Fighting the Good Fight, But Not to Win

Tom Hilton:

When progressive bloggers attack Obama or congressional Democrats, it isn't because after careful, calm, dispassionate consideration they conclude that there are in fact reasonable grounds for criticism and that airing it will have a net positive practical impact. Progressive bloggers attack Democrats because bloggers are conflict junkies and progressives are desperately in love with failure. Bloggers habitually parlay the most trivial incidents into overblown hysterical outrage; progressives cannot bring themselves to lend their support to anyone who has actually won an election.

The liberal blogosphere was born in opposition to Bush, and is habituated to misrule by corrupt and incompetent right-wing ideologues. The attitudes that were appropriate and necessary under those circumstances are dysfunctional and self-defeating when we have a president who isn't corrupt, isn't incompetent, and is (for any but the narrowest, most dogmatic lefties) on our side. We had some value in opposing Bush; we were more or less useless during the election (Obama won with a network he built himself, not the 'netroots', and some people will never forgive him for it); and now, it seems, a sizable faction (majority? large minority? I don't know) is determined to be worse than useless. I have good reason to be optimistic about Obama's presidency, and no reason at all to be optimistic about the blogosphere--which is determined to doom itself to irrelevance and self-parody.

He's right about many progressives being in love with failure. They don't want to win, because losing validates their continuing adolescent fantasy of being oppressed by the world. Talking about "the art of the possible" with such people is self-defeating, because they love posturing and hate the horse trading that is real politics. They're "big picture" people, and while they'll do all kinds of research to come up with a 12-point policy paper, they can never explain how to get it enacted. They just want someone to say their ideas are great, even if they'll never become government policy.

I disagree with Tom that such people will be "worse than useless".  They're just as useful now as they were during the Bush administration, that is, they don't matter. Blogs are mediocre tools, at best, for real-world activism. They're often great at collecting data and interpreting the news, and facilitating competing viewpoints. Real activists can use the stuff they get from good blogs in their work and avoid the bad blogs. A bad blogger - and all of these progressive saints and martyrs Tom is referring to are poor bloggers - will just accomplish nothing, bad or good.

Comments

[Ripley]

Blogs are mediocre tools, at best, for real-world activism.

I think that's the DNA-level reality of it. Other than campaign fundraising, I don't know that blogs/bloggers have any tangible effect on policy, decision-making or governmental action, at any level. I'm not pleased about that, but I think it's the way things are, at least right now.

[Mithras]

Right. I'd only add that to the extent that the media believes blogs have power, then blogs do have power to shape the media narrative. That's different from real-world activism, though.

[Tom Hilton]

I disagree with Tom that such people will be "worse than useless". They're just as useful now as they were during the Bush administration, that is, they don't matter.
Fair enough. In this case, "worse than useless" is based on my sense that the sniping I linked to, while coming from the left, would be exactly as useful as a talking point from the right.

[Mithras]

Yeah, I'm coming around to your view, actually. The negative value is that Chris Matthews or one of his type seizes on it to sow FUD. In fact, that's why people like Bowers and Sirota are talking crap like that - so they get attention. (Avedon really believes it, I think.) "Obama's support is dropping among liberals" is a great way to ensure nothing gets accomplished, which would suit these people just fine - they would say health care reform (or pick your favorite issue) would have worked if only Obama had been more progressive.

[Tom Hilton]

"Obama's support is dropping among liberals" is a great way to ensure nothing gets accomplished, which would suit these people just fine - they would say health care reform (or pick your favorite issue) would have worked if only Obama had been more progressive.
I'm not sure it's a conscious strategy, but yeah, I think that is how it works for them.

The irony is that it could actually be helpful to Obama to have a steady stream of noisy criticism from the left (to foster the appearance of bipartisanship)--but only if the criticism is a) explicitly leftist, so it isn't as useful to the right; and b) calculated strategy, rather than something they actually believe.

[Mithras]

Adroit as he is, I can imagine Obama turning even this kind of knee-jerk sniping to his advantage by engaging with it in a constructive way.

The way for bloggers to create space for Obama's team to be negotiate more progressive policies is to argue for those policies without demonizing other people in our voting coalition. Being all "more liberal than thou" and calling people fake progressives or Obamabots is counterproductive.

[Tom Hilton]

A-Frigging-Men!

[Narya]

The disconnect I seem to see is the people who want to both claim (a) that Obama is All About Change! and (b) that Obama is, of course, silly!, a politician, complete with horsetrading (not that there's anything wrong with that). I think the latter is closer to the truth, and I do not think there's anything wrong with it. (Anyone who thinks a person is going to become President w/o being a politician is delusional.) The question isn't whether someone is a horsetrader, the question is what he or she regards as tradeable in such trades.

I was never a huge supporter, I perhaps should add. And if he's successful, in some important but possibly arguable sense of that word? Yay--everybody wins. I have no desire to see him lose/fail just so I can complain that he's not progressive enough.

[Thers]

Blogs are excellent delivery mechanisms for saying "fuck" in public in creative ways. This I believe!

The real value that political blogs have is not with what I think you mean by real world activism -- voter registration, GOTV (do you mean electoral activism? I'm not sure if you're excluding issues activism, like, say, AIDS activism). I think left blogs can do a good job of anticipating & responding to right-wing lunacy before it can emerge from the wingnutosphere and grab the attention of the idiot media. That is to say, it really is a good thing that Free Republic & talk radio and the like have been eclipsed by a left-wing "fever swamp" (to use Hugh Hewitt's term). As the Clinton years showed, even the craziest conservative smears can have a serious effect by attaining legitimacy once some dope at the NYT starts imagining that there's some "there" there, no matter what cesspit it bubbled up from.

This is not a perfect analogy but it may do for a (very) rough illustration. I see left blogs as having a similar benefit for progressive politics as a rowdy crowd can have for a home team at a football game: Disrupting the other team's signals and intimidating the refs.

Of course to accept this role you have to by and large accept that you're not really on the team.

Like I said, this is not a perfect analogy, but it will do, at least as a reminder of why bloggers (at least most of us) should have a sense of where we really are. Like Tom I think we should be thinking more strategically, and as it happens I think focusing on the problems that exist with the media are more likely to be productive than anything else. For me, anyway.

I'd also like bloggers to be less apologetic about the fact that blogging can just be fun. I've chosen to change the world with my real-life career, after all (such as it is). I largely blog because it's meanspirited entertainment. If I can't make Obama pick who I want for Undersecretary of the Plenipotentary to Latvia, I'm still pretty cool with the fact that for recreational purposes I like to point out the many many ways Jonah Goldberg is a total douchebag.

[Narya]

No, no, no; Jonah is the doughy pantload!

[Tom Hilton]

What Thers said, especially the part about responding to right-wing lunacy (or, as I put it in comments elsewhere, the production and distribution of memes); the part about blogging for fun; and most of all, the part about Jonah Goldberg being a total douchebag. Or doughbag. Or douchey pantload. Whatever.