Back in January, Freddie DeBoer wrote a post in which he noted the absence of a genuine left in the mainstream political blogosphere. He astutely observed that the distinction between the moderate and extreme left is generally formulated in terms of differences in tone — the calm ratiocination of an Ezra Klein versus the fiery polemic of a Glenn Greenwald. But in terms of their political allegiances and their policy preferences, all of these people are just regular mainstream liberals.

DeBoer went on to accuse most of the mainstream liberal bloggers of being neoliberals, in the sense that they (a) favored deregulation, globalization, and the general expansion of market relations; (b) were instinctively more hostile to people on their left than to people on their right. Whatever the merits of this accusation, it started the discussion off on a hostile note. There was some discussion from folks like Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, but then the conversation kind of trailed off.

Now, however, the debate seems to have re-started on a somewhat sounder footing. Once again, it started with somebody crticizing Matt Yglesias for being a neoliberal — in this case, Doug Henwood. For a while, it seemed like a rerun of a sterile debate that counterposed thinking about policy to thinking about politics. But Noah Millman came up with a good summary of what is actually at stake: the integration of policy analysis into a larger theory of politics. Henry Farrell then intervened with a framework that I think is very helpful: