Ideology and the Left Blogosphere (19 Jan 2011)

This post by Freddie deBoer about the rightward drift of ostensibly left-wing bloggers names names and has generated a lot of responses. DeBoer writes that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere, both intentionally and not, while those writing within it congratulate themselves for having answered all left-wing criticism." That's not to say you can't find socialists and the like blogging here and there; it's just that the conversation-defining pundits online don't read them or respond to them. Instead there is a Potemkin left wing made up of moderates. "The nominal left of the blogosphere is almost exclusively neoliberal," deBoer argues. It subscribes to "the general paternalistic neoliberal policy platform, where labor rights are undercut everywhere for the creation of economic growth (that 21st century deity), and then, if things go to plan, wealth is redistributed from the top to those whose earnings and quality of life have been devastated by the attack on labor." Some of the prominent moderates may have begun further left, but career incentives have driven them to the neoliberal line, which secures "professional entitlement" in punditry circles.

The gist of his critique is that unless you are willing to assent to the broad tenets of neoliberalism (antiunion, anti-regulation, pro-neoclassical economic interpretations, etc.) you are not regarded as an "adult" in American political discourse. "The neoliberal economic platform is enforced by the attitude that anyone embracing a left-wing critique of that platform is a Stalinist or a misbehaving adolescent," he writes. And sure enough, deBoer himself had his maturity questioned. DeBoer cites a few examples in his postscript, and today at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen, after referring to deBoer target Matt Yglesias by his first name only (an annoying trait of the consensus-sphere; as if we are all chums and should all automatically know who is being referring to) writes somewhat condescendingly:

Freddie deBoer seems to be very smart. I had never heard of him before, which I suppose means he is not extremely famous as a blogger. So let's see how he evolves when it comes to his critique that "labor rights are undercut everywhere for the creation of economic growth" in an ongoing debate with some people who know more about it than he does. he shows a much better rhetorical skill than he does an understanding of labor economics.

Whether or not you agree with that marketplace-of-ideas approach to credibility, it's worth considering whether it's appropriate to dismiss rhetorical skill so quickly. Part of what deBoer claims is that left-wing argument is dismissed out of hand as mere rhetoric as opposed to the more "pragmatic" arguments of neoliberals. Left-wingers spout ideology while neoliberals have "real" policy discussions. But "real policy" is constrained by the rhetorical climate that is allowed to prosper; empiricism doesn't occur in a ideological vacuum. Instead ideology dictates to some degree the terms of the "ongoing debate" Cowen mentions, and deBoer is pointing out how restrictive that ideology has been. Mike Konczal puts this well in his response:

deBoer thinks that policy wonks create solutions within the context of a neoliberal capitalism, solutions that reify the naturalness of the current economic order, and that ignore the real problems. These solutions broadly fight for scraps that are left over from what the elites divide up, and don’t address more fundamental problems existing within our economic order.

To overcome that "reified naturalness" requires explicitly ideological effort of the sort that conservatives have never been embarrassed to engage in, at various levels of Straussian deception and bad faith. Ideological vigor (preferably of the good faith, nondeceptive variety) is not the only thing the left needs, but it needs it to some degree, and that means allowing views further to the Left than Gerald Ford into the "adult" conversation.

It's interesting to compare that Cowen passage with one from a recent post by Steve Waldman, whose has been arguing against complacent technocracy for several months now.

The empirical evidence is clear. Ideology is malleable, over years and decades rather than generations and centuries. If you have to choose one — smart policy and indifference to ideology or sloppy policy and careful ideological work — you are better off choosing the latter.

Waldman makes the claim that ideology is "path-dependent" -- that is, what's currently hegemonic affects the scope of what can become ideologically persuasive in the future. After some game-theoretical analysis he concludes that the side that focuses on "rhetorical skill" will be able to shape the "ecosystem of constraints" that dictates future policy more than the side that regards ideological work as unnecessary or somehow disreputable. In a fitting piece of rhetorical jujitsu, Waldman accuses the tepid moderates and technocrats of immaturity:

It is childish, and wrong, to imagine that acknowledging the ideological aspects of one's work and self makes one less trustworthy or more dangerous than those whose work is equally ideological, but who mistake their ideology for objectivity or truth and who therefore deny any role for ideology. Many of history’s most dangerous ideologues have been “true believers”, and others have pretended a “scientific” perspective while advancing claims we now recognize as ideological. Being acted upon by, and acting upon, prevailing ideology are part of what it means to be human. It is not just the province of economists or policymakers, or a fabrication of Svengalis in the propaganda ministry. Nevertheless, politicians and economists and other “opinion leaders” probably do have disproportionate influence over ideological change. As far as I’m concerned, they (we) ought to be doing a better, more careful, and more conscious, job of it.

Doing policy or doing ideological propaganda is not an either-or proposition. To be effective, one arguably must do both, with as much rhetorical skill as possible. But the existing crypto-left instead seems to sacrifice ideology to get along career-wise in the neoliberal media world as it already stands, rather than take advantage of the internet's potential to build an alternative forum to subvert it.

