Netroots not = radical left

Chris Bowers over at MyDD has some observations regarding the "insider" view of progressive bloggers as radical leftists.

I would like to think that the furor surrounding Hackett's withdrawal from the Ohio Senate race that has been expressed over the past day on Dailykos, MyDD and other sites has gone a long way toward finally convincing a large number of journalists and members of centrist Democratic organizations that what the progressive netroots and blogosphere want from the Democratic party is not simply a hard push to the left. Hopefully, witnessing the online anger over the Ohio Senate primary being handed to Sherrod Brown, who happens to be the only Democratic member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to ever run for statewide office (Bernie Sanders is also a member of the CPC, but he is not a Democrat), has caused more than a few people who have simply dismissed the netroots as "hard left" to reconsider their views. I would like to think that, and I would like to hope that, but I am probably asking for too much. Viewing internal struggles within the Democratic Party and the progressive movement as always arising ideological differences in a simplistic, left-center-right, linear matrix has become an all too easy way for lazy minds to conceptualize the American political scene. I suppose if, after Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, after the online outcry against further campaign finance regulation and the Kelo decision, after the frequent blogger collaboration with the New Politic Institute, after the total collapse of Nader's support online, after the netroots support for Ben Chandler, Stephanie Herseth, and Paul Hackett in their special elections, anyone who was still viewing the netroots as simply an online uprising of the left-wing of the Democratic party wasn't paying enough attention to actually understand the netroots and the blogosphere anyway. As with many people who view the world in purely ideological terms, no amount of actual evidence to the contrary will help uproot their comforting belief that the netroots and the blogosphere differ from the rest of the Democratic Party mainly on ideological grounds. The fact that the majority of the netroots who were invested in the race are upset that the only Democratic member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to ever run for statewide office just won his primary probably won't change too many minds on this subject either.