Here’s Some New Anger For You (II)

Perhaps we could follow Dahlia Lithwick’s advice and start bringing people together to write co-authored, “balanced” posts in the blogosphere as well.  Just think of it: Jessica Valenti and Ann Althouse would be writing about feminism together; Amanda Marcotte and I could pen an article on Christian theology; Justin Raimondo and Michael Ledeen could write about the war.  Oh, wait, that might not be very practical, since all of these people have wildly different views of the world grounded in actual arguments and experiences.  Some of these arguments are better than others, but to want to actively blur the differences between them and bring together political opponents to engage in self-conscious Broderism is not just strange but actually destructive of real political discourse.  It is this sort of stifling miasma that people go to the blogosphere to flee, and no wonder!  Maybe the blogosphere actually expresses widely diverging political views that consensus journalism and commentary actively tries to suppress, and these consensus pundits and journalists do this so that people will be conned into believing that the extreme poles of acceptable discourse range all the way from Jonah Goldberg to E.J. Dionne.  That idea is not only wrong and insulting, but it is likely to make some of us a bit, well, angry.