The Chattering Class Club

DougJ has an amusing rant over at Balloon Juice - "meta" talk on the left blogosphere can get tiresome, but this is right on:

And things aren’t getting any better. I spent the last week with too weak a WiFi signal to post, comment, or do much of anything internet-related besides read the RSS feed on my phone. Obviously, it’s my fault for what I’ve chosen to put on my Google reader, but the entire fucking thing was Kevin Drum congratulating Matt Yglesias on how well he countered Ezra Klein’s point about Megan McArdle. And half the time the topic was how clubby SCOTUS had become.

Cokie is dead, long live Ana Marie Cox.

What Are We "Progress"ing Toward?

What does it mean to be a Progressive/Liberal in America today? How do Progressives understand that term?

That seems to me to be an extremely important question, which I touched on in my last post.

There was a split in the Democratic Party in the late sixties between (roughly) the economic justice/labor/New Deal left on one side, and the (then) "New" Left/Anti-war/Cultural Revolutionary Left on the other.

One reason Obama excites me as a candidate is that he seems to me to represent a recognition that the old fights are fading in importance: in part because 1968 is, well, 40-years-ago history - the combatants are either mostly dead (the Boomers' parents) or will be in rest homes gumming creamed spinach pretty soon (the real, actual hippies the Right still rants about); and in part because the last 8 years have established beyond a doubt that the old hippie/square shouting matches are a luxury we can no longer afford.