Chait's Netroots Opus

(updated below)

Jonathan Chait has a lengthy piece in the current issue of The New Republic entitled THE LEFT'S NEW MACHINE: How the Netroots Became the Most Important Mass Movement in U.S. Politics. The piece is incredibly ambitious in scope, and though it gets a lot wrong, it strikes me as an important piece of journalism, one that paints a much more accurate picture of what the liberal blogosphere is and what animates it than anything else I've seen from a major journalist to date. To Chait's credit, this piece will go a long way toward correcting a number of persistent misconceptions about the so-called netroots.

In particular I think Chait does a good job explaining how the prevailing media and political environment in the late 90s and early part of this decade--an environment that was characterized by a number of profound asymmetries that consistently disadvantaged Democrats and liberals--led to the creation of (and need for) the liberal blogosphere. Chait also does a reasonably good job dispelling the notion that the liberal blogosphere is some kind of reincarnation of the New Left. As he points out, the major players in the netroots are not ideologues:

The second bond is a shared political narrative. This is not exactly the same thing as a shared ideology. The ideology of the netroots is, indeed, somewhat amorphous, as liberal bloggers themselves often point out. . . . Far from being ideologically hidebound, as their critics often contend, they are ruthlessly strategic political calculators. . . . Like the New Right (and unlike the New Left), the netroots is committed to working within the two-party structure. They have relatively little use for street demonstrations and none at all for Naderite third parties. They fervently support Democrats and, with increasing frequency, work for them directly.

Chait even concedes that the sometimes bitter conflict between the netroots and bastions of Democratic centrism like the DLC and The New Republic is about "ethos, not ideology."

In making these points forcefully and convincingly, Chait advances the ball considerably. Unfortunately, Chait can't quite manage to avoid adopting a condescending tone toward his subjects and applying obvious double-standards. For instance, while he's willing to paint with a rather broad brush when describing the beliefs and motivations of the netroots crowd, he bristles at the generalized criticisms voiced by various bloggers about the DLC and his magazine, TNR. Clearly oblivious to the double-standard he's invoking, Chait writes:

In reality, of course, the DLC is a political enterprise and TNR a journalistic one; each has on its staff individuals who do not always agree with each other; and neither institution exerts total control over every individual on its payroll. While both the DLC and tnr supported the Iraq war, both stridently opposed almost every other element of the Bush agenda. The overwhelming majority of DLC missives and TNR articles are perfectly congenial to mainstream liberalism and perfectly hostile to the Republican Party of George W. Bush. But these sorts of subtleties generally escape the Manichean analysis that pervades the netroots.

Needless to say, a number of subtleties escape Chait's analysis as well. Where Chait gets things the most wrong, in my opinion, is in his contention that the netroots want to "recreate the Democratic Party in the image of the conservative machine they have set out to destroy."

Chait is certainly correct that there are aspects of the conservative movement that liberal bloggers admire, most notably its extensive media infrastructure and ability to maintain a unified message. But Chait moves from there to a contention that, as far as I can tell, has no basis in fact whatsoever:

The notion that political punditry ought to, or even can, be constrained by intellectual honesty is deeply alien to the netroots. They have absorbed essentially the same critique of the intelligentsia that the right has been making for decades. In the conservative imagination, journalists, academics, and technocrats are liberal ideologues masquerading as dispassionate professionals.

Chait wants to create symmetry here where none exists. While his characterization of the prevailing conservative critique of the "intelligentsia" is more or less accurate, he clearly misconceives entirely the liberal critique. As Digby once wrote:

We [liberals] have no organized campaign and we don't see the media as being politically biased. We see it as abdicating its duty to sort out the important from the trivial and connect the dots in these confusing times that are ruled by spin, PR and marketing on all sides.

Or as I once put it:

Journalists today are more like play-by-play announcers than referees. They no longer see it as their job to step in and call fouls, i.e., to call a lie a lie. As a result, modern politics operates more or less on the honor system, which, needless to say, only invites the dishonest and unscrupulous to make a mockery of our political discourse. When all that readers are presented with is dueling narratives, suddenly even the facts are up for grabs; the very concept of objective truth becomes increasingly elusive. . . .

Journalists often protest that this sort of lying and misdirection is "just politics as usual." But this profoundly misconceives the role that the media plays in enabling this sort of behavior. On many levels, politics is a game, and like any game, the players will adjust to the level of officiating. If the refs are unwilling to blow the whistle, the game is going to get pretty rough and dirty. But if the refs step in and start calling some fouls, the players will react accordingly, and the level of our political discourse will improve overnight.

Chait contends that:

The prevailing sentiment here [in the Netroots] 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.

But this is just demonstrably untrue. At the heart of the liberal critique of the media is a desire for truth. Liberal bloggers don't want to destroy the media; they just want journalists to do their jobs better. They want journalists to keep our political discourse from degenerating into the fact-free clown show that it has so often become. That's the desire that animates the liberal blogosphere. It's the force that drives people like Duncan Black and Bob Somerby, the theme that unifies all of their writing.

