From Stanford University's Hoover Institution Policy Review, an article by Tod Lindberg titled, Left 3.0 - Obama and the Emergence of a Newer Left:
The left side of the American political spectrum has undergone an extraordinary transformation over the past dozen years. Perhaps because it remains a work in progress, the extent of this transformation has gone largely unremarked and seems underappreciated even among those who have been carrying it out. Forty years after the forces of the “New Left” managed to deliver the Democratic presidential nomination to their preferred candidate, George McGovern, only to see him lose the general election to Richard Nixon in a 49-state landslide, the United States is home to a newer Left. Its political hopes repose not in a man able to muster less than 40 percent of the vote nationwide, but in the convincingly reelected president of the United States, Barack Obama. This newer Left is confident in itself, united both in its description of the problems the country faces and in how to go about addressing them. This Left is conscious of itself as a movement, and believes it is on the rise. It has already managed to reshape American politics, and its successes so far have hardly exhausted its promise. Policies are changing under its influence. And its opponents do not seem to have found an effective way to counter it politically.
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Obama staked his legacy on patching the largest remaining hole in the New Deal social welfare safety net. Guaranteed lifelong access to affordable health care has been at the top of the Left’s policy agenda since fdr. Bill Clinton tried, failed, gave up for good. Obama would not give up. Despite an economy that continued to sputter contrary to his own expectations and those of his advisors, despite public opinion polls that early turned against the reform effort, despite ominous electoral signals, and despite having to abandon the Left’s cherished “public option,” he persisted. And he prevailed. It was a political risk on the order of the one Ronald Reagan took in cooperating with Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s successful effort to wring inflation out of the economy in 1981–82 at the cost of a brutal recession. Obama lost Democrats their House majority in doing so. Not that they thought it would happen, but in the view of many on the Left, health care reform on the scale Obama was able to achieve, though imperfect, would be worth losing a House majority. The remainder of Obama’s first term would be a domestic policy desert if not worse, entailing various capitulations to the gop, at least in the eyes of many on the Left at the time. But he had his signature achievement, subject to validation by the Supreme Court and the ability to sustain enough Democratic political power in Washington to prevent its repeal.
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The new media environment has been very favorable to Left 3.0. Vibrant websites abound, some of them extraordinarily influential: The “netroots” have been a formidable force. The sorting of the political parties into left and right has an analogue in the sorting of the consumption of political opinion. It has never been easier to avoid encountering opinions with which one might disagree. The effect of this on the Left side of the political spectrum has helped promote the solidarity of Left 3.0 and the Democratic Party: The victors in the internal political debate were those advocating for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
http://www.hoover.org/...
I think it goes without saying, in that last paragraph, Mr. Lindberg is pretty much referring to Daily Kos. :)
The entire article is well worth the read. It describes the ways in which Republicans, thanks largely to right-wing radio, are currently incapable of unifying in the way that Democrats have. Unfortunately, the article appears in the final issue of Policy Review, which is ceasing publication.
Giant h/t to thinkprogress.org for finding and reporting on this article. They summarize it better than I could:
Lindberg argues that the latest iteration of the left has transcended its past ideological divisions to put forth a practical, technologically sophisticated, and politically viable set of ideas tempered by expectations of slow but steady progress. What holds the left together in Lindberg’s analysis? “[T]he achievement of a greater degree of economic equality by means of politics.”
http://thinkprogress.org/...
It may be hard to appreciate how full of win we are in the wake of Sequestration. But think about it: The GOP detonated the sequester bomb because their last desperate hope is to quasi-treasonously harm America and pray the electorate blames President Obama. I believe the strategy will backfire, Dems will retake the House next year, and then, finally, as Lindberg predicts, things will start to get better quickly.
Update 1:
Salon has a post about the Lindberg article. They close with this:
Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. It remains to be seen whether the basic argument of “Left 3.0” is borne out in the years and decades to come. Speaking of history, it was Hegel who observed that “The owl of Minerva flies at dusk” — by which he meant that one can only understand an epoch retrospectively, when it is over or almost over. This may explain why the best essay ever published by the conservative journal Policy Review appeared in its final issue, discussing the end of conservatism as we have known it and the rise of American liberalism in a new form.
http://www.salon.com/...