modern "conservatism" = perpetual victim complex

if you can make enough libs feel like the whole world is against them, you'll have an audience for a Limbaugh-like figure to stroke, stoke and maintain that perpetual victimhood. libs i know don't feel that way, though.

Kevin: "... there just aren't very many liberals who are interested in listening to hour upon hour of seething resentment and raw contempt. That seems to still be a mostly conservative vice."

How about whining? That's what really works for "conservatives". Listening to hour after hour of Rush Limbaugh whining about how his "conservative" listeners are the poor, pitiful victims of "powerful liberal elites". His audience never gets its fill of listening to Rush Limbaugh whine about what poor, pitiful victims they are.

I think it is the community aspect that has produced the growth. Progressives had no place to go to vent and we simply aren't very taken by someone telling us how to vent without some feedback via talk radio. Daily Kos is big because it is a huge community with lots of great ways to talk back. Same with the other blogs of any size.

I'd call it all the progressive church of reason (even if it isn't entirely reasonable all the time).

It could be something as simple as a mismatch in the medium. I'll happily cruise through my bloglist, but if you want me to sit there and listen to somebody flapping their gums on the radio, no thanks, even if I agree with them. I sometimes download podcasts or Crooks and Liars clips, but those I can play, and stop, when I want to. Radio? Maybe in the car, but I'm not in mine that much.

Mr. Drum why do you hate America & God so much???

Or something like that. I don't know. This will come off as smug to most hardcore Republicans but personally I think the success of conservative talk radio lies in that it appeals to the baser instincts of people. Rage. Hatred. Suspicion. Fear. Especially fear & anger. To most moderates & liberals I know, those raw emotions don't hold the power they do for the more motivated social conservatives out there. There are exceptions on both sides of course but from my perch that is how it appears to me. Liberal talk radio could never, or should ever, hope to copy that formula. When all you have are people speaking in measured & intelligent tones, the dial is almost always going to get turned to the more dramatic & heated exchanges. Like Kevin, I don't what it adds up to in relation to the 'net except to say it is what it is and I'm just happy to have places sane places to visit that aren't shrill & angry all the time.

Can anyone explain why dailykos is so popular? Kevin doesn't link to kos articles very often, and neither does TPM (the two sites I read most regularly), which would be odd if it were popular because it had such great content. I visit dailykos every now and then and rarely find anything worth sticking around for. There's probably a lot of good stuff in there somewhere, but the quality level is extremely inconsistent and you have to wade through a lot of other stuff to find an occasional article that even begins to approach the average quality of articles here or at TPM.

It's the war, stupid.

Here's what the netroots is all about: The netroots is all about hearing what people REALLY think when they can say whatever they want because

1) they are not running for office

2) they are not professional journalists who have to keep their editors and owners happy and who are angling for better jobs or just trying to keep the job they already have.

3) they can choose to be completely anonymous and therefore don't have to worry about any negative repercussions from anyone who has any kind of power over them

In other words, blogs are about what free people would say if they were really free.

It is still early days, and I suspect that the reason why liberals aren't gravitating to left-wing recreations of Rush has been both that they aren't used to that sort of thing, and the cults of personality that spring up around these guys are less prevalent on the left.

That said, I'd look at the immense popularity of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert as counterexamples. They're pretty unabashedly progressive and delight in mocking conservatives (and some liberals, but generally conservatives) and reap high ratings for it.

I visit dailykos every now and then and rarely find anything worth sticking around for.

ditto. i will go months without visiting. it's too screechy for my tastes.

What jimBOB said - it's the medium. Blogworld is interactive - you can speak up in comments or start your own blog. You can agree, disagree, build on or refine others' ideas...good times.

Next to that, a unidirectional, command media like talk radio or political TV shows pale by comparison; ditto newspaper op-ed pages.

The participants in those one-way media have rarely had the courage to brave the interactive world that the Web has made possible. For all the criticism I give Joe Frickin' Klein, he's to be commended for having jumped in.

As far as Chait's piece as a whole is concerned, I think he gets a lot right, but boy howdy, does he ever get a great deal wrong about what's happening out here. I just finished reading it maybe ten minutes ago, so I don't have a full rundown ready. But I'm working on one.

I think one of the major reasons the blogosphere is so good for liberal politics is that it is more reflective of the liberal approach to things.

Right wingers seem to love command and control, hero worship, and liked to be told. Talk radio is perfect for this - essentially it's one way (except for carefully screened calls which can be dropped the moment the host stops wanting them), it the 'leader' telling the 'followers' what to do. BTW, for those who think 'followers' is demeaning, consider their proud use of the term 'dittoheads'.

Liberals seem to thrive on diverse organizations, everyone having a voice, no one subsuming themselves into the voice of the majority. There's a reason why Republican conventions have to be carefully set up to showcase minorities, because any random sample or camara angle would show a bunch of white guys in suits. The DNC, you can get a pretty diverse crowd where ever you look - and it doesn't take long to find someone willing to speak independently of the 'collective' voice.

The Blogosphere is perfect for this. Liberal sites have comments, diaries, etc. so that everyone can be part of the conversation. Dailykos isn't about Kos - if he got hit by a bus the site would feel the loss, but would go on (which is not to demean his role, but is rather a powerful testament to what he's accomplished.)

The right wing media really took off after the removal of the Fairness doctrine by Reagan.
Since those wealthy enough to own TV and Radio outlets are overwhelmingly Republican and because Republican ideology is based on sound bites, resentment and hate, they blanket the airwaves.

Anybody who aspires to be a "good Democrat", "good Republican", "good liberal", "good conservative", "good (L)libertarian", "good Green", or "good" anything else, or thinks that others should share such aspirations, is unlikely to be worth listening to. There is only truth, and the pursuit of it is so damnably difficult that to handicap oneself with group loyalties at the outset is to condemn oneself to even more than the usual, inevitable, allotment of failure.

I don't have statistics on Talk Radio - but I do know that Fox News Channel is in fact one of the oldest skewing networks on TV (I think it is number 2 after the Hallmark Channel). The media behaviors among this age segment skew signficantly toward the passive. The blogosphere is significantly younger and for that reason much more participatory and information hungry. To the degree that progressives skew younger, they are probably more likely to partake in more active and interactive media.

Beyond the demographic however, it does feel that this particular generation of conservatives feeds on grievance.

To add to my previous post, here's a couple ore things that the netroots are all about:

1) holding other commentators (i.e. journalists, pundits, politicians) accountable due to the fact that the medium is interactive

2) making possible some small componentof direct democracy since anyone can participate.

3) And even if you don't comment yourself, many people whose views are currently excluded from MSM discourse have their views represented by other bloggers as as result of the greater range of views represented in the blogosphere than the MSM

The notion that the group usually most supportive of a large, pervasive, state differ from another group, due to that other group's love of command and control, is pretty funny.

Similar to what JimBob said, maybe conservatives are older, grumpier guys who might be working blue collar jobs where they can listen to the radio in their work trucks, or retired guys tinkering in the garage.

Liberals are younger, and listen to music more in the car. Conservatives are all "you call this music!"... and there might be overlap with sports talk radio, which liberals also don't listen to in droves.

there just aren't very many liberals who are interested in listening to hour upon hour of seething resentment and raw contempt

There are more liberals who want to comment hour upon hour about their seething resentment and raw contempt than want to listen or watch some pundit or big mouth do it on the radio or TV.

