obviously pure speculation on my part, having never met the man, but that is my impression of him. My money is on him being the future Rove of the left or DNC chair.

  53. OCS: “ā€¦ Uhmā€¦. Sputterā€¦ Ackā€¦ Thunk.”
    Chomsky’s day job is as a linguist, in which capacity he is absolutely brilliant (though, imho, wrong.) So brilliant, in fact, that I completely forgot about the rest of him when I was writing that. He does, in fact, have an extremely interesting (and very influential) theory of the mind, and in particular its capacity for language.
    It’s generally hyperbole to say that someone ‘revolutionized a field.’ It’s completely true in the case of Chomsky and linguistics.
    None of which has anything to do with his politics, other than implying that if he’s wrong, he’s likely to be wrong the way a very intelligent person can be wrong, rather than in the way a stupid person might be.

  54. I think the broohaha over Edwards’ hiring of the blogger Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon shows that no blogger who yields to the urge to rant is going to be acceptable to the American public in politics. Americans demand inoffensiveness of their politicians. While it’s possible that a cultural shift would change America to the point that they accept intemperate words and gaffes as no big deal, I think that’s very unlikely. If anything we’re going the other way – politicians are often forced to apologize for bland and factually true true statements – like Durbin’s observation that torture is characteristic of totalitarian societies and not America.
    Moulitsas probably does want to be a power behind the throne but if he becomes one it will be as an opinion leader, not as a Rovian political operative. He’s been fairly successful at shaping opinion on dKos but his political advice hasn’t been particularly acute.

  55. Curt, I’m not sure it’s fair to generalize from the broohaha created by the Catholic League against two women who were everything the Catholic League loathes, to assume that this means no one who feels passionately and argues heatedly will ever be acceptable to the American public.
    If that were so, Bill Donahue would have been gone from the Catholic League long before he could Swift Boat Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

  56. Hilzoy: Gottcha. My reaction was to his blogosphere presence (political aspect). Kind of an involuntary response. Iā€™d expect a similar reaction from you if I referenced say, Krauthammer or Buchanan.

  57. Running for the House in, say, a safe Democratic district is rather different than running for president. Kos lives in Berkeley in the 9th Congressional District, which is Barbara Lee’s district. Kos is probably to the right of Barbara Lee. He has some offensive comments to his name, but Barbara Lee actually voted against the Afghanistan war. If she retired, Kos certainly wouldn’t have any problem winning the general election, and I’m not sure that fiery leftist comments would hurt him very much in the primary.
    Not to say he would do it, but I think it’s perfectly feasible.

  58. A bigger problem for Kos’s potential congressional candidacy is that the 9th District covers Oakland and is probably majority black. That’d probably hurt Kos’s chances in a primary. But, anyway, house races are such an incredibly different thing from presidential races, especially in open seats in incredibly safe districts.

  59. The point with Marcotte is that everybody with that style of blogging will have said something that some politically opposed group can twist to be “offensive” Durbin is a great example – it’s not just Marcotte. I doubt one person in the country was offended by his point that torture is not American but he was still forced to apologize publically.

  60. Probably way too late at this stage to comment (I’ve been grading and buying a house), but fwiw as the guilty party responsible for the blogosphere/wonkosphere distinction, I was working from vague impressions rather than real data, and I’m fully aware that it fails to categorize a bunch of interesting and important blogs well. That said, I do think there is something there – but a decent network analysis along the lines of Glance/Adamic would be needed to find out if it’s more than just an impression. To the extent that I was right, I think that there are more links than there were a couple of years ago – Glenn Greenwald is an obvious example …

  61. Probably way too late at this stage to comment (I’ve been grading and buying a house), but fwiw as the guilty party responsible for the blogosphere/wonkosphere distinction, I was working from vague impressions rather than real data, and I’m fully aware that it fails to categorize a bunch of interesting and important blogs well. That said, I do think there is something there – but a decent network analysis along the lines of Glance/Adamic would be needed to find out if it’s more than just an impression. To the extent that I was right, I think that there are more links than there were a couple of years ago – Glenn Greenwald is an obvious example …

