Blogometer PM Extra III
BLOGGERS VS. BLOGGERS: Talkin' 'Bout My Generation
Prompted by a New Donkey post on CT SEN, TAPPED's Matthew Yglesias identifies a "generation gap" among Dems: "I'd say that there were a series of events from 1998-2003 -- the Clinton impeachment, the Florida recount fiasco, the Iraq War -- which served to draw a lot of people into higher levels of political engagement, sometimes because we were little kids during earlier dramas, but often just because the people in question were doing something else earlier. ... People who look to those years as their reference points just have very different ideas and perceptions about a lot of things. I always find it intriguing that Bill Clinton, his wife, and his friends, advisors, and collaborators seem to have been a lot less radicalized by the events surrounding his impeachment than, say, I was."
Noam Schieber at TNR picked up on Yglesias' thoughts and wrote: "I think there's a lot to this, but I don't think it's 100 percent right. I'd put it this way: The first group basically thinks George W. Bush and the GOP are the biggest threat to the country these days. From that it follows that anyone who enables the Bush-era GOP is complicit in hurting the country. The second group--at least the portion that was supportive of Bill Clinton--came of age at a time when you could argue that the threats to the party (and the country) from the left were as big as the threats from the right. Back then, this group regarded the left wing of the Democratic Party as substantively wrong and politically self-defeating. ... Most of the second group no longer thinks the far left represents as big a threat as Bush and the GOP; some, like Lieberman, still do. But, either way, it's tough to get over your formative political experiences, which is why there's still a lot of sympathy in this group for the Liebermans of the world."
Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly follows the debate and agrees with Schieber: "This attitude is what I've come to think of as Kaus-ism. Although reasonable minds can differ on this subject, Noam is right that beating up on loony-lefty Dems in the 70s and early 80s was arguably necessary for the health of both the party and the country. But here's the thing: it worked. In the late 80s and 90s the party became far more soberminded, adopting nearly all the prescriptions that the centrist neoliberals had been fighting for. The neolibs didn't win every single battle — no faction ever does — but they sure won a lot of them."
Hullabaloo wasn't buying any of it though: "There's a fascinating conversation going on around the blogosphere about the "young turks" vs "the fogies" in the Democratic party that feeds into my critique of the establishment as having an irrational fear of hippies. This latest discussion stems from an observation by Matt Yglesias that a lot of young people don't remember the age of bipartisanship and only see the polarized political world of 1998 on. Therefore, they see a politics that is far more partisan than those who came before. ... I find this fascinating because I think I am twice Yglesias's age and have been following politics very closely for more than thirty years. Yet I was first shocked, then radicalized by the actions of the modern GOP during the 90's and I believe exactly as he does that hyper-partisanship is going to be with us for the forseeable future."
