stuff

Confession time: while I stand by just about everything I wrote, I will cop to a certain amount of planned outrageousness in the post. You'll have to forgive me. If I'm right in my description of the situation as laid out in the post, it's necessary for me to be provocative. Asymmetrical warfare depends not on the power of the initiating actor but on the disproportionate nature of the response. I will further confess to having written most of the post weeks ago (inspired by a little teasing from Julian Sanchez, actually). I knew the middle of the holiday season was the worst time to post it. I knew MLK weekend was the best time to post it-- not because of symbolism but because of the news cycle and the rhythm of the blogosophere. It worked out.

I guess I can still bring it out of people.

I'm sorry some people thought I was just taking personal swipes at Yglesias and Klein; I didn't mean that. My point is and was that they and a few others are called the left-wing extreme on political blogs all the time, and they aren't really left-wing, and it muddles the debate. It makes it harder for them, too, and a real left-wing would help provide cover for them, as well as represent a voice I happen to like. A lot of people wrote to tell me what a good guy they both are, and I never meant to dispute that; I don't know either of them. Being good dudes is just far besides the point, and the preeminence of personal stuff is a big part of the problem.

By the way-- I never used the term "sellout," and I wouldn't, in large part because that's a distortion of my argument. It bothers me that the term seems to be getting thrown around in response to my piece.

So it's been gratifying to get this into the conversation; I can't tell you how important I think it is to have people like Jon Chait and Kevin Drum and so on weighing in on this. And I think it supports my reading of the landscape. Drum doesn't deny that he isn't a conventional leftist. Chait does the same. (Someone called Chait's post mean spirited, but I just find it direct and honest.) Yglesias takes a different tack in denying that he's left in degree, but I don't think his policy platform contradicts a lack of interest in supporting labor. For context, part of the reason I wanted to bring this up was because many of MY's commenters, not just me, have been asking him essentially these questions for months without any response. Ezra Klein weighed in within the comments section of the initial post, and Will Wilkinson had smart things to say as well.

I am sorry, though, for the Twitter ugliness. To put it succinctly, some conservatives were taking gratuitous swipes at the post on public Twitter feeds. I responded in an update to the post. Some people felt, for some odd reason, that this was out of bounds. But, look-- people were talking trash on public Twitter feeds. So I talked back. If you don't protect your tweets, they're public. Twitter is a public forum. It's not passing notes in biology class. I understand why people get bent out of shape about this, and it's why I fucking hate Twitter: it turns everybody cliquey. It's public, but gated through the following system, and it encourages a situation where people look to their in group to back them up in a kind of weird public/private fusion. And as I said, a bunch of conservatives dismissing my piece, often with vulgarity and nastiness, doesn't exactly go a long way to refuting my point. By all means, eviscerate what I say, but do so openly. Twitter creates a sense of false openness in a public forum while limiting accountability and creating an echo chamber.

But look, I am  fully capable of being a first class dicknose, and I am sorry for not being better than the tenor of those attacking me. Personally, I've always signed my real name to everything I write on the Internet, I try to email others and remain open to their emails, and I will frequently apologize or correct something, or at least report a grievance in my own space. Best I got for you.

One reason that it may have read as more angry is that I dearly wanted to avoid a countenance more in sorrow than in anger. While movement conservatism's long campaign to be branded an oppressed minority has been very good for them strategically, it has been very bad for them on substance. (I wrote about that in an essay I'm quite proud of.) I was hoping to avoid too much self-pitying, though I won't argue to hard that I did that perfectly.

Now then-- since the estimable Yves Smith and many others have called me out... Smith says, "As one of my correspondents noted, 'We don’t lack people willing to ask others to take a bullet for them.'"

True enough. So look, the thing is that I'm not built for the day-to-day blogging grind. I get overly emotionally involved and then I'm unfair to someone and then I'm a mass of guilt for days. For some reason I've been stuck in the "a blog is several times a day" deal but as people have pointed out, there's no reason for that. So I'll try and post here every once and awhile but with no expectation of real regularity, and if anybody cares to read, cool. And the first order of business will be on substance, not metablogging, and will concern my stance on neoliberalism and what I call the globalize-grow-give school of the American left wing.

Finally, I want to dispute a cruel rumor: I don't have a dog named Trotsky. His name is Miles.

He is a Maoist, though. It gets tense when we talk politics.

I know, I know. Preemptive dog blogging. The last refuge of a scoundrel.