In the long run, the only way to prevent embarrassments like this [the Edwards blogger scandal] from escalating and causing greater damage – and more importantly, to fulfill the rich potential of the blogosphere as a persuasion and organizing tool – is for the voices of reason within the Netroots to stand up to the smack down artists and prod their peers to trade their juvenile accusations for mature arguments. ~Dan Gerstein

This appeal to reasonable Kossacks and lefty bloggers is roughly the same as all of those earnest entreaties by liberal columnists who keep asking, a la Friedman, “Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King?” or the more common refrain, “When will the moderate Muslims stand up against the jihadists?”  These appeals are amusing in a way because they assume that there is a large number of reasonable people in these communities who fundamentally disagree with the fanatics, but that they simply are not as loud or active as the latter.  It may be that there are a very few who do disagree, but they are so few that if they were ever to try to stand up to the overwhelming majority they know they would be shouted or cut down. 

Besides, the lefty blogger narrative of this controversy became established very early on.  Like some embattled minority group rallying around an accused criminal from their community, progressive bloggers across the board seem to have come to the same conclusion: “First they come for Marcotte, but tomorrow they will come for me.”  It became unacceptable for any of them to open up a breach in their wall of mindless solidarity.  They just had to keep telling themselves: “It’s only the noise machine, it’s only the noise machine.  Besides, Christophobia is funny.”  It’s a lot like watching Republicans rallying around Mr. Bush’s decisions, regardless of what they are. 

The prevalence of automatic groupthink in the Netroots, that supposed bastion of boisterous discussion and debate (if you believe the descriptions they give of themselves), has been interesting to watch, even if the response does not really surprise.  The most amusing thing is that the Netroots as a whole took this episode as a challenge to their influence and they believed that they could only retain their influence by defending Marcotte and McEwan to the last, when all they managed to prove was just how oblivious and politically dense they were and so ensured that their influence would decline.  Their solidarity with the two bloggers (the latter’s remarks about “Christofascists,” by the way, were obnoxious and ignorant, but fundamentally no different in substance from the idiocy spewed by Andrew Sullivan or Chris Hedges in their books) actually guaranteed their further marginalisation and irrelevance as a quasi-independent political force.  In some ways, this is a shame, because it aids the center-left warmongers and the Lieberman-loving centrists of the Democratic Party and makes one of the most vocal antiwar constituencies appear to be a gang of radicals deeply alienated from the beliefs of the vast majority of the American people.  This is exactly what opponents of the war didn’t need.  It was also the opportunity for the major players on the blog left to demonstrate something approaching good judgement on a no-brainer of a cultural controversy.  They missed their opportunity, and they won’t get another one quite like it.