The other night, I hit a wall with the way I was engaging with/on this site. The experience of being "inside" the site's logics as a participant started to feel so sickening to me that I couldn't stand it any more. So I took a deliberate step back. Made the deliberate decision to stand outside the logics of the site. Dipped in for brief lurkings, but from this space of outsider. Participated in one discussion in a diary but also from this space.
I learned something about the landscape I'm in, and my location in it.
1. Different continuums
I've been unwise in my tendency to only locate myself on the continuum that runs from right-wing to left, with moderate in the middle. While that continuum is useful for some things, it offers no way for me to understand the full range of my experience of this site.
A second continuum offers more insight. This one has drama, hyperbole and self-referential worldviews on one side, and calm deeply reality-responsive approaches on the other.
(I am struggling for language here because these words are a translation of perception that is not initially verbal for me -- it's gut level.)
Using the lens of this second continuum, here's the view: the dailykos functions as an echo chamber for participants who share a basic self-referential worldview. This does not mean that all who participate here are at the center of that. There is variation. But overall, it functions as an echo chamber for a self-referential self-reinforcing worldview. In this, the site is in the same category of the continuum as right-wing contexts that are similarly self-referential and self-reinforcing.
The high drama, rigidity, and echo chamber quality of this kind of thing makes me sick. I already knew this about the right wing stuff -- I haven't even been involved in it but my brushes with proponents, combined with my actual political perspective (the first continuum I mentioned) made it pretty clear. But this experience as participant on this site showed me that I am just as sickened by left wing versions of this dynamic as I am by right wing ones.
My initial confusion on this situation was not having that second continuum as a lens, and trying to place myself politically in terms of left/right/moderate.
This second continuum brings into words what I feel in my gut: deep underlying similarities between the self-referential left and self-referential right.
2. Limited range of discussion
One of the things that confused me about my response to being "inside" this site was that it has what appeared to be a range of opinions.
For example, there is an opinion-continuum running from the extremely high-drama OMG Let's Criticize Obama In Strong Language If He Doesn't Do Things Just How We Think They MUST Be Done side to the "Chill the fuck out, Obama's frakkin' got this" with a dash of "Obama is smarter than all of us" side.
(description of the second side edited for greater accuracy, thanks to Meteor Blades in the comments)
I tend toward the second one, myself. But after seeing this argument happen over and over and over again, it started to feel exhausting to me to even read these arguments, let alone try to participate in discussions.
After I deliberately stepped away from the inside of the site's logics, I had an off-line discussion that I found instructive on why this happened.
I was trying to get to what I wrote about in #1 in a discussion with my girlfriend. And she kept speaking from this space that I felt was off somehow. We usually agree so strongly on politics that this was an unusual situation, and I remarked on it. I said that I was trying to figure out what was going on and she kept bringing it back to defending President Obama -- and that this was a conflict between us in the discussion.
She thought about it and said that it probably came from her feeling angry and defensive in response to all of the high-drama self-referential hyperbole from his dkos (and other similar progressive) critics. I said that this response wasn't helping us to understand what's going on, that it just keep diverting attention from really getting at what is going on. She agreed - said it was more of a response to the critics than anything else.
And a light bulb went on for me.
The second stance on a continuum named above -- the "Chill the fuck out, Obama's frakkin' got this" with a dash of "Obama is smarter than all of us." one -- exists only in relation to the stance at the other end, the OMG Let's Criticize Obama In Strong Language If He Doesn't Do Things Just How We Think They MUST Be Done. It is a reaction wedded to what it reacts to.
I understand the reaction -- but it is limited because it exists only in relation to the other side of this particular opinion-continuum.
The back and forth between these sides could go on forever, hence the "this is endless" sensation I have had when reading and participating in those kinds of discussions.
Back and forth, same concepts, same concerns, same limited range of opinions. From outside its logics, it looks like an entity discussing things with itself, curling in on itself, moving as if its self-referential world is THE world and not just a small sliver of what is actually going on.
Echo Chamber.
3. A View From Outside
I have always had difficulty getting distance from social movements and the left. Yes I might criticize (and I have and do, sometimes pretty harshly). But at some basic level, I feel this side of the political continuum as my family. Years and years of involvement with various movements cements this feeling.
During the last couple of years, though, I have been shifting my perspective - questioning this feeling of rock-bottom alliance and family-ness. But it's hard to shake this feeling of family. I may never be able to do it automatically.
In this case, I had to decide to distance myself in order to see more clearly where I stand in relation to this site and the political perspectives it encompasses. It's hard for me to be as brutal in my words as my perception warrants. I'll try, though.
A view from here:
The self-referential left and right wing are marginal bodies in the landscape of this whole country. At the same time, these entities are internally convinced that they are extremely important and clearly correct in their understanding.
Members of these bodies have gathering places where their self-referential worldview fills the available space. Inside these gathering places, the world is reduced to a very very limted range of perception and related action.
There is no discernable difference between the left and the right from this perspective.
Now. But.
If I say such a thing to members of these bodies, the response is likely to be along the lines of: But we're the ones who are correct! We're the ones who are right - morally, politically, ethically! What we do and how we see things is justified by this fundamental correctness and goodness in our understanding of what is going on. We're not like those others who clearly are so wrong.
Well, you know what? You're all equally convinced you're right, despite the fact that you can't all be right. And you all work very hard to create spaces where the fundamental assumptions in your worldview are maintained and protected from deep scrutiny -- self-referential echo chambers where apparent arguments among members make it appear as if there is diversity of perspective, but discussions have to stay within the self-referential parameters of the ideology.
It's ugly to me. All of it. Stepping back -- deliberately distancing myself from my location on the right-moderate-left political continuum -- brings this into stark relief in my perception.
From this view, entities with these self-referential worldviews are not to be trusted, because they are more focused on building and maintaining these echo chambers than with responding to the complexity of the world around us.
You are like different flavors of evangelists coming to the door.
Each of them deeply convinced that they are so very different from the others who have also been there. Each speaking from inside a self-referential world of perception and interaction with others in the faith that strokes their sense of their importance in the larger landscape.
And I look at you all and wonder how important you really are in the larger scheme of things. Sure you make a hell of a lot of noise and heat and drama amongst yourselves and when you fight with each other. And looking at all this noise and heat and drama does give the impression that it is Really Big Stuff.
But I have a suspicion. My suspicion is that the majority of people in this country aren't part of what you all, collectively, are into.
I can't assert that this is true, because I have no special understanding of "the majority of this country." It's just a suspicion.
A suspicion because there's something in the air that I am sort of ... feeling, these days. Maybe because there is a focus or anchor point on this other continuum now, with the elected president openly and consistently acting from the side that I clumsily named calm deeply reality-responsive approaches. Maybe that makes the existence of this particular continuum more visible.
So maybe there is another visible set of choices in operation right now. Not only do we have left-right-center available for positioning. We also have this other continuum.
4. Where I stand
On the left-right-center spectrum, I'm at least in the same general room as dailykos.
But on this other spectrum, I choose to stand outside, looking curiously and with gut-level disgust at all this self-referential, echo-chamber noise and heat, seeing it as just another in a parade of evangelists of various stripes, knowing that nothing is likely to pierce participants' belief that they are fundamentally in the right and that the other noise and heat generators are wrong.
This site and its related actions are not a place for someone like me.
And if members at the center of this ever do get around to serious internal critique of why the movement isn't more effective than it is in changing the world to its specifications, I suggest that you look into whether or not there is a significant chunk of people in this country who are instinctively turned off by all forms of echo-chamber politics and so don't want to be a part of any of it. I don't know what the answer will be on whether this is the case, but as I said ... these days, I have my suspicions.