The netroots as a whole don't normally organize ourselves around the normal social signifiers or political alliances. We can't. Online identity is a strange and amorphous thing anyway, and the desire to participate in politics doing it cannot be easily analyzed by the usual human shorthand. We just don't know enough about why and how people really use this thing to make sweeping judgments about what we really "mean," certainly not based upon a conference that only a very small segment of the netroots attended, (many of whom are paid political professionals of one kind or another.)So what or who is represented by the group of individuals who are attending yearly Kos? The Press is using it almost as a Rorschach Test. It means whatever the observer wants to read into it.
That conference, fun as it might be, is a tiny, tiny corner of the netroots universe and I don't think should be used as a proxy for anything in the larger movement. The only way I can see that the netroots really organize at this point, is around a common world view. It's not policy or personality or even party. It's about how we see our role as citizens and how we think our society and government should work. Wonk work is necessary to sort all that out into coherent programs and political agendas, of course. Real life organizing is required to turn this energy into votes. Communicating ideas and critiquing the political scene is necessary to educate and learn. But none of those things defines what's going on here in any precise way. The best I can do is say that it is (for most people outside the professional political sphere anyway) an empowering, social and political movement that has the potential to rearrange the way we normally build coalitions. (Not exactly a bumper sticker, is it?)
That's not surprising. It is a brand new phenomenon, and no one has yet offered an evaluation that everyone recognizes is so accurate that it must be the true one. I suspect that Digby's idea that it is a bunch of people who all have a similar world view will ultimately be a part of the answer. But at this time I think that if anyone does try to apply a single label to what yearly Kos means will simply prove the truth of the General Semantics concept that labels do not change, even when the phenomenon to which the label is applied undergoes radical change.
To use Hayakawa's "The map is not the Territory" analogy, people tend to continue to use the old, comfortable map even after the mapped river has changed courses. Ask any Mississippi riverboat pilot. The nature of the netroots changes at least as rapidly as the course of the Mississippi River does. [*]
An answer, but not really "the definitive" answer, right? That's because there isn't any.
[*] Since conservatives, by their own admission, demand certainty, a lack of change, and a maximum of control, it is obvious that conservatives can never use the netroots approach successfully themselves. Since it will be a source of power that they cannot use, they will find it necessary to control it.
That's why right-wing websites almost never permit comments, especially uncontrolled comments, and it is why they will attempt to regulate the netroots in harsh ways. Bill O'Reilly is attempting to do so by demonizing Daily Kos and the yearly Kos convention as extremists. There will also be efforts to pass laws controlling websites and their content, and those effort will steadily become more draconian as they repeatedly fail to control the threat to the right wind world views.
I can't pass this up without comment on the extremism with which Bill O'Reilly has attempted to apply very negative labels to both yearly Kos and to Marcos's site, Daily Kos. Bill's over-the-top rhetoric simply point out how much he feels that this group of people threaten him and his lofty and powerful perch on FOX network.
O'Reilly is right to feel threatened. The world view of the yearly Kos participants is one that is growing rapidly, and it leaves no room for the mixture of lies, propaganda and manipulation that has been his stock in trade. The growth of the Kossite world view will soon relegate him to a backroom where he will reside, a sad, sick, forgotten old man angry that his glory has been taken away.
Good riddance.
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