If the internet has done anything, it has provided a place for anyone to comment. What old media people do not understand is that being able to respond with one's own thoughts is what is so popular about the internet.

Before I found Political Animal, or any blog to comment on, I had found a way to use the internet to send comments to publicationss and authors. I would use the 'send this article to a friend' box and address it to the author or editor and include a critical or positive comment regarding the article. I did that much more than I ever would have with pen and paper, and I think that is due to the internet's power to communicate in real time.

I'd rather engage in the discussion - via a blog at least - then listen to some blowhard blather on incessantly through his talking points. I can't say it anymore simply than that.

3) they can choose to be completely anonymous and therefore don't have to worry about any negative repercussions from anyone who has any kind of power over them

I think The Fool's first two points are valid, but I don't see #3 as being a big deal these days. Not that many well-known bloggers are anonymous anymore. We know who Atrios and Kos are. Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Jane Hamsher, Christy Hardin Smith, Ezra Klein, Jeralyn Merritt, Laura Rozen, Brad DeLong, Glenn Greenwald, John Aravosis, Ariana Huffington, John Amato, yada yada yada, blog under their own names. Digby's one of the few well-known bloggers whose real identity isn't generally known.

This is particularly worth keeping in mind when MSM figures take potshots at "anonymous bloggers." Because when they do, they're just bullshitting everyone: they never hear anything any anonymous bloggers say in the first place. They just want to slam people in a manner that isn't subject to refutation.

Kevin:

You seem to think that immitating Limbaugh is a good thing for liberals. It is NOT.

The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives enjoy knocking others and pointing out how they are better than anyone else. while Democrats believe in cooperation and in getting people to work together for the common good.

This is one reason Obama is making such a big splash.

What is this "taawk raydeeo" you speak of?

Maybe the best way to look at the rise of the netroots/left blogosphere is through a Foucaultian lens. What has been happening over the last few years is the creation of a new regime of truth (group whose discourse can be labeled 'true') to which the old regime has been reacting in a number of ways. The archaeology (in the Foucaultian sense of what thoughts/ways of thinking can be allowed) of the early 21st century is a potentially fascinating study.
And, yes, I'm betraying myself as a pointy-headed intellectual, but I really do think that a decent understanding of Foucault and a couple of other modern theorists (definitely Zizek,and even some carefully chosen Baudrillard) helps to explain a lot of what has been happening over the last few years in areas as disparate as the 2000 election and the warming debate, and I find the absence of such a lens from the discussion to be more than a little disquieting at times.

Well lets look at the last six years. I wasn't even slighly interested in politics until I was lierally forced to find out what the hell was going on about three years ago. And yes I want red meat. I'm listening to Air Amnerica exclusively. Is it boring? yes at times but it's still better listening to then the local radio. I even bought XM radio. It's taken a while for me to truly see what is going on, and the more I find out the more I want to know, and the more pissed off I get, and furthmore the more I want to listen to Progressive talk Radio. Yester-year was nothing really interesting. It all was the same year after year. No wonder no one was interested. But today. I want someone that can serve the red meat. But I also want it fair. There is no need for the Dems to stretch the truth one bit. The facts are All I need. It's plenty filling in itself

I think that liberals appear to be looking for something different than conservatives. (As with all such sweeping generalizations, of course, this is dramatically overbroad.) It's that perpetual victim complex thing. In Chicago, where I live, a major conservative talk radio station put up huge billboards around town that said, "Liberals Hate Us." I can't imagine being drawn towards a liberal radio station that advertised itself as "Conservatives Hate Us." To the contrary, I'd be put off. And I appear not to be alone. The local progressive radio station countered with its own big billboards -- "Liberals Love Us."

I'll add -- I do listen to the progressive radio, but I don't enjoy shows or discussions (whether by hosts, guests, or callers) I perceive as whiny or inaccurate. (Good satire -- a la Stewart/Colbert -- is neither.) I have become a devotee of blogs, including DKos, for a variety of reasons including (a) getting reliable news and analysis -- and yes, I click through the links and am a very critical reader - I want the truth, not what I want to hear, (b) a sense of community, shared purpose, and motivation, and (c) reassurance that I am not completely insane.

RT: point duly noted. However, I was thinking as much of blog commenters as much as I was blog hosts.

I know this will sound elitist, but I don't really care. Talk radio, to be entertaining, mostly has to deal in black and white, good v. evil. Nuanced discussion becomes a little boring. An audience that recognizes that few things are actually black and white -- and I think this describes liberals far more than conservatives -- will not be that attracted to the classic talk-radio format.

I, for example, will come home and my partner will have Randi Rhodes on. I can't listen to her for more than a few minutes, because just about everything she says, I think, "Well, that's not really correct" or "She took that point a little too far" or what have you. I get annoyed listening to her, even though I think we are probably pretty close in our actual political views.

Liberals are not conservatives who are liberal. They have fundamentally different brains. So it's not that surprising that we would be entertained by different stuff.

Rush and his ilk are simply professional whiners. We don't have a version of that, and we wouldn't want it.

Well, at least he didn't come out and declare the war is lost for every terrorist in the world to hear.

You meant to say "Well at least he didn't dare to puncture the fantasies of our dear leader and his loyal followers."

You don't think the terrorists can see what's happening in Iraq already? Or see how easily Bush is bamboozled? You probably also think that Iran didn't notice that North Korea was able to build nukes, while Bush floundered and bluffed and backed down and eventually made an agreement far worse than the one in place when he took office because NK is now a nuclear power and negotiating from a stronger position than ever.

You probably believe a lot of things that you get fed by the sort of people who aren't willing to admit that Bush botched the war in Iraq so badly that a little mini-surge isn't going to do anything but try to postpone the inevitable for the purpose of saving political face, at the cost of American lives.

The preaching and hectoring nature of the right-wing noise machine is designed to plug into the authoritarian nervous system. It is something that alienates non-authoritarians. Liberals and authoritarians do not inhabit opposing but equal political spheres. Political ideology does not matter. Three decades of research tells us that authoritarians have entirely different orientations to authority and consensus building. Bob Altemeyer argues that authoritarians show a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society, they show high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and embrace conventionalism. They are chronically self-righteous. Liberalism opposes this mindset no matter if the ideology is on the left (old Russian communism) or the right (fascism, American post-war Republicanism).

There is an authoritarian minority the psychologists call “social dominators�. These are the amoral Machiavellians who end up as leaders of the authoritarians. These are the people who have hardened prejudices and will do everything to maintain power. Authoritarian societies are a strange mix of arbitrary power of the leadership and strict submission to authority and law by the followers.

I read the blogs because I want the truth.

Modern conservatism relies on the opposite - propaganda, smear campaigns - the truth isn't important. The favored tactic is to invent a horrible charicature of "the enemy", e.g. the liberal who hates Bush to the point of derangement, and pretend it is real.

I also like hearing opinions, but only if they are fact-based.

So I really don't see where this is any great mystery to all of this, about what "blogs stand for" in a political sense. Right now blogs are unique in that they are not filtered through a corporate-owned lense that has become such a distortion in traditional media.

So "Daily Kos" is full of "seething resentment and raw comtempt."

Are you reading the same Daily Kos that I am?

I'd be more interested in listening to hour after hour of people figuring out how we can help voters see the fatuity of the conservative media. There's an "emperor's new clothes" moment waiting out there which we haven't been able to craft.

