Roots of defeat: let us study, and emulate, the left's online tactics.(SPECIAL POST-ELECTION ISSUE)

THE four-year ascent of Barack Obama from state senator to president marks not just the triumph of a man, but the coming of age of a movement.

That movement belongs to liberal (or "progressive") Democrats, who in less than a decade have remade themselves. Once respected only in academia and the news media, they have become a fighting force. They systemically digitized the means of political organization and strategy, with the ultimate goal of dominating the political system--"Crush their spirits!" was Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's pre-election rallying cry.

The Left's online movement is consciously modeled after the Goldwater-and-Reagan-era conservative movement. To those trying to build the Left, the vast right-wing conspiracy was an object not of scorn, but of admiration. They studied the Right's network of think tanks, issue groups, and talk-show hosts, looking for clues on how to push a message with brutal efficiency. They took these lessons to heart and shaped them to fit the web. Ironically, today's Right has much to learn from them.

The Left has created not just a collection of unshaven bloggers but a machine that beat the Right at its own game. The Left's response to idea mills like the Heritage Foundation and AEI is the Center for American Progress, except that it produces few ideas: A reported 40 percent of its budget is given over to marketing. The tip of the spear is ThinkProgress.org, a site written ostensibly by CAP policy wonks. Its sole function seems to be to discredit conservative candidates and personalities; it contains 11,000 pages with the words "Sarah Palin" on them, according to Google. ThinkProgress entries aren't all that original, but they frequently serve as jumping-off points for the left-wing blogosphere and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

If ThinkProgress is the framing and messaging arm of the netroots, Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall is its resident opposition researcher. When he began blogging eight years ago, Marshall seemed like a classic starving-artist type, bouncing around from freelance gig to freelance gig and blogging in his spare time. But Marshall has become the Left's most consistently high-performing purveyor of new attack memes against Republicans and conservatives. He has built a small empire--TPM Media employs seven reporter-bloggers, and one former employee landed at ABC News.

Daily Kos's Moulitsas is in many ways the central fixture of the liberal blog scene, and activism is his main focus. Moulitsas has pushed his many readers--he receives tens of millions of page views a month--to donate to his favorite candidates, usually second-tier liberal challengers to comfortable Republican incumbents. Daily Kos is not merely a platform for liberal views, but an instrument for building political support in and for the Democratic party. "[Daily Kos is] a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory," wrote Moulitsas in a defining 2004 post. "The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It's one between establishment and antiestablishment factions."

The netroots' early successes were achieved over the opposition of the party establishment and with little support from major donors. But the Democratic fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue changed the game: Any donor could earmark money for specific candidates, and could do so online. The site has now raised nearly $82 million for Democratic candidates, most of them liberal.