  62. Probably way too late at this stage to comment (I’ve been grading and buying a house), but fwiw as the guilty party responsible for the blogosphere/wonkosphere distinction, I was working from vague impressions rather than real data, and I’m fully aware that it fails to categorize a bunch of interesting and important blogs well. That said, I do think there is something there – but a decent network analysis along the lines of Glance/Adamic would be needed to find out if it’s more than just an impression. To the extent that I was right, I think that there are more links than there were a couple of years ago – Glenn Greenwald is an obvious example …

  63. I’m popping in even later than Henry, but the following bugged me–
    “I’m not sure how you’re defining centrism. Personally, I’m a pragmatist, trying to figure out what is in the best interests of the country. Given that the best answer isn’t always consistent with the ideologies on the right or on the left (and often neither), does that make me a centrist? I’ve always thought so. The above quotes show how easy it is for some people to label, lump and then dismiss centrists, when centrists are the group most likely to actually have their own thoughts about an issue.”
    That’s how centrists see themselves. But everyone thinks they have their own thoughts about an issue. Centrists have that “I’m a pragmatist” thing going, and the fact that they fall in-between the lefties and the righties is something they think shows their independence of mind. I’d find this more convincing if the self-proclaimed independent thinkers sometimes fell on the extremes of an issue, because there’s no particular reason why you’d expect independent thinkers to conclude that the best position on any given issue falls somewhere in the middle of the American political spectrum (which happens to be fairly far to the right compared to political spectrums elsewhere).
    Or think of the American political spectrum in 1850 on slavery. The lunatic lefties of the period are the only people whose opinions would be acceptable in polite society today.
    Coming back to the present, I won’t proclaim myself as a lefty to be independent of mind, because for one thing I can see occasions where I’ve been wrong precisely because of my ideological leanings. It’d be nice if centrists would admit the same. Quite a few centrists went along with the Iraq War, it seems to me, because of some psychological need not to seem too far out of the mainstream of public opinion, and unfortunately mainstream public opinion was effing batsh** crazy in 2002.

  64. OCSteve:

    Hilzoy: Chomsky’s view of the mind
    ā€¦ Uhmā€¦. Sputterā€¦ Ackā€¦ Thunk.

    I just noticed this. I’m curious: since Chomsky’s politics, so far as I know, have nothing to do with his professional expertise, and vice versa, which part of Chomsky’s view of the mind do you take issue with, exactly?

  65. Gary: I can’t speak for OCSteve, but my impression was that just as I temporarily forgot that Chomsky had political views, he temporarily forgot that Chomsky had anything else.

  66. “Iā€™d expect a similar reaction from you if I referenced say, Krauthammer or Buchanan.”
    Hmm? Krauthammer was a psychiatrist, but in what alternative expertise, other than opinion, would they potentially be cited in parallel?

  67. “Gary: I can’t speak for OCSteve, but my impression was that just as I temporarily forgot that Chomsky had political views, he temporarily forgot that Chomsky had anything else.”
    Ah. Okay, that happens. Thanks.
    Henry Farrell: “Probably way too late at this stage to comment”
    Yeah, not so much.
    Donald Johnson: “I’d find this more convincing if the self-proclaimed independent thinkers sometimes fell on the extremes of an issue….”
    Of course, John Brown and his followers did.

  68. Chomsky’s day job is as a linguist, in which capacity he is absolutely brilliant (though, imho, wrong.)
    OTOH (or maybe supporting your parenthetical), there’s this.

  69. But I find a lot of what Chait says about “the netroots” to be flatly false about me, and also of a lot of the people he seems to be discussing.
    A lovely post as usual, but this line in particular summed up my feelings. Chait had some interesting observations, but I felt he was consistently misrepresenting liberal bloggers as I know them or else just missing the point. Granted, I don’t read Kos that often, but Chait often seemed to be chiding bloggers and congratulating his own crew, both on inaccurate grounds. I see much more intellectual honesty and insight on my favorite blogs than I did, for instance, in Chait’s own article. Many of the most respected liberal bloggers are well-known and prized for their commitment to accuracy. It’s a false dichotomy to suggest that one can’t be committed to accuracy and also an activist. It’s also a false dichotomy to suggest that working to craft a more effective slogan for a policy is divorced from the policy itself, and that selling a good policy necessitates lying or a “by any means necessary” attitude. Umm, what about discussing policies, deciding on the best one, and then figuring out how to sell it, shooting for a smart but honest approach? Can’t these merely be steps in a process versus forces in opposition? I thought Chait set up many false oppositions, dichotomies, and equivalencies. I also felt Chait still really doesn’t get Iraq, since he seems to view disagreement on it as just another issue rather than a central, defining one. Anyway, I could go on (and perhaps will in my own post sometime this week!), but I’d be interested in your other disagreements with Chait.
    (Also, in all honesty, I’d be intrigued to hear that Godel lecture. šŸ˜‰ )

