THE EVEN NEWER NEW LEFT….In Dissent this month, Brian Morton writes that bloggers are the new New Left:
I’m thinking of people like Joshua Micah Marshall (the man behind Talking Points Memo); Eric Alterman, the Nation columnist, author of many books, and blogger for Media Matters for America; Ezra Klein (The American Prospect); Kevin Drum (the Washington Monthly); Glenn Greenwald (Salon); Matthew Yglesias (the Atlantic); Bob Somerby (the Daily Howler); Rick Perlstein (the Campaign for America’s Future); and the writer who goes by the name of Digby who blogs for her own website, digbysblog.
….Because most of these writers are very young, they’re not afraid of being red-baited, and this fearlessness in some curious fashion makes them freer to mount radical critiques of U. S. policy than older generations of writers grouped around Dissent and schooled in the socialist tradition.
The whole piece is a really, really nice tribute to the lefty blogosphere, which means that it’s totally ungrateful of me to kvetch about this one point, but….um….you know how us bloggers are.
In order, the (approximate) ages of the bloggers he mentions are 39, 48, 23, 49, 40, 26, 60, 39, and 47. Matt and Ezra might fairly be described as “very young,” but not the rest of us. It’s true that none of us are socialists though.
I only mention this because of the persistent notion in the media that bloggers and blog readers are all a bunch of kids. But it just ain’t so. The age distribution of the political blogosphere is actually pretty much the same as the country at large.
On another note, Morton also says that “these writers share a politics that is interested in deep-going social reform — you could say it’s a social-democratic politics, although few of them would use that term.” I wonder if that’s true? With a few caveats that’s basically how I think of myself, and I wonder how many other liberal bloggers do too?
