I read this Jonathan Chait piece about the various liberal bloggers (called "netroots)" with some interest, it is worth a read.

Then there is also this exchange to read between Chait and Eric Alterman, with this great line:

"On the other hand--and this is also endemic to the best and worst of almost all opinion pieces but particularly at TNR--Chait's piece is actually empirically empty. Either we trust Chait or we don't."

I'll let you work your way through those pieces.

I thought Chait's argument that the new liberal left bloggers are taking strategy (or strategery) from the well-organized and on-message right wing movement of the last few decades rather than from the well-meaning but misguided and unorganized lefties groups to be an interesting argument.

I was trained by the radical '60s generation in a very direct way (pur lineage of leftie radicals--Hampshire College to Univ of Wisconsin-Madison) and so having been forced into the belly of the beast I definitely have seen the limitations of that political movement as well as its core outlook.

In my classes currently I stress the rise of the right as the key post-WWII story, certainly the key post-1964 story. The textbooks, all liberal and quite well meaning, are also about useless on this point. Historians too often seem to think that the turn rightward is a detour when it is and has been and likely will continue to be the major thrust of the American outlook.

Note I say right wing, but I do not say anti-statist. The right has discovered the state and it likes it! oh yes it does!

That makes it very lonely for those few of us left out on the anti-statist wing of things.

I must confess I very rarely read the left liberal blogs. They are just so fucking tiresome.

And I don't know if it is just me, but isn't Daily Kos just about impossible to read? It is a very confusing looking site. All the 'open threads' and other things, I don't know, I can never really tell what the hell is happening, what they are talking about, and just what I am supposed to be reading.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad they exist. I guess. I just don't want to have to read it.

Of course, I don't read the right wing blogs anymore either most of the time, they are too shrill or just too goddamned stupid to waste my time reading.

I hate all of these bastards anyway.

Isn't it preferable to ride out here in the sunlight on the unaligned broad Highway of Truth that is Unsullied and Undismayed?