NP: Youssou N'Dour, Egypt

In a post about an article about Social Security, Kevin Drum brings up Ron Brownstein bringing up a good point:

BROWNSTEIN: On the left and right, the assumption is deepening that in this highly contentious political environment, no one can ever really operate as a neutral broker. Instead, politics is reduced to a binary choice: news organizations, lobbying groups and centrist legislators searching for common ground are all either with or against you. And when they are against you, they must be overrun by any means necessary.

DRUM: This sense that anyone who deviates from the party line is a traitor does indeed seem to be gaining steam. Liberals, for example, are almost as dismissive of the mainstream media as conservatives these days, and the result is an increasingly fact-free environment in which both sides feel free to ignore any news report that makes them uncomfortable. This is not an area in which I hope liberals catch up with conservatives.

On the liberal side, this is exactly the fight that's been going on for a couple of days now between Buzzmachine and Daily Kos, among others. I'm with Jarvis on this one, as I think the Kos crowd is far too rigid in the admission requirements for their club. Although I don't know if Dean as DNC chair is the embodiment of that ideology, as others have posited. Dean's a shrewd guy, so I think he can mitigate the "angry Democrat" vibe that dogged him throughout the Democratic primaries.

And I don't think that he's taking advantage of the bottled-up rage of the MoveOn crowd, but, much given some of the comments I saw during the DNC leadership drive, a lot of these folks may think much more highly of their influence than is actually warranted. It strikes me in much the same way that online communities always tend to think they have more power over the object of their desires than they actually do. You know the types, the ones who think the writers of a TV show are hanging on every word typed on a USENET forum or a message board. Only in politics.

Certainly, there has been some leveling of the playing field, and these extreme liberal sites have influence. But hanging around too many people "just like you" tends to blind you to the fact that there are other people just sort of like you out there, too, and some not like you at all that still share some important core beliefs, and they're all important. As soon as you get into the "I'm a real X-Files fan/Chicago Fire supporter/Democrat and you're not" argument, you're pretty much doomed to the margins, at best.