July 2008
By James Verini
In an interview with The New Yorker, Pat Buchanan recently described the life cycle of American conservatism this way: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” If we accept Buchanan’s logic, then it took about 40 years, beginning with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, for the Right’s roots to be forged into planks and those planks reduced to wooden nickels.
In the resulting vacuum, another movement is already threatening to graduate from inspiring to oppressive: the Netroots putsch and its sounding board, the liberal blogosphere. Together, these forces bear a striking resemblance to the enemy. Just as Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush depended on developments in new media—direct-mail campaigning, talk radio, cable news—so the new wired Left, with its disheveled assortment of journalist-activists and activist-journalists, has mastered the Internet. See Full Story
