In MyDD’s absence, the popularity of Moulitsas’ Daily Kos—his own blog, launched in 2002—skyrocketed. While conservatives had spent the Clinton era fulminating at sites like FreeRepublic.com and Lucianne.com, liberals had entered the Bush era with no online port. Kos became that port. Before too long it had been upgraded to allow users to post “diaries” of their own. At the end of 2004 it was the most popular weblog, political or otherwise. Today it gets around 500,000 unique visits a day. When the Dean campaign folded and MyDD was relaunched, it was just one point in a network of growing, highly active left-wing blogs.
Early in Crashing the Gate, Armstrong and Moulitsas daydream about using their influence to topple America’s rusty political system. “If only we could say, ‘To hell with the Democratic Party!’ ” they write. “But part of the present American reality is that we live in a two-party system, and the Democratic Party is our only alternative.” As long as progressive bloggers are stuck with the Democrats, Armstrong and Moulitsas say, they should reclaim it as “the party of the people. Our message is simple: You can get out of the way or work with us. Trying to stop us is a losing proposition.” Despite these gripes, Armstrong and Moulitsas don’t venture far from the Democratic mainstream. They criticize pro-choice activists for not rallying behind pro-life Democrats. The most lionized politician in their book is Brian Schweitzer, the moderate governor of Montana who picked a Republican running mate in his successful 2004 run.
The rest of the book investigates ways Democrats can let the blogs into their power structure and start winning some elections. When felled presidential candidate Howard Dean started running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee—an office elected by around 400 party insiders—liberal blogs threw themselves into the race, promoting Dean and attacking the other candidates. According to Armstrong and Moulitsas, Dean’s election to the ultimate insider’s job “was made far easier when the field was cleared of most of his rivals, with a little help from bloggers and the netroots.”
Most of Crashing the Gate’s narrative runs along these lines, with liberal blogs (or the occasional smart Democratic organizer) outsmarting hated party hacks to install their own party hacks. The most surprising section of the book is a sort of paean to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Surveying the news channels and think tanks that have demolished liberals’ causes, the authors marvel that “what conservatives have built over the past thirty years is nothing short of brilliant. We can admire it the way we would admire the precision, engineering, and craftsmanship of a stealth fighter.” They don’t want to build an anti-aircraft weapon to take this out. They want their own stealth fighters.
In the progressive future of Crashing the Gate, blogs aren’t going to demolish the old party system or remake Washington. They’ll be one cog in a powerful “left-wing conspiracy” that will win the country back from the GOP. (The “conspiracy” phrasing is tongue-in-cheek.) Sites like Daily Kos, they promise, will do for Democrats what Rush Limbaugh did for the Republican Revolution. This is already manifesting itself on Kos, as the offices of Democratic politicians such as Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold, and Michigan Rep. John Conyers post “diaries”— press releases plus earnestness and hyperlinks—for the consumption of the blog community. There’s already an answer to this on the right at RedState.com, which often features diaries by Republican congressmen and conservative radio hosts. Traffic to both sites is growing healthily, at the cost of dividing much of the political blogosphere into left-wing and right-wing echo chambers.
The prospect of a left-right bloggish Cold War can’t be what anyone was thinking when they visited Glenn Reynold’s Instapundit.com in the months after 9/11. The University of Tennessee law professor behind that site was a prolific commenter on Slate’s discussion boards, “The Fray,” until he started fiddling with blogging software in 2001. Before the 9/11 attacks, traffic to Instapundit.com had been humming along at more than 1,000 readers a day. On that day, it nearly tripled. “You hear often the same reasons given,” Reynolds writes, “basically variations on ‘I got tired of watching the video of the towers collapsing,’ and ‘I got tired of yelling at the TV.’ Like me, people were unhappy with the mass-market journalistic product and wanted to try making something of their own.” Reynolds’ superhuman pace—he had six posts up on September 11, 2001, before he started blogging about the attacks—quickly pushed him to the forefront of the medium. He was a human news aggregator, posting pithy commentary and links to media as large as CNN.com or as small as a new blogspot site. His readership grew exponentially; smaller blogs would creak under the “instalanches” of thousands of hits after Reynolds linked to them.
For Reynolds, whose site now gets 250,000 to 500,000 unique visits per day, today’s blogs are only a whisper of the truly independent medium that’s on its way. Blogs’ impact on the mainstream media (MSM, in blog lingo) “is akin to what happened to the Church during the reformation,” he writes. Consumers were already growing less trustful of the press. There was plenty of room for alert, fun-loving bloggers to challenge the media. Professional journalists such as Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Edward Jay Epstein, and former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel had preceded Reynolds into the blogosphere, but the unknown law professor quickly won a vastly larger readership. “News and reporting used to be something ‘they’ did,” Reynolds writes. “Now it’s something that we all do.”
Though he’s a self-described libertarian who backs the Iraq war and supported Bush over Kerry, Reynolds shares a major theme with Moulitsas and Armstrong. It’s there in his title, An Army of Davids, with its evocation of citizens bringing down tyrannies with their slingshots and stones. It’s implicit in his fondness for words like revolution and his tales of big organizations (such as CBS News) running scared from the blogs. His subtitle, “How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths,” easily ranks among the most optimistic statements on blogging (or markets and technology, for that matter) ever.
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