Indeed, this is THE fundamental difference between the netroots and the conservative movement. The netroots is, in a very real sense, a reaction to the pervasive dishonesty of the conservative movement, a dishonestly that had, by the late 1990s, thoroughly contaminated the way the mainstream media covered politics. While it's certainly true that many of the most prominent liberal bloggers believe in a more forceful and robustly partisan form of politics, they have zero desire to adopt the sort of dishonest tactics pioneered by the Right. And if they did, one of their fellow bloggers would call them out for it pretty quickly. In other words, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Duncan Black are not the leftwing equivalents of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

At one point Chait makes this assertion:

In replicating the form and structure of the conservative movement, inevitably the netroots have replicated its intellectual style as well. The netroots, like the conservative movement, believe that they represent a natural political majority, one that can only be stymied by the timidity of their party's political establishment.

This is simplistic at best. On some issues, like the war, the netroots certainly does believe that it represents a majority view (and rightfully so). On other issues, though, it's more of a belief that, if presented dispassionately with the facts, more people would find their position meritorious. And on that score, I think the netroots differs significantly from the conservative activists of the last few decades. Although I have little doubt that most conservative activists believe in the fundamental correctness of their positions on various issues, most--to this day--do not think that their views have a natural majority constituency. They realize, for instance, that entitlement programs are extremely popular and tax cuts for the wealthy don't make intuitive political sense. Knowing that, all things being equal, many of these core conservative ideas have little chance of ever commanding a majority, conservative activists long ago resigned themselves to the use of deception and propaganda to achieve their political ends. That's how they justify arguing that Social Security is on the verge of bankruptcy or that tax cuts increase revenue.

The members of the netroots, on the hand--whether naively or not--generally believe that their positions on most issues are capable of commanding majority support without the need for deception and that all that is needed to rally support for them is a thorough airing of the facts (and debunking of conservative lies). There is much more value placed on process and much less tolerance of knowingly deceptive tactics. That's not to say the netroots bloggers are always right or always well-informed, but they certainly do not see themselves as purveyors of propaganda or consider the use of deception and half-truths to be a desirable (or even acceptable) way of pursuing their political goals.

UPDATE: I see Atrios has weighed in. I agree with most of what he says, particularly this:

[Chait] doesn't quite seem to understand what the word "propaganda" means. Honest but persuasive speech which employees legitimate rhetorical tools not meant to deceive doesn't qualify as "propaganda." Hyperbole, exaggeration, anecdote, metaphor, humor, can all be employed without intent to deceive, even if hyperliteralists might find that the statements are not literally true.

UPDATE II: Digby perfectly illustrates my point and reminds me why he/she is the best and most eloquent representative of the netroots to yet emerge:

I didn't start blogging to deny reality or create another narrative out of whole cloth. (The bloggy jargon about "framing" and "narratives and "memes" are btw, contra Chait, just shorthand for "making a good argument", "telling our side of the story" and "ideas." They are not nefarious revolutionary propaganda terms designed to mislead.) I started blogging for the opposite reason. What I saw was a political establishment enmeshed in an extremely disorienting up-is-downism, perpetuated by a right wing machine that had used sophisticated marketing techniques, propaganda and plain old lies to completely distort our common perceptions of reality -- as Hewitt so perfectly demonstrates. Right about the time that Republicans started impeaching presidents for minor sexual indiscretions and dishonestly manipulating every lever of power they had to attain the presidency I knew politics had gone insane, not me. (And I think my judgment has been pretty well vindicated if I do say so myself.)

I try to see the world as clearly as I can because to do otherwise is to lose one's mind. I'm sure I succumb to group think from time to time and avoid writing about things I find difficult to discuss or about which I feel I have no particular insight. (You'll notice that I rarely engage in arcane economics.) I don't pretend to be entirely objective but I try to be a clear eyed person who calls it as I see it. I honestly can't understand how we can survive as a culture if we can't find a way to get past this "everything is spin" idea that Hewitt is promoting. It's the right that pushed that into the discourse and it's the netroots that are trying to unravel it and get back to some sort of common understanding of what constitutes reality.

More than anything I am interested in combating this epistemological relativism that has entered the body politic; things like the irrational dismissal of science or the insistence that cutting taxes produces more revenue or any of a thousand other assaults on reality. I can't help but be slightly insulted that my participation in the netroots movement is even being compared to such demagoguery and deviousness. I do not think we are the same animals and if the netroots become that I will no longer be a part of it. . . .

Overall, the piece is insightful in some respects and I don't mean to pick it apart. But none of this happened in a vacuum, and Chait rather scrupulously avoids delving too deeply into the rightwing's strategic mendacity. And without that you can't really understand what brought us to this place and what motivates us to move ahead. Rather than wanting to become a competing propaganda organ, I think most of us actually want to reintroduce the idea of honest political debate because we believe we will win on the merits. (Why else have the Republicans found it necessary to lie, cheat and steal to the degree they have?) The first step in doing that is to dismantle their propaganda, which is what we are doing. No one that I know of has ever suggested that we create our own.

That's exactly the point I was trying to make above. This is where Chait truly misunderstands the subjects of his piece. Liberal bloggers have zero desire to become propagandists. They are driven to do what they do by a deeply-seated belief that the truth has, of late, been badly abused by conservatives and by an overly passive and, at times, clownishly inept mainstream media. The notion that liberal bloggers are somehow unconcerned with truth couldn't be more wrong. A desire for truth is what drives them.