Conservative columnist, David Brooks once pointed out that the Internet has had the net effect of not bringing us closer together, but rather, driving us further apart. By allowing individuals to coalesce into narrower, self-reinforcing groups – based on political, ideological, religious or regional sentiments – the Internet has created a society that is characterized by many separate groups where communication is largely within and between group members. Brooks went on to say that one could get up and watch Fox News from dawn to dusk, read conservative newspapers or magazines and listen to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity on talk radio and thus, never come across a competing idea all day. Likewise, the same sort of thing happens amongst the denizens of the left. It reminds me of a comment made by Norman Mailer after the Bush victory in 2004: “How could Bush have won, I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” Mailer was reflecting the fact that as a resident of New York City, one of the Bluest in America, you would never find a Bush supporter, unless you deliberately left the insularity of your own social group.
That brings me to the point of this piece. Many of us who utilize the blogs to traffic in political thought tend to stay on those blogs that are user friendly. We tend to blog on those sites that are supportive of the ideas we ourselves promote and favor. At the same time there are those on the far right who are doing the same thing, peddling their ideas or attacks against the current administration and Progressive ideas in general. These attacks on the very essence of Progressive thought go largely unchallenged with no more than a handful of stalwart progressives waging a counterattack and enduring a tremendous amount of vitriol and abuse in the process. Thus it is time for us to sally forth and bring the battle to the opponent’s home turf. Anyone who has had a peek at the latest trio of reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center knows full well just how violent the rhetoric on the right has become. All one need do is to look at the attacks against those who voted for health care or consider the case of the Hutaree Militia as proof positive that things are getting more confrontational and vicious.
I regularly dust it up with the wing nuts on TownHall.com but there are also several others like AmericanThinker.com; Human Events, and RedState.com to name just a few.
It would be great if we could get some help battling lies and misinformation on these sites and others like them. Townhall.com in particular is easy to deal with, as they don’t restrict your participation unless you engage in bona-fide hate speech. AmericanThinker.com screens your input and RedState.com will redact your comments if they don’t agree with you. I had an article dispelling the lies on health care redacted and I have since been barred from this site so you may only be able to get one shot at them and then you are done. If you’re up for the fight, and you ought to be, considering the stakes, the links are below.
We just fought and won some semblance of a health care reform program and there are plenty of other important battles ahead. As Progressives we need to learn how to throw a punch, figuratively, and stop being seen as a bunch of kumbaya signing pushovers who let the right push us around. My advice to you is the same that Stonewall Jackson gave a group of cadets at the outset of the Civil War. When asked just how bad he expected things to get he replied: “If I were you I would draw my sword and throw away the scabbard.”
Steven J. Gulitti
April 11th, 2010
Rage on the Right
The Year in Hate and Extremism
http://www.splcenter.org/get-i…
Fear of FEMA
http://www.splcenter.org/get-i…
Midwifing the Militias – Resurgence of the Patriot Movement.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-i…
Townhall.com
http://townhall.com/columnists/
Human Events
http://www.humanevents.com/
American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/
RedState.com
http://www.redstate.com/
If you describe your straying outside the Left Blogosphere like this:
then I submit you aren’t really engaging conservative thought.
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p>I occasionally “tour” such sites to see what they’re focused on. That can be interesting, but a lot of those sites are batshit crazy, and visiting them will just confirm a dismissive attitude toward conservatives.
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p>Rather than “taking the fight to the wingnut”, maybe time would be better spent finding the best representatives of conservative thought and engaging that.
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p>At least if you wanted to fulfill Mr. Brooks’ mandates.
engage away.
…but they’ve hijacked the term.
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p>What we’re seeing – and what I expect to see on the Commons tomorrow – are people who have been demogogued into lynch mob politics.
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p>At their best liberalism, progressivism, and conservatism (even libertarianism occasionally) share a commmitment to civic values that the Tea Party leadership exploits for short-term political gain. I say “short-term” because this particularly rancid form of directed pseudo-populism has already hit the point of diminishing returns: hence the Brown avoidance of tomorrow’s rally.
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p>It wouldn’t hurt to do both.
The best the Tea Party folks seem to come up with is the very weird conspiracy theory that swirls around an article in the Nation in the sixties by Cloward and Piven.
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p>The best I’ve seen so far from that side of the world has been Next Right and American Conservative.
…which is (in content) nihilist propaganda, but contextually very well written for its purpose
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p>Much of this has nothing to do with Left v Right dynamics, and rather reflects an attempted coup by Right-opportunists against intellectually honest conservatives, using populists as cannon fodder.
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p>Intellectually honest conservatives like Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan are good examples of those waging last-ditch battles against this tripe.
One has to remove the period on your Weekly Standard link — a remarkable article. Behavioral economics seems like a fruitful direction for research. The assumption that markets are populated with purely rational actors seems can be useful but it has to be a simplification and figuring out how to adjust it can only be a good thing. So all the anti-intellectual sewage the author pours on it seems pretty embarrassing.
There is one thing that pretty much all internet sites have in common, most of them are techno-libertarian sites. There aren’t too many agrarian back-to-nature websites, for obvious reasons. A good example of this is the Mr. Wendell Berry Of Kentucky website, which states:
And Wendell Berry is a prolific author of essays, someone you would expect to be eager to write and have his work read. Not only are authors like Mr. Berry not well represented, neither is the audience who would like to read agrarian, traditionalist writings. Everyone on the web is into Wired Magazine and Tomorrowland Techno-progressive Libertarianism, so the opposition sites you cite are already on your side for the most part, but only disagree with you about free market capitalism and government and taxes.
“I occasionally “tour” such sites to see what they’re focused on. That can be interesting, but a lot of those sites are batshit crazy, and visiting them will just confirm a dismissive attitude toward conservatives.”
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p>SJG: That is the problem. If we continue to be dismissive of them they begin to believe that they are actually onto something as no one is challenging them. I find that most of these people are long on rehtoric and short on historical references and data points to support their arguments. Another common practice they have is that they can’t stay on the topic because they are lacking in their argument. I had a guy quibble with me over my claim in “Coming Unhinged on the Far Right” He claimed that if you factor in Stalin and Mao, the left has killed more people than the right. However, my article was about political violence in America, so go figure. We need to put these folks in their place when we have a valid argument and aviod doing what they do when we don’t.
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p>”Rather than “taking the fight to the wingnut”, maybe time would be better spent finding the best representatives of conservative thought and engaging that.”
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p>SJG: This is a good idea, but as the other commentor said, we should do both.
Do click the Reply button under my comment.
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This, frankly, sounds more like ego-stroking on your part than engaging.
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p>Seriously engaging with conservatives might include things like: