I'm not crazy about doing the inside-blog-baseball thing, but via Telford's Jesse I came on a post by Steve Gilliard that has me in a bit of a preachin' mood. Gilliard takes an item about grade-grubbing, a complete yawn as far as I'm concerned, and stretches the point about as far as it'll go, to launch a complaint about small-fish bloggers "complaining that their blogs don't get enough attention from the likes of Atrios and Kos."

As if they are owed some kind of recognition because they blog. They spend hours whinging (I love that britishism)about how other people don't recognize their work and we all need to promote each other and all that nonsense.

My reply was simple: write better. ...

If you want to grab an audience, you have to work at it. You have to do it every day and not expect an ounce of help. Not one link, not one kind reference. You have to do the work to get noticed. Some of us are more talented than others, but if you work hard and show effort others will appreciate it. ...

The problem is that we live in a performance based world. If you can't perform, you are not going to have a job or be taken seriously. It's easy to criticize and hard to do. It's easy to ask for a break, but hard to work to a point where you would find that insulting.

And what went through my head as I read this was, Well, isn't Steve Gilliard just one of nature's Republicans?

I mean, it's all there, isn't it? The self-pitying, all-but-presidential self-righteousness about one's own "hard work"—the hysterical, defensive sense of entitlement, the conviction that success is validation, the aggressive insistence that anybody who hasn't made a killing in the lottery is a LOSER, a whining (excuse me, whinging) nobody. The conviction that there's a club, and that merit ("performance") and nothing but has secured you your deserved membership in it. (Never mind that Gilliard is hardly one of the better prose stylists working in Blog these days.) No doubt Steve will find it a relatively smooth transition from his current stance to the more sensible one that'll someday net him some of that nice "the liberals left me" money.

Has Steve Gilliard ever happened across Clay Shirky's work on power laws in the distribution of attention in the blog space? (I've got an earlier post on the topic here.) It might teach him some humility. But put that aside. The preaching point here is something I remember going on about during my grad school days, with respect to all the good liberals on the faculty whose liberalism proved no impediment at all to their opposing (often with an edge of gratuitous nastiness) their students' efforts to unionize and improve their living conditions.

More than anything, the difference between left and right seems to me to have to do with empathy, with the capacity and the willingness to extend yourself imaginatively. When you're confronted with somebody disadvantaged—say, someone laboring under disadvantages you yourself have to some degree overcome—what's your instinctive response? Do you think yourself into their place? Or do you hug what you've got tighter to your chest, and give thanks you're not one of the bums, that you got yours? Do you congratulate yourself that the world has been organized for your good, or do you reflect a little on contingency? Politics isn't what you say about policy and about national affairs. It isn't, really, what you say at all. It's how you act when you have power—especially in relation to those who have less of it. From that aspect, I'd say I know all about Steve Gilliard's politics I want or need to. Enough at least to know they aren't mine—or those of anybody I'd care to spend time with.

posted by michael  4:18:15 PM  
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Hillary Clinton can kiss my progressive ass. Last week, as you're no doubt aware, the progressive "Take Back America" conference was getting plenty of blogospheric buzz—while generating something less in the way of actual rhetorical thunder. David Corn wrote about a certain word having gone missing from the foreign policy discussion:

Former (and current?) presidential aspirant John Edwards addressed a crowd of hundreds at lunch. He talked earnestly (as he does) about the need to help all those sons and daughters of mill workers (and other hardworking Americans) who didn't get the breaks he received as a son of a mill worker. And when it came to foreign policy, he passionately discussed promoting moral values and development abroad. He denigrated a foreign policy that delivers the rhetoric of freedom and not the reality of economic progress and true liberty. Is a six-year-old girl in Sudan really free, he asked, if she goes to bed each day hungry? But throughout his 25-minute-long speech, Edwards did not make a single reference to Iraq. How, you might ask, can anyone speechify about US foreign policy without mentioning Iraq? Well, it's not too difficult. When Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean spoke to the group in the morning, he too said not a word about the war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton not only didn't say anything at the conference about Iraq (which didn't prevent Ariana Huffington from excoriating her for having earlier declined to discuss an exit strategy, claiming "discomfort" with the topic)—she didn't say anything at the conference, period. Hillary was a no-show, preferring to spend her time bagging herself a million in pre-campaign cash at a Hollywood fundraiser.

