It's About Linking and Money

I don't have as much time or ability to comment on The Blindspot, by Freddie deBoer, as I would like. I've already praised it; it doesn't need more, and I'll have to limit my comments to two short points.

First, the comments saying "Klein has beliefs! Yglesias has beliefs! They just focus on the policies that are possible!" are a bit wrongheaded.  Those things are undoubtedly true. Where the problem lies is that neoliberals like Klein and Yglesias only really pay attention to arguments coming from the center-left and the right. They don't link to anybody who's really to their left, they don't discuss anybody to their left, and therefore they don't acknowledge the existence of anybody to their left. This has been a constant problem online that has everything to do with the sheer multitude of voices. You can't read it all, and you can't even read most of it; so it becomes too easy to focus on a few quick, convenient sources.

That isn't even necessarily a problem. If those sources are doing a good job of being curators of opinion—which is the ultimate role of the vast majority of political bloggers—then they'll be exposed to a variety of opinions simply because of the nature of the network. The problem comes when all the big voices are all paying attention to the same voices, and rarely (if ever) venture outside of that reservation to see what everybody else is saying. This is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it's the oldest problem with blogging, and has only been exacerbated by the rise of social networking tools as blogging substitutes. Echo chambers are a constant menace.

Secondly, you can't understand this issue without having also read The Rise of the New Global Elite. Money is speech. The Supreme Court ruled it so, it has reaffirmed it over and over again, and it's almost certainly going to keep doing so. In a country—and on a planet—hurtling headlong towards a plutonomy where the vast majority of wealth and income are in the hands of an ever-shrinking minority of the ultra-wealthy, that is naturally going to mean that speech is in the hands of that tiny minority as well.

deBoer hits on this when he talks about market fundamentalist libertarians and their outsized influence, but it isn't the thrust of the article and I think that misses the point. People who sell their ability to write and speak as their stock in trade—people like Klein and Yglesias, to get back to them—are almost inevitably going to have to sell that ability to the beneficiaries of the plutonomy because there's nobody else to sell it to. Speech is money, and we all know who has the money.

That sharply curtails their flexibility. Sure, they can advocate for progressive social policy and maybe even slightly progressive economic and taxation policy. But an out-and-out assault on the economic foundations of America? Hell no. Even acknowledging that such a thing is advocated could dry up the money spigots, and get you replaced by people whose morals, ethics, or lack of such more perfectly serve the interests of the guy who's ponying up the dough.  Sure, deBoers points out the outsized influence of outlets like Reason has to do with the money behind them, but he never brings up the fact that the money behind them is in the hands of self-interested, self-serving billionaires.

This isn't "libertarians" buying speech; this is the plutonomy perpetuating its interests by showering convenient people with money. And, yes, that is harmful to the American public discourse. But since the American members of that "global elite" demonstrated that they couldn't give a rat's ass about their fellow Americans at gunpoint, I doubt that matters much to them. Money is speech no matter where you're from.

deBoer did a follow-up entry that said he was being deliberately provocative. Fine. That's the OTHER, non-curatorial job of the blogger. But there's one thing that I did want to actually quote and response to.

I am sorry, though, for the Twitter ugliness. To put it succinctly, some conservatives were taking gratuitous swipes at the post on public Twitter feeds. I responded in an update to the post. Some people felt, for some odd reason, that this was out of bounds. But, look-- people were talking trash on public Twitter feeds. So I talked back. If you don't protect your tweets, they're public. Twitter is a public forum. It's not passing notes in biology class. I understand why people get bent out of shape about this, and it's why I fucking hate Twitter: it turns everybody cliquey. It's public, but gated through the following system, and it encourages a situation where people look to their in group to back them up in a kind of weird public/private fusion.

I wholeheartedly agree. Twittering is a form of blogging. It's public. You can dial up anybody's Twitter page and read the lot of it. The fact that's short-form blogging doesn't change that.  That's one of the reasons I get a bit annoyed with all that "death of blogging" nonsense. Blogging never went away. It's just that, for many, it got shorter and faster.
For many people, that's an improvement. But sometimes you need something beefier, and I still believe that Freddie deBoer's work demonstrates just how important it is.

The Blindspot

This piece by  Freddie deBoer on the milquetoast, capitulation-happy people who dominate the "left" in blogging today, and how its membership excludes opinions that are actually leftist, isn't just good. It isn't just great. It's ASTONISHING. Even if you disagree with it, it's one of the best pieces of long-form personal essay-writing I've read this year.  It's a rich, meaty smack in the face to those who argue that "blogging is dead" by reminding people what the hell it was always about.

I may have more to say later. But I'll tell you two things: Freddie is going on the blogroll RIGHT NOW,  and I don't have the faintest clue what the hell happened to Matthew Yglesias, either.