  70. “I also felt Chait still really doesn’t get Iraq, since he seems to view disagreement on it as just another issue rather than a central, defining one.”
    Elephant in the room. TNR was in the neocon tank; they are among those responsible for this war.
    Chait is trying to ignore the fact that TNR frequently looked like the ‘Mini-Me’ of the WSJ editorial page, which did seem to be the goal during Peretz’ ownership. Added to that, the blogosphere is showing how much of TNR’s vaunted ‘analysis’ can be done far better by amateurs.
    This leads to rather contorted behavior.

  71. Gary wrote
    (Donald Johnson: “I’d find this more convincing if the self-proclaimed independent thinkers sometimes fell on the extremes of an issue….”
    Of course, John Brown and his followers did.)
    Not sure what your point is, but I can guess. Don’t romanticize extremists, because some of them were in favor of violence. No kidding. The centrists of 1850 took for granted black inferiority and were therefore willing to accept various compromises that sanctioned slavery, which meant they were in favor of one of the very worst forms of violence. The extremists of the period included William Lloyd Garrison, a pacifist, and John Brown, a terrorist, both of whom thought black men and women were the equals of whites and acted this way in practice.
    So if you’re saying that extremist supporters of the radical doctrine that blacks were human with equal rights sometimes supported violence, that’s true. But whatever one thinks of John Brown (and some black activists have always admired him), he was nowhere near as bad as the typical centrist politicians of his era in terms of supporting violence against innocent people.

  72. Chomsky’s basic political views can be found in the link below (which I found at “A Tiny Revolution”) in an interview with evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. In summary–people are capable of endless self-deception about the nobility of their own actions. Sounds right to me.
    link

  73. my impression was that just as I temporarily forgot that Chomsky had political views, he temporarily forgot that Chomsky had anything else.
    Yup.
    Krauthammer was a psychiatrist, but in what alternative expertise, other than opinion, would they potentially be cited in parallel?
    I was trying to think of people whom Hilzoy might think were extremists on the right, as I think Chomsky is on the left.
    Bad choice?

  74. A better example — not ideal, but more at what you’re getting at, OCSteve — might be William Shockley, who both modernized electronics with the invention of the transistor and is also an unrepentant and thoroughly vile racist.

  75. Gary wrote
    (Donald Johnson: “I’d find this more convincing if the self-proclaimed independent thinkers sometimes fell on the extremes of an issue….”
    Of course, John Brown and his followers did.)
    Not sure what your point is, but I can guess. Don’t romanticize extremists, because some of them were in favor of violence.

    No. My point was that John Brown was a self-proclaimed independent thinker who fell on the extreme. So, therefore, self-proclaimed independent thinkers do sometimes fall on the extremes of an issue.
    If I’d had another point, I’d have made it. Your interpretation that I was saying something else is purely imaginary, I’m afraid. Hallucinatory.
    I wish people wouldn’t do this. I really do tend to say what I mean. If I’d had a whole other point, I’d have actually said something about it.

  76. I knew a guy in college who was a linguistics major and a huge fan of Chomsky. He was always going on about how brilliant this Noam Chomsky guy was, and so I sort of filed it away in the back of my brain, Noam Chomsky, famous linguist. It wasn’t until a great many years later that I learned that this Chomsky guy also has political opinions. Goes to show you.

  77. I wish people wouldn’t do this. I really do tend to say what I mean.
    With all due respect, communication is a two-way street. If you consistently find that people misunderstand what you think you’re saying, perhaps you should consider the possibility that the problem isn’t entirely on the other end.

  80. Jonathan Chait is not a serious person

    Why can’t regular media journalist types come up with some new songs to sing about bloggers? They have three, old standards by now, like Stardust. The first one, a simple ballad, goes, Bloggers are bad/because they’re angry, foul-mouthed hippies. The s…

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