Seeing the launch of the new blog CentreLeft got me thinking about left-liberal blogosphere. I read a lot of left-liberal blogs and don’t feel my time is wasted. There are a good many people with politics totally different from mine who can write well and persuasively, who can make good jokes and offer a political analysis that is surely accurate, even if it previously escaped me. But the left blogosphere has its problems, and they are what I want to talk about in this post, because they are telling.
I was amused to see CentreLeft launch with these words:
“[W]e must challenge and correct those Conservative bloggers who habitually distort and deceive.
“We need to adopt an oppositional mentality - not when it’s already too late, but now. We need to be awkward; we need to be aggressive; we need to be persuasive. Quite simply, we need to have the stomach for the fight.”
“… Cameron’s Conservatives are not so cuddly…and we intend to prove it.”
Yes, it’s true that the post also said “we must fashion a space in which to argue and debate the direction of the left itself, looking inwards before turning outwards”. But the words quoted above far better reflect the posts made so far, and certainly they better reflect the modus operandi of most of the top established left-liberal blogs. Is there really a need for another attack-dog blog from the left?
It’s curious that for all that ‘oppositional mentality’, that aggression, that ‘fight’ and for all the left blogosphere’s many posts attacking Conservatives, David Cameron and conservative blogs, there is very little evidence of any effort to engage with conservative ideas. While there are plenty of posts in the liberal blogosphere about all of these, not many attempt to argue with the ideas expressed in their own terms. Common to most of them is the understanding that anyone expressing a conservative view is insincere – “habitually distort and deceive” - or half-crazed. Conservatives are to be understood as self-consciously unpleasant, bigoted, greedy people scheming to hide their real natures for electoral purposes. So why even bother refuting the arguments they make, when these are merely a cover to hide their true intentions? How naïve! This cynicism may also explain some of the hilarious paranoia one sees on certain issues – for example, the idea that Total Politics magazine is some kind of Tory front.
What explains this apparent aversion to a battle of ideas with conservatives? I think part of it actually seems to be a strong sense of intellectual confidence. There is scarce acknowledgement of any upper limit to the support for left-liberal politics and policies in these discussions. Whether a particular stance will in itself be popular or unpopular with voters is not really the issue. Either voters’ preferences are left-leaning, or these preferences do not decide elections – but whichever it is, no problems there. Instead, conservatism’s success is explained largely in terms of a maddening cowardice by the left. Instead of telling the truth about conservatives, instead of calling a spade a spade, the left establishment keeps backing down! It’s not that they are wrong or unpopular on any of the issues - it’s that, inexplicably, the left’s leading figures insist on dodging some issues, and on a level of genteel argument on others that is scarcely reciprocated by the other side.
Hence the way in which attacking conservatives becomes top priority: if only the left would finally go out on the offensive, smearing even more opponents of multiculturalism as racists and so on, electoral success would come far more easily. Hence also the Orwellian obsession with ‘framing’ the debate with the right language, so that people’s true liberal preferences can come to the surface.
These are phenomena easily recognisable to anyone familiar with web sites like DailyKos and MoveOn.org which make up the American netroots – a movement analysed so well by Jonathan Chait. The netroots’ boundless faith in the notion of linguistic ‘framing’, popularised by pundits such as George Lakoff, is surpassed only by their obsession with a Democratic Party willing above all simply to express its unqualified dislike of conservatives. But insofar as the British left blogosphere is learning these lessons from its American counterpart, it is learning the wrong ones. Neither of these preoccupations, it is safe to say, has played a significant part in the rejuvenation of the Democrats. Anyone who believes George Lakoff has an important story to tell about how to use language to make unpopular ideas popular should read Stephen Pinker’s devastating critique. The language that propelled Barack Obama so far in his 2004 Democratic Convention, and which he has repeated since, was conciliatory and in many ways conservative – not fire-breathing and uncompromising. The party’s success in Congress in 2006 was based heavily on choosing centrist and socially conservative candidates like Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey and Virginia’s Jim Webb.
At this point, it seems only fair to insert the usual qualifiers. I know the left has some great blogs, such as Hopi Sen’s, that do not remotely deserve to be lumped together with the above. They do explore ideas in detail and think there are good faith arguments worth having, arguing and debating the direction of the left itself. I’m also sure there are conservative blogs just as guilty of the above, making no real effort to refute the left seriously. I’ve doubtless been guilty of this myself. So anyone who thinks pointing me to thoughtful and considered left-wing blogs and thoughtless, ill-considered conservative blogs will tell me something I don’t know is mistaken.
Nonetheless, the lack of introspection on some of the most prominent left-liberal blogs, and the obsession with demonising conservatives, is unmatched on the right. This attitude misses the point about why Conservatives are doing well again. I don’t expect the left's bloggers to agree that the facts of life so often turn out to be conservative, but they should face the fact that there is a huge natural constituency for conservatism, and that some of the left’s failures are genuine. This attitude also risks making it much more difficult for the left’s politicians to rediscover electoral success by moderating their positions, those positions having been so thoroughly demonised. Insofar as this attitude will have an influence on the left as it moves from government to opposition, it will be negative – for the left itself most of all.
