To put it another way: bloggers see a much greater overlap between politics and the media. They support candidates who use their media platform to promote -- unambiguously -- progressive ideas.
While internet access and a computer is not free, it is becoming increasingly cheap -- certaintly cheaper than a cellphone plan. The barriers to greater online participation at this point seem to me to be both income and culture related, with culture (i.e., how you chose to spend your free time and how relevant you perceive the internet to be to your life) increasing in importance.
Also, people that have X amount of idle time don't suddenly give up tv to read amateur political pundits after work.
Of course it's getting better and will continue to get better. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that Chris' original post might be a bit ahead of its time. I'm not sure that I fully buy into the class warfare idea right now but I think that it's something that may be brewing if not already building. As internet gets even faster, more omnipresent, cheaper, etc. you will have more and more lower and middle class people spending more time online and having more access to blogs and other grassroots organizing efforts.
Maybe we're seeing the beginning of it, maybe it's still to come, maybe I'm crazy. But considering that the greatest population growth is coming from the Hispanic population, who are trending Dem, are largely NOT Dem fatcats, and whose internet access and usage is in the midst of what appears to be a major boom, I think the shift being described is still coming.
The question, though, is how blogging will change as it becomes democratized and the blog-reader's profile grows increasingly representative of the population at large. My guess is that blogs will retain many of the characteristics they posess today; to put it another way, bloggers I think are more "in touch" than their incomes suggest.
Just thinking of families I know, the main predictor of internet access is whether or not they have a kid who grew of age in the internet era. Income is less important. I was surprised to see that the dailykos readership spans a wide range of ages and centers much higher (30s+) than you would expect; that doesn't square with my personal experience.
2. Note that I repeatedly emphasized that progresive activists are only working and middle class within the world of progressive activists. They make a lot less than the millionaire donors who can drop $2K on several campaigns. The entire notion of the blogopshere being working class is only in the context of the progressive activist and donor community.
3. I use those phrases to describe her activist support. She does in fact have a lot of nationwide support among the Demcoratic rank and file, but within the activist community her support comes from the activist elite. The class strucutre I am talking about here is entirely within the world of the activist community--not nationwide.
Although it is still more than two years before the main parties in the United States decide on their candidates for the 2008 presidential election, it is widely assumed that the Democratic Party candidate will be the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. You might expect the political conversation among Democrats to be along the lines of "is Hillary electable" (given the preponderance of red states on the American political map) but as I discovered during a recent visit to the US, many in her natural base have already washed their hands of her. At a dinner party in New York last week with a group that included writers, lawyers, a former senior staff member for the Clinton administration and a columnist for The New York Times, the hatred of Hillary Clinton was unconcealed. It was articulated with the passion of people scorned. Clinton has not just disappointed, she has betrayed them. I might have been more surprised at the way these Upper West Side liberals were slagging off at someone many of them would once have seen as a political ally, if not a personal friend, had it not been for a pretty savage piece in that week's New York magazine. "The Trouble with Hillary" by columnist Kurt Andersen pretty much covered the waterfront of why Clinton is disdained by so many New York liberals. She is "all about cool calculation and calibration in service of the main chance", Anderson wrote, but unlike her husband, who was equally calculating, she lacks his charm and appearance of sincerity. One problem Clinton has is that no one likes her. "She has cold, staring eyes," one of my dinner companions remarked. She comes across as "wooden, priggish, cold, too much super-ego and too little id," says Andersen. A far bigger complaint is not about her personality, but her politics. In recent months, Clinton has cosied up to the leading members of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" she once excoriated for trying to bring down her husband. (That was before she knew the truth about Monica Lewinsky.) Former House speaker Newt Gingrich torpedoed the "Hillarycare" health insurance plan in 1994 but that hasn't stopped her making recent common cause with him - on the need to reform health care. She infuriated many on her side when she gave a joint news conference with what Andersen describes as "her two most appalling Christian-right colleagues", Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, to call for $90 million in federal funds to investigate their contention that the internet and other electronic media are "satanic".
You might expect the political conversation among Democrats to be along the lines of "is Hillary electable" (given the preponderance of red states on the American political map) but as I discovered during a recent visit to the US, many in her natural base have already washed their hands of her.