Site Upgrade

Okay, after reading other people complain about the comment system that Haloscan's moved to, I've decided to both upgrade this thing and clean out the Haloscan comments at the same time. Blog will probably be wonky for a while thanks to the upgrade. Comments may be down: but you can mail me here if necessary. Blogroll may be down as well, but I'll be replacing the entries shortly.

Edit: Or not? Have to admit to being somewhat impressed with how Blogger handled the transition. Regardless, I'll probably be messing about with this for a while.

And, yes, it's brown now. I still prefer the look of light-on-dark. But this template will do for the moment.

Re-Edit: Also fixed up the links. Anybody who wants to be added, email me the link and I'll look at it. One of the nice parts about having switched is that I don't have to hand-code the links anymore. Adding them shouldn't be an issue.

"Favorite Books"

Ezra Klein linked to me while opining on books that influenced his thinking, since blogs feature as much as books in his thought.

Much of my emphasis on the institutions of American government and the processes by which they work (or don't) came from my relationship with Mark Schmitt, first through his blog and then through his editorship at the American Prospect. That was cemented, of course, by reporting deeply on health-care reform, which is an opportunity that TAP gave me but that few other outlets would've been even mildly interested in letting me pursue. I consider reading the blogger Demosthenes use the word "props" in relation to politics as something near to an epiphany; it was the first time I realized that I could speak about Washington in a language I recognized.

Before I say anything else, I'd like to point out the box to the right that describes where all this comes from. That "no further connection" is something that I take quite seriously; my opinions have almost nothing to do with any fictional characters or their authors, and I have never claimed otherwise. It's all about pseudonymity, and the importance of clear pseudonymity. The character of Demosthenes did affect my thinking in that respect, and still does, since said character predicted a lot of the strengths (and weaknesses) of pseudonymous opinion journalism.

In fact, if anything, my opinions have been reconfirmed. The conflict between public and private interest has become as much of an issue for bloggers as for other journalists. Perhaps even more so, since bloggers are often trusted as much as (or more than) journalists since they're writing as citizens, instead of elites. What's handy about an obvious pseudonym is that it's actually quite difficult to exploit it to benefit yourself. Sure, you could theoretically attack someone behind a wall of anonymity, but nobody has any reason to trust you, unless you can bring solid proof to bear. You can't hide behind your organization, nor your profession. You are no expert, and in fact cannot be an expert, since you can't prove your expertise. Even if you succeed, you can only benefit indirectly at best. You can't put a pseudonym on a resume, and you sure as hell can't leverage it into a spot at the Washington Post.

So that's why I still think pseudonymity is important. You'll never be inducted as a member of the "village" as a pseudonymous opinion writer. You remain forever an outsider. You won't go to the cocktail parties. You won't drink at the insider bars. You won't attend the events. You won't get the plum administration positions. All you can do is read, and write, and think, and try to communicate your thoughts and beliefs as best you can.

But maybe that's enough.

"Buy a one-way bus ticket to any city and be poor there."

You know why I embraced Mark Ames' very personal attack on "Jane Galt", Megan McArdle, when others were whining about how it was mean? Because, as digby reminds us four years ago today she wrote shit like this:
(as quoted on Corrente)

“It seems to me that the poor should have had the EASIEST time leaving. They don't need to pay for an extended leave from their home, they could have just packed a few belongings and walked away to start over somewhere else. What did they have to lose?

When the wealthy evacuate, they leave behind nice houses, expensive cars, possibly pets that they treat as members of the family, valuable jewelry, family heirlooms, etc. This makes it emotionally difficult for wealthy people to leave. But by definition, the poor do not have this burden: they either rent their homes, or they are in public housing; their cars are practically junk anyway; and they don't have any valuable possessions. This is what it means to be poor. These people could just pick up their few belongings, buy a one-way bus ticket to any city and be poor there. Supposing they even had jobs in NO, it's not like minimum wage jobs are hard to come by.”

This is not some random douche. This woman has a comfortable sinecure at the Atlantic Monthly. This woman has been embraced by the media establishment.

Hell with THEM, too.

Dowd: Still Terrible

Whatzisname was gabbling on about how amazing this one piece by Maureen Dowd, she of the famed Clenis obsession, was on the nature of the Internet. So I gave MoDo a read, against my better judgment, hoping against hope that it wasn't just due to his apparent desire to drop SLAPP suits on everybody in sight.

No such luck.

The column is about that model who sued a blogger for calling her a skank. Seems a bit of an overreaction: I got called a megalomaniac once, and I hadn't even dreamed sued anybody, but MoDo was inspired by it. Why? Well, for the same reason anybody with a bully pulpit gets inspired by unmasking bloggers: because they want to bully, and they've got the money, connections, and power to do it.

