I was on the road yesterday, and as such I was unable to participate in the real-time discussion of
Richard Cohen's anti-netroots piece in the Washington Post. Many bloggers have already written excellent pieces on the subject, including
Peter Daou,
Jane Hamsher,
Georgia10, and
Digby. I recommend all of those pieces.
What I wish to focus on in Cohen's piece is not so much the "substance" of his column--
the old "angry left" character-assassination, diversionary straw man--but rather how it is generally demonstrative of the elitism and cultural bias that fuels the general anti-netroots narrative emanating from some particularly worried sectors of the Washington, DC political and media establishment. For Cohen to depict millions of people based upon a few selective emails is an obvious case of stereotyping. For Cohen to depict the activist base of the Democratic Party as childlike, angry, incompetent and foolish is nothing new at all. It fits nicely into the
netroots as teenagers narrative that Mike McCurry and Joe Klein recently helped fuel. If the nouns were changed, it would also have fit nicely into many upper class, European salon discussions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Just substitute "the childish angry left" with "the childish angry, working class" and/or "the childish angry native populations outside of Europe." I mean really--how dare those untamed savages talk to us mature, developed folk like that! They simply do not know what it best for them.
Ultimately, the anti-netroots narrative is fueled by a sense of cultural and professional supremacy among some elements, though certainly not all, of the Washington DC political establishment. It is certainly present within Cohen's piece, where the netroots are referred to as gullible, as incompetent ("aiding their enemies"), as losers ("Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice"), as " disease-laden," vulgar, and as violent " they smartly assembled into a digital lynch mob and went roaring after me." The characteristics Cohen attributes to the netroots are easily interchangeable with the characteristics nearly every cultural supremacist throughout history has attributed to a group of people who s/he considers inferior. Considering that
I have often postulated the netroots as the working classes within the universe of progressive political activism, I also find it interesting that what Cohen writes is quite similar to the way the American working classes are portrayed within our mass media. For example, consider the following passage from
the media awareness network (emphasis mine):
Richard Butsch, in his article "Ralph, Fred, Archie and Homer: Why Television Keeps Recreating the White Male Working-Class Buffoon," notes that the entertainment media tend to exaggerate affluence, and under-represent working-class men and women. Working wives in television series tend to be middle class women in pursuit of careers. Depictions of working class wives are rare. Working-class men tend to be shown as immature, irresponsible, and requiring the supervision of their "betters."
In her article "The Silenced Majority," Barbara Ehrenreich writes that the media rarely represent the interests or experiences of working class women and men. In news and current affairs programming, the "experts" who discuss issues affecting the working classes are often white, professional, middle class men. She continues that members of the white working classes are portrayed as dumb, inarticulate and old-fashioned.
This is really what the general anti-netroots narrative, and all of its various specific manifestations such as the Richard Cohen article, is about. The aim is to marginalize the netroots as needing the supervision of their "betters" within the political establishment. The netroots are teenagers, are foolish, don't know how politics work, are not pragmatic, and are generally naïve. Many people who consider themselves experts in the field, and as such consider the power and influence they wield as being entirely deserved, are concerned that people who they consider unworthy of power and influence are actually starting to accrue quite a bit of power. Portraying the netroots in this manner is their justification for seeking to marginalize and shut out the unworthy, inferior netroots. It is ultimately a narrative based on a sense of entitlement and superiority. Considering this, it is actually the restraint, not the anger, of the netroots that I find remarkable.