At a dinner party in New York last week with a group that included writers, lawyers, a former senior staff member for the Clinton administration and a columnist for The New York Times, the hatred of Hillary Clinton was unconcealed. It was articulated with the passion of people scorned. Clinton has not just disappointed, she has betrayed them. I might have been more surprised at the way these Upper West Side liberals were slagging off at someone many of them would once have seen as a political ally, if not a personal friend, had it not been for a pretty savage piece in that week's New York magazine.
"The Trouble with Hillary" by columnist Kurt Andersen pretty much covered the waterfront of why Clinton is disdained by so many New York liberals. She is "all about cool calculation and calibration in service of the main chance", Anderson wrote, but unlike her husband, who was equally calculating, she lacks his charm and appearance of sincerity. One problem Clinton has is that no one likes her. "She has cold, staring eyes," one of my dinner companions remarked. She comes across as "wooden, priggish, cold, too much super-ego and too little id," says Andersen.
A far bigger complaint is not about her personality, but her politics. In recent months, Clinton has cosied up to the leading members of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" she once excoriated for trying to bring down her husband. (That was before she knew the truth about Monica Lewinsky.) Former House speaker Newt Gingrich torpedoed the "Hillarycare" health insurance plan in 1994 but that hasn't stopped her making recent common cause with him - on the need to reform health care. She infuriated many on her side when she gave a joint news conference with what Andersen describes as "her two most appalling Christian-right colleagues", Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, to call for $90 million in federal funds to investigate their contention that the internet and other electronic media are "satanic".
I will never, ever support anyone who gets where they are based on birth, or who they were banging. Period. End of subject.
Last I knew, we fought a revolution in part to eliminate having so say "Yes. M'lord/lady" to someone just by an accident of birth or marriage. Yet now we are all too willing to turn our brains off and let family dynasties take over, at a time when social mobility overall is dying.
Great, you're advocating a meritocracy among de-facto Aristocrats.
I think Chris's analysis here is just as relevant to Clinton supporters, maybe moreso, than it is to detractors. If you support her, wouldn't it be helpful to understand why a certain type of activist doesn't?
I would urge you, as someone who sees Hillary's qualities, to say whether you think Chris is onto something or not. Do you think there is a split among different types of activists that's helps to explain why we don't universally love her?
Etc..., etc...
High status of birth = prep school education = standing out in applying to top colleges (plus tons of international travel) = (great contacts + prestige + better recruitment opportunities) = better experience = high status
Rinse, lather, repeat generationally.
Even a mongoloid like GWB can be on top in this rigged game.
No one ran around asking the various European nobility about their personal qualifications before removing their titles and privileges precisely for this reason. Of course they would be more qualified on paper (and maybe even in reality)...they were the only people in the game.
It's precisely the attitude you are giving that is leading to the slow death of social mobility in the U.S. (that's not my opinion...the Conservative British journal "The Economist" had a magazine devoted to the subject).
If you're looking for a politician who came from dirt poor without any connections, then, Bill Clinton is your man.
Not Howard Dean, Not John Kerry, Not Al Gore.
Let me remind you that we live in the United States of America. Why in the world would you penalize a high achieving person who happens to be born out of a Highly Successful Family?
We are all here to be the best we can be. To go for your full potential. Any responsible & loving parent would encourage their children to reach for the stars & even provide them with all the tools to prepare their child. That's any parent regardless if they were Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Conservative.
Either you're a person with NO KIDS & would NEVER understand or you're one of those people who have this attitude of " I HATE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE", " I HATE ALL RICH PEOPLE".
Yes, you provide all the "tools"...congrats. At the same time this makes sure that a brighter and more capable kid unlucky enough to be born to lesser parents loses out.
Let me put it to you this way. If your kids are so great...why do they need your status to get them ahead? Isn't their innate ability and merit going to make them "high achievers" or "successful"? Aren't you insulting them by not trusting their brilliance?
Or is it that you know there are better, smarter, or more capable people out there and you need to make sure those bastards don't have a level playing field?
If the level of the field is such that everyone gets medical care, housing, food, a chance at a decent job etc. then yes I should feel guilty giving my kids extra advantages. If on the otherhand it's a field reduced to a social darwinist heaven then I am not going to feel guilty giving my kids a leg up.
But in both cases I need to support and work for a cooperative rather than a competitive winner take all reality. In both cases I need to work for that level field where all are protected and where all abilities are used for moving society forward in harmony with the planet, etc. etc.