Searching for inspiration (12 April 2010)

Sometimes I feel so uninspired. Or should I say, (Sometimes I Feel so) Uninspired.. Usually what happens when I feel this way is I begin driving myself with ever more relentlessness through posts in my RSS reader, looking for something to spark my interest. But what I always seem to forget in these moods is how many ideas and articles I have already set aside because I was too busy to deal with them at the time. I probably have dozens of things that I have either starred or shared in Google Reader, thinking I would write about them later here. And I have a stack of articles printed out as well that I have been meaning to read and write about. Yet when I am in this mood, I never feel like going back to that stuff. (Once I shelve something for later, I am essentially logged it for permanent limbo.) In fact, the essence of the mood seems to be a weariness with the backlog, a sense of futility, and a craving for some deus ex machina that will crank the wheel of my "creativity" without my having to do much of anything.

So I press forward it pursuit of novelty, because novelty seems to work that way -- as canned creativity. The freshness of some particular meme can generate a seemingly automatic response: "So and so recently wrote X about Y. I agree/disagree with X, but believe that one must also think about Y this way. Also consider what Z said about Y when responding to so and so as well." (In a post about the sudden outburst of journalistic cheerleading for the economy, Ryan Avent notes how this mentality among journalists can stampede them into manufacturing new received wisdom.) Novelty can stand in as a replacement for deliberation, can simulate the feeling of having thought something through, simply because it leaves a residue that's similar to what I gain after I've thought my way through to what seems to me a fresh synthesis or analysis. When I go to the stream of fresh new content, it is because I want to avoid having to think anything through but still yield the same reward. I think that is the danger inherent in novelty generally.

A corollary to this is that I generally need to immediately think of something interesting to write about something I read or else I won't bother. This also seems like a problem.

Death of the blogosphere (3 July 2009)

I found the weirdly joyous response by some of the most renowned bloggers to this interesting post about the death of the freewheeling blogosphere of old a little unseemly, an object lesson of what a small world that it is among them. They all seem to lament the loss of "charm" from blogging, since it is no longer a casual activity for them. Yes, they seem to collectively be saying, we were once young and foolish and not as professional as we should have been, but our social capital pulled through for us in the end. Our example proved that the blogosphere was nothing revolutionary, just a new tool for the ambitious to display their talents and make useful connections. It's sort of a bummer that all those new voices allegedly coming from outside the established power networks in America will continue to be ignored, but oh well! We are all paid pundits now!

Of course I don't blame them for professionalizing -- would that I were paid for blogging. But with professionalization comes all the customary ways in which the fantasy of "meritocracy" is thwarted, or rather, the fantasy that raw merit could triumph over a lack of soft-power skills -- cozying up to idols, self-promoting without being annoying, etc., etc. The promise of the blogosphere early on was that it was to provide a new path to the public sphere, a way for new voices to be heard. But instead it was just a new media for journalists to do their woodshedding. I think the idea that you could make it big in the blogopsphere was always a bit of a distortion, since those people who did make it big most likely would have succeeded in journalism anyway. What seemed to have happened is that the early bloggers formed a network and were able to help each other along into the establishment as they began to advance in their careers. In the past, those sort of networks would not unfold in a public forum, as they did in blogs with all the reciprocal links and log-rolling. If the charm is gone in a certain sector of the blogosphere, it's because the pretense that it's not an audition for big media punditry has been dropped.

Still, when Ezra Klein writes, "The blogosphere isn't thrumming with the joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years. And that's a shame. But the upside is that it's more careful. It reports and investigates and uncovers", he's mainly referring to his generation of analysts and journalists. I'm guessing he doesn't bother to read around much in the weird blog world that is certainly still out there (and I'm sure there is a lot of "charm" in the non-professional blogging and video making and so on happening online), because he has a responsibility to keep up with all the big league pundits and have opinions about them. Professional opinion makers who now write blog posts as part of their repertoire for their job are naturally going to assimilate journalistic seriousness to their practice. Laura, the author of the original post, argues that this has somehow made the blogosphere "less hierarchical" -- I'm not sure if that is a typo, but it seems that the hierarchy has reasserted itself almost totally, in that most of the bloggers that people link to are established in a reputable big media post or an established think tank. Bloggers establish credibility by becoming affiliated to established brands, by publishing under well-respected banners. It is harder now to create a brand for yourself that extends its reach beyond Facebook, the base camp for inconsequential self-branding.

What was revolutionary about blogging then is merely that it allowed those traditional networks to metastasize in front of the jealous outsiders who, with their own unacknowledged blogs, feel even more bereft. They perpetuate for those outsiders the idea that the world is somehow rigged, and help them continue to fail to see that part of "merit" is the ability to push your meritorious work among the people who can bring it wider repute. In other words, blogging seemed a way to sneak around the whole self-marketing thing -- you just put your awesome writing online and wait for the plaudits to roll in. But of course that doesn't happen. Instead, it is tempting to do even less of the self-marketing, since the work is already out there, and easier to become overwhelmingly discouraged, since it is being ignored. Talent is a matter of taking your own work seriously, and the "freewheeling world of the blogosphere" early on had the illusion of being a place where such serious career-mindedness wasn't necessary. Now we know better.

