Liberal bloggers like Markos Moulitsas used to have major sway in presidential politics. | Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images 2020 How the Democratic Netroots Died Only 15 years ago, liberal bloggers like Markos Moulitsas were a powerful force in presidential politics. What happened?

Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

Twelve years ago, progressive political bloggers were so influential that nearly every 2008 Democratic presidential candidate attended the Yearly Kos convention—a gathering of liberal online activists named after Markos Moulitsas’ popular Daily Kos website.

This year, that same event, now called Netroots Nation, attracted a measly four of the 24 Democratic candidates. Only one of them, Elizabeth Warren, even polls in double digits. Rather than attend the event, the Bernie Sanders campaign engaged in a Twitter spat with Moulitsas.


What happened? Not all that long ago, liberal bloggers had genuine achievements to point to: Only a year before the 2007 Yearly Kos, Ned Lamont, a wealthy but little known Connecticut businessman, beat Joe Lieberman—the incumbent and a former vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party—in a U.S. Senate primary by embracing the “blogosphere,” a ridiculous word for a not-ridiculous force: progressive online activists who could drive discourse, cultivate small donors and legitimize outsider politicians. Lamont made common cause with bloggers to punish Lieberman for his vote to authorize the Iraq War. Thirteen years later, now-Governor Lamont has endorsed the only presidential candidate who cast the same vote: Joe Biden.

Moultisas chalked up the lack of presidential attendance at this year’s forum to “fear.” But the opposite appears to be true. Democrats do not fear offending the blogger stars of yore because the attempt to turn armchair pontificating into organized political power has failed.

Antipathy toward President George W. Bush and the Iraq War sparked a chemical reaction with internet technology to create powerful force in politics, but social and technological shifts have since depleted that power. The decline of blogger influence stems in part from the rise of Facebook and Twitter, which have fundamentally altered how Americans do politics on the internet. No longer do we hop from blog to blog by clicking blogrolls, and most of the earliest political bloggers have shut down their websites and begun posting their commentaries on their social media accounts instead.

But it’s not just the rise of social media. The political ties that unified progressive bloggers during the George W. Bush presidency have frayed, too. The netroots’ fragmentation and weakened power in 2020 is as much a story of the end of a coalition as it is of changing technology.

In the first decade of the 2000s, the scrappy lefty blogger crew steeled Democrats to block Bush’s plans to partially privatize Social Security, ousted Trent Lott asSenate majority leader after he praised the 1948 segregationist presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond, and transformed a small-state governor named Howard Dean into a presidential contender and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. I had my own little blogger success stories while tapping away at LiberalOasis.com, where I conducted the first formal blogger interview with a presidential candidate, Dean, and broke the news of a misleading attack from Lieberman against Lamont.

The founding members of the progressive blogosphere envisioned a movement distinct from the left-wing activists of yesterday—aggressive, but not beholden to ideological purity. As described by Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong in their 2006 book Crashing The Gate, netroots activists wanted progressives, and their favored politicians, to be “fiercely partisan” but not “ideological” because “there is actually very little, issue-wise, that unites most modern party activists except, perhaps, opposition to the Iraq War.” They wanted not litmus tests on policy but a style, an attitude: a tougher Democratic Party that could better beat Republicans.

That politically welcoming perspective was put into electoral practice. Progressive bloggers championed a 2005 long-shot House special election bid from Paul Hackett, an Iraq veteran from Ohio who supported gun rights and “limited government,” but did not hesitate to call President George W. Bush a “chickenhawk.” Some bloggers were angered when Hackett was pressured by Democratic Party leaders to drop out of the 2006 Senate race to make room for Sherrod Brown, even though Brown was more liberal than Hackett. Bloggers also recruited Jim Webb, a former Reagan administration official and Iraq War opponent, to run for the Senate in Virginia in 2006, and they didn’t flinch when a 1979 essay surfaced in which Webb argued “Women Can’t Fight” in the military. Webb apologized for it.

Ari Melber, writing for the Nation, concluded that bloggers' love for Webb showed a preference for “political pragmatism” over “ideological purity”: “If netroots Democrats care about one thing more than aggressive partisanship, it’s winning.”

But the 2008 presidential primary put an end to the netroots’ unity. In his 2009 book Bloggers on the Bus, Eric Boehlert captured how the election drove wedges through the once-harmonious band of online activists. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugged it out, some bloggers took sides and others felt caught in the crossfire.

In March 2008, a group of Daily Kos diarists who backed Clinton staged a virtual walkout in protest of the site’s tilt toward Obama. Moulitsas shot back that Clinton’s refusal to drop out showed she was “eager to split the party apart in her mad pursuit of power.” His Crashing the Gate co-author, Armstrong, saw the race differently; in his view, Clinton “showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement” while Obama “didn’t need the netroots” and “was basically an identity-politics cult” leader. Armstrong later quit blogging and worked for Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson in 2012.

