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.
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