Yeap, it implies that we within the blogosphere are partisan. You know what I think of that? Good. Being a partisan Democrat is a step up from being a typical Democrat because the latter will always be castigated and pidgeonholed by the right (e.g. "you don't know where they stand on the issues") and as a result, the typical Dem will compromise their values in order to appease perception amongst the elitists within the media and rightwing punditry circles in a vain attempt to "grab the center" for votes. That's the DLC strategy and Hilary Clinton milks it for everything it's worth. Thus, she's not very popular with us in the blogosphere because of her penchant for sanctimony and demagoguery -- she'll use any "old school" crutch such as "Deadbeat Dads" and "Mortal Kombat Creates Child-Killers" just to get elected even if facts surrounding those crutches are wrong. She and Joe Lieberman share the same cerebrum (as well as membership cards with L. Brent Bozell's PTC organization).
On the other hand, you won't ever hear that "you don't know where they stand on the issues" line when the media and the rightwing attack dogs discuss partisan because partisans won't waste time telling you where they stand on the issues (commonly laced with a liberal supply of choice expletives) and certainly won't apologize for them either. Unlike Dick Durbin who'd gladly pluck out his spinal collumn and hand it over to the Republicans as if it were contraband, partisan Democrats will pluck out their spinal collumns only to wave it proudly in the air as if it were a flag and say, "Ooooh, look what I have here - it's a spine! And I don't need a permission slip to brandish it!" In reponse, the media and the rightwing attack dogs approach partisans by sliming and castigating them (e.g. "This guy is off the chart left!") because they know they can't defeat them in a heated issues debate (as evidenced by Wolf Blitzer's recent exasperated sigh after getting schooled by Howard Dean).
How did that success come? I'm not going to fall for the usual excuses trucked out on AM Radio by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boorts such as "They worked hard", "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps", and the like. I won't fall for them because they're bullshit. They don't tell the whole story. Their success has more to do with either good fortune, luck, and/or text-book exploitation of the masses by prostating themselves at the feet of Mammon - the Great Balaam of Capitalism - than it does with actual work. Although Capitalism has been the engine of our nation for some time now, it is also the very engine that can not survive unless it divides, conquers, and exploits the people. It must divide the people into camps (Compact Cars Vs. SUVs; $20 Vs. $120 tennis shoes; "haves" Vs. "have-nots") in order to maintain it's own relevence and distract people from noticing the values it espouses: cronyism, corruption, greed, selfishness, rougery, tyranny.
And why not loath them? How is it that in a country of 300 Million people, the upper 1-7% get more stroke, more privlege, more access, etc. than the remainder? How is it that such a minority can systematically run roughshod or the majority time and time again? Where would the rich be at if they didn't have an underclass to exploit?!? Simple -- they'd be in the same place the Religious Right would be if it weren't for their ACLU meal ticket: scratching their asses while standing in a welfare/unemployment line! Forget the fully loaded Lexuses, SUVs, Rolls Royces, and multi-million vacation homes. They would be living in a van down by the river. Considering the ever widening gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" in this country, I've got very bad news for the Rich: history shows us via the Roman empiracism and European colonialism that it's a very, very, dangerous thing to be surrounded by a bunch of poor people with nothing left to lose. A gun is a poor man's lawyer. A lawyer is a rich man's gun.
I would agree and, interestingly enough, comedian George Carlin was a guest on Don Imus recently and he was asked about how he felt regarding how starkly divided the nation is. Carlin said that the corruption of the GOP, the incompetence of Bush regarding Katrina, and the borderline complicit/complacent nature of the Democrats have created a virulent melting pot at the individual/citizen level where there's simply way too much competition and not enough cooperation. The scales need to tip over in the latter area soon to balance everything out or we're in for an upheaval that'll make the 1960s look tame.
But electing people who got there by connections and a family name is insipid. The only reason Evan Bayh is where he is is because Daddy was where he was.
I would note that we regularly, as a country laugh at supposed "democracies" like Pakistan (or the Perons of Argentina) where the Presidency shuffles between a couple of dynastic clans who utilize connections and wealth to be placed on the ballot.
Yet here we are in the US, with literally two decades where the Presidency has bounced back and forth between to immediate families, and you're demanding we all enjoy making it three.
