The Swampland experiment over at Time Magazine has been fascinating to watch. After years of getting hammered by the progressive bloggers, Joe Klein entered the fray, and from day one the sparks have been flying. If you haven't been following along, it's going to be a bit difficult to bring you up to speed on all of the details; nevertheless, Kevin Drum does an admirable job of both summarizing the dispute and getting to its core. It's one of those subjects that I've been meaning to blog about for a long time now, so... an excerpt from Kevin and then some thoughts:
In a followup post he listed some benchmarks for identifying a "left-wing extremist," and after reading comments from liberal critics suggesting that real-life liberals didn't take any of the extreme positions he imputed to them, he replied sarcastically, "There are no lefties left. There are no socialists left....Jeez, that's a relief."
So what's gong on? The biggest clue is that the first example of lefty extremism that comes to Klein's mind is an issue that's been all but dead for over a decade, while his examples of righty extremism are alive and well right now today. And socialists? There have never been many socialists in America, but there were at least a few who pretended to be in the 60s and 70s, when Klein and his generation first became politically active. But today? Outside of Berkeley, you'd have to swing several hundred dead cats before you'd be likely to come across an actual socialist.Still, since I became politically aware during the 70s and early 80s (a decade later than Klein), I have at least a little bit of appreciation for what's driving him. For somebody with a moderate temperament, some of the excesses of that era are bound to leave scars. In my case, though, I was only aware during that period, not active. Like most lefty bloggers, I only started following politics in a serious way in the late 90s. So for me the ghosts of school busing are just that: ghosts.
My political frame of reference is different. It's Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America; it's the insane wingnut scandal-mongering of the Clinton administration, culminating in Kenneth Starr and the Republican loonies trying to impeach a president over a blow job; it's the press beating up on Al Gore in 2000 and a conservative Supreme Court then awarding the disputed election to its favored candidate; it's a series of brazen, multi-trillion dollar tax cuts aimed at the GOP's rich donor class; it's the K Street Project; it's the 30-year stagnation of middle class wages, partly due to an unholy alliance between conservatives and neoliberals on trade and unions; it's a disastrous war in Iraq led by a president who had no clue what he was getting into (and still doesn't); and during this entire time a Democratic Party seemingly adrift and unwilling to really fight back.
Now, I sort of get the fact that, having grown up and reported on politics during the 60s and 70s, Klein still gets twitchy when he sees things that remind him of it. And his personal knowledge of the past has some pretty obvious utility, especially for a blogosphere that tends to be pretty historically myopic. But in the face of everything that's happened since 1994, does he really think his memories of school busing are germane?
This generational split is absolutely essential to understand. Most DC pundits who openly identify and work as liberals are part of the 1970s school of thought. They see "the left" as a group primarily concerned with identity issues and economic radicalism, a politics that they rightly believe led to the great liberal collapse of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (For more on this, see EJ Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics)
The problem with that, of course, is that today's liberals, and particularly today's liberal bloggers, are absolutely nothing like yesterday's liberals. We came of age during the 1990's, not the 1970s, an era that Kevin very accurately describes above. For us, the collapse of the Democratic Party is ancient history, a past that we've read about but didn't live through or participate in. It's concerns are not our concerns - never have been, never will be.
As I've mentioned numerous times here on this blog, my own personal story is one of evolving from a "conservative" Republican to a "liberal" Democrat. And sure, part of the evolution has been a genuine shift in my political beliefs on a fairly wide variety of issues. But another part has undoubtedly come as a direct result of the evolution of the Republican Party through the 1990s. Under the influence of people like Tom DeLay, James Dobson, Newt Gingrich, and Grover Norquist, the Republican Party virtually abandoned its links to libertarianism in favor of a new form of government activism, one based on an odd mix of market fetishism and fundamentalist christianity. As much as I left the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me.
Like many of my fellow progressive bloggers, I now consider myself a moderate liberal. But because I am angry, genuinely, deeply angry about what these people have done to my country, people like Joe Klein, a man with whom I have far more in common politically than not, label me an "extremist." Rather than turn his considerable talents and enormous potential influence to battling those in power who are driving this country over a cliff, he instead wastes his time fretting about how "angry" those on the "extreme left" seem to be.
As Glenn Greenwald put it a few months back, "it's not 1972 anymore." Yes, our anger is as real as it is genuine, but this time, there's a difference. This time our anger is shared by a significant majority of the nation. Here's how Tristereo put it a few months back:
Many of us out here in Left Blogosphere are actually moderate liberals. Angry as all hell, it is true, but moderate liberals nevertheless. We are "Left" the way anyone to the left of Louis XIV is Left. We have nothing in common with the Ward Churchills out there even if we wouldn't quit ACLU if they defend him, just as we didn't when they defended Oliver North).
We are not the radicals. To force women who wish to terminate their pregnancies - for whatever reason - to use coathangers - that's radical. And unspeakably cruel. To refuse to recognize, both legally and publicly, a couple in love - that's radical. And narrow-mindedly cruel. To base foreign policy on the president's "gut" and an obviously untenable unilateralism - that's radical. And stupid. To get a team of unscrupulous lawyers trained in the black arts of sophistry (ahem!) but ignorant of American history to gut the Constitution and argue that a president is just an ominipotent monarch under a different name - that's radical. And utterly un-American.That's why I'm blogging. It's not to advance a "leftwing agenda." Unless preventing Social Security from being gutted by rightwing maniacs is considered a leftwing agenda. Unless demanding that the US president behave like the president of the United States is supposed to behave towards the victims of a devastating hurricane is a leftwing agenda. Unless insisting that the nation's schools teach science and not cynical lies is a leftwing agenda.
These are some of my issues. If I thought marching and protesting could help them today, I would march and protest. But I think there's something we can do that's more effective to counter Bush and Bushism. That is to help build a genuine second-party that will stand up against these scoundrels and provide this country the intelligent, genuinely strong leadership it deserves. And that will require a different kind of left - the left of blogs like Mahablog. (And it will require a lot more than just blogs, to say the least, but we have to start somewhere!)
All f which brings me back to Joe Klein. Slowly but surely, he is learning. Maybe very slowly, but nevertheless surely. If and when he comes around, I hope that lefty bloggers will let bygones be bygones and work, at times at least, with Klein in common cause. Because if they don't, well... that just might mean that Klein was at least in part right all along...
UPDATE: For those interested, Atrios, one of the main targets of Klein's complaint, has continued the conversation in some detail here.
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