Quote:
Originally Posted by Baltimore Jones
Just missed EDIT window:
The Supreme Court protest point is probably not a good one, you're right. Liberals WERE out in the streets worldwide soon after that against Iraq.
Which makes it all the more baffling and embarrassing that this energy never trickled up to electoral politics or anything approaching mainstream political commentary until 2015. Check out the documentary "Left of the Dial" about a "left" attempt at talk radio (Air America) for a flashback to horrible 2004 liberal commentary (and there's still huge swathes of the commentator/comedian class who are like that).
Nader was the only game in town - the original point I was responding to.
Having lived through this period of the Democratic Party and as one of those anti-war marchers, I disagree with this characterization of the recent past. First, the anti-war protests and later turn in the Democratic Party against the Iraq war was one of the biggest reasons for the big Democratic wave in 2006 and for Obama defeating Clinton in 2008, so they certainly did trickle up into electoral politics.
Second, while Air America wasn't very successful (although it did get Al Franken and Rachel Maddow started), the leftwing blogosphere of the time was powerful as a different version of today's online and podcast leftwing culture (preferable imo because it was more interactive). It's easy to miss how much this changed the media culture from what came before because now almost all opinion writing is some version of blogging or microblogging.
Nader himself was the cause of a big part of the difference between the left then and today. Many of us (myself included as a Nader voter in 2000) believed his
description of Bush and Gore as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, only to be rudely awakened by the stark differences between them after the election - with Gore becoming the most famous climate change activist in the world and an opponent of Bush's pre-emption doctrine leading to the Iraq War and W ending up, well, how he did. Given Nader's role as a spoiler giving the election to Bush, the lefty blogosphere, as exemplified most strongly in the organizing spearheaded by the Daily Kos,
mostly adopted a more pragmatic attitude towards the Democratic Party, focused on growing the party back into power as the most important goal and largely rejecting Nader's characterization of the two parties as being two sides of the same coin.