Netroots On Chait In Tnr - Road to the Middle Class

HERE IS how the netroots experience their birth in the aftermath of the contested 2000 election in Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong’s book, Crashing the Gate:

Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means. Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side.

That is a version of reality that conservatives and Republicans would certainly contest. But never mind. That’s the netroots’ story and they are sticking with it.

It is certainly true, as Jonathan Chait writes in The New Republic, that the netroots experience themselves as another great political movement like the conservative movement that hit the radar with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency 16 years later.

And he certainly captures in his article the flavor of the netroots, at least from the perspective of one who is not a member.

What is interesting, for a conservative, is how much he gets wrong about the conservative movement. That is always a frustrating, but also an exhilirating experience. After all, if mainstream liberals don’t really “get” the conservative movement, after all these years, so much the better.

The bigger question is: Just what is the netroots movement for? For it is the difference between the netroots and the conservative movement that is most telling.

The conservative movement went critical in the 1960s in a coming together of political activists, books, interests, and scholarship. It was a coming together of people who believed that the welfare state was the wrong road for the modern world and who wanted to think and organize around the project of reforming it and/or replacing it. On the way the original fusion of libertarians and traditional conservatives developed into a big tent that included evangelical Christians, Jewish liberals mugged by reality, and Reagan Democrats that felt uncomfortable in the post-patriotic McGovernite Democratic Party.

The question is: who do the netroots represent, beyond a cadre of angry college-educated children of the welfare state? Where do they want to take the United States? What do they want to change? Where are their books?

In Chait’s view the netroots don’t really have a philosophy and they don’t really have an agenda. Pushed to say what they believe in they regurgitate a fairly conventional liberal agenda. Only more so.

Let’s look at it another way. Conservatives formed a movement because they wanted to change the welfare state. That’s what movements are for, to mount an insurgency against the establishment by political organizing and winning elections. Conservatives wanted to move the nation away from top-down management by experts and activists.

The netroots appear to be forming a movement to oppose the establishment for not opposing the insurgent conservatives with enough energy. Maybe that’s a brilliant idea: putting some backbone into wimpy liberal establishment types and make them fight for the programs that help poor people.

Or maybe it’s a catastrophic error. It could just as well split the Democrats, as the right-wing patriotic side of the party splits off from the left-wing netroots. Or it could move the whole party to the left, away from the center where the independent voters are.

I come back, again and again to the analysis of Lee Harris in Civilization and Its Enemies. To him we are talking about the war between the western team and the eternal gang of ruthless men.

Why it is that the netroots seem, rather obviously, a gang of ruthless men?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.