(Whatzisname himself loved this one line about how the Internet is full of angry drunks, but screwed up the attribution. He handed credit to MoDo when she was pretty clearly quoting Leon Wieseltier. Leon is an editor at The New Republic—that's the "liberal" publication notorious for shouting down Iraq-war-reluctant liberals and progressives. Leon himself is one of those I-supported-the-Iraq-war-but-not-Bush types. So take it for what it's worth.)

The column itself is incoherent, though. Take a look at this bit:

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

Absolutely! Well put!

But look what preceded it:

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

And what follows it:

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

What the hell is she on about? She answered her own question. What is the "mentality" of the pseudonymous? The same "mentality" of those people she named. Were people like the Federalists and revolutionaries and dissidents "shredding somebody's character...and not being held accountable?" Yes, but they did it for reasons that she herself found laudible! So clearly she thinks that it must be valid some of the time. What's the dividing line? When are we being "constructive" and when are we being "cowardly"?

She doesn't say. She probably doesn't know. Even if she did, who is she to tell the rest of us? The rights of privacy and expression that she (and whatzisname) hold in contempt are not intended to protect her. She has lots of well-paid people to do that for her. They're for everybody else. They're for the people without high-priced lawyers, or independent wealth, or powerful allies.

They aren't for modern nomenklatura like MoDo, or whatzisname, or Wieseltier. They're for us. They're to protect us. That's probably a idealistic attitude, but it bears repeating.

The threat is not those who would exercise their rights. The threat is those who would take them away.

"The flattery that you're 'connected' can bring out the late Bob Novak in anyone"

That quote is from a very interesting, if dispiriting, piece from Harry Shearer on how the Obama White House isn't doing enough for New Orleans.

I say I might try one more time to reach out to Axelrod himself. "Don't bother with Rahm Emanuel or Axelrod," he advised. Why? "Their only interest in all of this is destroying Bobby" -- a reference to the state's fast-talking Republican governor and possible 2012 Presidential candidate Bobby Jindal.

"You mean, the same way that the Bush crowd only cared about destroying Kathleen Blanco?" I asked. His smile was part-rueful, part-"It's never too late to get wise, bud".

On Sunday, six days before the fourth anniversary of the catastrophe that almost drowned New Orleans, President Obama gave an "exclusive" interview to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. If you want to hear it for yourself, go here. Along the way, he dropped a little message: Janet Woodka's office would be allowed to expire at the end of next month.

Experiment officially over. To be clear, I'm not upset I wasn't treated like a celebrity or given ego-satisfying access. Frankly, the inside game creeps me out, the flattery that you're "connected" can bring out the late Bob Novak in anyone. I'm just angry that New Orleans, which did not bring about its own disaster, is watching a second consecutive president trash his glib promises to "rebuild it better".

Not exactly heartwarming stuff. But that bit about access says a lot.

See, Tom Ridge revealed a little while ago that the Department of Homeland Security had been manipulating its "terrorism level" system for political ends. That's caused a firestorm of controversy, because a lot of us had been shouting from the rooftops about how that was happening, and were either ignored or mocked for being "Bush haters". Vindication! Surely, now, the media would relent!

Not so much. No, here's how Marc Ambinder, proud avatar of the Washington consensus reacted:

Journalists, including myself, were very skeptical when anti-Bush liberals insisted that what Ridge now says is true, was true. We were wrong. Our skepticism about the activists' conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence.

This bought him a withering response from the people who had called it. All of them asked "why is it that journalists are so willing to make the ridiculous 'right for the wrong reasons' argument about their opponents and defend themselves as 'wrong for the right reasons'"? Even people who are reasonably progressive fall into this trap. Glenn says it's about access, and certainly that's a part of it.

But I think the quote from Shearer above has a role to play too. People are never quite sure whether they're right or wrong. You define "right" and "wrong" within a social environment. But journalists want to be listened to. They want to be 'connected'. They want to be, well, popular. Even if you're quite cognizant of all this, you can still be affected by it. If you're surrounded by people who manifestly know more about the issues than you do—the lot of any Washington journalist these days—then why not defer to them? They're "connected". You're "connected". You're part of their tribe. They're part of your tribe. That is what's important. Not "right" or "wrong"; that's just a matter of opinion.

(You don't even have to be a bad person. Shearer is a great man. He's fighting for a great cause. But even he is tempted to trade on his celebrity to gain inside access.)

So people like Krugman and Greenwald aren't being attacked because they were right, any more than they were being attacked for being wrong. Those things are irrelevant. They're being attacked because their arguments signify that they are Other. They aren't part of your little family. They aren't connected. Like the "gamma girls" that Media Whores Online wrote about so long ago, they don't even necessarily want to be. So they're fair game, and people like Ambinder will call them names in order to show just how loyal they are.

