Or, how we must learn to stop worrying and start loving our fellow lefty bloggers:
Which is not to say that the left can’t learn from the right. Some of the bigger left-of-Labour blogs have much higher traffic than specifically Labour-identified ones, but there are still bad old leftist habits. One thing that’s impressive about the Tory bloggers is that, though they have disagreements, they don’t escalate into nuclear polemic – they do recognise each other as being on basically the same side – and also, they link to each other assiduously. Compare that with the far-left blogs, where in some particular cases, a mixture of sectarian dogmatism and personality clashes leads to long-running feuds, and in one or two cases putatively socialist blogs that do little except run furious denunciations of other socialists.
I’m not that familiar with the toffosphere, but I wonder how much of that supposed unity isn’t an optical illusion. From what I’ve seen of the American wingnut sphere there as a high degree of lockstep as well as long as their “movement” was on the ascent — once the Repubs started to lose the rats started to bite each other. Furthermore, much of their unity was also centrally directed, with much of the traffic being vertical, top to bottom rather than horizontal between equal(ish) partners/blogs. If you get your talking points from the RNC, disseminated via the bigger blogs & mainstream media, then reinforced by the smaller blogs linking back (and being linked to as examples of “grassroots outrage”), it’s no wonder there’s a greater degree of communality amongst rightwing blogs.
But even before the lost presidential and congressional elections there were schisms. There has always been the paleoconservative, libertarian and isolationist right (Pat Robinson, antiwar.com, Jim Henley, etc), subjected to almost as much wingnut hatred as the socalled liberal left for their anti Iraq war stance. Then there were the high profile apostates like Balloon Juice or Andrew Sullivan, once part of the wingnut right until they sobered up (latest example: Little Green Footballs). And currently we have the Teabagger/Palin fanatics trying to purge the unbelievers and vice versa. So much of what makes the rightwing blogs look so united is a ruthless attack of anybody on their side who doesn’t adhere to orthodoxy. So I’m skeptical about how nice the Tories really are towards each other and how much of it is –at least for the moment– enforced from above.
All of which doesn’t take away from some of the more self destructive tendencies of the non-Labour left, it’s true…