Elitism, The Right and Blogging
Mon Jan 17, 2005 at 11:10:31 AM PDT
Update [2005-1-17 14:10:31 by Armando]:From the diaries by Armando
This book review from yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer is a wonderful example of elitist fear of blogs. Despite the Olympian tone, the review, by a Mr. Frank Wilson, is little more than a hatchet job on the notion that someone without the proper credentials should be allowed to have a role in our public discourse. And you may even be acquainted with the author being reviewed, an old friend of both us and of Bill O'Reilly, Hugh Hewitt.
Hewitt's thesis is this: "When many blogs pick up a theme or begin to pursue a story, a blog swarm forms...which, when it breaks, will fundamentally alter the general public's understanding of a person, place, product, or phenomenon."
If Hewitt can be paid for such banalities, I need an agent. But I digress...
Hewitt notes that while it was left-of-center bloggers Atrios (Philadelphian Duncan Black) and Joshua Micah Marshall who got the anti-Lott swarm buzzing, it was conservative bloggers - notably the chameleonic Andrew Sullivan, whose coloration at the time was deemed conservative, and Republican law professor Daniel Drezner - who brought it to critical mass...
Actually, no, it was primarily the guys over at NRO who started calling for Trent Lott to step down because the right wing didn't want the increasingly damaged Lott--who'd been making racist comments for years--to remain leader because they thought he too often acquiesced to the Democrats. But there's more:
Hewitt correctly laments that "the political left is seriously behind in the promotion and development of bloggers with insight and good humor." Typical of the lack is Markos Moulitsas, the fellow behind DailyKos. Kos,
who described the American contractors brutally murdered in Baghdad last spring as "mercenaries," gets plenty of visitors - 1.6 million a month -
and has plenty of credentials, but his commentary tends to range from the merely strident to the downright appalling,
qualities that have been more characteristic of talk radio than of blogging...
Naturally, a blog can only be as good as whoever does the blogging. The people behind some of the better-known blogs tend to be talented and accomplished. Glenn Reynolds, whose InstaPundit probably garners the most visits of any, is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. The guys behind Powerline, voted blog of the year by Time magazine, are all lawyers. These are people who know how to weigh evidence, marshal arguments and write.[Emphasis is mine.]
[More below the jump]
Let's break this down, beginning with the first words from Hugh Hewitt's
biography:
Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show...
By Mr. Wilson's oh-so-elitist standards, Hugh Hewitt should be considered another of us among the great unwashed masses, since he hosts a rightwing radio talk show and chums around with that jackass Bill O'Reilly. But for Wilson he's not just another pleb with a computer and an ISP...and I'll get to why in a moment.
Next, there's nothing scandalous about Markos referring to the "contractors" as "mercenaries." They weren't driving a glazier's truck, and they sure weren't in Fallujah to lay Italian marble in somebody's sunroom, which is the connotation the right hopes to elicit when they use the term "contractor." No, they were paramilitaries paid to perform paramilitary duties. George Orwell would scoff at Frank Wilson.
Then there's Wilson's assessment of blog commentary as "strident" or "downright appalling." What's his standard of measurement for "appalling?" If it's accuracy or informed analysis, then find me one damned member of the 101st Keyboarders whose war drum-pounding analysis of the Iraq war and the subsequent occupation matches up to the quality of what's been written at Daily Kos. I initially started reading Daily Kos because of the analysis provided by Markos, Steve Gilliard and RonK. I won't say their predictions of the Iraq morass were particularly prescient--those with even rudimentary knowledge of the situation could see what was likely to happen. But all three were brilliant at distilling down to the essentials what was wrong with Bush's plans for Iraq, from the logistics to the numbers of troops to the strategy based on passionate embrace of American troops to the reliance of Chalabi to the misplay of the sectarian rivalries to the failure to assemble a larger coalition to the complete lack of preparation for a challenging occupation to the utter disregard for truth in presenting a rationale based upon an immanent nuclear threat. I would contend that the best commentary on the leading liberal and left bloggers--the folks here at Daily Kos, Steve Gilliard, Billmon, Atrios, Josh Marshall, the gang at Tapped, obviously Juan Cole, and many others--could in the future be collected and published by the Library of America, just as they've published some of the best contemporary reportage and commentary on the Vietnam War. Most of what's written at flagship blogs of the right like Little Green Footballs and Command Post is more likely to warrant mention in the Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence reports monitoring hate and extremist activity.
Why did the liberal bloggers get so much right about the Iraq war? Because, as well or better than many in the credentialed press, they "know how to weigh evidence, marshal arguments and write." Those skills, and an ethos that values honesty, integrity and scrupulousness, are keys to getting things right and earning respect. Those bloggers I mentioned have earned my respect. Mr. Wilson doesn't seem to like them. But is Mr. Wilson's opinion worthy of our respect? Let's weigh the evidence.
