This one’s definitely for Bob, who’s the most blog-skeptical of us three: At TPMCafe, Max Sawicky tells the netroots what we are, and what we’re not.
4. People power rests in the ability to mobilize people and resources around some common, substantive agenda by turning them out for meetings and demonstrations (local and national), boycotting, petitioning elected officials, shutting down workplaces, and mounting campaigns to contest the seats of incumbents. It’s more than surfing the web, donating money and voting. It happens that the latter activities serve the needs of website commerce, and the prior ones do not. Everybody has to make a living, but it is not necessary to base a universal political philosophy on how you make a living.
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Read the whole thing. I’m not sure what he’s saying about “website commerce” — to the best of my knowledge, Markos and the MyDD guys are not getting rich off this blogging racket. (For the record, I’ve never made a penny from it.) That being said, I think he’s right about the necessity of going beyond being online to effect genuine political change. Blogs evolved as a way for progressives to create their own intellectual/ideological space, which had been bizarrely neglected by the media marketplace. But campaigns are still run largely in meatspace; for instance, Deval Patrick is even more successful in person than as some kind of disembodied “web presence”. Same for Dean, or Obama: Obama the MySpace phenomenon follows Obama-as-public speaker and Obama-the-biography phenomenon, not the other way around.
I think he’s being pretty reductionist and unfair about the extent to which folks-who-blog go easy on the Dems; I seem to remember that Josh Marshall and others had to hold many, many Dems feet to the fire over Social Security, and the list of progressive particulars against Joe Lieberman is hardly limited to Iraq.
Finally, a bit of naivete is good. Someone’s got to keep asking the “stupid questions”, and challenging entrenched assumptions and conventional wisdom about what’s necessary and what’s possible in politics. No, you don’t want to get “played” by politicians whom you admire, but goodness, the MSM — who are supposed to be professionally skeptical — have shown a dismal record of gullibility over the last 20 years or so, Judith Miller’s warmongering being the crowning glory. I’ve yet to see the hive-mind of the liberal blogosphere get fooled for long. I hope we’re too smart and contrary for that.
In any event, read the article that started it all … Jon Chait on the netroots, in that most anti-netroot publication, The New Republic.
Are there other sites that run content from TNR?
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karen
Here’s the link
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If the link doesn’t work, just google “Jon Chait” and hit the “cached” link under the netroots article.
I think BMG’s traffic rivals MyDD. What makes MyDD important isn’t the fact that it gets high traffic, it’s that it’s sort of like a hub for bloggers, dc peeps and lovers of meta.