Responding to me, Chait says he hasn’t changed his views. I could be missing something, not for the first time. But as far as I can understand it, he seems to be saying that there were too few Democrats who acquiesced in Bush’s agenda from 2001 to 2003 for Howard Dean to have been right to complain about it; but there were enough of them for the netroots to complain about it.

He is right, of course, that most Democrats opposed Bush’s agenda and a few of them supported it. And he is also right that the netroots helped to reduce the number of Democrats who were willing to support it. Here, I think, is an answer to a question that Chait doesn’t address in his article: Have the left-wing bloggers succeeded in their professed goal of getting Democrats into power? Presumably the Republicans would have lost Congress even if blogs had never existed, given failure in Iraq, corruption scandals that newspapers were covering, and the general exhaustion of the party.

But the blogs did succeed in keeping Democrats who might have been inclined to make a deal with Bush on Social Security from doing so. Without them, it’s just barely possible to imagine 4-5 Senate Democrats crossing over on the issue. I think that would have cut Republican losses in ‘06, since candidates would have been able to point to the rising balances in people’s accounts.