So who are we to call Pakistan a joke anymore?
I suppose you are also one of those who feel affirmative action was vile because it discriminated against white people? Or that eliminating inherited nobility was a vile intrusion on private property and tradition?
I also love how you munge "rich" with birth and/or connections. I already noted the difference, which you pretended to not see and kept arguing the strawman.
We have a society which is moving more and more into a de-facto aristocracy, with de jure structures which pretend everyone has opportunity. Just like when technically a minority was equal under the law, except that numerous social and economic structures made that untrue in reality. We instituted affirmative action understanding that nothing short some reverse discrimination would break those de facto structures. Same here.
She is nothing more than a rather dirty political animal with expensive makeup.
But I also said:
I would vote for her if she was running against Bush
Believe me, I could say far worse things about a politician. There was just no excuse for Democratsin06 08 to give me a one for that. I give people a lot of leeway when they say things I don't like. That's why I can honestly call myself a liberal.
Or does she seem like the sort that's just trying to win and has no emotional investment in what she's doing?
She epitomizes the worst of the beltway and is utterly out of touch with 'the base'. Only Holy Joe and Biden are worse.
But let's not get carried away now. HRC is a Professional Politician playing in the highest level of the political arena. Regardless of how you feel about her, she is now in the "superstar" rank among a very select group of politicians who are serious contenders for the Presidency.
To get to that level in the Political Profession, you have to be Highly Ambitious, Determined, have a strong base of loyal supporters, a deep desire to succeed & a Big Ego.
With that said, how in world can you declare that only Hillary is out of touch, ambitious & has a big ego? Hello, each & every serious candidate for the Presidency have All these traits. If not, they would NOT reach these levels among thousands of Highly ambitious politicians across the country.
It would be ignorant or naive to think that HRC is the ONLY one who is "self centered, ambitious, ego driven, out of touch, etc." At this level in politics, ALL THESE Men & Women Politicians in BOTH parties have those SIMILAR traits. If they did not, they would not reach that 1% of Top politicians among thousands of fellow ambitious politicians.
It's all about perception. But at the end of the day, Feingold, Clinton, Dean, Warner, Bayh, Edwards are ALL PROFESSIONAL , Ambitious, Driven, politicians with Big Egos. They have to be ! Or they would not be thisclose to being their Party's Presidential nominee. They may really want to be President to change the world, BUT they are also human & would love the Attention, the Power, the Recognition. If not, they wouldn't be running for the presidency !
This is no different than sports. The Michael Jordans, Magic Johnson's, Larry Bird, Steve Young's, Jerry Rice's, Roger Clemen's ARE ALL "ELITE" among their Profession. All these Professionals have BIG EGOS, Strong Determination, Tremendous Ambition to be #1.
It would be very naive( just because you don't like HRC )to conclude that HRC is ambitious, ego driven, out of touch, etc. while your FAVORITE Democratic candidate for President is NOT.
You may think he or she is different, but ALL THESE HIGH LEVEL politicians have VERY SIMILAR traits or they would not be in the Top 1% in their field.
Hllary is out of touch, ambitious and has a big ego. See how easy that was? You went to a lot of trouble to say that all politicians are human beings. So what? Are you trying to claim that since all politicians are human there are no differences between them? As usual, I suspect you have no point, but are simply blathering.
2. Here you go. And here is the stuff for Clinton. This information isn't hard to find. It is, shall we say, an "open secret" that the Clintons raised the vast majority of their money from large donors, while Dean did the opposite. Also, on the first link, note that before he won New Hampshire and became the presumptive nominee, Kery's numbers from smaller donros were much less.
3. Dude, I don't know how mcuh clearer I can spell this out for you. As I tried to make clear in the post, those activists with more power (and money is a form of power) would be the activist elite, and those activists with less pwoer would be the activist base. Aka, the Demcoratic leadership would be the activist elite, and people on blogs would be the activist base. Is that good enough for you.
I think you are having a difficult time getting through my terminology, and understanding the scope of my discussion. I am not talking about the country as a whole. I am talking about the world of progressive activists.
Also, I know you mentioned readers per day, but if you check Kos' site meter you see that 600,000 is the number of hits, not the number of readers. A lot of the hits, especially at a place like Kos, are people like me who go back a huge number of times a day.
