Before and After the Storm

Jonathan Chait has a lengthy examination of the netroots in the latest New Republic. My Townhall colleague Dean Barnett is probably the leading authority on this subject, so I’ll labor to sound half as smart as he does on this.

Chait’s piece is important and I have a feeling it will live on because it gives us the blow-by-blow on how an entire political movement came into being. I also find myself thinking back to where I was as an information consumer in 2000-01, as Chait/TNR represent the change on the left perfectly.

Back then, TNR was the leading broadsheet of the left. If you were hanging out at Barnes & Noble in the ’90s and wanted to check out what the other guys were saying that week, TNR was your best bet. Journals of the hard left like The Nation and Mother Jones were less relevant.

That’s not to say TNR satisfied all the left’s needs. They had Fred Barnes as well as Michael Kinsley on staff, and the piece correctly notes that the magazine represented a tradition of pragmatism and intellectual honesty. In other words, it was pretty thin gruel for what is today the netroots. What I remember most clearly was that TNR’s most strident, uncompromising writer was… a young Jonathan Chait. He was the one who first called himself a “Bush hater” in 2003, yet that same year, alarmed by the gathering storm within his party, he penned a blog called “Diary of a Dean-o-phobe.”

Chait and TNR are today considered right-wing by the standards of new pottymouthed progressives. Lieberman-worshipping neocons, I think Chait and his ilk are called.

How did it all start? Chait says the Florida recount. He paints a picture of a Bush team playing hardball with conservative pundits impatient for even more against a Gore team playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules. Anyone who remembers the immediate street demonstrations for a revote, combined with unprecedented demands to count every pregnant chad and Florida Supreme Court decisions that did violence against the state’s election statutes, knows that’s not exactly how it went down. And the narrative of a docile left pre-2000 doesn’t exactly jive with Clinton’s impeachment two years earlier, when the left certainly seemed more energized than the right.

But this pastiche of How We Got Here holds up in this respect. Bush won. And the Left seethed. A storyline grew up that everything the Bush team did tactically in those days must have been right, even though guys like me were biting their nails thinking the Bush people weren’t being tough enough.

Ultimately, I’d put the turning point more than two years later, probably with the 2002 midterm elections and the run-up to the Iraq War. I think that election is when the Democratic Party of Prescription Drugs finally died. As someone who tracked this stuff pretty closely back then, the vitriol on the Left in 2001 was nowhere near where it was in 2003. Resigning themselves to American defeat in a war is not something the Left would have done in 2001, either before or after 9/11. Today is a different story.

For Chait, everything pre-netroots can be boiled down to Right=Ruthless, Left=Lethargic. I think the two movements are more alike than Chait allows. The right certainly has its share of academic types who refuse to get their hands dirty with electoral politics. I’ve had righty bloggers confess to me that advocating for candidates and campaigns feels somehow “dirty” to them. The right-blogosphere is a lot more academic than the left. The thoughtful Kevin Drum-Matt Yglesias types who dominated the lefty blogs in 2002 are now junior partners in the progressive blogosphere. Hamsher and Moulistas are not exactly their intellectual peers.

What I think is true is that the right has been more aggressive in building an alternative media over the years. But you have to be more aggressive when you start out smaller (the same is true of the netroots). Chait writes that if you talked to a scholar at Brookings and an editorial writer at the New York Times about the “movement,” their eyes would glaze over. Well, of course they would. When you’re as big and unchallenged as the Times was at its height, you don’t need to coordinate yourself within a “movement.” You can just espouse and people will listen. And do it under the veil of objective journalism, so people will assume that it’s fact and not opinion. Lean just a little to the left, and it makes a big difference. Lean a lot, and people will be on to you (note: this is happening). Milquetoast establishment journalism wasn’t a flawed part of the Left’s gameplan. At the time, that was a perfectly legitimate model. Even today, it still may be. Who contributes more to shaping the dominant frame about Iraq: the mainstream media, or Rush Limbaugh?

Where the Left has focused its time and attention is on the electoral process. The right hasn’t as much. We’ve built a policy, message, and ideas infrastructure — that’s what Heritage, AEI, talk radio, and all the best examples of conservative infrastructure are. That means the policies that get implemented after we win are more likely to be ours. But we’re more likely to grumble about the people doing the implementing because the rightroots hasn’t involved itself as much in the primary process back in the states.

Tagged: jonathan chait netroots new republic

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