It’s kind of odd that most of the at least modestly interesting stuff I read on the right is fratricidal while the most insufferably boring stuff being produced on the left is fratricidal. This isn’t because I have a rooting interest in disarray on one side and against it on the other. It’s because the stuff on the right is substantive and risky, and the stuff on the left is about DNC emails, a cartoonish caricature of Hillary Clinton and (now) Tim Kaine, and it carries no risk whatsoever but comes from a deeply oblivious place of unconscious privilege.
On a deeper level, on the level of intellectuals at least, the right is already taking this election off, while the left is merely pretending or threatening to do so out of some combination of leverage-seeking and genuine ideological petulance.
I have more respect for people whose whole career depends on feeding the right’s appetite for partisanship who go on the record as absolutely not supporting Trump under any circumstances than I do for people who are trying to fatten their member lists by feeding lefty outrage.
I doubt there are more than a half a dozen people at DFA who will fail to vote for Clinton, but they can’t take a single action without being judged on how many new members or donations that action produces. The perverse incentives make committed, idealistic, and genuinely good people do really stupid and insulting things. I know, I worked in that world for a year, and it was depressing to have everything we tried to do fed through a potential-for-outrage metric.
In my blogging, I’ve never chased page-views that way, but I observed many others have at least temporary success with it. It makes money and builds lists, which is why it is done. But it winds up being a sucker’s game. No one gets into politics to build lists. No one becomes a writer in order to figure out how to exploit people’s frustrations in the most self-interested way.
And the readers?
It’s true that some of you are rage-a-holics. You’re our best customers and our worst commenters. But, most of you want something genuine that you can’t so easily get from the corporate media.
If we fail to deliver on that, sooner or later you are going to catch on.
People can do whatever they like, but I’m not wasting any of my time trying to explain why our most vulnerable people shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of your disappointment.
