"an Exceptional Piece... That Everyone Interested In Politics Should Read

I am not ordinarily an admirer of Jonathan Chait's. To put it mildly. But I have to say his big article in the New Republic on the Dem-left "netroots" is an exceptional piece of explanatory and analytical journalism that everyone interested in politics should read.

Netroots liberals may cheer when the Democratic Congress exhumes the ERA, say, or "comparable worth," but that's not why they're in politics - they're in politics to end the Iraq War and beat the Republican Noise Machine at its own game. And the consequence, for liberalism and the country, may be that once the war is over and Bush has exited stage right, we'll be left with a new movement liberalism that imitates the worst qualities of the contemporary conservative movement - the team-player mentality, the obsession with keeping "our guys" in power and "their guys" out - without having bothered to acquire any more substantive reason for being in politics. Markos Moulitsas says he wants to imitate Grover Norquist; the danger is that he's starting out where Norquist has finished up.