Actually, it's a well know and well described phenomenon. In Europe, or old left, it's called the avanguard. That's also the reason that the "complains" about the Al-Qaida group on 9/11 was well educate and grow up in, at least, middle class families made very little sense.

Andrew--

I think this is a very important point--when it comes to issues involving race there is huge hole in the blogosphere.

You have done a very good job of bringing women to tpmcafe (I'd be happpy to see more, but the women on tpm are both diverse and outspoken, which is great. )

Now it would be wonderful to find blacks, latinos, and others to become contributors.

Maybe both contributors and people who read tpmcafe regularly could make suggestions?

I have no idea for TPMCafe. TPM has some demographic info (note: 3/4 male).

There's been a fair amount of research in terms of the netroots stuff, although I'm too lazy (it's Friday night!) to get it right now.  I'd certainly be willing to get back to you if you don't come across it/don't believe me.

I suggest Kwame Anthony Appiah (author most recently of Cosmopolitanism), for starters. He has an interesting mind.

Even though he is a white male, I think, David Hollinger (in Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism) has more interesting things to say about these issues than just about anyone I can recall reading or hearing. Sometimes committed, well-informed non-minorities speaking on these issues are more easily able to say certain things, just as the reverse is also true, I think.

Maybe bring on on a regular basis activists who are working in the inner cities. The thread a few months ago on organizing was a promising start in this regard. This could help bridge three important gaps referred to by others--not enough minority voices, not enough organizers who have not been using the internet a lot and maybe can provoke people on what they think requires FTF interaction and cannot be done via the netroots, and, I would maintain, not enough voices working on the ground in high poverty areas, rural as well as inner city (and there is now concentrated poverty in some inner suburbs as well), to educate and enlighten the rest of us.

I'm not sure if I were and American Black, Hispanic or Asian that I would want to spend my disposable time blogging with a bunch of know-it-all White folk on the Internet. Speculating the intricacies of politics and world affairs is not something I can see a broad demo of racial minorities engaging in in America. They are probably too involved with the realities of daily existence. On the other hand, Whities can express their superiority to others in the blogosphere with anonymity; so it's a safe haven for half-baked, cracker intellectuals such as I.
How wonderful it would be to share perspectives on racial, cultutal and economic issues with a totally underserved, unheard and misunderstood population of countrymen.

I think both.

Netroots can't be everything to everybody but it can do wonderful things that benefit everyone in the progressive movement that no one organizaton can do.

Take my concern about the corruption of the Lexis-Nexis database. The average ACORN activist probably is not familiar with Lexis-Nexis but the corruption of the Lexis-Nexis database is going to affect him when the mainstream press has to rely on Atlas Shrugged posts for background information on ACORN.

By installing Atlas Shrugged in the Lexis-Nexis database, the right wing has achieved a significant victory over progressives in the information war but most progressives don't even know there was a battle.

My job is to alert the netroots to this dangerous situation. Someone else is going to have to take it up with Reed-Elsevier, the company that owns Lexis-Nexis, as to why Atlas Shrugged is considered a news source and why a site like Talking Points Memo isn't.

I have no doubt that an ACORN activist would understand the threat to democracy posed by the corruption of the Lexis-Nexis database but that activist has only so much time in a day to spend on politics.

All of you rich, educated, white, male bloggers out there - just fix this and know you did a good thing for everyone else. If those ACORN activists ever get wind of what you did for them, you will have their respect and gratitude.

I think an important part of this is the work of those in the progressive netroots who are experienced with the use of internet communication tools, in providing additional support in elaborating, refining or, in some cases, establishing the panoply of internet communication tools ... including support in making sites usable for low-bandwidth users, like landline dial-up users or library users where very high bandwidth sites are blocked.

If there are gaps in coverage, the "natural"
netroots solution is to establish new sites / blog / community blogs to cover those areas of interest, and then for the rest of the progressive blogosphere to link into their coverage.

Being most effective in offering this kind of service may involve establishing one or more skills clearing houses.

...because the American people had become convinced that they democratic party were out of touch with their realities.. this time they'd be right, because the party is now controlled by a few who simply do not care to take a stand against globalization based on third world standards.