Comments on comments (25 April 2009)

I don't have access to the amount of hits this blog gets, so I rarely have any sense of whether it is being read other than the number of comments a post gets. The commenters seem to be a group of about dozen people whose input is always appreciated, even if I only occasionally respond directly. Of course, I would love it if there were more comments, not only because I might learn more, but because I would feel more popular. But I do read them and don't regard it as some kind of a chore.

I say that because I don't really agree with how Virginia Heffernan assess comments in this NYT Magazine piece -- which in reality is more of an advertisement for conservative columnist Anne Applebaum.

Online newspaper commenters as a whole seem to have (at least) the stamina, drive and spare time to become a cogent part of online journalism. But as it is, online commentary is a bête noire for journalists and readers alike. Most journalists hate to read it, because it’s stinging and distracting, and readers rarely plow through long comments sections unless they intend to post something themselves. But perhaps the comments have become so reader-unfriendly, in part, because of the conventions of the Web-comment form.

Which conventions are those? I'm not sure; Heffernan doesn't really elaborate. She laments that comments are often rote exercises in reader self-promotion in which the writer's actual argument is neglected, is not "read against itself" in the manner of a contrarian literary analysis. Why this would be preferable or even different from the point-by-point refutations that Heffernan regards as formulaic is also not clear.

Though she tries to orchestrate a balanced view, Heffernan seems to be bothered ultimately by professional writers not receiving due respect from commentators, who sometimes find journalists to be operating in bad faith or turning in disingenuously presented copy. Toward the end, she passes off this sentiment to other writers in a jokey turn of phrase -- "making commenters more accountable for their posts doesn’t exactly transform them into the reverential chorus that every writer probably thinks he deserves" -- but then again she is a writer herself. And she begins the piece with by contrasting commenters' boorishness with Applebaum's resume and a recounting of a few of the plaudits she's received from other journalists, i.e., the people who matter; the professional opinionmakers.

It's not that journalists expect reverence so much as they want to protect their monopoly on opinion formation in the public sphere. And judging by this, they seem to believe they are above having their motives questioned. But as a group of people who produce information for money and then make a big pretense of their objectivity, journalists are precisely those whose motives must be scrutinized, and at times, when necessary, ridiculed. For the sort of respectful commentary Heffernan prefers, publications need to make sure they have an editorial assistant -- as they always have -- to sort through the letters, etc., to find the stuff they think others would be interested in reading. Commenters are under no obligation to make that judgment themselves in providing content to the publication for free.

Metablog blogging (2 Feb 2008)

I'm a poor judge, perhaps, but Sarah Boxer's chin-scratching piece about blogs for the New York Review of Books seems a few years behind the curve. Are people really only discovering now that writing in these so-called "blogs" is more spontaneous and unedited than finished, reported pieces? That it relies on a currency of "links" that take you from one "website" to another on what bloggers playfully call the "internets"? That people who write blogs like attention, which is often their only form of compensation? That blogging is performative?

Boxer was apparently commissioned to compile blog excerpts for a book, and she rightly notes that the idea is somewhat futile; the act of editing (as opposed to linking) blog material would tend to denature it and remove it from the base upon which it relies, the immediate access to the rest of the internet, even if its just to fact check some outrageous claim that's been made. There may be nothing outside the text, to paraphrase Barthes, but books still seek to create that illusion, while blogs are fully comfortable with intertextuality and their discourse is entirely enriched by it. I would personally find it inconceivable to be reading one blog in isolation -- reading blogs means diving into the blogosphere, as part of your routine, in small bites between other bursts of computer-assisted productivity. And it requires the RSS feed aggregator (like Google Reader, for example), which is the blog-equivalent of a book, only it is always growing and requires constant grooming and tending. It makes the idea of someone else compiling seem redundant and limited -- a book about blogs would only satsify someone who didn't really get them, thus all the books about blogs tend to condemn them and their offenses against language and "ethics," as if journalists would hold themselves to any standard without the threat of libel.

Boxer hails blogging as a realm of viturperative underdogs -- a version of the notion n+1 floated about Gawker:

Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that's no way to blog.

Perhaps I am biased by the corner of the blogosphere that I tend to visit (I don't read gossip blogs, for example), but blogging is starting to be professionalized, with able bloggers being taken up by traditional publications seeking to develop an online presence -- Megan McArdle, Matt Yglesias, and Ross Douthat at the Atlantic, for instance. A career path will take shape for those who want to blog professionally, who want to be public thinkers responding in real time to events in a given field of expertise. And the unaffiliated and unpaid will sink to a backdrop, on social network pages, perhaps, and be read mainly by friends and acquaintances. And blog haters will be curled up with their Strunk and White somewhere, fighting the dumb fight against the evolution of living languages.