This seems to be the main theme of the blogospheric zeitgeist this morning and as I just spent best part of an hour composing this response to Donna’s comment on the ‘e-democracy’ conference, I thought screw it, it’s a post.
So here’s some further thoughts on the ongoing metamorphosis of the liberal blogosphere into the fundraising arm of the Democratic party, and on the ensuing exclusion of other voices:
Every time I read one of the big blogs self-congratulatorily patting themselves on the back I think Hah! we put you there, bigshot. Back along before the war, when the election was being stolen and real antiwar activist overseas were looking for a bit of sense in the ocean of bullshit that was coming from official US media sources, we found a few lone voices, like Atrios and Kos, speaking out.
Understandably they were feted abroad as being the last remaining sensible Americans and we all flocked to read and encourage them; the left supports those who speak out against injustice. As disquiet over the war spread – fed by the constant stream of information from antiwar bloggers and activists around the world – those US blogs, because of the input of their commenters – many of them activists and acdemics abroad – began to get a name for themselves for having good information and analysis.
In encouraging antiwar sentiment in the US we created a monster: the blogging kool kidz. They now think it’s all their own work and don’t acknowledge either the support of those thousands of small bloggers worldwide who supported, publicised and linked to them. or the later leg-up they’ve been given by influential lfriends in the Democratic party structures and media.
That latter kind of co-option is the way the establishment works to neutralise potential threats, and the bigger bloggers, enamoured of their own importance, either don’t see or refuse to see it. They think they made themselves popular and influential. Nope, we made them popular to to begin with, but as soon as big media saw that the nexus of intelligence clustering around these blogs could be a threat they moved quickly to absorb the bloggers themselves into the existing power structures.
It’s happened in quite a subtle way; by having shifted from their initial antiwar focus to concentrate on the shortcomings of the mainstream media the big bloggers have in actuality become a necessary adjunct to it. Big blogs are shoring up the very media/military/political structures they claim to be railing against.
It’s fascinating how by being suckered by party politics into arguing on the rightwing media’ ground they’ve already accepted the right’s framing of current political issuess as cultural and insular rather than fundamental and global. So the kool kidz’re becoming part of the problem, not the solution, liberal blogging as another branch of showbiz.
I’m sure the big bloggers would disagree vehemently – after all, aren’t they the good guys? But meaning well is not sufficient, meaning well is not revolutionary, meaning well is accommodationist and reformist. Take the Huffpo or Kos – these big blogs, while superficially enabling democracy and challenging The Man, are enabling a sham democracy that challenges little.
That kind of ‘liberal’ blogging changes nothing fundamental, it just makes shit more palatable by allowing people room to bitch about it. Max Sawicky gets to the core of it:
4. People power rests in the ability to mobilize people and resources around some common, substantive agenda by turning them out for meetings and demonstrations (local and national), boycotting, petitioning elected officials, shutting down workplaces, and mounting campaigns to contest the seats of incumbents. It’s more than surfing the web, donating money and voting. It happens that the latter activities serve the needs of website commerce, and the prior ones do not. Everybody has to make a living, but it is not necessary to base a universal political philosophy on how you make a living.
While I’m not one to deride political space, god knows we need more free political space – this kind of blogging has turned the potential for real actvism into little more than a celebrity-based money-raising machine Its now all about the elections, all about the media and superficialities, all about tweaking the political process to their preferred party’s advantage.
Meanwhile the substantive issues – bigotry, greed, poverty, ignorance and now climate change – are undermining society from within and continue unchallenged. Max Sawicky again:
Anti-intellectual preemption of the rubric of progressivism by the not-very-progressive obscures genuinely critical ideas about life under capitalism.
Well, quite. No-one, least of all the blogger writing on his bosses’s time, with a mortgage and a car and quite a nice life really, really wants to overturn the current political system; it’s the way things are that got them where they are, why would they really want to change it, other than to get rid of a few annoying assholes?
No, they just want it to be more Democrat-friendly so they and their peers can get better jobs and everything will be nice and comfy again. The aim is to make the system work their way, not overturn it.
The trouble is, the planet is on the edge of such momentous climatic, economic and political change in the coming decade that the insular little world of beltway media and frontline liberal blogging will be forced to accept there are other worlds than theirs. When New York is flooded or there’s a million-strong river of refugees headed to DC from Florida, the rickety political structures they’re so desperately trying to shore up will inevitably give way. What then?
For all their vaunted sophistication and internationalism I’m not really sure that many big liberal bloggers even realise there’s is another world out there at all except in theory. Even Iraq seems to be comprehended as a semi-fictional place off in some tv-land somewhere, and it only pops into existence when they choose to look at it. As for the other worlds within the domestic borders, they don’t get any air time at all so they exist even less. (And who wants to be reminded of the fate that awaits should one’s standard of living slip?)
No doubt all this (if anyone reads it) will dismissed as the sad bleatings of a lower-tier, also-ran blogger. Let me just say for the record that I’ve never blogged for any other reason that when things are wrong, someone should say so. I’m not pursuing a career, we don’t do ads, this is not a money-making exercise. In any case I’ll be dead in a few years so I have no compunction about speaking my mind now. What have I got to lose?
My feeling about blogging is that it’s a combination of record and samizdat. If an injustice exists, it should be put on the record somewhere, even if it’s only on a lower-tier also-ran blog. It would still please me no end if only one person read this blog – that’s one other person who knows, and who’ll tell someone else who’ll tell someone else. And there are millions more out there all over the world who feel just like me. THAT is the real strength of blogging.
It’s all about getting it on the record and making unheard voices heard. For the first time in history anybody has the chance to talk to anybody in the world in real time: that’s a dangerous thing to those in government and in power so we’d better make the most of it while we still can.
Hmmm: tendentious, argumentative and verbose, a classic Palau post, if I say so myself. Maybe a little short on the needless offensiveness, but hey, we all have off days.
