"[Blogs]'re a flawed and problematic medium. They encourage polarization and extremism rather than debate and understanding. They turn on snark and mockery more often than facts and agile argument. They've not become a space for muckraking so much as hackery, where each side touts their independent credentials each time they deliver another blow to their traditional enemies. We don't take on sacred cows nor unexamined institutions, we hit the long-hated "Mainstream Media", the other side's propaganda outlets, or opposing politicians. We boast a combination of people who can write, people who can report, people who can crack jokes, and people who can do none of the above. If we've democratized some information -- poll results being the type I can think of -- we've done so without context or education, leaving readers more informed but, in many case, less knowledgeable. We fire off missives without time to think, desperate to fill our internal quotas. At the same time, the few worthwhile writings that do emerge from our caffeinated rips are quickly pushed down the page by useless quoting and snarky pointing, forever denied the chance to make a difference or change some minds. We link to funny stats, to easy facts, to things we can talk about, but rarely to the thoughtful and worthwhile writings of our peers. I'm glad we donate some money, do some activism, and talk some politics, but I'm far from convinced that we've helped a too-polarized country become any better of a place.
I've not yet -- and not for lack of trying -- found the blog where smart and engaged partisans are respectfully speaking to each other, where naturally skilled reporters are unearthing the crucial issues of the day, where the point is to inform and enrich rather than enrage and destroy. And until I do, I can't stand talking about this transformative and enlightened medium. Because until that day, all we've really got is a couple of technogurus proselytizing for us because it advances their careers and puts their breathless exclamations into the (mainstream) media, a couple of gems whose readers are lucky to have found them, and an endless army of critics well equipped to carp and stab at minute flaws in their betters, but rarely able to excel in the skill they find so easy to judge. We've got a medium where the editor rejects nothing, where our articles achieve an acceptance rate of 100%, and we suffer for it. We're the D&D players in the back of the class who mock both the math whizzes and the jocks, simultaneously jealous and contemptuous of what they do better than us and delighted whenever we can nail them for a misstep. And then, through the transcendent and healing power of mockery, we convince ourselves of their incompetence and our transformative achievements through the use of snark. Congratulations us."
(After a partial quote from the above):
"And according to C. W. Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle, "That’s what makes those who are going to live in this brave new world of [blog-enhanced] politics a little nervous. [Bloggers are] talk radio without the FCC, opinion columnists without the editors." Adds West Texas A&M University professor Leigh Browning, "Blogs are inevitably going to have more impact on the extreme left and extreme right."
Pay attention to the word "extreme." For although it is certainly true that bloggers did not invent extremist politics—indeed, the deepening divisions within America are the long-simmering outgrowth of myriad and complex forces having to do with the growing sense of alienation and powerlessness in society—there can be no doubt that blogging has given new voice and new reach to the extremist strain in American society.
This extremism has lain at the periphery of American politics throughout our long history. More than forty years ago, in fact, the historian Richard Hofstadter published a famous article in Harper’s Magazine entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." In it, he described the key features of the extremist conspiracy theories that have played such a dark role in American political life since even before the Revolution. Hofstadter wrote:
The paranoid [extremist] sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, [which] only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
Doesn’t that sound a bit too much like the two bloggers quoted at the be ginning of this essay? Multiply them by many thousands more—and instead of an audience of thousands, as such people spoke to in bygone eras, give them now an audience of millions—and you begin to grasp the heightened danger. Right now, today, they are preaching to us that the government is ruled by a conspiracy of the right (or the left), that the 9/11 catastrophe was knowingly aided and abetted by Big Business (or the Jews) anxious to give the American people an external enemy to focus on instead of the disastrous economic situation that has resulted from their own perfidy and greed, that Osama Bin Laden has (depending on their political stance) either already been captured and is waiting to be trotted out at the appropriate time or else could have been captured were it not for the machinations of America’s hidden traitors. No matter how preposterous the claim, I guarantee that you can find it argued eloquently and vociferously somewhere in the blogosphere, supported by an encyclopedia of "facts."
But lest we all have a good laugh at the absurdities often found on the Internet, we would do well to heed Hofstadter’s principal point: “The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” And what makes it especially dangerous today, of course, is that they are attempting to fill the vacuum left by an enfeebled mainstream media.
Still, as a blogger who goes by the name "Scottxyz" noted, "The polarization that blogs have produced is problematic, but the alternative—a homogenized media—is worse." His point is well taken. As William Powers wrote recently in the Atlantic magazine, "The fractious, disunited, politically partisan media of the nineteenth century heightened public awareness of politics, and taught the denizens of a new democracy how to he citizens. Maybe [they were] on to something.""
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