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Matt Stoller, TPMCafe and a Movement Working to Define Itself
By nathanleewilcox | January 25, 2007
The mission of HeadingLeft is to chronicle the best work being produced by the progressive blogosphere. Soon we’ll be automating the process and recruiting a much larger editorial board, but here at the beginning James Boyce and I will be doing things manually so please bear with us!
Jerome Armstrong’s MyDD is often seen as the fountain head of the liberal blogosphere. Certainly the work that Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, in particular, have done on that site in the last three years has been some of the best the blogosphere has produced.
Last week, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo invited Matt Stoller to kick off a discussion of the netroots on TPMCafe. It was a great discussion and here are some of the highlights.
Matt kicked it off with his post, What is this new movement?
Over the past nine years, a series of shocks to the country have radically changed the contours of our political debates. In the 2000 election, the Presidential debate involved sweater hues and snowmobiles, ‘lock boxes’ and ‘fuzzy math’. Virtually nothing in that election prepared any but the most cynical political observers for the massive security failures, electoral fraud, the creation of the beginnings of a police state, the loss of two wars one of which was sold under false pretenses, and the destruction of a major American city – all tragic events which have not only occurred on the watch of some very bad people without adverse consequence, but have all increased the power and wealth of those same people. America is a very different place in 2007 than it was in 1999.
This series of events has done something specific to a relatively apolitical white liberal class that had been somewhat absented from the public debate since the early 1970s. It made us angry, and has created a movement.
The responses to Stollers post were varied and excellent. I recommend Mark Schmitt’s When they tell you it’s not about generations…, Nathan Newman’s New Left, Netroots and the In-Between Lefts, Chris Bower’s When Blogospheres Collide, Josh Marshall’s Institutions Talk, Enthusiasm Walks, Jo-Ann Mort’s Netroots–Solidarity Forever?, and Stoller and Marshall’s respective follow-up posts Quick Thoughts and Netroots Movement? Response to Bowers.
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