It surprises me that Chait misses the reason for this treatment. He mentions it himself:

Once the movement has settled on a position, it will not tolerate members who side with the opposition. I'm not saying that the position itself is unprincipled. I'm describing a tactic they use to advance it. The inability of Bowers and Stoller to distinguish between the morality of their ends and the morality of their means is a good example of the phenomenon I'm describing.

And politics is like that. Politics is not beanbag. What Chait seems not to grasp still is that however much he wishes the game were different, it is not. Again, his reliance on Norquist as a supposed doppelganger of the Netroots fails to appreciate the basic point I made in my first piece:

It is not admiration that the Netroots expresses here. It is dealing with the reality of the situation. Chait mistakes understanding your political adversary, what you are up against, with admiration. No one wants the nation so divided politically. Everyone wishes we could all be reasonable. But only a fool acts as if the world is how he wishes it to be.

Chait WISHES Grover Norquist and his ilk did not exist. But they do. TNR and the DLC wish it. And by acting as if what they wished were the actual case, they did serious harm to the Democratic Party and even to the issues they support.

Kevin Drum told him this and Chait did not absorb it:

Chait makes an obvious point: netroots bloggers are advocates. Their goal isn't to tell both sides of the story or to engage in dispassionate inquiry. Contrarianism isn't seen as a virtue for its own sake. They have a point of view, and their goal is to marshal the best arguments they can come up with to advocate for that point of view. Political calculation is part of the game. This is unremarkable. In fact, it's so unremarkable that Chait could have simply said this in a paragraph or two and then moved on. It's not as if anyone would argue the point. But instead of doing that, he spins this idea out to nearly 3,000 words using language that seems deliberately designed to be as loaded as possible.

And because of this advocacy role, the undermining of the political advocacy by supposed allies, like TNR and the DLC and Joe Lieberman, etc., are seen as particularly harmful. And they are. The term Fox News Dem is not just catchy, it means something. Oh by the way, Chait plays the innocent if he is arguing that TNR and the DLC are not themselves full of willful blindness and invective as well. They seemed to enjoy the skirmishes when it suited them.

As for the idea of the Netroots turning someone into an unperson, I think there is too much of that. But sometimes what else is there to do. Take David Broder for instance. But for the most part, it is not a good thing to do.

Jon Chait is a gifted writer and thinker and the Netroots SHOULD engage him. Peter Beinart wrote a good book and he was engaged. Joe Klein has improved markedly, ironically since he began bloggin imo, and folks are engaging him and Karen Tumulty in positive ways I believe.

My final point is one that Chait alludes to but does not draw out - the marriage of the Left Blogs to the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, as it exists today. The biggest threat to the Netroots, imo, is cooptation by the Democratic Party. I am one who is at risk of this as well. I believe the Democratic Party is the only political vehicle for progressive change. But I try to limit my utterly partisan cheerleading for the election season. Unfortunately, I think some in the Netroots now treat the election season as all the time. There is no offyear for some.

To me, when Chait compares the Netroots to the Right Wing, he missed this as the biggest risk. It is not that the Netroots will war with erstwhile political allies, but rather that it will fall in line with all pronouncements Democratic. But then, I am fixated on Iraq so perhaps my perspective is skewed on this.