Even when they apologize, though, as Ambinder eventually did, the bits that aren't rescinded still show what's going on:

And yet -- we, too, weren't privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.

This is just ridiculous. As Paul Krugman pointed out, he had every reason to doubt the Bush administration's pronouncements. In fact, he had very little reason to defer to them. But defer he does, because he is surrounded by "experts" that he's evidently too ignorant to question, in a community he desperately, desperately wants to belong to.

When he apologizes for that, I'll pay attention.

Edit: You should observe the latest apology, and what follows it. He's not really sorry for his description of the left. He's sorry he got caught out on it, and about "using the wrong words", as if there were right ones to express that ridiculous train of thought.

But look at this:

Both Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler have written posts eviscerating me for contending that Bush-hatred, not anything else, drove skepticism among liberals about the terrorist threat warnings. They've both written good posts, really; lawyerly, passionate and persuasive, over the top, at times, but they've given me a lot to think about. (One post is better than the other, but I won't say which one.)

They haven't changed my mind, but they've certainly modified my conclusion. I didn't spend enough time thinking about what I wanted to say. Incidentally, if I am a symbol of everything that is wrong in journalism, then I suggest they are both giving me WAY too much credit.

The bolded bit is mine, and it raises a simple question. Why, in an apology of all things, does Ambinder think that he's in any position to determine what is a "good" post and what isn't? He's apologizing for being a terrible writer! Why would a terrible writers think he gets to play judge and jury on the works of good writers like Greenwald and Wheeler!

Because he thinks of them as Outsiders, thinks of himself as an Insider, and believes that it's the Insiders that get to judge. That's why his "apology" is utterly meaningless. He'll talk about the past failings of "journalists", seeking safety in numbers and in the passage of time. And he'll admit to saying what he thinks badly. But he's never, ever going to admit that he came to the wrong conclusion. That might threaten his status.

As for that following post... look at this snippet:

The White House seems to have a back-up strategy and is openly embracing budget reconciliation. What Jay Rosen calls the Church of the Savvy -- that is, us media elite types -- say that reconciliation isn't possible, likely, or feasible.

Oh, Ambinder wants so badly to be one of the "savvy elites". Look beyond the watery veneer of irony, and you actually see the desperation there. He wants it so bad he can practically taste it. He wants it so bad that we can taste it.

I don't buy that Ambinder's sorry for a damned thing. He won't change his thoughts, won't change his actions, and has already gone back to the standard fare of vaguely-hidden shots at Those Filthy Hippies who said his Washington buddies were full of it.

Fear not, O Republican Elites. Robert Novak may be gone, but clearly a bumper crop of Douchebags For Liberty are jostling to take his place.

Netroots Nation

I'm not at Netroots Nation-

(well, as far as any of you know)

...but I do support their aims and goals. And I do look forward to the video coverage.

Find Your Own Damned Pony

Canadian opinion journalism is almost universally terrible.

No, sorry, it is. There are exceptions, but by and large they're buried under a feculant mound of blowhards, faux-populists, "political strategists" who do little more than copy ancient American talking points, and Christie Blatchfords.

There's a reason I rarely bother quoting them. For all that I castigate whatzisname—and justifiably so, considering his apparent adoration of British libel law of all things—at least he's vaguely engaging, and counts himself among their bloggers, who are actually a fair bit more interesting. (James Curran's brand of somewhat disillusioned Liberalism come to mind. As does Jen Smith. Or Calgrit, but that's obvious.)

But man, sometimes you read something from an opinion journalist that just blows your head off:

[I]n certain quarters of the progressive media, commentators are bruiting over the possibility of Fascism in America. One thing about the Yankee left — no matter how hard they dig there is never a pony hiding under their particular pile of shit. Eight months after electing the most progressive candidate to even think about the White House since George McGovern, suddenly Fascism is on the march. And the Republicans are just discombobulated enough to provide fuel for the phony fire.

You be a bit confused. See, nobody who had actually read Sara Robinson's magisterial article on fascism would say this. They'd know that she was drawing on impeccable sources, made logical analogies, and had been published on a site that is absolutely authoritative on the subject among American liberals and progressives. If it's on Orcinus, you can take it seriously.

Even if it weren't on Orcinus, you could also look at how it was posted on the website of the Campaign for America's Future. Which makes sense, as she's a Fellow there. Yet here's Mr. Bell, citing "certain quarters" and linking to Truthout, in a brazen and obvious attempt to paint Ms. Robinson as a nutter.

