I like the progressive blogosphere being compared to the French Revolution, a period in history of incomparable literature and philosophy. We just need to make sure that a Napoleon doesn't result from our efforts...
Simon Rosenberg was recently telling Howard Fineman that Daily Kos and Atrios are now the real players in the Democratic Party and that the liberal blogosphere amounts to the equivalent of the French "Resistance" to the Vichy Washington insider Dems. Don't you love it when they state the obvious?
This article should further empower the growing cavalcade of experienced writers at DKos and should make rank-and-file Kossacks (such as myself) proud of their contribution.
Some excerpts:
"It's not a fight between liberals and conservatives," Rosenberg told me the other day. "It's between our `governing class' here and activists everywhere else."
In other words, it's The Beltway versus The Blogosphere."
Down with the Third Estate!!!
What's interesting is that Rosenberg is himself a Beltway creature, a preternaturally self-assured young insider with a cherubic face and a cold smile. He heads a group called the New Democratic Network and ran his own campaign for DNC chair. But the names he utters with reverence are net-based: organizers such as Eli Pariser and bloggers such as Daily Kos and Atrios.
Rosenberg rejects that notion that the bloggers represent a new "Internet Left." It's not an ideological rift, he says, but a "narrative" of independence versus capitulation: too many Democrats here are too yielding to George W. Bush on the war in Iraq, on tax policy, you name it. "What the blogs have developed is a narrative," he told me the other day," and the narrative is that the official Washington party has become like Vichy France."
And:
Rosenberg, who has, and can move easily in establishment circles, somewhat self-mockingly declares his own allegiance to the "narrative." "I feel like I've joined the Resistance!" he says.
Finally, what I have been saying since I logged into Daily Kos the first time:
But if Rosenberg is right, the key is not ideological purity but combativeness, and an appreciation of the power and tone of the internet.
So, Kos, are you meeting with Hillary as the article says? Make her beg and grovel if you do. Not that that will make a difference with liberal activists who have pretty much written her off.