See here for more.

not really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland,_California#.22There.27s_no_there_there.22

As for whether blogging is simply blowing off steam … sometimes it certainly is. Sometimes it’s formulating ideas that turn out to be half-baked. Sometimes it’s formulating ideas that turn out to be good. But mostly it’s about engaging in argument, which is something that I happen to enjoy. If others enjoy reading what I write, and responding to it, then great. If people occasionally find something interesting that they hadn’t thought about before in what I write, even better (I grant that this isn’t likely to happen all that often, if at all). But the point is that I don’t usually engage in extemporaneous writing because I hope that it might have World Historical Significance, shape politics etc (if I did, there would be better ways to achieve such significance than by writing blogposts). I do it because argument is worth engaging in as a form of education (I feel that I’ve learned and am still learning from it).

O.K. I will bite. I don’t carry a brief for Alan Wolfe but some of his work isn’t awful. See this essay on the authoritarian personality and contemporary conservatism.
http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/news_item.2005-10-27.6168871533

I can’t quite imagine Roger Rosenblatt referencing Adorno in a critique of conservatism.

And as for Serious Pundits, come now, Krugman is a very clever guy who can turn anything he wants into a defense of his liberal political economy views. In that respect, he can write about anything because he is able to bring a clear and consistent point of view to it. That’s why people like Peter Singer are also wanted as op-ed writers. A Serious Pundit is like a Philosopher with a short attention span. S/he is not a specialist in the way you suggest. Maybe you’re simply admitting that you don’t have what it takes to be a Serious Pundit, and that’s fine. But it does make one wonder whether participating in CT —either as you or me—is anything more than blowing off steam.

The second question, which seems less rhetorical, misunderstands why I at least started blogging and have continued it (I can’t speak for other CTers, although I suspect that some of them at least would have similar views). I started blogging as a way to talk about things that I couldn’t talk about in my academic work, but that I find interesting. But it was, and remains, a supplement to my main intellectual activity; I am an academic who blogs, not a blogger who is an academic. I put considerably more thought and effort into my academic writing than into my blogposts (and sometimes it shows). I have no particular interest in swapping my academic career for a career as a pundit, and indeed have politely refused various opportunities that would put me more firmly on the pundit track (that doesn’t mean that I mightn’t engage in occasional punditry, just that my be-all and end-all, contrary to your belief, isn’t in becoming a writer at the New Republic or the New York Times). Whatever side-ventures I’ve engaged in recently have had a strong academic component (creating a wiki to keep track of academic blogs; starting off a political science papers blog); this emphasis is likely to increase rather than decrease over time.

And there’s pretty good reason why I wouldn’t want to become a pundit. As a blogger, I can write about more or less what I want to. If I get a largish audience for it, fine, if I get a smallish audience for it, fine. But I don’t feel beholden to an imaginary public, nor to a publicly defined role, nor am I in any way financially dependent on appealing to that public (as you may have noticed, we don’t run ads). If I were to become a pundit, I would have to limit the things I write about, because it would have become my day job, and because Serious Pundits in the New York Times can’t write columns about the latest SF novel that they liked. I further wouldn’t have much time to engage in serious research (Paul Krugman seems to be able to pull off the balancing act, but I am not Paul Krugman, and I suspect that even he has made some considerable sacrifices as an academic in order to make enough time to write two columns a week plus ancillary material). In short, blogging at CT is more or less exactly right for me – I can write about non- and quasi- academic subjects that I want to write about, I get an interested audience, at least part of the time, but it doesn’t make me feel like I am sacrificing my research.