Perhaps he might be justified if he could point to anything in the substance of the post. But he didn't. He didn't quote Robinson, as I did him. He didn't summarize Robinson. He didn't rebut Robinson, because rebuttal requires that you demonstrate the vaguest familiarity with the subject.

In fact, Douglas Bell has given us absolutely no reason to believe he read word ONE of what Robinson wrote.

You may ask "why on earth wouldn't he?" You may ask "why on earth would he pull such a dishonest ploy"? You may ask "why on earth would he spend the rest of the article taking shots at Americans that care about their politics, instead of babbling about 'silly seasons'"?

You may ask "why on earth would he possibly think he could get away with this?"

Why?

Canadian opinion journalism is almost universally terrible.

"Jane Galt" Truly Revealed!

HAH! Oh boy is this too good.

Mark Ames just penned an expose on Megan McArdle, my old "friend" "Jane Galt". Far from the Libertarian hero she's portrayed herself as, it turns out that Ames has revealed a person who has benefited, from beginning to end, from public largess. Why? Well, meet her dad:

Megan McArdle is the daughter of one Francis X. McArdle, who built his career as a public servant in the New York City administration, then moved over to the private side, where he could leverage his contacts with the government -- and finally moved back onto the public payroll in 2006, when Mr. McArdle was appointed by then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to advise the federal government how public funds should be spent, and on whom. Earlier this year, Mr. McArdle was reportedly in Albany lobbying the New York state government for a job as the "stimulus czar," appropriating President Obama's federal spending money.

Megan was born in 1973, a few years after Francis got his big fat job on the public payroll in the New York City administration, where he stayed for 11 years. Among the first big jobs Megan's daddy took while climbing up the public payroll career ladder were jobs as Inspector General for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, and Director of Program Budget for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

So Megan McArdle's entry into this world was literally greased by taxpayer funds. But of course, it wouldn't stop there.

Francis McArdle, rose up the Big Government ranks in the New York city. His public-funded career reached its peak in 1978 when then-Mayor Ed Koch named him as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where he served until 1981. That job put McArdle in control of all sorts of public works: water supply, waste water, sewage infrastructure. It's kind of fitting that McArdle's privileged childhood was funded by taxpayer's shit and urine -- a Freudian might say that this is the source of her inexplicable hatred of the same Big Government that pissed dollars and shat gold on the McArdle household.

Megan's dad moved from the public sector overseeing public works to a job with real estate developer Olympia & York -- just in time to take advantage of the huge Battery Park City project that Olympia & York was developing under contract. The success of the project relied on huge taxpayer subsidies -- at least $65 million in 1981 dollars -- as well as major public works projects to make the development attractive, including the disastrous Westway road project, which drained at least $85 million of federal subsidies until it was finally mothballed in the mid-80s, due to environmental concerns and public protests -- the kinds of protesters whom grown-up Megan McArdle would later attack. No matter, though, because by the time the Westway was canceled and all that public money was wasted, Olympia & York, Megan's daddy's company, had catapulted into one of the top real estate moguls in the world, and Megan's daddy was ready to move on to even bigger things.

In 1985, F. X. McArdle had moved from the private sector to a position that Megan understands better than any other: a lobbyist who manipulates Big Government on behalf of private companies. Francis X. McArdle was named to head the General Contractor's Association of New York. He stayed in that lucrative position for the next 20 years.

So. Her dad was a public servant who cashed in on the private side, and then made even bigger bucks as a lobbyist. Our heroic libertarian individualist is the daughter of a wealthy lobbyist.

It doesn't stop there, though:

Megan showed how much she owes to her dad's way of doing business when she admitted in a blog post that she owes her success to personal contacts "I sent out about 1400 resumes blind after my firm failed. I got not one response. All the jobs I interviewed for came from personal contacts."

We learn just how useful these personal contacts are for Megan McArdle thanks to a gushing profile on her published in early 2007 in a rightwing magazine called "Doublethink" -- put out by a corporate-funded advocacy group with ties to Tom Delay and Cato, whose mission is to "identify and develop future conservative and libertarian leaders." In the profile, we learn that Megan's first job in 2001, after graduating from the University of Chicago's graduate business program as a committed Ayn Rand libertarian, was canceled due to the market drop in 2001. So instead of flipping burgers to make ends meet, the libertarian moved back home into her parents' Upper West Side digs -- a home that taxpayer money helped to fund. There, in the hard knocks of the Upper West Side, the 28-year-old MBA seethed in libertarian anger at all the welfare queens and wasteful government spending programs she saw all around her. But it wasn't until bin Laden created an opportunity that Megan finally got a job -- as an "executive copy girl" for a post-9/11 cleanup crew near the site of the WTC. It was exactly the sort of job that those "personal contacts" can help you get in the "byzantine" world of construction in NYC.