Increasingly, Kevin has been mentioning the sheer inanity of much of the mainstream and conservative commentary. Many people won't notice this inanity until we help them see it. Those famous pundits are celebrities and authority figures, after all. The force of denial keeps them afloat as they ponder the candidates' haircuts and their tones of voice.

Re: "what does Daily Kos have?" questions above:

What Daily Kos has is everything, because of the gazillion diaries. If you want to know about some obscure hearing going on, someone will be live blogging it. If you've been gone all day and want to know if any stories broke while you were gone, a quick scan of the front page will tell you.

I don't spend a lot of time there, but for a quick update on almost anything, it can't be beat.

Commenting makes blogs unique and liberals are instinctive commenters. In fact, can't shut 'em up. And liberals enjoy the process of the way the comments are apt to amplify and change the starting point. (Excluding the food fights with Al and his clones, which are more a matter of rhetorical gymnastics, to mix my metaphor.) That is, liberals are emphatically not dittoheads, but always have a little different take on the problem, or have a fact or two to add to the mix. Blogs were made for them.

What are Political Animal's Nielsen ratings?

The word you're looking for to describe the netroots?

Citizenship.

I haven't gotten far in Chait's article, but this early observation strikes me as wrong-headed:

Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline."

There is an authoritarian minority the psychologists call “social dominators�. These are the amoral Machiavellians who end up as leaders of the authoritarians. These are the people who have hardened prejudices and will do everything to maintain power.

The ancients had another name for these people and the pyschological forces that drive them: "archons," or variously "princes of this world."

There is no conservative "noise machine" you silly fools.

There is the press, there is outrage, and then there are people who can simply communicate the truth more effectively.

Go suck eggs, liberals. Your pathetic little band of unhinged bloggers isn't going to amount to a hill of beans in 2008. What, is Jane Hamster going to get someone to actually win an election someday?

More people watch Howie Mandel in just one night than spend a month with Keith Olbermann. Someone like Jeff Foxworthy will always have ten times as many viewers as a raving lunatic like Anderson Hooper. And America is a better place for it!

What are Political Animal's Nielsen ratings?

They're on the same par as the show that plays for free on cable channel 623 that lists all of the houses that were for sale six months ago in the dumpy town where you live.

Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah!

And sinking like a stone!

"What Daily Kos has is everything"

Bingo, including "seething resentment and raw contempt," if that's what you're looking for. What those who talk about the latter conveniently ignore is that there are large numbers of posts that are neither resentful nor contemptuous.

On a tangential note, on the day that Ronald Reagan passed away, Kevin had an appropriate post on the subject. There was, of course, a variety of responses to that post, most of them respectful. A poster over at Tacitus' blog said that Kevin's comments section that day was "toxic."

I reviewed the posts and categorized them. Roughly 10% said anything even remotely negative about Ronald Reagan. The rest were neutral or sympathetic. But that other individual was looking for "seething resentment and raw contempt," so that's what he found, to the exclusion of all else.

And sinking like a stone!

And yet here you are. Funny, that.

"There is no conservative "noise machine" you silly fools."

Ah, Norman, Norman. Start with a false premise and it destroys the credibility of everything else you say. Which didn't have much substance actually, unless you think, "Go such eggs, liberals," is a substantive comment. Talk about your "seething resentment," for heaven's sake, can't beat conservatives for it.

The netroots works because it allows Liberals to focus on our issues. In the past few years, our issues have mainly been negative--the incompetence of Bush and the MSM. However, we also have positive issues such as universal healthcare, lowering carbon emissions, and so forth.

If you listen to Fox or Rush, they don't spend an hour talking about how great Gonzales or Rumsfeld really is--they find a Liberal who is a little kooky and make fun of him. Similarly, the Left Blogosphere finds Conservatives who are bad people and focuses on them. We are not arguing with each other but are instead pointing out each other's flaws.

The same issues come up in mainstream print media. Read the last page of Newsweek this week, and you'll see George Will get upset about one comment by Howard Dean. George Will didn't get upset about George Bush and a Republican Congress screwing the country for six years, but he got upset about Howard Dean making one controversial comment.

Liberal radio didn't work because the shows were horrible or they were broadcast with less than 10 Watts. Air America got decent ratings in the small number of places where you could actually hear it above the static, and it got bad ratings in areas where the static was louder--imagine that. If they wanted even higher ratings, then they would have been more controversial.

Talk radio did not work for the left because they already had the major networks and CNN. Plus, of course, NPR. The right needed an alternative. Ditto for Fox News. It was an alternative to the steady left to center-left networks' news operations, like 60 minutes.

The blog world is more evenly divided because it is a new thing. Newspapers are declining and they have been an asset for the left the past 40 years, basically since Vietnam. Blogs and web sites are taking their place. The vitriol seems to be about evenly divided but the left seems to have a lock on the way out loonies like the "Truthers."

I read this blog precisely because it isn't a rah-rah echo chamber of Go liberals/Democrats and nothing but raw seething contempt for conservatives & Republicans. I occasionally look at Atrios or Kos to see what liberal memes are out there, but rarely ever read the comments. It's just not interesting or appealing.

Start with a false premise and it destroys the credibility of everything else you say.

And the conservative noise machine consists of what? Fox News and three or four scattered hosts in a sea of liberal media? Do conservatives control any of the top 50 newspapers in this country? Do conservatives control Time, Newsweek or US News and World Report? Do conservatives control ANY of the three major networks. ABC, NBC or CBS? Do conservatives control CNN?

Sounds like the makings of a large and pervasive LIBERAL noise machine. But if you think the conservative noise machine really exists, run with that. The facts prove otherwise.

More Chait:

"They are, by their way of thinking, self-made men and women who pulled themselves up from obscurity by dint of pure merit."

Luck is involved in all human endeavors, but the success of bloggers such as Kevin, Atrios, Markos, Josh, Billmon, Digby, Matt, Marcy, etc. are based far more on merit in terms of meeting an unmet demand than most successes. So why the qualifier --"by their way of thinking? And the addition of "pure" before merit seems snarky.

For myself, the most prominent bloggers seem remarkably modest for the most part about their very real bogging accomplishments (especially compared to counterparts on the right).

I`m finally getting my revenge !

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha

Newspapers are declining and they have been an asset for the left the past 40 years, basically since Vietnam.

Which ones? The ones I have read all support MY contention that the media, et al in this country, is a massive liberal noise machine.

NONE of the newspapers in this country, save perhaps certain parts of the Wall Street Journal. Why, not even my beloved Union Leader is considered respectable in convervative circles anymore!

The New Hampshire Union Leader is the daily newspaper of Manchester, the largest city in the state of New Hampshire. As of 2003 it has a daily circulation of 61,548; as of 2006, the circulation of its Sunday paper, the New Hampshire Sunday News, was 72,833[1]. It was founded in 1863.
It was called just The Union Leader until April 4, 2005.

Here is the link to the Internet version of the Union Leader--with TWO fawning, kiss-up articles on Elizabeth Edwards! Boo! Boo!

And I was caught in that traffic jam in Hooksett. I nearly spilled my beverage driving over a median. Apparently, an animal or something leaped into my path and I had to run it over in order to avoid a nasty spill. I believe it was a deer or a small horse.

Liberal radio didn't work because the shows were horrible or they were broadcast with less than 10 Watts.

Funny thing about the 10 watts. Limbaugh and Saveage get the 50,000 WATT FLAMETHROWER OF TRUTH -- I'm not making that up -- and our Progressive Talk station, while it lasted, was powered apparently by a gerbil in a treadmill. Liberal Media domination here in Boston. My ass.

