Hitleriffic Cocoon

This long, somewhat fawning article on Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zuniga reminded me of this Politburo Diktat post on "Statist vs. Libertarian Blogging" and Myrhaf's reaction to it. Myrhaf summarizes the Commissar's contention and his own disagreement with it.

It seems that the big righty blogs are more likely to link to smaller blogs than the big lefty blogs are.

I'm not convinced by his explanation, that the lefties are Stalinist, whereas the righties are libertarian. No, the difference is that those on the right are genuinely interested in learning new information, whereas leftists are more interested in having their feelings reinforced by agreement. To get information, go to them that know. But to stay comfortable within the liberal cocoon, just hang out at Daily Kos or Democratic Underground. [links omitted]

In the Commissar's own words:

Leftie bloggers, by inclination, by personality, tend toward the Statist model. The One Big Nanny-State Blog that will care for its community members, thus: dKos and its diarists, Atrios and its comments, the DU model, Kuro5hin, etc.

...

Rightie bloggers, again by inclination, by personality, tend toward the Libertarian model, following Milton Friedman's analogy of the pencil, where countless participants, each working for his/her own good, unguidedly worked together to produce a pencil very cheaply. The market analogy does not apply perfectly to blogging, but I'll use the closely-related concept of "specialization." Rightie (i.e. Libertarian) bloggers do NOT aspire to blog-statism. Instead, they aspire to do whatever it is they do, on their own turf!, and refer other stuff to specialists. (The economic concept of 'relative advantage.) For example, during the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, Instapundit didn't try to cover it, he referred readers over to Le Sabot Post-Moderne, a guy on the scene in the Ukraine. [link omitted]

Perhaps I read Myrhaf wrongly, but I think that he is too hasty to disagree with the Commissar. I would say, instead, that the Commissar made a very good observation on the structural differences between of the left and right sides of the blogosphere, and even on the general "inclinations and personalities" of their respective bloggers, but that he didn't go far enough to explain how these differences arose.

Why is the structure of the port side of the blogosphere generally more rigid than that of the starboard? What leads to "statist inclinations" (e.g., a tendency towards control-freakishness by the head honchoes on the left)? Myrhaf provides the underlying cause: Their general epistemologies differ. If you want "to stay comfortable within the liberal cocoon," (i.e., to be comfortable with a given set of illusions), you will spend all your time with the like-minded. All things being equal, those among the like-minded who are most interested in power will gladly take charge, and to keep that power, they will quash dissent. Why? Because dissent threatens the basis of their power, which is the ability to insulate their fellow travellers from having their beliefs tested against reality. With apologies to Ayn Rand, I would put it this way: Where there are people looking to be taken care of, there are those willing to "take care" of them. Where there are proles, there will be leaders.

This paragraph from the Kos article should make my point.

Being able to argue about politics online was exciting, but a website with a comments function is hardly unusual. In October of 2003, though, Moulitsas transferred his site over to a technology called Scoop, which allowed registered readers to maintain diaries -- their own unique weblogs. Suddenly, Moulitsas had transformed his site from something that looked kind of like a newspaper column into a genuinely new, complex community filled not with readers but with writers. "Scoop has the potential to revolutionize political participation," the NDN's Rosenberg told me. "The old model was that you used your body to take part in the political process -- you drove voters to the polls, registered them. Markos's model is: You use your mind. You get to figure out what the party ought to be doing, you get to figure out what's wrong with the Bush administration, you get to be the intellectual. It's an infinitely more involving activity." Soon, Moulitsas's site had spawned eponymous new stars, well-read diarists who carried Moulitsas's crusades forward when he was otherwise engaged or asleep: Billmon, DavidNYC, Bill in Portland, Maine. If they were good -- or outrageous -- enough, he promoted them to the main site, allowing them to share space with him and exposing them to an audience that was growing by the tens of thousands.

Note the difference between how "promotions" occur in each side of the blogosphere. A "rightie" blogger, with a good post and a little luck, can get Instalanched, but it's up to him to take advantage of the attention, to cultivate a larger audience as a result. A "lefty" gets promoted as if he's a member of a political party. (And stay with me, that part gets better.) Note also that Kos's idea of "be[ing] the intellectual" isn't really being an intellectual. (The article makes the point numerous times that Kos is not interested in abstract ideas so much as tactics for political power.) Rather, it is the intellectual equivalent of driving a bunch of reliable Democrat lever-pullers to the polls on election day.

Any extra attention is at the direction of the higher-ups and so is earned by how well his posts have toed the "party line" (and are perceived to be likely to do so in the future), and therefore how well they help the "cocoon-tenders" maintain the insulating quality of the cocoon. You, the small blogger get attention to the degree you help the head honcho maintain power. And so Kos hand-picks "outrageous" diarists -- the ones who will dutifully spin silk for the cocoon. This is in contrast to having the many eyes of a vast audience of critical readers "voting with their feet" by becoming their regular readers through a process akin to natural selection or a free market. (And someone like Instapundit remains big only so long as those readers find his recommendations reliably useful. Note that I do not think that "the right" is uniformly individualist. Part of it is, but the movement has many strands. This lack of ideological uniformity forces a certain amount of objectivity on the movement as a whole that the left seems to lack.)