It was at this time, living in her parent's swank Manhattan pad and working a job in her daddy's line of business, that Megan McArdle's blogging career as a right-wing libertarian crusader was born.

Instead of admitting that she got her first job thanks to daddy's shady connections with the corrupt construction trades, Megan pretended that she took the WTC-cleanup job as a sort of personal penance, a gift to the people of her stricken city: "[I}t was easier to bear it all than it would be working somewhere else, and worrying, and unable to do anything about it." Really Megan, you shouldn't have born that cross for us.

There's a lot more there about the Atlantic Monthly, which I'll leave aside, since it is the former employer of Matthew Yglesias, a blogger I still respect.

And, honestly, the quality of an argument is not dependent on the identity and nature of the author. This whole enterprise of mine here would be somewhat silly if I didn't believe that. I could have just gone eponymous like the aforementioned Yglesias. I didn't, and that was for a reason.

So, instead, I'll say that this is more instructive than anything else. it's about a key problem with modern opinion journalism, which is that far, far too many people in that business are in it because of being born to the right people and belonging to the right class, instead of due to skill, talent, and insight. They are wealthy and secure enough that they don't have to worry about the economic repercussions of what they have to say; yet somehow almost inevitably spout conclusions that support the wealthy and powerful, because that's who they identify with.

And, yes, the "libertarians" tend to be the worst, because they don't understand and don't recognize the structures that placed them where they are. They want to think the best of themselves, they want to think that they're responsible for their success, so they adopt an ideology that lets them do that. It's understandable, sure, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should fall sway to that same ideology. Yet precisely because it's so convenient, they're the ones with the bullhorns, at least on "economic" issues.

I see this in a number of the defences out there, too. John Carney's rant about how "ugly" the Ames piece is ignores the privilege that he enjoyed as the son of a successful antitrust lawyer. (I have little sympathy for it anyway, considering how "ugly" the results of the policies both Carney and McArdle advocate, but regardless.) Ezra Klein posted a more thoughtful response, but again misses the point that it's McArdle's privilege that is the point here, and the incoherence of her ideological advocacy in light of that privilege.

And that's all assuming that she makes utterly impersonal, completely logical and rational arguments. But she doesn't. Her blogs have always been peppered with autobiographical details that are supposed to support her claims, and I remember "Jane Galt" constantly appealing to her authority as some kind of economic expert. She isn't, and has been roundly castigated for that already- but if you want to appeal to your personal authority, you're fair game, because it's your credibility that's at question here.

(That's also not getting into the hypocrisy of the right complaining about personal attacks. Seen her birth certificate lately?)

For all that his column may be uncomfortably personal, Ames has delivered an explosive broadside to McArdle's credibility. And considering how much he's written on privilege in America, it makes a lot of sense. "Ugly" or no.

Wingers!

The thread is barely relevant, but I did like this one comment in it:

Boing Boing's a high-visibility weblog. There are a lot of sullen, disappointed right-wingers out there who miss the old days, when they had jolly times smashing the shop windows of the early liberal blogosphere. Some of them are fixated on Boing Boing as the uppity liberal enemy that must be suppressed.

This is middling bizarre of them, seeing as how Boing Boing isn't primarily a political weblog. It's very effective at focusing on the political issues it does pursue, but it isn't all politics all the time. I suspect that's what actually brings in the wingnuts: unlike weblogs like Firedoglake or Hullabaloo or Daily Kos, Boing Boing's entries can be understood (more or less) by someone who isn't up on current events, and who never learned the song about how a bill becomes a law.

(I think that's why we have so much trouble with commenters who misunderstand Cory's take on the realities of copyright law. As a rule of thumb, just about everyone thinks they're an expert on art, sex, traffic laws, popular music, and copyrights, and just about everyone is mistaken. I can't vouch for their adherence to the rest of the rule, but when it comes to copyrights, these guys are definitely not an exception.)

If you want to see how much they distort the local discourse, look at the difference between a thread on global warming and one on some other complex scientific subject. These guys get their talking points dished out to them by the source feed right-wing weblogs. This means that if global warming comes up, they swarm the comment thread because they know something they can say. But if an entry's about some scientific development that isn't covered in their spoon-fed talking points, they're at a loss, and so that thread will instead be full of science buffs discussing the actual entry...

...I've done my time and then some on Usenet. If learning to moderate online forums is like studying trolls and demons, then hanging out on Usenet is like living in Sunnydale: if you survive long enough, you'll eventually come up against one of every kind of monster -- and after a while, your reaction will change to "Bored now."

Fun! And true. Usenet is the best inoculation for trolling winger idiots, and it's kind of sad that it's almost completely deprecated now. Web forums and blogs are very nice, but they just aren't the same.