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, a blog aficionado, told Boehlert he was dismayed at how he felt Obama’s online supporters had treated Clinton: “I don’t think people, myself, are ever going to look at Daily Kos the same way.” In the 2016 primary eight years later, Daily Kos was accused of favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders, as Moulitsas banned “malicious attacks” targeting Clinton, “our presumptive presidential nominee,” before the primary process was completed.

After Obama won the primary, and the presidency, ideological purity began to rise in importance among the most prominent bloggers. For an activist movement to set aside small differences to fight a common political enemy, only to form a circular firing squad once the enemy is defeated, is an old political story. The progressive blogosphere wasn’t all that different from its forebears, after all.

In July 2008, Obama provoked several leading bloggers when he supported legal immunity for telecommunication companies that abetted warrantless wiretapping by the second Bush administration. In the 2008 primary against Clinton, Obama, then a U.S. senator, promised to filibuster any bill that gave the companies retroactive immunity; but he stood down after winning the Democratic presidential nomination and voted for compromise legislation that included it. That helped him avoid being tagged as soft on terrorism, but Glenn Greenwald charged Obama with supporting “a full-scale assault on our Constitution.” Duncan Black, who stills blogs—and tweets, naturally—under the handle Atrios, dubbed Obama his “Wanker of the Day.” Moulitsas, ahead of the switch, fretted, “We may worry that he’s just another one of these spineless Democrats” and fail to give Obama the full “intensity of support.”

Obama’s willingness to ignore the bloggers’ demands foreshadowed the difficulties the netroots would encounter once Democrats began wielding power. Obama’s groundbreaking campaign tapped the power of the internet, but it did so largely without the help of progressive blogosphere leaders. Matt Stoller, an early blogger who is now a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, gave Boehlert a clear-eyed assessment of the Obama campaign’s posture toward the blogosphere: “They don’t care what we think. … Their logistical operations are remarkable, their campaign structure is phenomenal, and we’re not a part of it.”

Once Obama won without the “intensity” of the blogosphere, the relationship between the online left and the Democratic establishment reverted to fractiousness, with the purist outsiders taking potshots at the compromising insiders. In December 2009, as it became clear that a public health insurance option would not be part of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Moulitsas lambasted the legislation as “a turd of a ‘reform’ package, potentially worse than the status quo.” When Obama tried to boost morale for the slowly recovering economy and credited his stimulus package, Atrios scoffed at the calls by Democrats to “clap louder you stupid hippies.”

When the Obama administration persuaded Sen. Arlen Specter to switch parties in 2009, helping Democrats briefly hold a 60-vote Senate supermajority, blogger-activists who could not forgive Specter’s conservative past helped Rep. Joe Sestak defeat Specter in the 2010 primary. Specter’s willingness to participate in a Netroots Nation primary debate proved insufficient for the blogosphere. The victory was pyrrhic, as Sestak then lost the general election to a Republican.

As the Bush-era blog leaders struggled, the decentralized nature of the online political world gave oxygen to newer factions, including a robust democratic socialist left that viewed the founding members of the blogosphere as insufficiently progressive. “Once Obama took office, Kos went soft” wrote the "Chapo Trap House" podcasters in their best-selling book, based on Moulitsas’ negativity toward Sanders in 2016 (and ignoring his many attempts to boost primary challenges against establishment officeholders.) Oversimplifying the community of Bush-era bloggers, the "Chapo" gang dismissed the netroots as “a league of pathetic, repulsive morons who mastered a technology every child knows how to use” and “piloted journalism into a newer, even more idiotic frontier of toxic hackery.”

One person’s toxic hackery is another person’s call for revolution. Which was exactly the problem for the blogosphere: Its decentralized nature rendered it fairly useless for accumulating organized power. In Crashing the Gate, Moultisas and Armstrong saw decentralization as a strength: “That’s why this movement is so effective—and so threatening to established powers. It is leaderless. It cannot be harnessed, controlled, or co-opted.” Well, yeah.

Boehlert, who now writes for Daily Kos, rejects the conclusion that the attempt at an organized netroots has foundered. He points to the sprawling anti-Trump “resistance” as based on “the model that the blogosphere created 15 years ago” in shaping dialogue that’s “very aggressive, factual and passionate.”

Nearly two decades after the birth of the blogosphere, there’s no question that the ability of the internet to make anyone a publisher—or, in the age of podcasting and YouTube, a broadcaster—has altered the political landscape, brought new people into the process, and made the ground under the Washington establishment shakier. But the vision of a powerful, progressive “netroots” that was at once aggressively partisan, progressively principled, organizationally leaderless and politically potent was not sustainable. It couldn’t go on forever and so, to paraphrase Herbert Stein, it didn’t.