But I digress (or for those of you paying attention to the inside jokes, regress).
Anyways. Turns out, the Big Dog had Hillary’s top blogger call sort of a summit meeting of what apparently is the – and this is an important phrase and meme gang – "liberal blogosphere".
Daily Kos diarist kid oakland’s post is mostly concerned with the lack of color in the photograph of the bloggers with President Clinton. He wrote, in part:
It may well be, as we learned at Yearlykos, that the liberal blogosphere is significantly more white than the Democratic Party at large.
Thereby providing me with my point of departure, to wit:
The "liberal blogosphere" is an oxymoron to begin with (think jumbo shrimp). And whether the "liberal blogosphere" wants to hear it or not, the absence of people of color isn't the biggest problem it has. It is the extent to which it fails to represent the Democratic Party, period. Big, big problem.
Now one might reasonably think to oneself: Damn, good thing Chris MC has nuthin’ to lose, because he is practically thumbing his nose at the Power Players of the “liberal blogosphere”! And if you had that thought, you would be right.
My question to you, “liberal blogospherists”, is about the ideological divide that "liberal blogospherism" appears committed to creating in the Democratic Party.
To me, a candidate who cannot get elected if only the liberal blogospherists vote for him – which is to say every candidate – should be able to say that he will do what he believes is right for Connecticut not what’s right for either political party (much less an observably narrow slice of a political party, a number of whom don’t even vote here) without having to fend off a fusillade of insults, accusations and threats. Seems like a very sound way to represent your constituents, too.
By way of illustrating just how cut off some of these folks are from reality, this tidbit from none other than the illustrious Matt Stoller of MyDD in the wake of Ned Lamont’s historic upset of sitting United States Senator Joe Lieberman:
If white progressives, disaffected union members, and blacks strengthen the informal alliance that's being created in this campaign, there's not a Democrat anywhere in the country who can't be beaten in a primary.
What planet could Stoller be living on? What do these groups share other than perhaps a temporary and weak alliance of antipathy? News flash, big shot – we identified this as a strategic problem in the seventies (about ten years, not incidentally, after the Republicans published a friggin' manual on the subject)! Can you say Republican hegemony?
What could diversity in the blogosphere reasonably mean? If it doesn't mean diversity of opinion, diversity of doctrine, then what remains? And if liberal blogospherists do mean that, then they are coming right around and meeting themselves without, somehow, seeing it coming. The liberal blogospherists, if they are talking about diversity of opinion - which is what a truly liberal community would mean - are going to have a very uncomfortable "Pogo moment": We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Ideology is fundamentally, irreducibly, and always about power. All ideology develops within the metaconversation of dogmatism, that is the problem with all ideology. Dogmatism produces ideology, ideology demands intolerance, and intolerance justifies lots of nasty stuff like, say, hating someone because they have different color skin or facial features or religious practices than the ones you believe are correct.
Heads up "liberal blogosphere", your entire project is about to implode into a black hole of hypocrisy.
I guess there is good reason to be unfamiliar with the firmament of liberal blogospherists and their paralell universe...
9 comments:
Brilliant blather Chris Mc. Now if only it were true. So many false assumptions, it's hard to know where to begin.
I guess it's easier to just say the reality inside Chris's head isn't the reality the rest of us live in.
Looking forward to CLP's next seminal moment.
PS If Chris Mc wants to come out with his support of Joe Lieberman, well, he just ought to. But to blame the "purists" of the liberal blogosphere for his lack of courage?
Could the real problem be that Democrats had their primary, and Loserman just plain lost? It's called party politics, and the only point I'll cede is that the blogs are now playing the role of enforcer.
MikeCT said...
Chris MC,
OK, call me dense, but I find your post incomprehensible
I wondered if it was just me. I read through it twice, and beyond the general hostility toward the "liberal blogosphere" (I suspect Chris typed this with the same combination of anger and paranoia that Janet Parshall (sp?) has when she talks about "secular humanists"), I really didn't get the point.
To answer what was perhaps the only contextually comprehensible sentence in the post:
If white progressives, disaffected union members, and blacks strengthen the informal alliance that's being created in this campaign, there's not a Democrat anywhere in the country who can't be beaten in a primary.