I don't mind personally -- people I disagree with are more interesting to listen to -- but something is very wrong here, and I don't think it's the market forces at work.

More people watch Howie Mandel in just one night than spend a month with Keith Olbermann.

Howie Mandel strikes you as a Republican?

Do conservatives control Time, Newsweek or US News and World Report? Do conservatives control ANY of the three major networks. ABC, NBC or CBS? Do conservatives control CNN?

Yes. Those are all far-right media outlets. If you don't get that it simply supports my view that Republicans are hysterical about national health care because they're afraid someone might get on to how nuts they are.

cleek predicted it at the top of the thread and Norman Rogers has now proved it true:

modern "conservatism" = perpetual victim complex

This is just a guess but I think the assertion that liberals are less likely to want to listen to how bad the other side is are right on. Sure, Kos draws a large audience but, like you say, its only that big in comparison to other blogs - not other media outlets.

So why would this be? My guess is it has something to do with the basic assumptions pushing liberals vs. conservatives. Liberals are more community oriented and probably, in their heart of hearts, believe in the possibililty of a world that works for everyone. The game isn't about winning through competition but through cooperation. Conservatives, on the other hand, probably adhere to the view that the world can't work for everyone, that there are going to be people left out, and so the right thing to do is to not get left out. If coming what you came by was at someone else's expense, well, it was going to be that way anyway.

You can see where this is going. When the goal is a world that works for everyone, making an enemy of 1/2 the world doesn't make as much sense. Of course, I'm not saying you can't make sense out of it, but its a further stretch than if you start from a place of "everyone can't win."

Personally, I'm one of Kos's daily visitors, and I go there more out of habit than anything else. Usually, I don't even read a full post. Why? Because its only about beating the competition. It takes me about 1/2 a post to remember it and then I either get back to work or see if one of the more policy-oriented sites I like has anything new up.

"More people watch Howie Mandel in just one night than spend a month with Keith Olbermann"

That's what Rove counts on.

And anti-Bush and liberal are not synonymous. Political labels are meaningless in the current debate, since the real galvanizing issues have all the weight of junior high students assigning peer groups.

The non-galvanizing issues -- war, ecology, consumerism -- are the ones that bore the masses to death. Entertainment trumps information. American Idol's sweet comforts beat pumping mental iron. Bush is more fun than Gore.

The issues are incidental to the divisions. The fault lines lie along the boundaries that separate complacency and self-regard from higher levels of thought.

That's why liberal professors are rampant and conservative intellectuals are few, far-between, and almost universally without wit or a sense of irony.

Bill Buckley excepted.

Archons, indeed. Go, trex.

"Do conservatives control any of the top 50 newspapers in this country? Do conservatives control Time, Newsweek or US News and World Report? Do conservatives control ANY of the three major networks. ABC, NBC or CBS? Do conservatives control CNN?"--Norman Rogers
By my lights, which are far from radical, conservatives usually control virtually all of the above media. They may not be consistent, but when it comes to bowing to authority, supporting the use of force first, withholding or distorting the facts, accepting even the Bush Admin's claims at face value (at least initially), or giving time to Bush liars, they are nonpareils. And why not? These media nearly all belong to corporations which rule the roost wherever they are. Dependent on political favor to approve their real estate deals, tax evasions, stock option deals, mergers, acquisitions, plant closings, violations of OSHA and other regulations, etc. etc., they do ANY administration's bidding like lap dogs, and favor lower taxes, less regulation, and the unleashing of private enterprise in their own bailiwicks.

"What does Daily KOS have?"
I agree that TPM is the Most Professional and research is their strong point - Good Old Fashion Journalism. I RSS feed all of them on my Homepage and Just see the New Headlines - Read them when intersting. You are missing a Ton if you only log on once in awhile. I truly believe that our Leading Democrats are listening to us VIA TPM, Kos, Muchraker, WashingtonMonthly ... ... ...
You want to BE In The Know - Dont You?

It's about communication, fluid and topical. The trolls, including dear Normie, are part of the disruption process. But people are moving away from left-right and towards up-to-date, without so many tribal affiliations. That's what I think, anyway.

Time, Newsweek or US News and World Report? Do conservatives control ANY of the three major networks. ABC, NBC or CBS? Do conservatives control CNN?

CLD: Yes. Those are all far-right media outlets.

KR: By my lights, which are far from radical, conservatives usually control virtually all of the above media.

I rest my case. You are all unhinged lunatics. For any of you to suggest that those outlets--which are responsible for reams upon reams of printed attacks on the administration and for hours upon hours of vitriol against good public servants who make the unpardonable crime of being Republicans is beyond ludicrous and not worth responding to.

My goodness. One has to wade through the stupid around here virtually every single afternoon nowadays.

Daily Kos, which is unique in the political blogosphere, gets about 500,000 readers a day . . . By national radio and TV standards, that's not "sizeable" at all. It's puny ? and it's not growing much either.

OK, but that still makes it the highest-ranked political blog on the TTLB Ecosystem, and the second-highest-ranked blog of any kind - miles ahead of the nearest conservative blogs, most of whose readers, I presume, are Limbaugh fans. Just as the 125 - 150,000 readers of the top conservative blogs are only a tiny fraction of Limbaugh's audience, I presume Kos's half-million daily readers are only a tiny fraction of the potential liberal radio audience - if you could reach it. Blog traffic is not an absolute measure of total audience - it's only a relative measure of audience compared with other sources, and in that perspective the outlook for liberal radio and TV has got to be good.

As a further data point, consider the Daily Show and Colbert Report - intelligent political commentary with a liberal flair, done right, and hugely popular.

I think there's more to be done here before we write off liberal mass media entirely.

As a further data point, consider the Daily Show and Colbert Report - intelligent political commentary with a liberal flair, done right, and hugely popular.

And yet ten times more people watch the affable and hilarious Jeff Foxworthy ask the question "Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader?"

In the case of the liberals who post here, the answer is yes. You have you narrowcast niche shows and your shrill, out of control and unhinged blogs. You don't amount to more than navel lint in a country as large and as diverse as this one, though.

Frankly, I read a fair amount of conservative commentary and I have to say that hatred of liberals and everything they stand for is really what drives the right-wing media empire. On any given day, at least half of the front page entries at Red State are generic "all liberals are evil" posts. I don't find that left leaning media has such an across the board hatred for all things conservative. Liberals DO have a knee-jerk extreme hatred of GWB that permeates most blogs and media, but it strikes me that liberals are far more selective in focusing their rage. For example, I rarely see anyone of liberal persuasion proclaim that conservatism is destroying the country and that they are the enemy. Contrast that with Rush/Ann/Red State/O'Reilly where liberals are traitorous enemies of the state who should all be destroyed. Hatred of GWB and crony capitalism may be what is driving liberals these days, but hatred of ALL liberals is what drives conservatives ALL the time.

Some people here seem to think that what interests liberals would make boring radio, and only conservatives are interested in radio that's interesting or provocative.

Wrong on a number of points, imo.

One example, local radio here in L.A. in the days before media dereg and the conservative takeover of the airwaves. The dominant local talk station was KABC, frequently among the top-rated stations in town. It wasn't all politics but the top host was a guy named Michael Jackson, who was a moderate lefty who covered the news from both sides but you know where his heart was. He was the top voice in town for three decades.

