As if watching the Obama campaign collapse into a scattered pile of binders and bayonets wasn’t encouragement enough, now you have a new reason to be happy: the leftosphere is sad.
Susie Madrak started blogging in 2001, just after Sept. 11, back when the country was hurtling head-first into war and the blogosphere was a mysterious frontier on the far edges of the Internet…
She started her own site, called Suburban Guerilla, and it soon became one of the boldface blogs of the “Netroots,” a new network of engaged political progressives giving a voice they thought was missing in the mainstream press. In time, millions like her took to their own keyboards, and thousands of similar sites bloomed…
Now, however, the Netroots, which were once thought to do to the political left what evangelical Christianity was supposed to do to the professional right, are 10 years old. In that time they vaulted Howard Dean to within a scream of the presidency, helped Democrats take both houses of Congress and several statehouses across the country, and gave the party what many in the movement believed to be some much-needed spine.
But with another critical election two weeks away, politicians, political operatives, and even the bloggers themselves say the Netroots are a whisper of what they were only four years ago, a dial-up modem in a high-speed world, and that the brigade of laptop-wielding revolutionaries who stormed the convention castle four years ago have all but disappeared as a force within the Democratic Party.
You really need to read the whole thing. It’s wonderful. I’ll just highlight one more highly amusing quote:
The beginning of the end, many of the current and former bloggers say, came during the great Democratic primary Civil War of 2007–08…
“I supported John Edwards,” Madrak said. “And the Obama people were very vehement about what they thought about it. And they up and left the site if they thought you were being irrational about Obama. I still don’t know where they went. They just up and disappeared.”
BREAKING: John Edwards Supporter Wonders Why Nobody Takes Her Seriously Anymore
The Nutroots have failed for the same reason Obama has failed: Their ideas don’t work in the real world. Their fantasies, while comforting, are meaningless. And they’re unable to learn from their failures.
And they blame Obama.
If there’s a downside here, I’m having trouble seeing it.
I leave you with a quote I wish I had said, courtesy of Lawrence Person:
Reading a Daily Beast article on the decline of the Netroots is like getting a telegraph on the decline of the horse-drawn carriage. @jtlol
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) October 24, 2012