Where are the women? Well, for one, they’re on my damned blogroll.

That bit about blogs being fundamentally egalitarian for one; while that may have been the case at one time, things seem to be moving towards a far more elitist structure. A few big blogs are becoming absolutely dominant, and the structure of those blogs (with their emphasis on subsidiary “Diaries” instead of links to other independent egalitarian blogs) is reinforcing that hierarchy. Even apart from that, though, a lot of the bloggers that get the most attention are people that are hardly lacking for a voice in the first place: Crooked Timber is entirely academics, for example, and I can’t think of a single poster on Huffington Post that isn’t a Name in some field or another.

(Matthew Hindman wrote a good piece on this.)

The other key insight for me was the one on ideology. It’s funny… with a few high-profile exceptions on a few issues, the right wing of the blogosphere seems far more ideologically coherent and comfortable than their liberal counterparts. I go back to this a lot, but Kos being the standard bearer for the netroots has a lot to do with this: he’s rather famously dismissive of policy and ideology, and thus sets the standard for not only all Kossacks, but all bloggers who wish to repeat and/or share in his success.

Other big “players” are little different: Matthew Yglesias would probably ruffle a few feathers at the Atlantic were he to be as outspokenly liberal as the Goldwater backers were conservative, and the Chris Bowers/Matt Stoller OpenLeft crowd are hardly likely to sacrifice possible “red state” pickups in order to serve the interests of a long-term ideological program.

(Besides, anybody who seriously uses the word “progressive” clearly isn’t interest in ideology in the first place.)

Then again, the answer could simply be that there really isn’t any money in liberal ideology at this point. Conservatives have their “Wingnut Welfare”, and liberals don’t. Get a few openly liberal “institutes” on to the streets of Washington, and things might turn around, no?

So far, what has been seen is a politics which tells them ‘thanks for you votes, thanks for your donations, thanks for your volunteer work, now STFU while we betray you’.

As for the democracy of talk radio, you might wish to consider the term ‘broadcast’.

Well, let me demonstrate “viewpoints that are strongly held and trenchantly expressed” :-)

“Debates that used to be the preserve of a small, self-perpetuating group of pundits, pollsters, and policymakers are now being opened up to a much wider group.”

Bah. From down here, it looks very much like a “small, self-perpetuating group” too, except there’s some tiny bit of shifting around. Yes, in a strict sense, going from e.g. a Gang Of 100 to a Gang Of 200 IS DOUBLING OH MY GOD ITS TWICE AS MUCH, EXPANDING 200%, GO GO BLOGS … but to anyone not a part of that world, it’s meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

“enable individuals to take control of the means of communication for themselves and create content that is immediately available to millions. … Blogs are fundamentally decentralized …”

Complete utter barking nonsense. If you aren’t part of some system, YOU DON’T GET HEARD. Proof: Where-Are-The-Women.

Yes, I know, there’s some important political points here. You’re a smart man. But let’s put it this way, the amount of wishful thinking and willing suspension of disbelief makes it very hard to sort the fact from the fiction.

Note my point is that Where-Are-The-Women(In Power) puts a very hard limit on how much “democracy”, how much real change there is – it’s an obvious, concrete, order-of-magnitude measurement distinguishing between supposed great leaps and arthritic staggering.

I’m actually skeptical there’s much of a new openness, when one does the baseline comparison properly. The arguments I’ve seen for this often fallaciously compare a “closed” print publication to an “open” blog, ignoring that there are also plenty of blogs which are as top-down and closed as anything that’s come before. There’s community sites, but that’s a fairly minor innovation – I recall how Talk Radio was once similarly hyped as the “democratic” “decentralized” voice-of-the-people (and we know what happened there …).

I’ve hardly appointed myself as a scourge to the net-evangelists. If I had, I’d start an anti-hype blog, there’s so much material … . I’ve turned down a project like that, too much work, not worth the personal attacks.

I just find the topic very problematic, and occasionally sound-off – a bad habit, given the risk/reward ratio. I do fear that liberals/intellectuals who buy into blog evangelism are participating in something that’s possibly overall quite harmful to what they’d like to see. But where’s the profit in saying that?

A few points:

The netroots is not just a product of the technology; it is also the product of a particular time and place in American politics. The netroots have grown up in the context of a very narrow set of intensely polarizing and motivating issues that have allowed the movement to achieve political significance without having to take positions on a broad set of issues. This is a very rare situation and one that won’t last much beyond the end of Bush and the Iraq war.

You recognize the netroots limited ideological scope, and see it as a significant problem for the long term, but when you suggested an ideological agenda they might adopt, you jumped right over the hard part. I think that unlike Kos et al, you underestimate how difficult it will be to adopt a comprehensive ideology while maintaining a broad base of support in an environment where one can create a nationally significant political institution from one’s laptop.