And you would be surprised by how few blogs have more traffic than you if you are getting 150 per day. Really, it is less than five hundred progressive political blogs. The tail isn't as long as you might think.
I'm pretty sure site meter counts visits from the same IP twice if more than 30 minutes has elapsed between page views. That's how I read this:
Site Meter tracks page views and visits. You may also have heard the term "hits". When someone comes to your site, they generate a "hit" for every piece of content that is sent to their computer. Viewing a single web site page would generate one hit for the page and one hit for every individual graphics file that was on the page. A single page could easily generate a dozen or more hits. When you are browsing a site, every time you follow a link, it is treated as a single "page view". Site Meter defines a "visit" as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.
Thus, I probably account for between 5-10 visits a day to Kos. (I'm not sure what your point was about page views btw unless it somehow relates to the fact that I used "hits" synonymously with "visits." Looking at the Site Meter quote above, I suppose "hits" could also mean page views).
Also, I'd really appreciate a link to back up your assertion that there are less than five hundred progressive political blogs that get more than 150 hits a day. I know I've seen some of your reports on the blogosphere, but my impression was that you focused on Ad Sense blogs, which probably under counts the lower traffic blogs.
I do disagree that Clinton dislike is generated by insider-outsider envy. I think if Clinton behaved differently, bloggers would flock to her. On the other hand, if Clinton behaved differently, she would no longer be the $2000+ darling (viz. Gore.)
be craeful of your assumptions. Internet readership, like internet linkages, follow a "Zipf" distribution. That basically is a double-logarithmic curve. Here's a plot courtesy Jakob Nielsen on both linear axes and double-log axes:
as Wikipedia notes, the distribution follows a 1/f law in its simplest form:
The simplest case of Zipf's law is a "1/f function". Given a set of Zipfian distributed frequencies, sorted from most common to least common, the second most common frequency will occur 1/2 as often as the first. The third most common frequency will occur 1/3 as often as the first. The nth most common frequency will occur 1/n as often as the first. However, this cannot hold precisely true, because items must occur an integer number of times: there cannot be 2.5 occurrences of a word. Nevertheless, over fairly wide ranges, and to a fairly good approximation, many natural phenomena obey Zipf's Law.
Many phenomena follow this distribution, including the english language (the word "the" being the highest frequency). The fact that website traffic follows Zipf's law has been extensively well-documented.
so it is true that the highest websites have a ton of traffic, but the distribution falls so suddenly that I dont think you can assume that most traffic revolves around them. At the very least, the traffic in teh tail is equal to teh traffic in the head; and most of the traffic is in the second tier sites.
If you calculated traffic for the solid middle of sites (digby, drum, TAP, mydd, etc) youd rolly find that they easily exceed teh traffic of the top sites.
I do not like Senator Clinton's position on Iraq, and I cringe when she takes up issues like flag burning and video games. But those disagreements do not blind me to her record of progressive activism, nor do they blind me to her broad popularity in the Democratic party.
Also my income is quite modest, I pay big bucks (in percentage to my income) to have high speed internet access and a decent laptop. I could care less about clothes and furniture and do-dads for the house. My husband and I spend what little extra money we have on internet access and related equipment. Would I rather have a new couch or a new laptop? Laptop wins every time. I don't think we are that different from most people our age.
The vast majority of your lengthy post seemed to be devoted to answering the question, "do bloggers matter?" This is indeed the peripheral question suggested by the post, but not the crucial one. Yes, bloggers donate money, yes bloggers donate time, yes bloggers donate ideas. But are they representative of any larger group? The answer I would submit is yes, to a point. Despite their occasionally near mythical-status in some circles, readers of the most popular political blogs remain merely one subset of the larger populace - representative certainly of that subset, suggestive of larger portions of the left, and occasionally informative on the nation as a whole. The MP (I feel like I'm talking about the British parliament) makes the case that their hatred of Hillary, which though it might spill over into the broader liberal community, is currently still limited into an especially small subset of the left.
Are there liberals who hate Hillary? Certainly. Will they ultimately thwart her potential attempt to win the nomination or the general election? Perhaps. Currently, however, despite the passion which some have on sites like this one, it remains a limited emotion of a small group of a part of the populace which has unfortunately been defeated in the last few election. For now, however, Hillary-hatred remains in the province of the right.
