But in politics, if you disagree 90% you want to concentrate on the 10% area of agreement. Don’t emphasise the disagreements, emphasise the area of agreement. It isn’t about proving you’re right and the other guy is wrong, it’s about getting as much support as you can. That 10% agreement, or even 1% agreement, might make all the difference when it comes down to a particular bill in the legislature.

A whole lot of the time, the main thing blogs are good for is glory.

`I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

If you want something other than a nice knock-down argument, the blog structure is lacking. At a minimum, there should be some easy way to recycle old arguments. Don’t write out your argument fresh, just link to the old copy. Some easy way to keep a database of old arguments—both yours and others—that you’d like to recycle.

And it should be easy to link to various other posts. Easy to make a framework that lets you put together a lot of posts into a coherent philosophy. You can look at the other guy’s and see where he’s coming from, you can show him yours. He might not want to look but it isn’t just short-attention-span arguing until the topic scrolls off the front page.

BBSes tended to be local because people didn’t want to pay long distance charges.

Newsgroups tended to be limited—if your newsgroup got hundreds of people who disagreed with you who wrote thousands of posts a day disagreeing with you, it was difficult and tedious to start a new moderated newsgroup.

Anybody can set up a blog and run it how they want, within the limits of the canned programming.

But beyond that, isn’t it mostly just the same old thing? I used to look at some loal BBSes. They’d get rollicking arguments about whether seat belts were really necessary, or about abortion, or about football, or whatever. People would argue and they’d feel like they were making great points that demolished their opponents. Then it would all scroll off, ready for them to do it again.

Of course it tended to be upper middle class males. Tell somebody who doesn’t have a lot of spare time about it, and see if they want to do it. “So you mean these guys just argue back and forth until they get bored, and then they change the subject and argue about something else?”

Tell a woman with three children about it, see how thrilled she is to join in.

Mostly, nobody looks at the old archives, right? So people argue the same old points over and over. As long as it’s fun who should complain…. But it’s hardly productive.

What the Left needs, surely, is a coherent philosophy that can lead to a coherent series of pragmatic actions that people might actually want to vote for.

I doubt it. If you can put together a coherent philosophy then you have the makings of a splinter group.

If you want to put together a political party, you need a set of glowing ideals that people can generally agree with, and fuzz out the pragmatic actions.

After all, for each action you propose there will be a bunch of lobbyinsts opposing it—and they’ll oppose you. People are far more fanatical at opposing actions that break their own rice bowls than they are at supporting actions that they think are good for the nation.

So as a minor example—suppose you propose normalising relations with cuba. Cuba is not a communist threat to the USA. They have an economy that’s strangled by communist bureaucrats. But they can blame their failures on us because we oppose them so strongly. Let them fail on their own merits and they’re likely to get reformed. And if we bought cuban sugar at world market prices, that would be cheaper for us.

Coherent, pragmatic, but it’s likely to lose you Miami, and the rich american sugar industry will contribute heavily to your opponents and possibly have some of your supporters murdered. When it’s tremendous amounts of money involved, they play for keeps. It will of course lose you anybody who’s still stuck in the Cold War. So you make fervent enemies. And friends? Various people will think ‘yes, that’s pragmatic. Part of a coherent pattern. But kind of radical. We don’t want too much change too fast.’

A long time ago I read a book about negotiation. I’ve forgotten the title and author now. They quoted a politician who had hired an academic as an aide. The politician explained that academic instincts were all wrong for politics. He said if you’re an academic and you’re discussing something, and you agree with the other guy 99%, then you argue about the 1%.

On the other hand, the current effort to punish Bush-kisser Henry Cuellar—as well as the effort to get things going for Joe Lieberman’s primary challenger in CT—is encouraging: one thing the left blogosphere has to start doing is punishing Democrats who stay outside the progressive fold, regardless the short-term gains and losses.

Can’t wait for Perlstein on the Nixon years.

The ethos at Kos, as near as I can tell from being a regular reader, is to elect Democrats who are proud to be Democrats. Unless and until more Democrats win in federal elections, anything else is a luxury that the party can ill afford.

Didn’t Perlstein go to the conservatives and basically tell them they had no principles after all, just a program to gain power? I think I first ran across that message at Brad DeLong’s blog, here.