When Limbaugh became popular, KABC tried to imitate him, trashing their whole lineup (including Jackson) for a bunch of right-wing replacements, and their ratings now are far behind where they used to be.

It ain't popularity that led to the explosion of right-wing talk radio. It was changes in FCC rules that allowed companies like Clear Channel to buy thousands of stations and run them like affiliates of the Republican Party.

In many towns (and big cities, for that matter) there is no liberal radio, and the righty talk shows have no competition. You get Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Savage, and three Christian stations, or you listen to music.

If you had a real free market, or even restored local control to station operators, you'd see a lot more liberal radio than there is now. Some of it would probably suck, but a lot of it would be better than you get with Air America, and in a lot of places it would beat the hell out of the crappy right-wing radio now on the air.

Leftists - not liberals, who are by definition moderates - but real leftists can make you feel the hate as good as any Limbaugh. The problem is, who you gonna hate? Leftists hate: banks, oil companies, record labels, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, imperialist warmongers, polluters, factory farming, gun nuts, health insurers, violent cops.

You think a leftist talk show host is ever gonna get a gig on Clear Channel?

But you want to hate on colored people, crippled people, women, vegetarians, environmentalists - that's not going to hurt your sponsors one bit.

So the furthest left you will ever get on radio is the voice of sweet reason. Sponsors will pay for anger but only if it's directed at the powerless.

I think the difference in the audience size is a good thing. Liberals are much more participant type people, and don't want to be told how to think. Conservatives tend to be more deferential to authority, and not so talk backish. Case in point: most liberals will talk to pollsters -- conservatives, less so.

Talk radio is geared more towards a hectoring, lecturing format. The Internet much less so.

Let's see Judith Miller she wrote for? Armstrong Williams wrote for? And they where fired why? It's not easy work to lie,You really have to be in a diffrent state of mind to get on camera , smile and lie.It's really not hard for a conservative.That's why they like Oxycotin popping Vigra raging sex with little boys from island nations Rush.

I've finished the long Chait article. It started pretty well and Chait makes some good points (he is a smart guy), but the article went down hill as Chait adopted a superior unfairly derisive tone and a somewhat distorting lens towards the netroots. (However, he does acknowledge the contributions of the netroots in providing more balance to the scales of political discourse in the US). See in particular his irritation with the netroots for the attacks on TNR and liberal Iraq war supporters.

Underneath it all, I suspect Chait is aggrieved by the fact that the netroots were largely right about the war with Iraq and he was wrong. I think he tries to be fair and even thinks he is being fair (it is not altogether a bad article), but I think Chait would have written a fairer less dismissive article if he had the sense to oppose the war in Iraq.

The same point Ben Brackley brought up, way upthread, unsettles me. Chait clearly projects onto liberals the value system of authoritarians. It is as if the desire for monopoly power is part of human nature. He does not see that liberals are working against the system of monopoly power for equity, justice, and liberal democracy (liberal democracy is monopolistic in its way). In the late 1990’s some liberals realized that Republicans were not just conservative liberals interested in having everyone at the table, but outright authoritarians. It became clear the only way to fight such a revolutionary movement was to organize on a war-like footing- something that comes naturally to authoritarians. Leo Strauss, the father of the neocons, denounce liberalism precisely because it could not resist the machinations of disciplined authoritarians. This is why he called liberalism decadent. This is why Hitler was convinced the Western democracies would collapse.

We should never confuse the conservative nature of the media, which merely reflects establishment power and laziness, and political authoritarianism. The American media in the middle 20th century was rather liberal and has always acted as something of a check on real authoritarianism, however sheepishly. This is why the social dominators have so attacked it and, when possible, sought to control it. Just think of Nixon/Cheney tradition of secrecy, intimidation and message control.

I almost never read Kos. But from everything I read in the blogosphere, these guys aren't authoritarian. Atrios? The Editors? Kevin Drum? All popular leftie bloggers, and pretty far from authoritarian.

"So why would this be? My guess is it has something to do with the basic assumptions pushing liberals vs. conservatives. Liberals are more community oriented and probably, in their heart of hearts, believe in the possibililty of a world that works for everyone."

They believe it works by socialism, a system that has been shown to be inefficient. Efficiency is of no concern to the left since perfect equality is the goal.

" The game isn't about winning through competition but through cooperation."

Agreed. The trouble is that this system produces poverty in abundence unless it is practiced in a small religious community where normal human competitive instincts are suppressed by higher goals (such as Heaven).

"Conservatives, on the other hand, probably adhere to the view that the world can't work for everyone, that there are going to be people left out, and so the right thing to do is to not get left out. "

No, they believe that people are best equipped to care for themselves and their own families since we have evolved into family structures through thousands of years. That is what Adam Smith was talking about when he described the "invisible hand."

"If coming what you came by was at someone else's expense, well, it was going to be that way anyway."

But if everyone believes that they will take care of themselves, they will make more prudent decisions (like unwed pregnancy, drugs, idleness) and prosper. There will always be the poor and there needs to be a way to care for them. Most of the time, this was a community obligation so "poor houses" were built in English towns in the 1500s. In modern times, we have tried to remove the stigma of poverty but instead got incentives that increased it.

It's a world view thing.

Universities trend left because they support idleness and passive careers. Conservatives tend to go into professions, the military and business, all fields that require action and decisiveness. Get a decision out of a university professor and then talk to me. I once wanted to complain about a math grade. I made several appointments but the professor never showed up. Finally, I saw him on the campus. I started across the street and called to him to ask if I could have a word with him. He looked around at me and started to run away. I decided that chasing him would probably not help my grade.

"In the late 1990’s some liberals realized that Republicans were not just conservative liberals..."

Yup. That's it. Except at the left and right fringes, I think many of us assumed that 80% of the population and a higher percentage of elites more or less embraced traditional liberal democratic values. The differences were in how to interpret these values in the modern age. It was an awakening to find out that was not entirely true of the modern Republican Party.

Liberals in the English-speaking tradition don’t embrace the precepts of socialism. They do oppose ruthless account book Manchester capitalism (including the neoliberal philosophies of Hayek and Ludwig von Mises) as the only worthy, or natural, basis of social organization. Liberals embrace the older idea of the national common wealth or Res Publica and its messy set of social values, obligations and risk-sharing. This is not government based on worker’s rights or class conflict although 19th century doctrines do inform the contemporary rhetoric. There has been a profound misunderstanding of the history of these ideas.

Although Manchester libertarianism speaks the language of liberty and justifies itself by invoking Nature (God-ordained dominance went out of vogue in the 18th century) it is really a justification for ownership class aristocracy unbridled by the monarchic or democratic state. Unlike the old landed aristocracy, which, at least in principle, had social responsibilities, the new owners had no obligation to society but that of enforcing discipline and Protestant piety. It conjures up images of the brutal “natural’ justice of Charles Dickens’s England and the Irish potato famine. One does not have to be a Marxist to denounce it as an illegitimate, cruel and unwise form of government. The history of the political economy of the ownership class from Adam Smith to Herbert Spencer to Hayek and Margaret Thatcher has yet to be told.

there just aren't very many liberals who are interested in listening to hour upon hour of seething resentment and raw contempt.

Absolutely. After all, that's why I broke up with my ex-girlfriend....

* "Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way."

* "May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't."

* "My men can eat their belts, but my tanks gotta have gas."

--George S. Patton defines the authoritarian mind.

