A few years ago I wrote this review (“The Orwell Temptation”) of Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism. It’s a critical review. But I bring it up because the central theme of the review was the intellectual’s tendency or temptation to overthink or overstate the gravity of their moment. It’s not quite grandiosity. But it’s close.
I’m not here to knock Berman’s book again. If you’re not familiar with it, it is the most articulate and thought-out version of the argument that today’s violent Islamic jihadism is the moral, political and existential equivalent of the 20th century’s battle against totalitarianism in its Nazi and Communist forms.
To me, it’s not a convincing argument or book. It’s overdone, an example of that urge to find our own times a bit more world-historical than they really are. But it’s certainly not a silly book.
And I say that because I think we’ve found another example that is so silly and ridiculous that it’s almost like an over-the-top parody. But it’s for real.
With all that build up, let me get down to particulars.
You may have heard that a few days ago, in TNR online Lee Siegel called the blogosphere “hard fascism with a Microsoft face.”
When I heard about that I figured it was a throwaway line, albeit a bit overdone and self-serious. But no, Siegel’s really serious about this. He is in earnest! And on Friday he followed up with a deeper analysis with the weighty title “The Origins of Blogofascism”. There’s even the beginnings of a sociological analysis and a historical one too. But let’s jump right into the mix.
“Moron”; “Wanker” (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and “Asshole” have been the three most common polemical gambits.
Polemical gambits? Lee, dude, how many times did your butt get kicked in third grade, buddy?
[Full Disclosure: I know most of the reporter-writers (aka ‘Editors’) at TNR personally; but to the best of my knowledge I’ve never met Siegel.]
But I digress. Let me quote at more length …
“Moron”; “Wanker” (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and “Asshole” have been the three most common polemical gambits …
All these abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as “any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control.” The proof, you might say, is in the puddingheads.
I am overwhelmed by the intolerance and rage in the blogosphere. Conscientiously criticize, in the form of a real argument, blogospheric favorites like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the response isn’t similar criticism, done conscientiously and in the form of an argument, but insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism.
Yes, getting some hate mail and getting called a wanker, truly the stuff of fascism. I’m going to have to completely rethink the March on Rome and the Night of the Long Knives.
Let me say a bit more about this though, because I can understand someone from the world of small magazines being shocked by the responsiveness, rambuctiousness and even hair trigger hostility of the blogosphere. I haven’t done much magazine writing in the last couple years. But I come out of that world of small political magazines. And it is, in many more than just the obvious ways, a different world.
Write a piece for the New Republic or the American Prospect or even the far wider circulation New Yorker and you may get a few letters in the mail from readers. Not that many or that often, but sometimes. Friends and colleagues will tell you what they thought or argue with you about it. The publication will probably get a few letters to the editor. But that’s about it.
Your contact with the people who read what you’re writing is quite limited. On the other hand, TPM gets anywhere from 2-500 emails every day. Needless to say, many fly in within minutes of your finishing whatever is being responded to. And, believe or not, not all of them are nice.
Not long ago I got on the wrong side of the ridiculousness of the proprietor of one left-wing website. And his antics were so dishonorable and shameless that I don’t think I’d ever speak to the guy again. Still, I don’t think he was a fascist. I think he is, mundane a category as it may be, a dick. Or perhaps I’m the dick. To him, certainly. Still though, I don’t think fascism has anything to do with it.
More generally, I think the blogosphere, in contrast to more staid venues for writing, is something like the much more popular and participatory sort of theater culture you had in the 19th and well into the 20th century (you may remember seeing some hint of this funned up in old Bugs Bunny cartoons) where, if the audience didn’t like what they were hearing or seeing, they started booing. Or hooting. Or heck, maybe tossing raw vegetables. You get a sense of Siegel’s reaction when he grandly opines that the blogosphere, “radiates democracy’s dream of full participation but practices democracy’s nightmare of populist crudity…”
Siegel is like some would-be Alexander Woollcott who thinks he’s taking a seat at the Algonquin Table. But he’s shown up on the stage at some freewheeling vaudeville theater. And when the crowd starts booing his pompous malarkey and he gets hit in the head with a ripe tomato, he imagines it’s some world-historical event.
In any case, hold that thought, because Siegel’s goofball Hannah Arendt channeling continues.
“Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition.”
Siegel then does a quick character sketch of Markos Moulitsas as one of these “rootless men”, ready, I guess, to congeal in to some sort of html freikorps …
So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that. I wonder, does Zuniga consider the Solidarity movement disgusting, compromising, venal politics, too? And was there really no one to root for during the Salvadoran civil war? It’s hard to believe the usually inflexibly partisan Zuniga actually said that. The rebels may have been “Maoist”–whatever that meant to them in Central America at the time–but their goal of overthrowing a brutal, rapacious regime might well be something that a passionate political idealist and reformer like Zuniga, looking back at it in 2004, would sympathize with. Or so you would think.
But, then, Zuniga–let’s cut the puerile nicknames of “DailyKos, “Atrios,” “Instapundit” et al., which are one part fantasy of nom de guerres, one part babytalk, and a third thuggish anonymity–believes so deafeningly and inflexibly that it’s hard to tell what he believes at all, expecially if you try to make out his conviction over the noisy bleating of his followers.
He told Deborah Solomon in The New York Times that he joined the army out of high school to build up his self-confidence. Elsewhere, he has spoken of his love of 25-mile marches with a heavy knapsack. After the Army, college and then law school. But he never practiced law, it seems. He drifted to San Francisco and into the high-tech industry, where he designed Websites. Finally, he ended up in politics, again drifting into the Democratic party, supporting first John Edwards, and then Wesley Clark, and then, as a paid consultant, Howard Dean.
Anyway, there’s just more and more of this and it just gets better and better.
I tried really hard to come up with something intelligent to say about this nonsense. But Siegel’s foolishness defied me. And all I can do is keep giggling that this guy actually can write this stuff with a straight face.
I freely admit blogging is an ephemeral form of writing. It’s written quickly, usually forgotten quickly. It doesn’t lend itself to that sort of rigorous writing and rewriting which is often the way you discover your ideas in your own mind. It is a popular medium on many levels. But it also has an immediacy and when done well, under time pressure, produces an economic form of writing, a concision and getting right to the point.
I saw a quote a few days ago where someone said something like blogging is a boon for information but an enemy of thought. And there’s an element of truth to that. In most hands, it’s more a medium of exchange than reflection. The technology can leave us with too little time to mull and digest. But as Siegel’s dingbat self-parodies show, having too much time on your hands can also lead to trouble.
