The big news that rippled through the, er, blogosphere (I hate that word) late last week was, in its way, pretty seismic: The New York Times didn't just hire Nate Silver to do what he's been doing, so well, at 538.com - they went and bought the whole thing, installing it within the Times. By any measure, that certainly counts as hitting the Big Time, even now.
In general, I think the move says more about The Times and how they might, yet, survive the digital revolution and cross the (very real) digital divide. I think older publishers - the Washington Post and their dismal web moves are a prime example (along with, these days, trying to unload NewsweeK) - have shown a real knack for getting the digital age wrong, trying to create, in house, what really has to be accepted as organic; you can't just, suddenly, make your own blogs and expect instant success (or, really, any success), just based on size or traffic, or pandering to obvious demographics. And, I think, the model of importing already successful bloggers has yielded dubious blogs (Megan McArdle and Ezra Klein strike me as two examples) which certainly get eyes, but perhaps, not quite so much respect.
Buying Silver, and his website strikes me as something more: it's gaining not just content, but the credibility of understanding why the web is different, and why getting people who already know what to do with it, and do it well, is the real recipe for folding new approaches to content into existing frames.
Still, Silver's move is also an example of good, old fashioned selling out, cashing in when the moment's right, and more than a few bloggers took note of the change suggesting that the move was a sign that blogging on one's own - though Silver, surely, hasn't been that kind of lonely operation in years - is being "left behind" in favor of a "professionalized" blogger/journalist class of already established names.
Pardon me if I take that a little personally.
Really, though, I don't; I think some of the moves towards professionalization amongst bloggers - clearly, some bloggers at a certain level, and in it for a longer time, have found success at making the whole thing pay off - are very real and even positive. It's just that, I think - and here it may seem personal, though again it's not - that some of this mythology around the "blogging class" is a waste of time and energy, an attempt to rewrite (heh heh) history in favor of the winners, or at least the winners as they appear right now.
More dangerously, I think the perpetuation of notions of a mythical "progressive blogosphere" - a chimerical creation of a set of lefty bloggers that largely self defines and reinforces - damages not only the work of many bloggers but is dangerous to our politics, narrowly defining the notion of what it is to be "on the left" and writing about politics, and creating false notions of our political life, just now and into the future, that in the long run do nothing to help real, progressive political ideas get the kind of traction they need to succeed.
The "progressive blogosphere" is vaguely defined by the notion of lefty views that get aired in various blogs; it kind of measures who's hot (say, Jane Hamsher and FireDogLake or Markos and Daily Kos) and kind of includes obvious group blogs that are affiliated with lefty enterprises (Tapped, Think Progress, TNR), but is rarely (indeed never, that I can tell) comprehensively enumerated down to specific blogs or specific views. It is, really, convenient shorthand for "people I know/read with whom I generally agree" since the whole notion of the Progressive Blogosphere is self-created and self-reinforcing among people who are in it: on the right, they tend to dismiss the notions of a clearly understood "progressive" blogosphere, and tend to, as one would expect, dismiss nearly any idea it's produced.
(And indeed, just to be slightly contrarian and provocative, I think it's actually easier to define a "conservative blogosphere," since, as is their wont, conservatives define these things much more narrowly and it's easier to come up with a short, punchy list of blogs that actually drive the conservative conversation. And even so, therer's a wide breadth for what passes as right wing.)
Within the "progressive blogosphere" as they see themselves, Silver's a success story borne, as so many are these days, out of the Obama campaign and victory. Silver's analysis during primary season of election results, poll data and past elections was valuable, unique research few others attempted, never mind succeeded with doing. As well, it confirmed, for many Obama supporting bloggers their own biases and preferences when thinking about voters and the issues of the day.
But calling Silver a "progressive" blogger or suggesting his success derives from the positions he holds is a stretch. Silver's politics don't particularly distinguish him from a host of others who, frankly, write about it better. Silver's strength lies in backing up his analyses with data-driven, factual pieces. It's not especially sexy, it's often a little dry... but his points are, most often, sound.