Bingo, you nailed it! On economic issues like trade and globalization, pension fraud, off-shoring, bringing in H1-B and H-2 visa workers to crush working class Americans, the Democrats and white upper class liberals aren't much different from their GOP brethern. IOW they either don't care or are oblivious to the effects globalization and "free" trade has had on the working class and the country in general.

Further evidence of this can be seen in the House where Rangel,Hoyer and Pelosi along with K Street have been working in relative secret in composing a new "Free" Trade bill for South America. To them South America just means a fresh pool of workers and natural resources to exploit and profit from.
And you hardly hear a peep of protest from liberals or party hack Democrats(the netroots)on this. Hell most liberal blogs outside of myDD and Sirota refuse to cover this.

Or switch over to Iraq where just recently Pelosi and Reid rolled over and gave Bush a blank check on Iraq despite coming in with a mandate to get us out of there. Again they blur the distinctions between themselves and the GOP. It shows Democrats have no more qualms than the GOP in letting more American soldiers get killed or maimed.

And tell me how again the Democrats are different from the GOP on foreign policy and economics?

Re: I got comments from Atlas Shrugged and the Volokh Conspiracy about Schlozman's indictment of the ACORN Four.

Volokh is not rightwing (though it is a bit libertarianish). Certainly not rightwing in the way that RedState is! The blog is seldom friendly to George Bush, and its postings are quite liberal on social issues like gay marriage.

Re: On economic issues like trade and globalization, pension fraud, off-shoring, bringing in H1-B and H-2 visa workers to crush working class Americans, the Democrats and white upper class liberals aren't much different from their GOP brethern.

Here we go again. Even if the above were true, that constallation of issue compris4s of a small slice of the whole political pie. When you compare the Democrats (minus Liebermann and Zell Miller, who pretty much minused themselves anyway) on issues like Iraq, abortion, Social Security, global warming, etc. to say the two parties are exactly alike, or even similar, is absurd.

Reminds me of one of my favorite bits in "The Great Gastby." It is mentioned that Gastby went to Oxford.

The reply is: "Ofxord, New Mexico."

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

.> Secondly, I'm one of the very few
> working class members here at
> tpmcafe.com

Unless you broke in to the Blogads survey database (or you work for Blogads and are breaking confidentiality) you have absolutely no way of knowing that.

sPh

Well, I was going to argue with that but I think that maybe I should ask why you're saying this and what it means for us that you think that.

That multi-line second sentence of mm232 posts is why.

I fired off some emails to Reed Elsevier and the LexisNexis folks. I suggest others do the same

here are some emails that will work

CORPORATE
Reed Elsevier Group
patrick.kerr@reedelsevier.com

LexisNexis Public Relations
1 937 865-6800, x56044
Toll Free: 1 800 227-9597 x56044
pr@lexisnexis.com

LexisNexis Group
david.kurt@lexisnexis.com
tel: +1 312 899 7805

Well, yeah... upper middle class liberals often don't take the line on economic issues that you'd like. A lot of fairly reliable Democratic votes come from the old liberal Republican bloc.

So what do you propose to do about it? The Democrats simply can't be a majority party anymore without those votes. You can keep a lot of them just by being the party of sensible social policy, but will that be enough?

"Re: And tell me how again the Democrats are different from the GOP on foreign policy and economics?" I'd like to recommend (for once in my life) Thomas Friedman in the Sunday Times on the GOP's painstaking gutting of the energy bill.  He starts by picking on "Congress," but overall it's one of those rare times that the media, much less someone like him, actually blames a party for, well, pursuing its usual interests. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

I hate this notion of "undeserved liberties" that comes out of the MSM or people who feel that blogs are competition (even though they probably get people more interested in reading a lot of MSM articles).

The objection, of course, is that most bloggers don't follow standard journalistic procedure. Of course, most TV pundits, radio commenters and even MSM columnists don't either. Neither do most academics. Writing criticism isn't the same as writing a straight news story, so you don't need to follow the same rules.

I'm a mainstream journalist. I also blog and comment here. They are different activities and they call for different procedures.