Unlike the old landed aristocracy, which, at least in principle, had social responsibilities, the new owners had no obligation to society but that of enforcing discipline and Protestant piety. It conjures up images of the brutal “natural’ justice of Charles Dickens’s England and the Irish potato famine. One does not have to be a Marxist to denounce it as an illegitimate, cruel and unwise form of government.

Quite true. In fact, while not anticipating the preceise form, Adam Smith warned about the dangers of the factions it was structured to serve, and warned about how their interest diverged from the common interest, which makes me question the sense of his inclusion, except perhaps as a contrast from which the later figures course diverged, in your list. I mean, it was Smith who wrote, of the very "ownership class" to which you refer, thus (at the end of Book I of An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations):

The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two. Merchants and master manufacturers are, in this order, the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

(emphasis, of course, added)

Question for Chait: How would he characterize his insane anti-Dean screeds in TNR 3 years ago?

Rather blogosphere of him ne?

What interests me is the comments function as a form of community.

Americablog usually has about 250 comments by the time I read a post- way too many for me to add anything. Brad Plumer (and believe it guys, he's really smart and you should read and comment there more often) only has about five regular commenters- kinda small. But everyone will have their own preference.

The point is, if there are 50 million liberals on the net, and the comment community for a blog averages (picking figure out of thin air) 100 commenters, that is, uh, 5x10 to the fourth, or 50,000 blog communities, which of course have the interesting property of connecting people who live thousands of miles apart at the speed of light, more or less. (If electrons moved, how fast would they move?)

IOW, having five blogs you visit daily would be about a ten-thousandth part of your hypothetically possible selections.

But you can't just throw up your hands- the possibilities opened by the net are too vast to ignore.

So we will explore and use this thing, and what we're experiencing is the birth and growth of a global consciousness. Someone in Thailand or Iraq can point a cellphone camera at something and we can see it in real time. If we stay up all night. Which I used to do when internet sex was a little more wide open and crazy.

Hey, where else can I come home and have my own monologue and my wife doesn't have to hear a word of it? Shut up, Rush, I've go a thing or two to say myself.

I think that's it, in a nutshell.

The point is, if there are 50 million liberals on the net

Stop.

There's only about a hundred thousand of you, tops. Everyone else lives their lives and goes about their business rationally and calmly.

I think it's about enlightened discourse.

I was protesting Bush's visit to my hometown & had some provoking conversations with the pro-Bush crowd. But I was polite and intellectually honest, which my enemies found disarming... and even thanked me for. I could crack their shell and get them to look at how full of shit they were (politely).

Conservative Talk radio is all "Here's what I'm angry about..."

Blogs are all "here's what I make of it...." And "I agree about this, but you've not considered this..." Which is what Hamilton and the crew were doing in beerhalls in 1770. Polite confrontation.

Democracy in action. (and a couple of superfluous Dicks Fucks and Shits.)

Don't forget that a lot of the media owners, of that sector especially, didn't want liberal voices to be heard. But there really aren't as many liberals who like to just soak up anti-semitic type slander about how awful all of another group is.

Argh, I'm so tired of DKos being called a liberal blog. Markos, himself, declares (when it's convenient to his purposes to do so) that it's not a liberal blog, it's a Democratic blog. He says all Democrats: liberal, moderate, and conservative, are welcome, and any and all conversation and strategizing dedicated to getting Democrats (no matter how conservative) elected is welcome on his blog... actually, not only is such conversation welcome, he says it's the sole purpose of the blog.

As such, any political candidate who is not a Democrat is persona non grata at DKos... no matter how liberal he/she may be, and no matter how conservative his/her Democratic opponent may be. Even in a case where there's a head-to-head race between a liberal Green and less-liberal Democrat, with no possible chance for vote-splittng resulting in a Republican victory (for example, the Matt Gonzales vs. Gavin Newsom mayoral runoff in '03), only supporters of the less-liberal Democrat are allowed on DKos, and supporters of the more-liberal Green are told to remove themselves from the blog and go f themselves. And if you complain, you're given the mantra: "this is not a liberal blog, it's a Democratic blog."

And yet here we are, accepting DKos as not just *a* liberal blog, but *the* liberal blog.

The guy's a partisan hack, and the blog is, in essence, a wholly owned subsidiary of the DNC. Period. Full stop.

Patrick Meighan
Venice, CA

"there just aren't very many liberals who are interested in listening to hour upon hour of seething resentment and raw contempt."
__________________

Unless the conversation is about Repugs or conservatives. Then, each and every thread pulses with contempt, even hatred. The one constant about the most partisan of sites, right and left, is contempt for the outsider, the interloper. The contempt even extends, to a lesser degree, towards like-minded sites with which one's home site finds disagreement, such as Kos.

It's called "tribalism."

Don't worry about the political leanings - as has been pointed out, those are all over the map, even among the lefty netroots.

If you're trying to distill it down to one (not really a great idea in the first place, go with this: It's about participation.

Norman,

If all of those news outlets are so liberal, why are the overwhelming number of commentators from the political right? Why do the few centrist and left commentators given mere seconds to comment compared to the minutes allotted to each and every right-wing commentator? Why are conservatives permitted to finish their commentary after commercial breaks but centrists and liberals are not? And finally, why are all of the media corporations vehemently opposed to the reintroduction of the fairness doctrine?

Very frustrating. Though I haven't read the Chait article yet, there's a common thread to many of the posts here -- they totally miss the point. Points, really.
First point: the real value of a functional and effective leftist-oriented talk-radio / cable-news universe would NOT be to talk to existing liberals. What possible benefit would there be from preaching to the already converted? You don't preach to the choir; you preach to convert the heathen.
To that end, point number 2: the WAY you do it is exactly what FoxNews did, but in mirror image. What is it that was responsible both for their commercial success and their power in the polity (not to mention the visceral rage that even thinking about them sets off in most of us)? It's their ludicrous claim to being "fair and balanced;" their simultaneous pretence to journalistic integrity and occasional (only when they think they know just whom they're talking to) admission that they are the reichwing vanguard.
So what would work against that? Simple: set up a radio/TV network that promotes itself as for the "normal" American, the little guy, and against the elites.. and, of course, totally, reliably conservative (that goes without saying -- but say it anyway: loudly, clearly, and constantly). Set the proper tone of rage and loathing, victimization and entitlement... but focus all the ire on the real enemies of the ordinary, Jane-and-Joe Sixpack American: the decadent and undeserving rich, the corporatocracy, the hypocritical religious phonies, and the abusers of governmental power -- both the corrupt pols and the lobbyists leaching off them on our dime. A stealth-mode network loudly proclaiming its conservatism but actually channeling only those parts of the shared libertarian overlap -- of which there's quite a bit -- between the far left and the far right, would (over time and with considerable expenditure of resources) be able to win over (or at least disarm and neutralize) a considerable fraction of the disenchanted middle, and even some fraction of the far-right conservatarians. Slowly, the reach would expand into those areas in which, once the blinders were pulled off, a more visibly progressive message set could be delivered -- but only over a time span long enough to lay the ground properly. (Actually, that might not take that long after all; look how quickly W's ratings dropped once the lies became utterly untenable for all but the 30% of unreachable psychotics.)
Of course, none of this can happen with any of the existing media conglomerates, for obvious reasons: their owners are intelligent enough to know that whatever money they'd make off such a network wouldn't be enough to offset the bigger damage done to their interests by a resurgent left retaking political power.
So point three: the only way for this to happen is for a large number of well-heeled progressives to be willing to invest a good chunk of change for a very long time before the financial rewards started appearing. But appear they would; if nothing else, the ratings of Donahue, before he was last cancelled (was that in '02 or '03?) make that clear.
It would take time; Rush wasn't built in a day, either. But anyone who truly believes that a progressive value set can't be successfully promoted to at least 10-20% more Americans through properly-used mass media just hasn't been paying attention. After all, we've got God on our side.

