Jonathan Chait’s opus on the blogosphere is behind a subscription firewall at The New Republic. That’s a shame because he put a lot of effort into it and it has some interesting points. Unfortunately, he mistakes the personality and political thinking of Markos Moulitsas for the entire blogosphere. How so? Well…he paints us all with the same brush.
First, Chait discusses the ties that bind bloggers (and, as throughout the entire article, he talks about bloggers but never about their audience or communities).
The second bond is a shared political narrative. This is not exactly the same thing as a shared ideology. The ideology of the netroots is, indeed, somewhat amorphous, as liberal bloggers themselves often point out. A major source of the ideological confusion is Moulitsas himself, who is almost comically lacking in philosophical depth.
I thought Chait might develop on this theme, explaining that Moulitsas’ lack of ideology is a major sore point within the blogosphere, but he segued away.
Some liberal bloggers have tried to turn this ideological confusion into a strong point: Far from being ideologically hidebound, as their critics often contend, they are ruthlessly strategic political calculators. Moulitsas
eagerly touts this line. “They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I’m not ideological at all,” he told *The Washington Monthly*. “I’m just all about winning.”It is true that the netroots embraces political calculation. But the strategies put forward by these activists almost invariably involve shifting
the Democratic Party at least a bit to the left.
By using ‘some liberal bloggers’ Chait insulates himself from criticism, but ‘this ideological confusion’ should rightfully apply only to Moulitsas, and certainly not to Chris Bowers or Matt Stoller, or to me. Once Chait has established that the entire blogosphere is as ‘comically lacking in philosophical depth’ as Markos, he goes on to build a narrative along these lines:
Indeed, if there is a single thing that the netroots most admires about the
right, it is its philosophical and political unity.
Again, this might be true of Daily Kos and their Kops, DHinMI, MissLaura, etc….but it is not true of any other blogging community I know. It is precisely this admiration for the bullying tactics of the right that has led to a steady exodus of thinkers and activists (as Atrios would put it: “those who, you know, actually give a shit about stuff”) from the Daily Kos site. Chait doesn’t seem aware of this. So we get the following:
To [Joan] Walsh and other journalists, the relevant metric is true versus untrue. To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful.
There is a term for this sort of political discourse: propaganda. The word has a bad odor, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. Propaganda is often true, and it can be deployed on behalf of a worthy cause (say, the fight against Nazism in World War II). Still, propaganda should not be confused with intellectual inquiry. Propagandists do not follow their logic wherever it may lead them; they are not interested in originality. Propaganda is an attempt to marshal arguments in order to create a specific real-world result–to win a political war.
To me, this argument is wildly off the mark and isn’t even fair to Markos, who is not in the business of propaganda, nor in the practice of endlessly repeating misleading talking points. Liberal bloggers are totally distinct from propagandists because they have real-time audiences that will call them out on the slightest error, or the slightest inaccuracy. Chait returns again and again to the theme that bloggers are intellectually dishonest and 100% results oriented.
At the narrow level, the netroots
take part in a great deal of demagoguery, name-calling, and dishonesty…Was the veneration of [Cindy] Sheehan intellectually shabby? Without a doubt. Was it,
considered as a whole, a bad thing? That is not so clear……[Going forward, the Blogosphere] will be nastier and more ruthless, and less concerned with intellectual or procedural niceties.
I never left Daily Kos and I still consider myself a Kossack (user no: 8962). But I have repeatedly critiqued the site as I have seen it display a lack of commitment to progressive values, hostility to ’embarassing lefties’, and thuggish practices that mirror the tactics of the right. Chait has picked up on these trends, but he has quite falsely attributed them to the entire blogosphere.
The idea the Matt Stoller, for example, is non-ideological and 100% results oriented, is patently absurd. Does Chris Bowers have a disregard for intellectual honesty? Give me one example.
Part of the problem is that it is difficult to write about the blogosphere as if it has one voice. Another problem is that, in the blogosphere, the audience and diarists are frequently as important and consequential as the front-pagers. Look at the work done at TPM Muckraker or E Pluribus Media, for example.
The real story of the blogosphere is much bigger than the personality of its most famous blogger. The blogosphere is only a small part of a much bigger movement. It’s one leg in a stool along with Moveon.org, the DFA, and other blooming citizen activist groups. And we are ideological. We are on the left. And we intend to move the Democratic Party and the country to the left. Whether Daily Kos wants to come along for the ride is another question.