The Left's New Machine by Jonathan Chait, The New Republic

How the netroots became the most important mass movement in U.S. politics.

The Left's New Machine

by Jonathan Chait

Post date: 04.30.07

Issue date: 05.07.07

Most political activists can point to one catalyzing event, an episode in each of their lives (or, more often, in the life of their country) that shook them from their complacency and roused them to change the world. You can find many such stories if you troll through the netroots, the online community of liberal bloggers that has quickly become a formidable constituency in Democratic politics. But the episode that seems to come up most often is the Florida recount. For instance, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong's book, Crashing the Gate, the closest thing to a manifesto of the netroots movement, begins like this:

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 was the spark. Fed-up progressive activists began organizing online. Fueled by the new technologies--the web, blogging tools, internet search engines--this new generation of activists challenged the moribund Democratic Party establishment.