A few minutes on Google yielded a fascinating collection of book reviews by Mr. Wilson that hardly present the portrait of a man who knows how to weigh evidence. In some cases, his interests just seem plain loopy, like his decision to review and recommend a book by a risk analyst who calculated the probability of God's existence at around 70%. There is his glowing review of libertarian tomes by the likes of modern-day Social Darwinist Charles Murray. There's his attack on Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" which is posted on the website of Opus Dei, the doctrinal revanchists closely linked to Franco's Fascists and whose American members include FBI agent/Russian spy Robert Hanssen and supposedly Justice Antonin Scalia:
If the book is to be believed, the Holy Grail is now hidden beneath a prominent landmark in a major European capital. The tourist bureau in New York of the country in question says it has yet to receive a single inquiry about that.
"If this book is too be believed?" What the hell does that mean? It's a work of fiction! By such reasoning we should blow off The Great Gatsby, because you'll never find West Egg on a map of Long Island.
More relevant to the subject of political blogging are Wilson's political statements and judgment, which show that his skills and ethos aren't up to the standards of Daily Kos or any of the other leading liberal/progressive blogs. For instance, there's his attack on Kerry's Catholic piety within a review of a book on Catholic voting behavior:
In July, in an article in the Washington Post, Kerry was quoted as saying, "I oppose abortion... . I believe life does begin at conception." But, he added, "I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist."
That's morally and intellectually incoherent. "Every time you cast a vote on the floor of the United States Senate," Marlin says, "you're voting to impose your beliefs on somebody else. If you vote for higher taxes, you're voting to impose them."
He has a point. The Catholic view that life begins at conception is not put forward as a mere gynecological factoid. The church draws a moral conclusion from it: If human life
begins at conception, then abortion - the direct and intentional termination of a fetus' life signs - amounts to the taking of innocent human life. It is hard to see how one could accept this as an article of religious faith, as Kerry says he does, and feel no obligation to act on it - in fact, to feel obliged not to.
If that's the case, than every Catholic deciding on judicial appointments better be checking up to make sure that they only support jurists who would overturn Griswold v Connecticut, because the Roman Catholic Church also forbids contraception. But Catholics deciding on who to chose for President might also get hung up on Bush's war in Iraq, which cannot be reconciled with the Catholic Just War doctrine and was expressly opposed by the Pope. I wonder if Mr. Wilson feels that Catholics such as Alberto Gonzalez feels any obligation to act on that belief?
Another glaring example of Wilson's inability or refusal to adequately and critically weigh "evidence" and judge arguments is his review of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." Read that review, and you'll notice that Wilson fails to adequately "weigh evidence," such as questioning the consistency of the stories presented by the switfies, look into the backgrounds of switfies such as O'Neil in order to assess their credibility, or to see if there are any inconsistencies, such as the fact that some of the swifties who claimed that their flotilla vessel didn't take fire in the action for which Kerry was awarded the silver star were themselves awarded medals for their acts in that very same firefight. Why should anyone accept the statement that bloggers don't know how to weigh evidence when it comes from somebody whose own record at weighing evidence and marshalling arguments is as incompetent or dishonest as Frank Wilson's?
But lets come back to something I mentioned before, the distinctions he makes that put Hugh Hewitt into the category of reliable sources, separate from the other category of bloggers who don't know "how to weigh evidence, marshal arguments and write." If it's the quality of analysis, I think we've already dispensed with the notion that Instahack, Hugh Hewitt and their ilk know what they're talking about, even if they may be law professors. No, that's apparently not what make him think the commentary of the left's blogs ranges from "the merely strident to the downright appalling." What's gotten into his craw is that he believes we're not credentialed like those law professors. That's it, nothing more. It's that we're not, in his mind, worthy of inclusion among the elite, or, even if, like Markos, we have "plenty of credentials," we've debased our elite status among the highly credentialed.
Reading Wilson extolling Hewitt is like reading stodgy old aristocrats from the 1930's attacking FDR and radio and the labor movement and anything new that eroded their privilege. He comes across as something like a parody of an upper crusty type from an E.M. Forester novel, or maybe a tweed-clad professor at Huxley College appalled by the ghastly behavior of Professor Wagstaff. Whatever his problem, screw him. He's a rightwing shill, and condescending judgments of our ability to weigh evidence and marshal arguments from such a mediocrity look like little more than elitist fear that their credentialed status is threatened.
Wilson cites Hewitt's argument that blogs are akin to the Guttenberg press, but that seems to scare them both, as it should anyone who extols the virtues of credentials and decries the democratic and egalitarian aspects of blogs. As on so many matters, the more apt comparison was made by Bill Moyers:
I think the Internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why they called them inkstained wretches. Because they operated their own hand presses. For a little bit of money, like Tom Paine and others, you could have your own press. ... After the revolution independent journalists, printers they called themselves, sprung up all over the country ... they were partisan by the way, vociferously. They attacked the others' politics. but it was a healthy period of bombast in America in which people could sort out the information. I think the bloggers, then the websites, come closest to the spirit of cacophony, to that democratic expression, that we had in the early part of this country's history.
That's what's going on here. The people attacking the blogs on the left do not want people to sort out the information. They do not want people without credentials presenting facts and arguments that haven't been vetted and neutered. And they don't want a sense of democracy. They want compliance.
I don't intend to be compliant. Neither should you.
