Do the netroots progressives owe more to Goldwater than Hoffman?

[BurtWorm]

Jonathan Chait argues so in a cover story in TNR:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=xQrNb9zsY1hUSr5ditd9qS%3D%3D

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So the netroots are clearly liberal, and more liberal than the Democratic Party as a whole. Ideology, however, is not the movement's defining trait. What unites them is a desire to replicate the successes of the conservative movement dating back to the 1960s.

When you turn to the '60s to find an antecedent for the netroots, the natural comparison would seem to be the New Left. The parallels are certainly there: Both movements were led by young people and political outsiders, driven by distrust of establishment liberalism and stoked by an unpopular war. But the netroots do not see themselves in the New Left mold. Rather, they see themselves in what was called, in its insurgent days, the New Right, and before that was known as the Goldwater movement.

The intellectual genesis of the netroots analysis lies in a book called Before the Storm by left-liberal historian (and tnr contributor) Rick Perlstein. He argues that the conventional narrative of the '60s pays far too much attention to left-wing activism. After all, he observes, the '60s ended with the left smashed by a rising conservative tide that has continued to this day. The real story is that of the grassroots countermobilization on the right, which took its most public form in the Barry Goldwater campaign. This movement built counterparts to the dominant liberal institutions, slowly took control of the Republican Party from the moderates who had been running it, and jerked the national agenda sharply to the right. Perlstein's book, wrote blogger and George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell in a Boston Review essay, "enjoys near-canonical status among netroots bloggers."

Like the New Right (and unlike the New Left), the netroots is committed to working within the two-party structure. They have relatively little use for street demonstrations and none at all for Naderite third parties. They fervently support Democrats and, with increasing frequency, work for them directly.

Indeed, if there is a single thing that the netroots most admires about the right, it is its philosophical and political unity. There are, to be sure, numerous strands of thought on the right, each of which emphasizes different elements of the conservative canon. But there is far more holding together the conservatives than there is breaking them apart. This has been true dating back to the founding of National Review, with its emphasis on fusionism--the conservative creed uniting economic libertarians and social traditionalists. Religious conservative groups lobby for tax cuts, and economic conservatives support anti-abortion judges. One of the key figures uniting the conservative movement is Grover Norquist, a GOP activist/lobbyist who holds weekly meetings in which conservative activists and intellectuals hammer out a common agenda.


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