This piece originally appeared at joshua.trevino.at.

It came as no surprise to see DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas and DailyKos editor Susan Gardner in the pages of the Washington Post on August 11th, trumpeting “How We Won the Mainstream.” The hard-left “netroots” are ascendant these days, having moved from an aggrieved minority to the self-proclaimed vanguard of the American majority. That majority is now in broad concurrence with the “netroots” on two cardinal points: it dislikes President George W. Bush, and by extension the Republican Party; and it wishes for an end of some sort to the war in Iraq. In this light, the Post is only following good editorial practice in giving column space to a major voice of the day. Left unexamined is whether the “netroots’” claim to representing, much less winning, the American mainstream, is true.

That claim rests upon a series of dubious propositions. From the fact that a majority of Americans dislike the things (the President, his party, and the war) that they hate, “netroots” leaders Moulitsas, Gardner, et al., derive a series of conclusions: that they therefore “led” the American majority to that dislike; that this dislike is the functional equivalent of their consuming hate; that their prescience, such as it was, on these points implies a philosophical and intellectual rectitude on all points; that this concurrence between them and the national majority implies the majority’s support for their policy preferences; and that this concurrence between them and the national majority implies that they are representative of the national majority. All of these conclusions are non sequiturs at best, and demonstrably false at worst.

As it happens, we know fairly well what the “netroots” look like as a group, because, as is bloggers’ wont, they have spent a great deal of time examining themselves and their peers. There is an especial wealth of information on the DailyKos community itself, which, given its size and prominence, we may reasonably infer is a representative sample of the “netroots” at large.

A commissioned third-party survey of the DailyKos readership, published in May 2006, revealed that the “netroots” are remarkably synonymous, in demographic terms, with the old “new left” of the Vietnam era: that is, cloistered in coastal enclaves, financially well-off, and aging. Nearly 60% of readers reported making more than $75,000 annually; nearly 62% were over 45 years old; over a third were over 55 years old; and just under a quarter are over 65 years old. Furthermore, as the survey firm reported, their geographic locations “correspond heavily to the coastal ‘blue state’ regions.” This is a cohort, then, that largely came into political consciousness during the Vietnam War and Watergate -- and the resultant policy biases and frames of reference, with the hyperbole over President Bush and the insistence on retreat from Iraq, are on stark display today.

It is not merely in material demographics that the “netroots” diverges wildly from the American mainstream it claims to represent. The sources of their fundamental values are also sharply at odds with the mass of Americans. Nowhere is this more evident than in the internal, self-reported polls of religious belief periodically undertaken at DailyKos. At about the same time the ’06 demographic survey was released, a sitewide poll on faith garnered the participation of over 1,400 DailyKos readers. Shockingly, only about 37% definitively affirmed a belief in some manner of monotheism; and just over 40% declared for atheism or agnosticism. A subsequent poll in February 2007 on theistic views attracted the participation of over 6,100 DailyKos readers: in it, nearly 75% subscribed to an atheistic or agnostic variation, and over 40% declared for outright atheism. A followup to that poll, in which the pollster purposefully eliminated the atheist and agnostic options, garnered over 3,400 responses and still delivered nearly 46% against monotheism, with 22% selecting “Other.”

This data places the “netroots” profoundly at odds with their fellow Americans. Most Americans do not live in coastal enclaves; most are not especially wealthy, even as they are middle-class; and most are not especially old. Furthermore, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, adult Americans are about as unlike the “netroots” in faith as they could possibly be: they are 76.5% Christian, 78.2% monotheist -- and less than 1% atheist or agnostic. Even allowing for the six years since this survey, and the errors inherent in surveys of web communities, the immense gap between the “netroots” and the nation it claims to lead is undeniable.

Some of the results of this fundamental disconnect between the “netroots” and the American people verge on the ridiculous. Mere days ago, the “netroots” followed the lead of a Louisiana Democratic Party smear campaign, and attacked Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal, a Catholic, for writing a purportedly “anti-Protestant” article in the New Oxford Review. Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos and Duncan Black, proprietor of the popular hard-left site Atrios, both denounced Jindal for citing a quote that purportedly described Protestants as having “utterly depraved” minds. The quote, in fact, was from John Calvin, the founding titan of the Reformed Christian movement -- and hence a historical Protestant giant -- who was describing humanity at large. (Man’s inherent “total depravity” is the first of the Five Points of Calvinism.) Jindal cited Calvin approvingly, and closed the piece with praise for the many virtues of Protestantism. Though it is tempting to ascribe simple dishonesty to Moulitsas and Black, the more likely cause of their error is outright ignorance: though both are, on paper, educated men (Moulitsas holds a J.D., and Black a Ph.D.), as “netroots” leaders, they almost by definition suffer from a massive incomprehension of basic matters of faith. (Unsurprisingly, given the data cited above, the overwhelming majority of their readers exhibit the same intellectual gap.) Bobby Jindal and your average churchgoing Presbyterian have a mental context for “depravity” in the arena of faith -- the “netroots” do not.

Faced with this reality, some members of the American left have taken to viewing religious orthodoxy — which is to say, the faith of average Americans — as an outright enemy. The American Prospect’s editor-at-large, Harold Meyerson, has been notably strident in espousing this viewpoint with his frequent attacks on what he calls “the Orthodox International.” “The opposition to liberalism ... includes,” he writes, “the [Catholic] church that the pope bequeaths us, the Protestant Christian Right, [and] the Orthodox rabbis of Israel.” In this, Meyerson’s identification of the long-term enemy to the leftist project is probably correct.

The “netroots,” suffused with the newfound conviction of their anointed status as leaders of the American mainstream, refuse to accede to this eminently reality-based view. Despite all the data, and all the experience, to the contrary, they proclaim themselves the representatives of the country at large — and nothing will dissuade them from their triumphalism. Wrote Gardner and Moulitsas in the Washington Post: “The ‘center’ is where we stand now, promoting an engaged and active politics embraced by significant majorities of Americans.” It is a resolute sort of denial that ignores the truths of the current politics: that the American people agree with them on certain discrete political and policy matters because of Republican failures rather than “netroots” leadership; that this agreement is in no way equivalent to their enduring obsessions; that they remain basically tacticians with fundamentally unsound grasps of their own philosophies and ideologies, and none whatsoever of others’; that what they want in the pragmatic realm is not the same as what the American people want; and that they are, at bottom, profoundly alienated from the American mainstream.

The Republican Party is on the wane, and its wounds are self-inflicted. We may therefore expect a Democratic ascendancy for some time to come. What we will not see, however, is a “netroots” ascendancy -- at least not in the “netroots’” present form. The concurrence between the “netroots” and the American mainstream is inherently transient, because there is no fundamental concurrence between them on the most basic criteria of identity and values. In the long run, there are only two possibilities: either they change, becoming something they are emphatically not now — or we tend to ourselves, come back in time, remind the American people who truly represents them ... and crush their pretensions.

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