One thing, though; I seem to recall the early liberal blogosphere being more inclined towards ruining the right-wingers' day, if only because they were so used to having the conversation to themselves, they were quite enraged at these tenacious little liberal bastards who Would. Not. Go. Away. I completely agree that the winger legions have never quite forgiven the liberal blogosphere for becoming bigger, better, and more vital than theirs, though.

(HT? ML.)

Eugene on Bloggers' Irrelevance

the Kos Krew is pretty uncomfortably aware of how much power they demonstrated that they DON'T have when that whole FISA debacle happened. One of the Kos diarists, eugene, talks about the "disconnect":

Watching both of these from afar, I am struck by the disconnect between the two - how at one moment our movement has been given a powerful sense of validation through the experience of Yearly Kos, as presidential candidates came to pay homage and as bloggers came to continue the work of building a new, open, left politics; and how at the other moment, we were completely powerless to stop our Democrats from selling out yet another one of our rights, from giving Bush even more unaccountable and unconstitutional power.

He goes on:

This seems to be at the heart of the disconnect. This year's Yearly Kos seems to have shown that in Democratic campaigns, the netroots are a welcome part of the process. Maybe it's merely because the establishment sees us as an ATM, or because they genuinely believe we wield influence beyond our numbers, or some combination of the two. Although it is quite an accomplishment to have the Democratic candidates appear at Yearly Kos seeking our approval, it seems that's all they seek of us.

I grow concerned that our success is increasingly being limited and confined to campaign politics. It's as if the DC Dems are saying to us "help us get elected, but don't expect us to listen to you once we win." We have not yet developed any effective means of changing their behavior - and really, that is what we really want from them. We want them to stop hoarding the gunpowder and start using it...

The rest is about Democratic policy differences; while interesting, it doesn't really address the central problem. Bloggers have indeed gone up in the world: from being seen as irrelevant, to being seen as a campaign resource. They're seen as a special interest group: to be pandered to when you need volunteers and cash, but they're ignored between elections. (Kinda like labor.)

Now, eugene has a good grasp of the situation, but there's a question not addressed, not really: if the Dems don't listen to them between elections, who DO they listen to? And why? A HUGE discussion followed, and like many Kos comment threads, little was new and what was new wasn't true. Yes, yes, they listen to corporations, but again, why? Corps donate cash, sure, but so do bloggers, and bloggers are the best bundlers around these days. Indeed, that's WHY they're so popular; one of the reasons for the shift away from pseudonymous, policy-based blogging to real-name "netrooting" is because a pseudonym can't bundle, and Kos figured out a while ago that that's where a lot of power comes from. Politicians like money, and Kos can channel it.

So if it isn't campaign cash, what IS it all about? Leaving aside the conspiracy theories and "RepubliCrats" and everything else, and leaving aside the natural tendency towards listening to those you see every day and ignoring the random voice in the wilderness that is your typical blog, who are they listening to? And why aren't bloggers part of that group.

I'm not sure, but I can suggest one thing that has really taken the sails out of Kos' "storming the gates": Lieberman. Power comes from the ability to build, but it also comes from the ability to destroy. I hate to say it, but there need to be consequences for pissing them off. Kos almost managed to drive that point home in Connecticut, but he ran up against an extraordinarily powerful campaign machine and the Republican party's willingness to support its pet "Democrat".

Had he taken Lieberman down, Kos would be one hell of a lot more respected and powerful than he is right now; all bloggers would be. The Dems would get the message that pissing off their base is as disastrous as it is for Republicans. (And it is. Republicans live in fear of their base.) Instead, they got the message that while bringing the bloggers onside is nice and maybe even necessary, ticking them off doesn't carry any serious consequences.

And, yes, the whole "nobody cares what they're writing" problem matters too. The reason why CATO/Heritage/AEI enjoy power on the Republican side isn't just that they're farms for Republican policymakers, but because they can get things published that make it sound like Scholars think you're an idiot and a danger to America. Sure, anybody who knows anything about these organizations knows that you shouldn't listen to AEI, but meanwhile they're all over the television, they're prompting dozens of opinion editorials, getting emailed all over the place, and are going to end up on your opponent's campaign literature.

That's why partisan think tanks EXIST. They provide the imprimatur of scholarly legitimacy on partisan attacks and defenses. Academia can't do that, "leftist" as it is. Issues-based think tanks try to avoid it, as it hurts their issue. The partisan shops, though? It's the entire reason they exist, and at this point they're very good at it.

And, yes, bloggers could do it too, if they were given any legitimacy. Unfortunately, since Kos and co. are treating bloggers as a loud mob, the actual writings don't have much (any?) legitimacy, and aren't listened to. They're just more fodder; a community-building activity at best.

