US politics

Sometimes I loathe blogging and I hate blogs. At the moment I can’t stand all this waiting, it’s driving me absolutely, nailbitingly nuts. My refresh button is wearing out.

Although nemesis is approaching both the Blair and Bush governments in the form of prosecutions for corruption and for perjury respectively, it’s taking it’s own sweet bloody time about it.

I want poodle and chimp blood and I want it now!.

Maybe I’m projecting my own feelings about the endless grey tedium of January but the UK and US news media and punditerati seem to have gone oddly quiet of late. I don’t mean there’s no news, that’s patently absurd what with wars and massacres and plagues all over the place – but there’s a faint whiff of tense anxiety emanating from the political reporters and commentariat. I wonder why?

They do have cause to be tense: both the accelerating Cash for Honours and Plame investigations and subsequent prosecutions will result in large part from the persistence of bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic. Unpaid citizens have been doing the job that the pampered, self-perpetuating mediocracy should’ve been doing. The media’s passive collusion in propping up illegal government and facilitating the obstruction of justice is about to be exposed and it won’t be pretty; no wonder they’re nervous. (Or maybe they’re just desperately trying to catch up on the story. That’s why they’re quiet – they’re reading blogs.)

That doesn’t mean there are no bright, persistent reporters on the big papers, it means they are exceedingly rare pearls of rare price amongst the cosy insiderdom and casual venality that are the modern Cranfords of Westminster and Washington, those murky little worlds of interlocked party-politics, thinktanks, op-ed columns and off-the-record-socialising, where political reporters and pundits work, go to the same schools, live in the same neighbourhoods, go to the same dinner-parties and social events and help each others children do the same in their turn.

That this state of affairs exists is due both to the way patronage, largesse and plain access has been managed by political parties on both sides of the Atlantic in modern times, most recently and blatantly by Blair and Bush. But it also testifies to the media’s willingness to be patronised and managed by politicians, providing there is sufficient personal advantage.

It’s been a long comfortable ride for the pundits so far, but the papers they write for are losing circulation and profits as fewer people turn, not to the papers or tv for news and political analysis, but to the internet and bloggers.

The trouble is that the small world of political blogging is, though supeficially wide-open, actually self-regulated and just as parochial, narrow-minded and self-interested as any other self-selected grouping.

Liberal blogging is already producing its own insider elites even though it’s that which brought us to this pass in the first place. Although they’re much less well-paid (if paid at all) than the right bloggers, the money is coming. With the ascendancy of the Democrats in Congress and a record-funded presidential race on the way, bloggers are no doubt already anticipating a tasty slice of the ad-spending and political-consultancy pie. The Hillary blogads are all over the place already.

I suppose they might argue that that’s the way the system works and what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander., t’was ever thus, blah blah blah, don’t blame us, a blogger’s got to live and so on. Fine, make your living from politics if that’s what you want to do. I’ve no problem with that, it’s your choice.

But remember that the moment you start to make your living from politics you are part of the political establishment, not the counter-establishment, on the inside not the outside, and expect to be treated accordingly. (I think finding yourself on a Murdoch paper like the Times’ list of 10 bloggers most likely to sink Hillary Clinton signifies that you are indeed, Established.)

Athough superficially separate, the walls between the big liberal blogs. Democratic party politics and paid opinion, already paper-thin, are crumbling. What does this mean for smaller, less exalted left political blogs?

It means that their role as political samizdat is even more important than ever.

US Democratic bloggers argued recently in criticism of the US antiwar march on Saturday that the left is dead, ineffectual and out of date and that party politics, not protest is where the actions’s at. Other big blogs have bought into this too. Observer journalist Nick Cohen has argued the same thing, though from a different perspective ( that of someone who supported the invasion of Iraq and now must spend the rest of his life justifying it by attacking the war’s opponents).

It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America. I hate to repeat the overused quote that ‘when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything’, but there is no escaping it. Because it is very hard to imagine a radical leftwing alternative, or even mildly radical alternative, intellectuals in particular are ready to excuse the movements of the far right as long as they are anti-Western.

Of course the ‘left ‘, at least as Cohen defines it – in terms of the Labour and Democratic parties – is dead: modern party politics is now merely a televised battle of who can raise most to spend on advertising, and electoral platforms are informed by market research, not political principle. Left? What left?

Those allegedly lleftist parties that liberal media and the big blogs argue and raise money for are all in thrall to to the free market. It’s the baseline from which all their political argument springs and it may not be gainsaid. Only in that sense is Cohen’s point valid; the Labour party left, that wanted to change the world is dead and gone, as are the New Deal Democrats. What remains is a bunch of middle-class policy wonks who beleive they can both simultaneously enjoy the fruits of the free market and assuage their liberal guilt by tinkering around the edges so things are a just a little nicer for the poor folk overseas and the blacks and the gays at home and they don’t have to feel so bad that they live so well.

But there is a another left – that’s iinternational and internationalist, that doesn’t trust any existing party, that’s comprised of people who would not necessarily call themselves leftists but who loathe injustice and lies (local or global) who abhor hypocrisy, cruelty, corruption and greed, who see that the free market as a panacea for all social ills doesn’t work and who are not afraid to say so, loudly and often, through any means they can find. They’re not seduced by power because they know they are powerless.

Blogs have given them a voice.

They might forget it now but that’s how the big blogs started too; Kos is only as big as he is now because of all the diarists. That made him and his site dangerous. That he’s now lauded in the media as a Democratic power-broker is the political establishment using the old ‘inside the tent pissing out’ strategy. By neutralising Kos they neutralise the his readers and diarists too, goes the thinking.

Power is very seductive, so I’m not at all surprised by the continuing co-option of the big blogs into the political establishment. It’s the way elites always work: co-opt, absorb and neutralise. Just so long as those bloggers co-opted remember that that they are no longer outside the system but within it and we’ll all get along fine.

But back to my original point, the current nervousness of the media. I may be entirely wrong about the reason why they’re so subdued. Maybe this is all an excuse for self-absorbed metablognoodling and they’re all just waiting for Bush to drop the Big One on Iran.

Now that really would be a paradigm shift
.

An attack on Iranian nuclear infrastructure would signal the start of a protracted military confrontation that would probably grow to involve Iraq, Israel and Lebanon, as well as the USA and Iran. The report concludes that a military response to the current crisis in relations with Iran is a particularly dangerous option and should not be considered further. Alternative approaches must be sought, however difficult these may be.

Yes, that might certainly make the subject of the co-option of liberal blogs somewhat irrelevant.