Daily Kos: Less Radical Than Early National Review?
That's the argument put forward in the Sunday Week in Review by Times book review editor Sam Tanenhaus ("An Antiwar Campaign That Takes A Page From the G.O.P. Playbook").
"Like the current Democratic insurgency, the conservative movement was driven by activists who combined journalism with partisanship. Just as today's insurgents often post their analyses and self-described 'rants' on Web sites like Daily Kos, so the conservative rebels of an earlier day poured forth their opinions in the National Review, the biweekly magazine founded in 1955 by the 29-year-old William F. Buckley Jr.
"Today, of course, National Review is widely read as a journal of the Republican establishment. But in its infancy it was regarded as extreme - far more radical than the bloggers most influential in the Lieberman defeat."
Tanenhaus again argues that the Daily Kos kids aren't nearly as left-wing as the New Right was: "The contrast with what is happening today in the Democratic Party are instructive. The challenge now comes from an insurgency in the Lamont campaign that is in no way as ideological as the new right was in its heyday."
Tanenhaus specifically denies the founder of Daily Kos oranti-war hero Ned Lamontis radical: "Mr. Lamont, a multimillionaire businessman from Greenwich, is by no means a radical. Neither is an insurgent blogger like Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of Daily Kos. In 'Crashing the Gate,' the book he wrote with Jerome Armstrong, Mr. Zúniga says his goal is to advance the cause of the Democratic Party and 'rebuild our institutions of power.' Few Democrats differ with him. What does set the insurgents apart is their belief in partisan."
Though Zuniga may indeed be technically more of a Bush-hater than an ideological left-wing radical, the Bush-hating invective and conspiracy theorizing prevalent at the Daily Kos website certainly dovetails neatly with the common description of "radical" politics.