In the meantime, though, as a community, they need to stop and think about how and why Democratic decisionmaking takes place.

And if it is because they're cowards?

Then the bloggers need to give the Dems a reason to fear THEM.

Liberal Bloggers: Unappreciated and Unimportant?

(Update: thanks to Progressive Gold for the link.)

So, at least according to one writer, Bloggers' power ain't what it used to be. Ben Smith at the Politico writes:

Officials of the Democratic campaigns, meanwhile, speak about the Netroots with a new relief and distance.

“Guys like Jerome and Markos -- I look on them like state legislators,” said a senior aide from a different presidential campaign... “They have constituents who matter, but they don’t really matter themselves.”"

Story's more complex than that, but that's what it boils down to: the Washington crew aren't really that enamored of even the big bloggers, and bloggers are lacking the kind of leverage that really gets Washington's attention.

Obama is especially wary:

Obama, alone among the Democratic candidates, hasn’t hired high-profile bloggers or engaged his campaign in their fights -- a move consistent with his strategy of avoiding traditional Democratic constituency politics, and of delivering a similar, universal message to a variety of constituencies.

Instead, Obama has channeled the energy around his campaign to creating an alternative online base of support on My.BarackObama.com. As others courted YearlyKos by battling O’Reilly, Obama offered convention guests a handy, apolitical guide to Chicago.

Obama still remains popular among the site’s rank and file, who are in other ways typical Obama voters -- younger and more educated than your average Democrat. But his persistence in casting himself as a bipartisan figure, and of reaching out to Republicans, has limited his appeal to the leaders of the liberal blogosphere.

“Obama has had the advantage on the war, and its ideological underpinnings, but he's not created any other credibility since then, and his lack of partisanship has given Clinton the advantage,” said [MyDD creator Jerome] Armstrong.

I can't say I disagree with Armstrong on Obama; he's a strong candidate, but when even Hillary Clinton is out-partisaning you, you've got a bit of a problem. Swing voters are nice and all, but if you lose your base, you aren't going to get to the general in the first place.

It's a little sad, actually. I'm convinced that one of the main reasons why blogs like DailyKos have been doing everything they can to become all-encompassing one-stop political sites is because they want to be big players. Markos, especially, seems bound and determined to be a big Democratic player, and doesn't care how many "diarists" are providing him with free content so long as this bigger goal is achieved. He clearly wants his site to be like the big Republican "institutes", or the DLC of old, that are absolutely part-and-parcel with the party itself.

The problem is that while having people provide your content for you is pretty much what "Web 2.0" is about, it doesn't necessarily mean that Markos is going to be seen as anything but a representative for his own community. They'll pander to him as much as they need to ensure that he keeps his people on-message and donating time and cash, but don't really care about anything his diarists write. DailyKos isn't like the "institutes": nothing the diarists or commentators write is being cited on television or in print, or really acknowledged by anybody outside the community. None of them are going to be talking heads on television, and while some may have books, they aren't going to be pushed like the right's think-tank stuff. It seems to have stalled as being seen as a "community", nothing more.

(Not surprising: a lot of the "netroots" seemed to stop paying attention to the actual generation and discussion of ideas back in 2004 or so, and for all their faults that's what think tanks and instututes and the like are for. If Kos et al don't care about anything other than scooping up as many bodies as possible under the label "Kossack", not caring about what they've got to say, then why on earth should the Dem leadership?)

What's ironic about all this is that the hat tip goes to Chris Bowers, considering his desperate attempts to seperate the top-tier bloggers from the hoi palloi. Apparently, it hasn't worked. The hoi palloi (in all their numbers) are apparently a lot more important than he is or anything he writes. He claims that...

In the end, it seems that Smith's means of measuring blogosphere influence is how scared insider and establihsment types are of the blogosphere. Frankly, I think that is a pretty immautre appreciation of the situation. If the only thing we had the power to do was scare people in the establihsment, then the blogosphere would never change from the way it operated circa 2003. However, the progressive blogosphere has grown twenty times larger since 2003, making change both inevitable and necessary. It is almost as though Smith is saying "I liked the blogosphere's earlier albums, before they got popular and sold out."

This is a terrible misread of what the article was saying. The point Smith is making is that bloggers are only seen as bodies; that what they write simply doesn't matter. That isn't a function of the size of the blogosphere, and sure as hell isn't "I liked the blogosphere's earlier albums". It's they aren't listening to you anymore, and they aren't interested in what you have to say, because you don't appear to be interested in anything anybody else is saying either. You aren't another voice in a debate, or even a chorus; instead, you're just another schmuck to exploit.

It's not that they've stopped "fearing" you. It's that they've stopped paying attention to what you have to say. And, yes, that's far worse.