While it is fun to laugh at the liberals bundling up in their cocoons, and to dismiss them (and their leader Kos) as cranks, the whole phenomenon reminds me of the following quote. Take the Commisar's tongue-in-cheek "Kostria" analogy somewhat literally for a moment.

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual....

This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture.... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call -- to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness -- idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men. [bold added]

I suspect that most on the left and many on the right would agree with that sentiment. And it certainly seems to describe how Kos runs his blog.

Someone else once widely dismissed as a crank, Adolf Hitler, is the author of that quote.

As I read the article on Moulitsas, who sounds like a power-luster, and I recalled the posts by Myrhaf and the Commissar, I was struck by the sheep-like quality of many on the left today. These are people ripe for the right dictator to come along. They do not wish to think for themselves, but want to be reassured instead. The question is this: How much are they willing to give up to get this reassurance? After having read The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff, I suspect that the answer might be, "quite a bit". For one thing, if you seal yourself off in a cocoon, you have forfeited your independent judgement.

***

The following are a few other reactions I had while reading about Kos, who sounds to me like a villain in an Ayn Rand novel. They are beside my main point, but I wanted to record them anyway. Before putting them down, I want to stress that I do not regard Kos or any other one man as particularly threatening to the cause of liberty. This is a republic, and such men become dangerous only when enough people give them power. I note the following about Kos mainly because he stikes me as the type of man who would rise to power in a sufficiently sheep-like nation.

Like Hitler, Kos has a tendency to go into monologues.

Talking with Moulitsas, like reading his blog, is a singularly withering experience. He speaks in twenty-minute chunks, so you don't need to ask questions so much as provision buckets to catch the flood. When I nodded to agree with a point he made, he looked mildly disappointed; his conversation tends to circle back over itself, probing, seeking resistance.

The article also mentions Kos's public speaking style, which vaguely reminded me of my own very limited impressions of Hitler's style, which I admit could be way off.

He can be so intense and high-strung, so full of kinetic energy, that the sheer performance of his speeches -- he never writes them out, just talks off-the-cuff -- can be distracting, like watching snakes fighting in a bag. ... Moulitsas's audience was one-part bewildered, one-part overwhelmed, and maybe a little inspired. "I'm not sure everyone really knew what to think," one Senate aide told me.

But if he has the energy and the ability of inspire crowds, he seems not to be as well-rehearsed.

Finally, I note that, unlike any comparable figure from the starboard side of the blogosphere, Kos is regularly consulted by the Democratic Party.

This record, combined with the sheer vigor and clarity of his online manifestos, has brought Moulitsas, a 34-year-old Californian whom nobody had heard of until three years ago, to the attention of the Democratic establishment, first as a resented adversary and now, increasingly, a kind of part-time sage, an affiliate member. Every third week, Moulitsas has a standing phone call with congressional powerbroker Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-Ill.), and he talks regularly with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In part, this is raw flattery, a way for Democratic politicians to keep a particularly shrill irritant off their own backs while simultaneously reaching out to his audience, the party's young, liberal, professional grassroots. But it's not just an empty gesture. Moulitsas has become so well incorporated into the party machinery that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) uses him to recruit candidates. "They get calls from, like John Edwards, and maybe Tom Vilsack, and then, always, Markos," one DCCC staffer told me. This legacy has made him the current champion of that wing of the Democratic Party --anti-war, deeply partisan, young, mostly white, and professional.... [all bold added]

If Glenn Reynolds had "a standing phone call" from Dennis Hastert, I don't think I would have found out about it only by trudging through a magazine-length article. It would have been all over the mainstream media by now, and there would be a major effort to make such interactions illegal. (Oh wait, but Senator McCain has already taken care of that. Far from this "gotcha" showing why we "need" McCain's bill, it should illustrate just how much danger our freedom of speech is in. If Kos wins a victory for the Democrats, I guarantee that some Republican partisans will enthusiastically revisit restrictions on bloggers.)

While I do not think it should be illegal for a political blogger to be involved with party politics, I find it noteworthy that Kos is driving such a huge bus of dependable Democratic voters to the polls. Part of the self-image of many Democrats that I know is their intellectual pretentions. They "think for themselves" and are "nonconformists". But what kind of nonconformist hops onto a bus and lets someone else drive them around without at least looking out the window now and again? As the article puts it so well in closing:

That sense of impending judgment suits Moulitsas fine. He is acutely aware of the limits of his moment. "There are technologies that are coming out there that I just don't get -- I try, but I just don't get them the way I got blogs," he told me. "Crooks and Liars is like the second biggest liberal blog now, and it's all video clips. And Friendster -- I have a Friendster account, I understand in the abstract that people would like the web to connect it in a certain way, but I don't get it, I don't understand how it works."

He paused for a minute, looking unusually non-agitated. "So the point is I know I have only a certain amount of time like this, and I'd like to make sure I do something useful with it."

The only nagging question is: What? [bold added]

This is one bus driving itself off a cliff regardless of the fortunes of the Democratic Party, which has not, so far, fared too well when following his advice

-- CAV

Updates

12-23-05: Clenched Fist salute to the Commissar for linking back!