Corn writes that the leadership's "don't mention the war" stance is symptomatic of a troubling disconnect between them and the troops:

What strikes me now is the asymmetry between the left and right on this topic. If you were to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (the grand meeting of rightwingers in Washington), you undoubtedly would hear many speakers from the platform--particularly Republican leaders--talk supportively about the war without hesitation. And the crowd would be in sync with these speakers. But over on the left, the friendly political leaders who drop by to address the troops avoid Iraq, and the crowd is disappointed and even angry. The bottom line: there is a disconnect in the progressive/Democratic world that does not exist in the conservative/Republican world. As long as that remains, it will likely be harder for the gang here to "take back" America.

Bad enough that the nearest thing to "progressive" national leadership the party has is unwilling to speak forthrightly to the one issue that, more than any other, currently defines progressive activism. (Or at least, establishes the bedrock concern on which progressive, grass-roots activism is being built.) How much worse is it that Hillary Clinton has given the TBA activists the back of her hand? We're talking about the only genuine source of passion and political commitment the Democratic party currently has, or will have for the foreseeable future: and Hillary'd rather schmooze Maggie and Jake Gyllenhall? Cash, apparently, is better than troops, at least as a corporatist Dem like Hillary understands things. (Which means that the last couple of elections haven't taught her much of anything.)

Marc Cooper spins this into the conclusion that progressives can't take back America because they don't even have a hope of taking back the Democratic party:

This is, of course, how real politics are conducted in this country. Take your name recognition, mix in your network of entrenched party operatives, hacks and local elected officials, water it with plenty of campaign cash a coupla-three years out, and eventually make yourself inevitable. ...

Hillary, of course, didn’t show at the confab. Why should she? She knows very well that if she runs for president, about 99.9% of the people in that room are going to vote for her anyway. Isn’t that what progressives always do? Bitch for four years about the “rightward drift “ of the party and then vote for the nominee, whomever it is?

The last time I bothered to check, there were no real grass-roots political parties in America... There were only campaign vehicles. Hillary’s building hers while the progs spend all week talking to each other. Take Back What?

Cooper appears to be saying that some progressives, someplace, should be constituting a "campaign vehicle" to challenge Clinton, and the rest of it is just so much hot air. Well, for starters, I have a hard time casting anybody in the candidate role for that putative campaign. There simply are no national (elected) progressive leaders, and so there's an anterior problem, one the TBA folks are trying to address: we need to get us some officeholders, and find a way to elevate their stature. More important, maybe: the last time I bothered to check, national political parties were—and had been, in most places and for as far back as I care to recall—real (if skeletal) organizations whose job is to maintain the machinery and the knowledge and the networks of partisan electoral politics between elections, ready for the time when flesh gets put back on the bones. If there's anything the history of the conservative takeover of the GOP tells us, it's that having control of the bones gives you a disproportionate amount of leverage over the long term.

In politics, the power to withhold is every bit as significant as the power to promote. And I think it's a key task now for progressives in the Democratic party to punish people like Hillary Clinton. Fuck her and her fundraising. You think you don't need progressives? Fine, then you don't get anything from us: no money, no troops, nothing. Let Hillary go her way, and let her sink—as, without progressive effort, she assuredly will. As far as I'm concerned, Clinton's just another aspirant to the mantle of Joementum: and Joementum, and the Joementum wing, has got to be purged if the Democrats are to rebound from the me-too hell into which the craven centrists have cast them.

posted by michael  12:45:57 PM  
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