These should be good times for the netroots, the loose coalition of bloggers, MoveOn activists, and online organizers that sees itself as the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. A Democrat is president for the first time in eight years, after using the Internet to organize volunteers and raise vast amounts of money. The Democratic Party now has a genuinely national presence and is targeting states that it had once written off, while the Republicans are in organizational and ideological disarray. So why aren’t the netroots happier about Barack Obama’s victory and the political transformations accompanying it?
Part of the explanation is that they weren’t invited to the party. As Eric Boeh-lert observes in the last (and best) chapter of his new book, Bloggers on the Bus, the Obama campaign had little direct contact with netroots bloggers. Although Obama’s advisers were very interested indeed in learning from the netroots, they had no interest in working with bloggers who might disrupt their control over messaging and money. Instead, they built their own blogging and online fundraising structures from scratch, combining a traditional campaign organization with new network capacities in what Matthew Kerbel describes in his book Netroots as a “hybrid” structure.
But the netroots’ discomfiture isn’t mere pique. Nor is it simple anger that Obama has broken his promises to roll back the security state that developed over the previous eight years, although this is surely important. The real worry for the netroots is that Obama is undermining their particular blend of online politics. He has taken the parts of netroots politics that he likes (online organizing and fundraising), while dumping the parts that he doesn’t (a strongly confrontational politics and emphasis on bottom-up decision making). There isn’t much room for the netroots and vigorous online partisanship in Obama’s plans for the future of the Democratic Party.