As I have said before I believe that new technology (the internet) has created new circumstances in the political landscape. It’s as though climate change has brought rain to formerly drought sticken areas. New growth is happening, mostly at random and all sorts of “varieties” not yet “species” are still working out their place in various niches in the new ecology. Bloggers are no more than folks with strong social/political instincts who now have a decentralized, democratic means to express their views. As such, some trends, coalitions, finding of each other is happening. For some this is exciting; for some it is threatening. Matt Stoller who posts at MyDD picked this up at Roll Call:
.. the growing number of bloggers, which, as this source said, represent “the Democratic version of the Christian right.”
“They are a little bit scared of the bloggers,” the operative said of the party leadership.
Stoller goes on to muse about such views:
there’s something very different about the progressive movement that’s emerging today. We’re not an aggregation of single-issue voters, and we don’t operate through fear. Our rhetoric is hot, but it’s not irresponsible or atomizing, and it’s two-way. Unlike proposition 13 in California, which passed with low turnout in the late 1970s, our key fight in Connecticut was a high-turnout fight based on substantive public and private debate.
In other words, there’s a pluralistic element to what the progressive movement is doing that is quite populist and democratic. We are fundamentally arguing for a tolerant and pluralistic society, and we’re doing it aggressively and somewhat viciously. That’s why it’s so hard to pigeonhole.