Another interesting comment on all this online leftism stuff from Nick Beaudrot:
If you believe that the Internet left is basically the "professional proletariat"—that is, the well-educated middle- to upper-middle-class who enjoy good living standards but are unlikely to vault into the top tax bracket with the top lawyers, medical researchers, business executives, university professors, or successful startup founders, either because they value a sense of "doing good" in their work or because they figure the odds of striking the big time are low—then Sawicky is correct, and the downtrodden have not truly been empowered. Instead, what you have is something more like the Populist movement, where the well-to-do farmers of the Breadbasket mobilize the not-as-well-to do who worked for them by convincing them that the East Coast Establishment was keeping both classes down, via banking, railroad monopolies, and the bottle (no joke).
My sense is that the professional proletariat is a fairly accurate description of the netroots' directorial class (Kos was a software programmer, Atrios an economist, Kevin Drum a tech guy of some sort, Stoller a Harvard grad, Marshall a political journalist, Hamsher hails from Hollywood, etc), but it doesn't dominate their interests entirely. In other words, while you will see a an arguably outsized amount of attention accrue to, say, net neutrality, the minimum wage also merits vigorous advocacy and attention, despite the fact that few of these folks will actually benefit from it.
One reason you see so much attention to health care, by the way, is that our system penalizes self-employed white collar workers rather heavily, and so all manner of freelance writers and self-employed political consultants and so forth either are themselves uninsured, or know folks who are. It's a rare issue that's simultaneously viscerally felt by professionals and blue collar workers alike.
