You will rarely hear me complain about the dumbing-down of culture. All that worried talk about the sorry state of TV, the movies, music videos, video games, hip-hop, whatever. My position on this is: that’s not culture–that’s pop culture. And it’s supposed to be dumb, or dumb enough for a mass audience to get it.
Besides which, there are cogent arguments to be made that it’s not too dumb at all, just different than what we’re used to–and of course downmarket. (The world of culture does, of course, have its problems: a small audience. The theater, opera, classical music, dance, literary books, for example–all of these are by now a niche taste. But that’s a different subject. Hopefully, Chris Anderson’s ideas about the long tail and Jeff Jarvis’s “mass of niches” mantra, among many other innovative ideas, will ensure that even niche tastes will be continue to be served in the marketplace.)
But back to the subject at hand: you will hear me railing about a certain kind of arrogant, aggressive political partisan. Like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of the DailyKos, who told the Washington Monthly: “I’m not ideological at all. I’m just all about winning†for the Jan-Feb 2006 issue.
By March 17, he had changed his tune. He told the Boston Globe that the blogosphere is willing to support senators who voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war “As long as they’re suitably contrite and admit they made a mistake.”
This zeal to call “wrongdoers” to account will be the undoing of the Democrats. It is off-putting. Here, for example, is the author Jane Smiley taking fellow author George Packer (The Assassins’ Gate, a work of deep intellectual honesty) to task:
Packer and all the pro-war hawks are as corrupt as the neocons are, because they retain some sort of sentimental attachment to their former idealism about whether “war” can be good or bad…. Packer may have made some progress toward redemption by writing a good book, but until he admits that he never knew what he was talking about before the war, and that antiwar protesters did know what they were talking about, he is still in the dark hole, and deserves to remain there.
Now, in the same letter to the editor at Salon.com, Smiley writes that “in a just world, these people [Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Feith and their underlings] would be taken out and shot.”
Okay, let’s give Smiley the benefit of the doubt and say she’s engaging in rhetorical exaggeration, with a lot of status anxiety thrown in–a common practice among literary lions, I note: Harold Pinter, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, John Le Carre, and Norman Mailer come immediately to mind.,
Still, calls for ideological purity are creepy. Only a political operative as young and green and ignorant of left-sectarianism as Zuniga would call for it. This is a case of tactics trumping strategy thinking, or just plain old common sense.
When only 16% of the population describes itself as liberal (as opposed to 36% who say they are conservative and 47% who call themselves moderate) and you need more votes, what is the point of making a big show of the fact you think Senate Democrats haven’t met a litmus test: that they aren’t liberal enough?
Is that the way to win over moderates?
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[...] —————————– **This continues to run through the cohort–”my people,” as the columnist Michael Wolff has called them in another context. Author Jane Smiley, for example, demanded that George Packer apologize for not admitting his own complicity (or something like that) in our crimes in Iraq because, despite his deep self-professed doubts, he supported regime change via invasion. I talked about this here. Vicious sectarianism is not, of course, anything new. But this age-old divisiveness, which today anyone is capable of putting on full display across the globe via technology, threatens to totally rupture the association of leftism (and possibly liberalism) with humanitarianism. [...]
[...] First journalist George Packer came in for a skewering for not being contrite about his pro-war stance before the invasion of Iraq, as I mentioned here. Now “newly minted dissenters from Bush’s faith-based reality” come under attack: 4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court humiliated itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did not object. When the Bush administration adopted an “Anything but Clinton” policy that resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush…. [...]
[...] I agree with Arianna (regardless of her motives, and I don’t claim to know what they are) and have written about this here and here and here). [...]
[...] Jane Smiley titles her post “Let’s Pile On Joe.” She invokes Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, James Cagney, and Martin Luther King. And her all-American grandpa. I have written about Smiley’s poisonous partisanship here and here and here. And about left sectarianism here and here. [...]
[...] It is looking for enemies to take down. It takes no prisoners. It is out for blood. It demands repentance. Above all, it demands that “liberal hawks” admit that they were wrong about the war–not just the miserably inept prosecution of the war but the decision to go to war itself. (I have written about this seemingly ad nauseam: here, here, and here, for starters.) There will be no such admission from me. I embraced my inner Neanderthal on 9/11, when nihilist Neanderthals drew my country into an internecine struggle and forced my country to choose sides, and to act, or to lose its own hard-won freedoms. The Euston Manifesto comes at exactly the right time. This boil on the left needs to be lanced. [...]
[...] Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos isn’t a leftist, it’s claimed (as if leftism or rightism are the only manifestations of ideology). He is merely partisan. Well, okay. He is, of course, fanatically anti-Bush and fanatically anti-war. Other than that, he’s not ideological at all. [...]
[...] I’ve written a lot about the crusade for ideological purity (specifically with regard to the Iraq war) in certain circles on the left (see here and here, for example, or search “Jane Smiley” and “Kos”). I also noted when the Washington Post took on the “angry left” and when Arianna chastised her readers for their excessive fervor. [...]
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