Bureaucratising Dissent Into the Grave?
Jeff Weintraub at TPMCafe makes an excellent point about the close connection between bloggers and the expected Fall of Lieberman (since it has been raised to such a level of importance by all concerned, it has to have a dramatic name) that the success of bloggers in influencing the conventional party political scene has made them just another adjunct to the same media noise machine from which blogs were supposed to be a distinct, independent medium. This reminded me immediately of one of my earlier posts on George Grant, blogs and the “bureaucratisation of dissent.” If pols are getting “blog consultants” and hiring their own blogging teams, will it be very long before most blogs lose any trace of their potentially renegade, decentralised and delightfully trouble-causing character? As I said back in May:
But on the more specific point of dissent, Grant would likely see political blogging as precisely this sort of release of built-up pressure into harmless diversionary channels, irrelevant samizdat for the allegedly “open society” in which the range of debate extends between two (or possibly three in a really exciting society) alternative methods for achieving the same bland, inhuman goals of the managerial social democratic and state capitalist structures. Unlike printing samizdat, blogs do not operate as a genuinely alternative source of news and information in direct opposition to official news outlets, but rely heavily on “the MSM” that we bloggers all love to hate and end up generally replicating the patterns of that media and feeding off its information for our own. It is only to the extent that blogging provides a venue for genuinely alternative or opposition voices that it can be a forum for generating moderately effective resistance to any given policy.
Most political blogs, certainly the most influential, become online outposts for their preferred political party. They may dislike the current leadership of the party, or they may love it, but they are as committed to the success of that party as anyone. This does not mean that they necessarily become reflexively party-line in their views, but there is a strong tendency for this to happen. The smaller bloggers then take their cues from the major sites, and thus the party’s hold on its activists is secured. Blogging quickly collapses into predictable alliances (indeed, the creation of blogger consortia like Daily Kos is the only way for bloggers to leverage any kind of influence online).
The main trouble with political blogging is that it tends to bring out the activists and single-issue obsessives across the spectrum, who are then either drawn in to becoming a conventional party man or who attempt to remain, John Taylor-like, lifelong opposition men. Political blogging has made the amateur sport of being a political crank into something else all together–it becomes an obsession with its own influence on the mainstream of politics and media, where it will quickly exhaust itself, be absorbed and disappear as a distinctive voice.
Bloggers should be on the one hand satisfied if they have made good arguments and reported the truth, rather than be concerned with whether their still largely obscure medium has “made a difference,” to overuse again a horribly overused and dreadful phrase, and on the other they should recognise that they have an almost unprecedented tool at their disposal: a medium, however limited, for shaping and making public opinion that does not have to be defined by the categories of the media or the politicians. It is a medium that does not have to be constrained by a party, a publisher or any set of interests favourable to the establishments that flourish in a highly centralised and consolidated state. It can be put at the service of a decentralised politics, and indeed it makes sense that bloggers should instinctively prefer decentralism from their own experience of the stifling, deadening effects of centralisation and consolidated control on corporate media and government. Yet they seem to be making the mistakes of the Populists and Insurgents all over again, who thought they were defending the small town and small business by making Washington bigger and more powerful and giving it ever more access to the world of the small town. Bloggers will see the relative success of the Kossacks, if there is a success in Connecticut, and begin to imitate them, but I am starting to think that this would be a mistake if bloggers dedicated themselves to the cause of one or the other dry husks that we call political parties and expended their energies on the parties’ electoral successes and shaping only perhaps one or two points of their agenda. We are seeing blogs becoming just another vehicle for the same failed, servile, party politics, and it seems to me there must be some kind of alternative that this medium offers that people raised up in a world of limited debate, uninformative news and meaningless party fights can no longer see or imagine.
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