Doesn't listening to the Rightwing Victimology-Fest require a certain level of paranoia to be able to tolerate that much conspiracy-mongering? I was excited that Air America was going on the air, but couldn't tolerate listening to hours of anger and snarkery. I tried, but although I agreed with many of the hosts and found in enjoyable in 10 minute burst, an hours was simply intolerable.

Democrats are naturally more optimistic and less paranoid. After all, we believe people can do and be better. It's the underlying foundational belief of liberalism, the belief in human potential for change. The underlying premise of conservative is man's need to be controlled, that his nature is evil and dangerous without societal control through the rule of law. That leads to a pessimistic, fear-ridden and paranoic worldview that thrives on fear-mongering hate radio.

You think a leftist talk show host is ever gonna get a gig on Clear Channel?

To be fair, Clear Channel has established "progressive talk" in some markets, although its power is minimal. For example, in Washington, Ed Schultz, Air America and other left-of-center talkers can be found in Clear Channel's 1260 AM, WWRC. However, its wattage is far weaker than its conservative counterpart, WTNT, 570 AM. (When 1260 was a top-rated semi-Top 40 station that carried the Washington Senators before they left following the 1971 season, it had a pretty good signal. Many feel since Clear Channel took it over, it hasn't paid attention to upkeep of its transmitting facilities. Is it coincidence, then, that the weakest of the three AM stations it owns is the site of "progressive talk"?)

So the furthest left you will ever get on radio is the voice of sweet reason. Sponsors will pay for anger but only if it's directed at the powerless.

Posted by: Bloix on May 1, 2007 at 4:36 PM

Okay, Air America may not be Pacifica, but it occasionally has something worthwhile to say. But if you're saying that "progressive talk" can't afford to be sufficiently populist for business reasons, I would concur.

It's not a bad piece? This novelette is worm queef Kevin, plain and simple.

There's at least two different moods (hinting at two writers developing the piece), one not giving a balanced account and very negative, the other suddenly in the last 1/4 of the essay seeming to contradict that and be more even-handed.

Don't be fooled, the first 3/4 is a hack job that gives a wholly unbalanced account, while employing ridiculously juvenile-level analogies and pretending to represent some kind of high-minded critique grounded in the History of Ideas, and presuming to defend and speak for some mythical "moderate mainstream".

I would say the mainstream are those people who are donating record amounts of small dollar contributions through the netroots, not the people who are hired and fired by money elites in New York City and Washington DC to write political journalism.

reading blogs is only slightly more useful than commenting on said blogs
critiquing those who write, read and comment on blogs is even more pointless

The appeal of dkos...it's not exactly the content. I think, it's the format and the sheer number of people using it that make it a social scene--it's like a bustling club. If you don't like one group of lunatics, try another. You make "friends"--you get into fights--if you stay long enough, you start to recognize the locals. And of course if you have a pent-up desire to blog, but are too lazy to start your own, you can write your own diaries. And as I said, having a lot of people writing and commenting is important too--it gives it the vibe of a hot restaurant, vs some other places that seem like sad, quarter-full restaurants or whatever.

My luddite wife learned to use the internet in 2001 after years of my trying to coax her. What changed in 2001? As an atheist she suddenly felt completely under siege by right wing religiosity led by our President's "faith based" initiatives. She needed to contact a community and there is no real geographic atheist community. They don't build churches so there is no reason for them to live near each other. But online there are several active atheist communities and my wife soon got involved with them...out of defense against what she perceived as an attack on her beliefs. Pretty much the same dynamic that has motivated the development of the right wing noise machine.

Unfortunately 8 years of Bush won't be enough to create a true liberal/progressive noise machine. It took the right wing sixty years to build something really effective. The backlash started with The New Deal, and even Reagan's election in 1980 wasn't enough. It took Republican unequivocal control of all three branches of government to switch the right wing whine of victimhood to a cry of triumphalism...shortlived though it was. For the past six years any right winger daring enough to critcize Bush has been immediately labelled a RINO. I figure by the time there is an establishment Republican candidate for 2008, the RINO label will start to be applied to Bush and Rove. Having lost the Legislative Branch and in danger of losing the Executive, the noise machine will have to swing their support behind a candidate who is openly critical of the Bush years to try to hold on.

The anti-intellectual bent of the netroots that Chait points out is almost the same as one finds in so-called conservative talk radio land. If the attitude you want is Kos' "we don't care about anything else but winning," fine then. But be careful what you wish for, because it will ultimately lead to the destruction of "netroots" movement as it has led to the destruction of the conservative movement.

You can bitch about intellectuals being soft, lazy and esoteric all you want, but they are the ones that come up with the ideas that you supposedly are fighting for. Otherwise you're no better than a cheerleader rooting for your "team" and liberalism becomes nothing more than a tribal standard. Ultimately what are you winning battles for anyway? If you can't define liberalism beyond simply controlling Congress or the White House, then all you're doing is sending politicians to public office with little to do and when that happens, as conservatives found out with the GOP Congress, then the scandals soon will come. Such scandals force the activists to have to defend the undefensible in order to protect your "tribe." Do you really want your own version of the Mark Foley story?

The conservative movement used to have strong intellecutal foundations. The Goldwater camapaign was very much an intellectuals campaign. The UChicago school set down the economic policies that dominated the 1980s. But conservatives began to abandon academia in the 1980s and 90s and pretty soon the ideas began to dry up. Those who work for conservative think tanks are shackeled by the "limits of permissble dissent," set down by their corporate or big-heeled donors. Thus, they regurgitate the same stuff they been saying for the past 30 years. Without intellectuals, conservative discourse is dominated by entertainers: radio talk-show hosts and TV pundits.

Now you see the results. Rush Limbaugh once said that his job is to hold the biggest radio audience possible. Well if that's the case, he will do anything or say anything to attract an audience regardless if it's true or consistent. In other words, if communism drew audience on radio, Limbaugh would be a communist. Conviction only works if it draws ratings. Thus, people like Mike Savage and Ann Coulter say outrageous things because they have drawing power, even if you doubt a man who once reportedly wrote mash notes to Allen Ginsburg really thinks homosexuals should get AIDS and die. Pundits and columnists repeatedly err or make bad predictions they know are BS or defend administration policy to stay in line with their audience and their administration and movement contacts. Or they become like Fred Barnes, virtual propagandists. An intellecutal has to be consistent and logical. Entertainers do not. They just have to be entertaining. The end result was the dumbing down of conservatism to the point where the founders of the movement, from Russell Kirk to James Burnham to Richard Weaver would hardly recognize what they created anymore.

