The Daily Kos community is intolerant of ideas that don’t fit their narrow view of Democratic progressivism. You can condemn Bush on the Kos. But if you criticize a sacred cow of the Democrats, a Hillary or Bill or an Olbermann, or if you propose ideas that differ from the approved Kos ideas, you will be run off the site. The diarist who deviates from the approved Kos script is shunned and insulted and his or her specific ideas—and this is the important point--will not be addressed. The surpression of dissent on the Kos is one of the prime features of the website and it is a disappointment. The Kos--like high school--is a place for like minded people who want to congratulate each other on how terrifically enlightened they are. It is not a place for engaging ideas.
Yesterday I wrote a (somewhat cheeky) diary that criticized Hillary Clinton for habitually lying. I gave specific, contemporaneous, examples of her lies. Two of those lies concerned Iraq, a war that has cost Iraqis probably three quarters of a million lives and Americans nearly 4000. What I said was as follows:
She lied about her vote on Iraq, claiming she didn't know it would give Bush the authorization to go to war.
She lied only a few days ago saying that Hagel was the author of the bill that she supported, when it was the Bush regime that authored the bill.
Not one of the over 60 respondents said they disagreed. Not one pointed to evidence that would contradict these assertions. No one even questioned the veracity of these assertions. Rather what I got from the Daily Kos thought police was the following:
"You should delete this diary. Now."
"It's inflammatory"
"I think this diary is horrible"
"Please delete this diary"
"I want no part of this crap"
"This diary is vile"
"Shame on you. You're an embarrassment to Democrats and anyone with a modicum of ethics"
"this is an obnoxious and inaccurate"
"diary: utter, utter trash...you do a lot of harm to your own cause with filth like this"
My favorite response was the one that said I would be turned in to the administrators (the Ministry of Love?) to be kicked off the site. For what? Having an opinion, one backed up by facts, that some don’t agree with?
What’s going on here? What is the threat? Why shouldn’t progressive’s disagree? Apparently one issue that hits a nerve with Daily Kos readers concerns the use of moral judgements. On the Kos, as elsewhere in our society, it has become politically incorrect to make moral judgements about events or people.
JM Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year gets at the lurking intellectual fascism underlying this trend. He writes:
"A while ago I began compiling a list of modern usages in present day English. At the head of the list were the antonymic pair appropriate/inappropriate...Inappropriate, I noted, has come to replace bad or wrong in the speech of people who wish to express disapproval without seeming to express a moral judgment (to such people, moral judgement in itself is to be shunned as inappropriate). Thus: "She testified that the stranger had touched her inappropriately."
Thus, it is all right to suggest that you might take exception to Hillary’s explanation of her Iraq vote, but to call her explanation an outright lie is "inappropriate."
This kind of relativism robs us of our ability to get at the truth.
Sometimes there are flat out lies. Like WMD. Like the AL Quaeda connection. Like Hillary’s explanation of her vote for the Iraq war. The truth hurts, but adults don't blame the messenger.