What is Higher Broderism and why does it hate left-wing bloggers? Higher Broderism is a school of thought, best exemplified by Washington Post reporter David Broder, that Washington DC elites should provide the common wisdom to the ragged masses beyond the beltway. Moreover, Higher Broderism believes that the only acceptable politics is centrist. It’s not so much where the center is at any given time, it’s the centrism itself. Therefore, politicians that occassionally buck their own party, like Joe Lieberman and John McCain, reside on the Mt. Olympus of Higher Broderism. In this view, it is more virtuous of Lieberman to buck the winds of his party and support the President on Iraq than it is odious for him to be wrong on the issue.
Here is how Broder put it in a September 21, 2006 editorial:
Now, however, you can see the independence party forming — on both sides of the aisle. They are mobilizing to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society — the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and the on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents.
The center is beginning to fight back. Michael Bloomberg, the Republican mayor of New York, is holding a fundraiser for Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat running as an independent against the bloggers’ favorite, Ned Lamont.
His election is important, as is Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee’s in Rhode Island, because both would signal that independence is a virtue to be rewarded.
That passage contains both central elements of Higher Broderism. First, note that “vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers” like myself are morally equated with “doctrinaire religious extremists”. My sin is not necessarily that I am wrong, but that I lack civility. But, the second element is the so-called independence that is exemplified by Joe Lieberman and Lincoln Chafee. Now, I’ll admit a little ambivalence about celebrating Sheldon Whitehouse’s butt-whupping of Lincoln Chafee a week from today. I want more Lincoln Chafees in the Senate, not less. But Whitehouse is a better representative for the people of Rhode Island. Chafee is a good guy that should have switched parties or gone independent, like Jim Jeffords. He didn’t, and now he is going to lose. That’s a loss for the GOP and for the nation, but it is a gain for Rhode Island. And considering the damage done by Bill Frist’s senate, it is, at least in the short-term, a gain for the nation. The fact that David Broder cannot distinguish between the civility and independence of Chafee and Lieberman belies the problem with his analysis. Lieberman in neither civil nor independent. He’s just beholden to certain interests, and he is consistent in that regard.
To gain a better understanding of the first element of Higher Broderism, that insiders should dictate common wisdom, we need to look at another Washington Post columnist, Sebastian Mallaby. Mallaby recently tackled the issue of ‘trust’. What does it mean when the American people lose their trust in government and in big business? Well, it’s bad.
There are powerful reasons trust tends to decline and accountability advances. Mobile societies tend to have weak bonds; the Internet makes it easier to hold people accountable and encourages acerbic negativity. And the absence of trust can feed on itself. Leaders function under stifling oversight; this causes them to perform sluggishly, so trust continues to stagnate. But occasionally there is a chance to escape this trap: A shock causes trust to rise, leaders have a chance to lead and there’s an opportunity to boost trust still further.
We’ve recently had a double opportunity. The boom of the 1990s boosted trust in business; the 2001 terrorist attacks boosted trust in government. But CEOs and politicians abused these gifts with scandals and incompetence. Such is the cost of corporate malfeasance and the Iraq war: Precious social capital is destroyed by leaders’ avarice and hubris.
This is another example of Higher Broderism. First, note that “the Internet makes it easier to hold people accountable and encourages acerbic negativity.” That quote is almost like a Zen Koan, if you think about it. What makes this a classic of the Higher Broderism genre is its failure to confront the central truth it raises. Blind faith in either the government or big business is misplaced and stupid. What Mallaby quietly and tacitly laments is that it is also stupid and misplaced to place blind faith in Washington Post reporters and columnists.
Another example of Higher Broderism can be seen today in an interview that ABC The Note’s Mark Halperin gave with right-wing nutcase Hugh Hewitt. Halperin coined the term Gang of 500 to denote the “”campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment” They are “the 500 people whose decisions matter to the political news and campaign narrative we get from the major media.”