You've really isolated the key issue, though -- the right to self expression isn't predicated on following any "rules" of any profession. And that's what journalism is, a profession with its own standards. For a journalist to say that a blogger has to follow a journalists' rules would be like an NBA ref showing up at a pick-up basketball game and saying "No, you can't play 'make it, take it' because NBA rule 142b says..."

What's really funny is that I could go out tomorrow and start writing a political book full of my opinions and reported in any manner I want and nobody would freak out about it because it's not a blog.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Thanks, Andrew. Your word is gold.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. H.L. Mencken

I suppose I prefer to deal with people rather than demographics. Just to take you as a convenient example, I have absolutely no idea of your biological gender, sexual identity, religion, ethnicity, handedness, genotype, aisle vs. window preference, or socioeconomic status.

Every time I hear about the need to be aware of what makes people different, I think of Martin Luther King's dream of "that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". I don't buy into the old homogenizing image of the melting pot, admire the newer image of a salad in which the ingredients contribute individually to a larger whole, and dismiss people who dismiss me with variants on "you can't understand. It's a $FOO thing."

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

It's more commonly spelled "avantgarde" or "avant-garde". It does mean "vanguard" in French though.

I can't get to more than the most recent issue (June 22)...  The DD only reverts to 5 pages and Sachs' MyDD isn't working past page one.  I'll give it another try later. 

I never did deny the underlying point.  In fact, quoting myself I said

None of this denies that there is a racial/ethnic/economic gap in the use of the Internet, or that this gap is harmful. 

I will try to keep abreast of Sach's ongoing series, though My DD isn't one of my must read websites. 

I took a very quick look over at Quack Track.  General searches only return a maximum of 100 responses, why, I don't know, but Black, Latino, and African American each returned the maximum.  Not all of these are political of course (and in the case of "black" not all of them deal with race by a long shot,) and the general categorization schema isn't particularly helpful to ferret out this information.  I used Quack Track rather than Technorati because I wasn't looking for who links to whom or how popular x is compared to y.  Sachs could further his series, MHO, by spending some time at Quack Track.  There are 54 blogs in the category Race Relations alone.

Just two more things and I'll close this overly long response. 

• What bothered me most about Blumenthal's video (which I didn't' find particularly funny, though perhaps I was having a grumpy day) was that while he may have been poking fun at the elitism of the blogosphere...the blow-back splashed ACORN and the Latino "Activists" Read the quotes you abstracted.  "Activist: "What blogs do we read? Whatcha mean? In the newspaper?" or "MB: 'What blogs do you guys read?'  [confused looks] Activist: "I don't read blogs."  How many "hip" people will look at that and react negatively towards the interviewees?  How dumb those Union sponsored groups are.  They don't even know what a blog is.  This isn't the only blow, nor the lowest:  Use of the Obama Girl video as if it had anything to do with either the Obama Campaign or TBA was, again, MHO.
• As you indicated, TPM Café doesn't hold the high ground on this issue, if indeed it is a moral one.  We out here in reader land can't do anything about that.  You guys back at headquarters can.  As one of those who kicked in a few bucks to get TPM started over two years ago (I had my second anniversary as a member or whatever you call us two weeks ago) let me urge you to do this:  on two levels.
• If you really want them, there certainly are experts in the Black and Hispanic communities who would be quite happy to post here on a regular basis.  I'm certain they'd develop the same kind of devoted following that M. J. Rosenberg or Elizabeth Warren have.  There are young academics whose presence wouldn't bust the budget.
• While you're at it, how about a bit more diversity of specialty?  Politics isn't only Political Science, International Relations, or Economics.  Politics happens everywhere.  It was a delight to see Michael Bérubé appear here--not often enough.  A Lit and Culture studies guy.  Imagine that!  Now how about a historian?  Not just once in a blue moon like Chalmers Johnson, but regularly?  Someone in linguistics would make a good addition...it doesn't have to be George Lakeoff or Noam Chomsky.  Get one of their students, or a recent graduate of their programs, or any of the academics/non-academics who know something about rhetoric and especially political rhetoric. 

aMike

I'd say it has nothing to do with people being forcibly excluded.

But everything to do with us ecouraging people of all stripes to participate.

Maybe we can make this bigger. I hope we can and think we should.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com