The "Progressive Blogosphere" is, still, a catch-all term for an insular group that doesn't like to acknowledge that blogging on the left, never mind overall, is far more diverse than they suggest. The largely white, overwhelmingly male composition of the "usual suspects" (you can make a case for exceptions like Adam Serwer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jane Hamsher, and some of the mob of bloggers that make up Kos - but they tend to be exceptions that underline the mindset), and particularly, the class similar composition of educated, elite professionals, leads to a narrowness in their pieces and biases that they rarely face up to or acknowledge. And it's just the sort of myopia that's made it hard to develop, on the blogs, a clearer picture of what is, and isn't, working out with the Obama Administration.
And though it's easy to make this case by highlighting the obvious topics where unanimity has prevailed - the discussions of healthcare reform that centered on a "public option" plan that sidetracked a great deal of other reform ideas, the "Obama vs. Hillary" fights of the primaries, trendy issues like food policy and environmental concerns where liberal dreams never die - I think the failings of the "Progressive Blogosphere" are thrown into sharper relief where there's less clear cut certainty of thought: the struggle to define a progressive approach to immigration that makes sense and could actually be accomplished; the failure to make women's issues and feminist concerns more central to a progressive agenda; facing up to the realities of our economic and banking crises and admitting that government spending and tax policy needs basic reform - on a wide range of topics, there's a definite lack of "progressive" sensibility in what is, ostensibly, a liberal, left-side group of writers and thinkers.
Indeed, the real problem here is that "progressive" is so poorly defined, so hazily conceived, and membership in "the club" of the "progressive blogosphere" is less about what you think than who you know and how you sell it (or more to the point, sell yourself). It's a term that's either too narrow to be of much use (when applied to "A-list" usual suspects like Kos, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Silver and on and on) or too broad (when applied so as to encompass everything from LGBT blogs to feminist blogs to environmental blogs and every catchy, interested subgroup in between). It would be better, healthier, and more honest to admit - as Chris Bowers and many other "serious" bloggers seemingly can't - that blogging is what it was, only on a far larger field with far more options: an opportunity for many interested, aspiring, and serious writers and thinkers and visual artists to put their ideas out there, try to attract an audience, develop their own unique talents and point of view. Some will be successful, some won't. Some will stick it out, some will fade out, some will, at some point, make it big.
To suggest, as Chris Bowers does, that what we have is all we have, or will ever have, is absurd. As absurd, really, as laying markers around a "progressive blogosphere" that simply doesn't exist. Nor, arguably, should it: we'd be better served if, finally, some of the labeled "progressive" bloggers came out and burned the term, as well as the labeling theory that drives it. The myth of a "progressive" blogosphere, and the misty, wishful storyline of "brave internet pioneers" who hacked the pathway ahead of, well, us, is pretty much full fledged fiction.
The faith in this mythology serves no one well: it's an obvious disservice to the writers and thinkers and analysts who sit, somehow, outside the circle; but it's also a dangerous box to dump a number of rerasonably interesting, occasionally brilliant bloggers. And it's yet more dangerous because clearly, with a lot of cash and some old school clout - Tina Brown's Daily Beast and Arianna's Huffington Post, anyone? - some even bigger operations will sweep in an pull the "progressive blogosphere" out from under the romantic ideals of its defenders, turning some vague liberal bromides into a cash cow where "progressive bloggers" can also be defined as Demi Moore and Brad Pitt. Hire a few "names people know" - indeed, like the Times picking up Nate Silver or WaPo window-dressing their failing print operations with an online star like Ezra Klein - and you, too can drape an otherwise soggy old media business in "new media", "progressive blogosphere" cred. Failure to define terms, draping under developed and unformed writers in star quality, sets the stage for opportunism and selling out. And pretty soon, It's Progressive Blogosphere, TM.
Why not get off this merry-go-round? Let's give some of these people time to grow (and grow up), time to see the world, to drink in complexities and think, harder, about how the world works. And more to the point let's - all of us - stop dancing around hazy terms like "progressive" and do the hard work of developing some principles, explaining them, and seeing what ideas, policies and practical proposals we come up with out of them. Or let's not... because I think letting go of "progressive", as an alternative, is also quite attractive. Let the "progressives" go off and play with the unicorns and pegasi (and Ashton and Demi and Brad) and let's get back to the things that should drive our politics: what's real, what's possible, and what needs to get done. Enough with the myths, and wishing on the stars.
Comments