Liberal Bloggers Are Closet New Dems. Discuss.

TNR's Noam Schreiber's can't exactly be accused of trying to build bridges between his magazine and its blogging critics. His latest collumn accuses Lamont supporters and associated bloggers of being - gasp! - secrret New Democrats. Schreiber is a talented writer, and his case is worth reading, especially for the links to research by PEW looking at self-identified political tribes within the two parties:

An interesting thing happened between 1999 and 2005, when Pew conducted another detailed analysis of the electorate: The New Democrats had entirely disappeared as a group while the liberals had doubled in size. The strong implication was that the New Democrats had been driven into the liberal camp by the extremism of the Bush administration. .... Of course, there are other reasons affluent Democrats might have moved leftward on economics in recent years. Certainly the consequences of globalization--outsourcing, the decline of traditional pensions, et cetera--have raised voters' economic anxieties. But, as a group, the former New Democrats tend to be more insulated from these trends than most. They are, by and large, still society's success stories. As such, they generally benefit from a smaller and leaner (though nonetheless active) government, which suggests to me that Bush is behind most of the group's leftward drift.

Schreiber's ultimatel conclusion is, it seems to me, less good. He seems unable to avoid taking a rather odd pot-shot at Libertarians (via, predictably, a Daily Kos post.) Instead, what seems to me to follow from his piece is much more interesting. Kos and his allies, as exemplified in Crashing the Gates, always have shown a pragmatic, heterodox "winning is what matters" streak, contrary to many of their more orthodox liberal followers. This pragmatic approach to politics used to be wholly owned by the centrist Dems. Thus, is it too much of a stretch to say that while moderate "New Democrat" politics has been on the backfoot in oppostion, that the Lamont-ites might find it more palatable as a governing philosophy when the Dems return to power?