What planet could Stoller be living on? What do these groups share other than perhaps a temporary and weak alliance of antipathy?
Well, these groups, or many individuals within these groups, may share a desire for:
1) Better access to health care for all Americans.
2) an end to income/wealth disparity in the USA.
3) an exit strategy for the Bush-Rumsfeld-Lieberman mess in Iraq
4) a return to governing principles of this country as spelled out by the Constitution
5) real education reform, unrelated to giving federal subsidies to people who want to teach children that Adam and Eve spoke English while riding dinosaurs to Church for Christmas services
6) the correct spelling of "parallel"
all goals (with the possible exception of number six) about which Joe Lieberman has either done nothing or actively fought against (which I only mention b/c other posters seem to think this post is another "you're only picking on Joe Lieberman because of his noble commitment to his principles" rant. Those readers got more out of this than I did. I couldn't tell if Chris was a Republican or a Lieberaman supporter.).
Telling is that Chris didn't wrap the intense partisanship of the Right into his treatise. It's not like Republicans are allowed anything resembling individual freedom. (Except maybe Ron Paul.)
And I remain curious about why Chris won't support Lamont. Is it because he no longer respects the two party system? Or is he simply convinced he knows better than the majority of CT Democrats? (And is therefore obligated by his superior intellect to break with the election results and reject the Nominee.)
Jim provided an example (albeit a mild one) of the mindset and line of argument
Which mindset did I provide a mild example of?
PS: the "liberal blogosphere" [even though I don't accept your narrow and slightly hysterical characterization] is a reaction to Republican hegemony, not a cause of it.
I had a hard time understanding this post as well. I think Liberals have been kicked around so much that the fact that we speak out at all has the country spooked because I think they thought they were just kicking a label instead of a constituency with teeth.
However, I do think that Kos and a few other high traffic sites have allowed their egos to inflate blogospherically, that is, disproportionately flatulent.
No one can argue that in a perfect world all of the noble political platitudes of governance are oh, so desirable but I don't understand why, once again, Liberals are taken to task for sticking to their Liberal convictions. Nobody, NOBODY else governs fairly or without political bias yet Liberals who haven't been elected are accused of abuses they may never commit.
Are you incapable of separating the hyperbole of political gamesmanship from political process?
And why is the act of offering Liberal opinion so offensive? Do other political points of view have some kind of inalienable entitlement to representing self-evident, absolute truth?
As for the assertion that the Liberal blogosphere does not represent the Democratic party the same assertion reworded is equally true, the Democratic party does not represent the Liberal blogosphere. More importantly, the Democratic party does not even represent as many Democrats as the Liberal blogosphere does.
Furthermore, the issue of race is irrelevant. The pure, unadulterated evil of the Bush administration's policies on the American people can no longer stand unquestioned and unchallenged. The Liberal blogosphere, for all its flaws, has not only stood up to these monsters but bested them at the polling booths they manipulate.
You don't have to love them but you damned well better respect them.
Asserting that the Republicans have hegemony already, however would be consistent with a bona fide case of hysteria,
um....you used the term Republican hegemony. I took it to mean that the Republican party controls all three branches of the federal government. I don't really see how pointing that out constitutes a "bona fide case of hysteria", whether you point it out or I do. (and I don't think the psychiatric profession still recognizes hyteria as a disorder; I could be wrong on that).
You keep harping on this notion of dogmatism and "reactionary ideology" in the liberal blogosphere. Could you, to borrow an argument from the estimable Lanny Davis, give an example of this dogmatism unrelated to Joe Lieberman or the Iraq War? cause your original post and your entire argument have nothing to do with Lieberman, right?
Why does alliegance to Joe Lieberman get some people so upset? Look, the only thing at issue is that he's been wrong, wrong, wrong on the war, and wrong, wrong, wrong in sucking up to Bush. That's it. Period. And that's all the "liberal blogosphere" is saying. Now I can't understand for the life of me why that makes the liberal blogosphere unreasonable, much less wrong.
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