Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

Patrick Ruffini takes an admiring look at Left Blogistan:
The four-year ascent of Barack Obama from state senator to president marks not just the triumph of a man, but the coming of age of a movement.

That movement belongs to liberal (or “progressive”) Democrats, who in less than a decade have remade themselves. Once respected only in academia and the news media, they have become a fighting force. They systemically digitized the means of political organization and strategy, with the ultimate goal of dominating the political system — “Crush their spirits!” was Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s pre-election rallying cry.

The Left’s online movement is consciously modeled after the Goldwater-and-Reagan-era conservative movement. To those trying to build the Left, the vast right-wing conspiracy was an object not of scorn, but of admiration. They studied the Right’s network of think tanks, issue groups, and talk-show hosts, looking for clues on how to push a message with brutal efficiency. They took these lessons to heart and shaped them to fit the web. Ironically, today’s Right has much to learn from them. Markos Moulitsas reacts to the above piece:
Yet here's the funny thing -- their machine is still bigger and better funded than ours. If I could trade Daily Kos for Fox News and the entire AM radio dial, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'd make some major changes at those media outlets, of course (beyond a change of ideology), most of them dealing with how they interact with their audiences online, but really, their problem isn't that they don't have an equivalent to Daily Kos or MoveOn, their problem is that their ideas suck, and now progressives have enough of a machine to counteract their lies and smears.