A Democratic civil war

Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry at 6:17 AM on September 16, 2005.

Get ready, it's the Beltway versus the Blogosphere.

Or so claims Simon Rosenberg. Umm, who is? Well, according to Newsweek's Howard Fineman -- the very definition of the Beltway Boy -- he is a "preternaturally self-assured young insider with a cherubic face and a cold smile" who heads "a group called the New Democratic Network and ran his own campaign for DNC chair."

Why does that description sound familiar -- oh right, sounds exactly like some cliched Tom Cruise role from the 80s. No doubt he's just waiting for the right kind of gal to wipe that "cold smile" right off his face.

Sorry, I get distracted. So what does Rosenberg have to say:

But the names he utters with reverence are net-based: organizers such as Eli Pariser and bloggers such as Daily Kos and Atrios. Rosenberg rejects that notion that the bloggers represent a new "Internet Left." It’s not an ideological rift, he says, but a "narrative" of independence versus capitulation: too many Democrats here are too yielding to George W. Bush on the war in Iraq, on tax policy, you name it. "What the blogs have developed is a narrative," he told me the other day, "and the narrative is that the official Washington party has become like Vichy France." [LINK]

For once, I'm going to resist my Pavlovian desire to applaud anything that slams the Beltway Democrats, and ask who is the "Blogosphere" aka "the Resistance" that Fineman is so eager to anoint as the next kingmakers of the Democratic Party?

I'm going to take a wild guess and say it's the kind of big-time bloggers who make it to the top 30 of the blogosphere. Here's the number of liberal women in the top 30: ZERO. Number of liberal people of color: ZERO. (And I am forced to use the "liberal" qualifier only because of crazy chicks like Michelle Malkin) Even if those stats are slightly misleading -- because blogs are all about anonymity -- the point is that the blogosphere is far more white-male dominated than any newsroom today. Resistance? I think not.

Pardon me for saying so, I think we've had plenty of revolutionary movements of change headed by white males. Call me crazy, but I'd like to hold out for one that includes folks who look like me. I don't need a DLC by some other name -- trust me, that's where we'll end up with any kind of political force that is so unrepresentative -- even if that name is the "Blogosphere."

Lakshmi Chaudhry is the former senior editor of AlterNet. You can write to her at lakshmi@alternet.org.