Like the netroots, conservative talk radio covers itself in populistic rhetoric because it sees itself as an outside force against the "elites". When such a movement begins that may be true but it won't be long, and Chait points this out, that the netroots leaders will be the guests of honor at the same Georgetown cocktail parties and ultimatley that power will go straight to their heads. The thing you find with many conservative radio talk show hosts is what utter suck-ups they are. They allowed themselves to be wined and dined by Republicans and conservative "leaders" in Washington ever since 1994 and pretty soon they began to stick up for them even when they went away from classical conservatism. GOP Congressmen could raise their own pay, spend billons on pork barrell projects and get the U.S. involved in nation builing in Iraq and wouldn't matter because our gang is in power, nothing they do is wrong because they are one of us. What did this ultimately lead to? Talk show hosts defending Harriet Meyers, defending the Bush II Administration's record on Iraq and on Hurricane Katrina and defending Mark Foley. Again, is that really what you netroots to become? Enablers of bad behavior and bad policy? Is that the end that justifies the means?

Not only that but like talk radio, the netroots inflates itself beyond its numbers. Half-millon people chiming in every day on a blog is great numbers but very insignificant when it comes to politics. Rush Limbaugh may very well have 22 million listeners weekly, but that's because he's syndicated in 600 different radio markets. In each market, he gets between 4.0 and 5.0 ratings. That's very good showing for an AM station but its miniscule compared to ratings for FM stations. Any FM station that pulled those numbers would fire their programming director. That's why the future of talk radio is unceratain. Those 21-54 year olds that have provided the backbone of the talk radio audience are getting old and the young persons advertisers crave, it has been discovered in market reasearch, do not listen to AM radio under any circumstances whatsoever short of a national emergency like 9-11. That's why Clear Channel, who's stations provide the backbone of Limbaugh's listenership, moved Limbaugh's show from a venerable AM station, KSTP AM 1500, to the FM dial here in Minneapolis/St. Paul with the new KXTK FM 100.3. Unfortunately, they're suffering in the ratings and advertisers are not going to drop proftiable accounts with other FM stations just because Rush Limbaugh is on the air.

Obviously the real test for the netroots will come when the Democrats dominate both the White House and Congress. But once those prizes have been reached you get the sense netroots activists will soon say afterward "Now what?" Continued contempt for the intellecutals and for ideas will eventually consign the netroots to the asheap of other "movements" including the departed conservative movement (1945-1995). To show what happens to a movement that gives up on ideas for political victories, here's an excerpt from an essay written by Austin Bramwell, a former board member with the National Review, for the American Conservative magazine published back in November of 2006. I urge everyone to Google and read the full essay because I'm sure you will find it very enlightening:

"...But “conservatism� has no mystical essence. Rather than a magisterium handed down from apostolic times, it is an ideology whose contours are largely arbitrary and accidental. By ideology, I mean precisely what Orwell depicted in 1984. I do not mean, of course, that conservatism is totalitarian. Taken as prophecy, 1984 has little merit. Taken as a description of the world we actually live in, however, it is indispensable. 1984 reveals not the horrors of the future but the quotidian realities of ideology in mass democracy. Conservatism exemplifies them all.

First, like Ingsoc, conservatism has a hierarchical structure. Like Orwell’s “Inner Party,� those at the top of the movement have almost perfect freedom to decide what opinions count as official conservatism. The Iraq War furnishes a telling example. In the run-up to the invasion, leading conservatives announced that conservatism now meant spreading global democratic revolution. This forthright radicalism—this embrace of the sanative powers of violence—became quickly accepted as the ineluctable meaning of conservatism in foreign policy. Those who dissented risked ostracism and harsh rebuke. Had conservative leaders instead argued that global democratic revolution would not cure our woes but increase them, the rest of the movement would have accepted this position no less quickly. Millions of conservative epigones believe nothing less than what the movement’s established organs tell them to believe. Rarely does a man recognize, like Winston Smith, his own ideology as such.

Second, conservatism is concerned less with truth than with distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!�) that, like “ignorance is strength,� are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker. At the same time, to rise in the movement, one must develop a habitual obliviousness to truth, or what Orwell labeled “doublethinking.� Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

Third, and closely related to doublethinking, the conservative movement engages in selective editing of history. When events have a tendency to disconfirm ideology, down the memory hole they go. Thus, conservatives do not recall their dire warnings about the Soviet Union during the Cold War or about the economy after the Bush I or Clinton tax increases. On the Iraq invasion, they will not remind you of their claims that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, that the world would soon be applauding the Iraq invasion, or that events in Lebanon and the Ukraine heralded global democratic revolution. Nor will conservatives remind you of their predictions that the insurgency’s demise was imminent, that Saddam Hussein and then Zarqawi were the Big Men of the insurgency, or that the insurgency consisted largely of foreign jihadis. As in 1984, the ability to forget that any of these events ever occurred signals one’s loyalty to the movement. (Hence, the rise of hawkishness against Iran, not four years after the last effort to sell a war to an otherwise balky public.) To prove his loyalty to the emperor, everyone must compliment him on his new clothes. The most loyal believe that the emperor is wearing clothes to begin with.

Fourth, conservatism is entertaining. Understanding the world, though rewarding, provides nothing like the pleasures of a “Two Minute Hate,� a focused, ritualized denunciation of enemies. To induce its own Two Minute Hates, conservatism, like Ingsoc in 1984, manufactures bogeymen such as “judicial activists,� “so-called realists,� or “moral relativists� that become symbolic representations of detested outsiders. Meanwhile, like the Inner Party in 1984, conservative leaders tolerate the more vulgar, angry purveyors of ideology—think talk-show hosts or authors of bestselling political books. The most vicious attacks, meanwhile, are reserved for turncoats, like Goldstein in 1984. (Of course, as many paleoconservatives could attest, the hatred is usually mutual.) Rooting for conservative ideology is as engrossing to its partisans as rooting for the local football team is to its fans.

None of this is to suggest that conservatism is uniquely pernicious. The roots of ideology lie deep in our cognitive limitations and instinct for group loyalty. One could make similar observations of any ideology. The most distinguishing feature of conservatism is its misleading name. Lexically, “conservatism� denotes caution, prudence, and resistance to change. Conservatism the ideology, however, has if anything tended towards recklessness. “Nuke ‘em!� has always been a popular conservative sentiment, never more so than today with respect to the Muslim world. For frantic boast and foolish word / Thy mercy on thy people Lord!

Whatever its past accomplishments, the conservative movement no longer kindles any “ironic points of light.� It has produced fewer outstanding books even as it has taken over more of the intellectual and political landscape. This trend will only continue. Worse, no reckoning will be made: they hope in vain who expect conservatives to take responsibility for the actual consequences of their actions. Conservatives have no use for the ethic of responsibility; they seek only to “see to it that the flame of pure intention is not quelched.� The movement remains a fine place to make a career, but for wisdom one must look elsewhere.

Gee, Sean, run out of things to say?

I am a firm believer of posting good writing from others when I see it and that which helps accentuates anything I write. Bramwell's essay about the conservative movement I feel points to the direction the netroots are heading if the stay on the same course.

Austin Bramwell article, Goodbye to All That.

Sensible party vs Stupid party.

Look, when you learn that by a vast majority, those who teach at America's universities are Democrat rather than Republican you can either rant about conspiracies or you can consider if maybe there is something about the party of shoot first, ask questions later, the party of ignoring and lying about science, the party of biblical literalism, the party of pissing off other countries even when there's no reason to that is less than appealing to people with a brain.

The exact same thing holds here. People who can think aren't interested in hearing lying rants day after day. That remains true even if you happen to agree with the sympathy behind the rants. I mean, I support most of what, say, someone like Al Franken believes but, damnit, there are more interesting to do than hear the same point repeated fifty times.