Finally, I think that how Democrats re-take power will be enormously important. I take that to be one of the generalizable lessons of 1989, that the way you topple those you oppose will shape what you do in power in more ways than can be imagined on the way in. But that’s a thought that probably needs a bit more baking.

The slightly wierd thing is that the one time you doubt yourself is the one time I agree with you.

soru

Straw-person?

Steve

What the Left needs, surely, is a coherent philosophy that can lead to a coherent series of pragmatic actions that people might actually want to vote for. Or am I wrong (as I usually am)?

Michael, I’m half prepared to be convinced by your argument, but only half prepared. What’s missing among the Kos types to my eyes is (a) a coherent set of ideas about what they would do if they got into power, and (b) an organized program to do so by taking over the Democratic party. If you look at the last real case of a successful takeover – the conservative takeover of the Republican party – they had both. Rick Perlstein’s book on Goldwater (and, I expect, his forthcoming book on the Nixon years) is very good on this. I think that the Kos types could do some interesting things – but I really think that they would need to get organized in a very different way to do it properly.

kos is a Latino, and Steve Gilliard is a well-known blogger who happens to be black.

The right-wing blogs, I’m sure, are highly skewed toward technophile white males, some of whom are complete assholes in spite of their expensive educations. But if some people think the left blogging community is a preserve of white maleness, this is their fault, not the fault of the community. They’re just not looking.

In dailykos, Jerome a Paris had a good diary (it’s down now, and I can’t find it) about the two-layered nature of the site: an inner core of activists who post constantly and maintain relations within the kos community, and an outer core of occasional readers who don’t usually post. I myself am in the outer core, ‘cause I don’t understand how these diaries get ‘rated’.

Calling these inner-core activists ‘elite’ is a misnomer. ‘Elite’ to me implies holders of economic and political power, and most of these activists are obviously of modest means. The working class is already there.

Blogs are, and are going to remain, an elite phenomenon. That’s only a problem if you think that the action in this space is about blogs needing to garner or represent a mass readership.

Blogs have no business trying to compete with big media, as even the triumphalists seem to be forced lately to acknowledge: and while they’ve been good so far at addressing big media, that I suspect is only an artifact of the moment. What will remain, though, is the extraordinary capacity of blogs to coordinate opinion among the elites who read them regularly. That’s no small thing, politically, and I think it’s turning out to be really what blogs are for.

There are, of course, vastly different styles of coordination on the right and the left, but that’s not particularly consequential here. As far as mass political action goes: no mass movement is spontaneously self-generating, or self-organizing. Mass politics requires the conscious direction of various cadres of political intellectuals—and those intellectuals need a space within which they can form their opinions, create consensus and coordinate action. It will be obvious where I’m going with this.

Contra schwa, I think there’s a case to be made that progressive blogs (like, for all my irritation with it, Daily Kos) are very well positioned to be at the center of a significant movement of progressive politics. (Whether that’ll actually happen is another matter entirely—there remains the significant problem of the progressive elites finding their masses, a problem MoveOn seems to be groping towards answering.) And they’re positioned that way, not in spite of the fact that they’re an elite phenomenon, but precisely because of it. Of course it should go without saying that, within that elite, there’s always room for greater diversity. But if there’s a more effective place than blogs for progressive intellectuals to coordinate themeselves as a political force, I’d like to know where it is. The union halls aren’t exactly beehives in these lattter days.

What passes for the Left—Hillary Clinton?—is so lacking in imagination that it doesn’t have sense enough to recognize a great Republican phrase (e.g. “the ownership society”) and run with it and explain that the Republicans don’t know what to do with it. That particular phrase was such an opportunity and the Democrats just let it slip by.

Politics is an elite business and there is no way the masses can take part except as individuals in that mass may excel and hence leave it. Only individuals have any effect on the world. “Masses” do nothing.

OK, back to the main theme.

A basic political problem is that the left needs to better connect with non-wonks, and blogging is essentially for wonks.

While I agree with you, Henry, I think the NYT/Atrios comparison is misleading. There are lots of blogs, but not many competitors for the space occupied by NYT. The main point, I think, is that left/liberal blogs are competing for the space occupied by NYT, and NYT does not have a large working-class readership, particularly outside NYC itself.