Hugh Hewitt: And so, given that we know that proportion is there, I don’t know the relevance that the fever swamp generates some antagonism towards you, that Daily Kos yells at you, doesn’t in any way, I think, not you personally, but media, doesn’t in any way change the basic underlying problem, which is that you’ve set up sort of castles full of liberal and hard left reporters, and that they’re criticized from the left doesn’t in any way diminish their left wing bias, does it?
Mark Halperin: Not at all. It only adds to the current problems, or the previous problems of the left wing bias on a lot of issues. What it adds is, people feeling cowed from the other direction, and it adds to the general lack of respect, which we have brought on ourselves, because look, we are too weak, and we are too superficial, and we have failed to stand up to power, as we should, if we’re going to play a proper role in a democracy. So the left criticisms, I think, don’t diminish the liberal bias, but they do make weak organizations, already under siege, more under siege, taking fire from a different direction.
Once again, the left wing bloggers are disparaged by proponents of Higher Broderism. In this case, we are adding to the general level of disrespect and cowing journalists into [yes, this is what he is saying} being less weak and superficial. I might rephrase this as “we are making them engage in real reporting which can border on the shrill.”
The problems of Higher Broderism are manifold. The most important aspect is for news coverage. When the Government decides to, I don’t know, invade Panama for no discernible reason, the Gang of 500 jumps into action and justifies the action. They become part of a psychological operation that is perpetrated on the country. They do not see it as their job to question the decisions made by ‘experts’ in the Pentagon, the CIA, or the National Security Council. If the government says Hugo Chavez is our villain of the week, then he suddenly becomes, not the twice elected and popular President of Venezuela, but a left-wing dictator. No fact-checking required.
David Halberstam demonstrated a long time ago, in The Best and the Brightest, that raw brain power and an Ivy League education are no guarantees that government employees will not make bone-headed decisions, like invading countries in Asia and then losing wars. This adminstration doesn’t even have the raw brain power part of the equation.
Another problem with Higher Broderism is that makes civility an unambigious virtue without any regard for the times and circumstance in which we live. We didn’t eradicate slavery and Jim Crow with civility and civility was not a virtue in those debates. Likewise, civility is not a virtue in the face of the disaster in Iraq, the abandonment of habeas corpus, and ‘unitary executive’ theory of government. These are moral questions, constitutional questions, and the side that is morally and constitutionally correct has been losing.
In fact, the left, as a whole, has been losing in no small part because of our unwillingness to match the right-wing in their level of foul-mouthed, acerbic, vituperative negativity. The President is saying we hate the armed forces and that we want to enable the terrorists to strike again. What’s the civil response?
In many ways the proponents of Higher Broderism have something in common with the administration. They both lament the fact that they can no longer control the message. I can’t imagine this country being mobilized to attack Panama again. Or Grenada. Not with blogs about to educate the public. Rick Santorum says the Iraq war will be won or lost at home. That’s really what the Gang of 500 thinks. That’s what the DC insiders think and what the Pentagon thinks. They’ve lost the ability to maintain public resolve. They really think the wars in Vietnam and Iraq were lost because the media was ineffective, or worse, a fifth column. You see, this blogging is interfering in their imperialism.
For Broder and his cohorts, the only reason WMD mattered was because it gave Powell a way to prevent a totally unilateral attack on Iraq. The WMD argument was the triumph of bipartisanship and internationalism over the worst instincts of the Bush administration. So, when we didn’t find them all they could say was, “it could have been worse.”
That’s Higher Broderism in a nutshell. Why didn’t they care about the Downing Street Memos? Because it hurt our resolve. They are not in the business of rooting out the facts. Not really. They are in the business of aiding and abetting one foreign policy disaster after another. When Lawrence Walsh started bringing home the goods on the Iran-Contra bandits in 1992, the Gang of 500 earned their name by ganging up on him and asking for bygones to be bygones. When Gary Webb uncovered narcotics and cocaine trafficking by the Contras, they helped to ruin his career.
They keep crying that left-wing bloggers are making their jobs harder. You bet we are making their jobs harder. The American people deserve better than Higher Broderism
