My side is better than your side, or is it?

By BJ

In my meanderings through the blogosphere, I came across this post at the PoliGazette where Michael van der Galien tries to explain why conservatives were so much more gracious in accepting Obama’s win than “the left” were in accepting Bush’s victories in 2000 and 2004.  The comment thread, to say the least, was quite interesting, and I have to feel sorry for Justin Gardner of Donklephant, who pointed out that 2000 wasn’t exactly the cleanest election victory in US history and that the 2004 re-election of Bush was an entirely different animal than a non-incumbent coming to power and has spent the rest of thread futilely trying to get some kind of productive discussion going.

Gardner did force the gazetteers to admit that there are some right-wing blogs that engage in hyper-partisan hackery, but of course the left is so much worse.  A couple of comments from Jason in the thread are indicative of the argument:

Ideological intolerance from the right appears to be mostly situational while ideological intolerance from the left is consistent and persistent perhaps even to the degree of being a core principle of the ideological left.

Your attempt to claim equivalence is thus rejected as both intellectually inconsistent and not supported by the evidence that exists right here in front of us on this site, without even having to “mine quotes” at all. And as I said, I didn’t have to mine anything — I simply keep stumbling across continuing leftist vitriol because it is so PERVASIVE that it is impossible to avoid while rightist vitriol is so relatively less prevalent that it requires searches and cherry-picking to highlight it while concealing the counterexamples.

And

A partisan hack will condemn the other side for pretty much anything(even evidence is not required, guilt is assumed and all interpretations are worst-case) but when confronted by the exact same behavior from their own side will attempt to change the subject by saying that the other side is just as bad or worse.

From what I see, the vast majority of bloggers on the partisan left these days are hacks. Even the ones that don’t directly participate in demonization decline to call out their own side when they deserve it. Silence is consent, at least once the problem is pointed out to them by others.

Apparently saying that intolerance is probably the core principle of the entire left-wing blogosphere, and blaming all of those who don’t come out to condemn those he feels are engaging in demonization as being culpable in said left-wing being a wasteland of vitriol, doesn’t count as partisan hackery.  Good to know for the future.

In any case, I’m not going to get into a pissing match over whether or not the right or the left are more inclined to ideological intolerance, but I do think it is important to examine how one could come to such a view.  I would say that Michael’s pulled out of the air number of 70% left, 30% right says more about their own placement on the ideological spectrum than it does about the reality of the situation.

Part of the problem is that I simply don’t read most of the blogs Jason and Michael paint as being extreme leftist vitriol factories outside of Newshoggers and The Moderate Voice.  Kos is the legendary bugbear of the right, but it certainly isn’t included on my overstuffed bookmarks bar.  And quite frankly, there are simply far too many blogs out there of every stripe for me to even pretend I have any kind of feel for the overall flavour of the medium.  I mean, there is a certain degree of arrogance required for the blogging life, but even my ego balks at such hubris.

More importantly, though, there is a significant problem of determining just what counts as “moderate”.  For the ‘gazetteers particularly, there has been an ongoing hammering of The Moderate Voice, where a few of them used to contribute, as becoming some radical far-left sewer of vitriol unworthy of the name “moderate”, while of course applying said title to themselves.  The only problem is that everyone thinks they’re a moderate.  Even when you find someone aware enough to note that their position on the political spectrum is hardly “centrist”, they aren’t about to accept that they hold unreasonable positions.  After all, if they were unreasonable, they wouldn’t be holding them, now would they?

To Jason above, claiming the left is consistently and persistently ideologically intolerant is probably merely stating the facts as he sees them, rather than an example of the kind of ideological intolerance someone on the left would see from the same statement.

Go back to Michaels’ 70-30 characterization.  From a starting point that assumes they are the models of moderation they like to claim themselves to be, many of the right’s arguments from near their own ideology probably don’t seem too bad, and therefore appear moderate rather then demonizing, while very little of the left-wing arguments they vehemently disagree with are going to fit the bill of being reasonable.  Your worldview matters when you read an argument, and both sides of the ideological spectrum contain certain assumptions about how things have progressed that make the other sides' arguments appear to be little more than misinformed dreck.

Over at Cogitamus, Stephen Suh described several policy positions as centrist, with the criteria being that a majority of the American population agrees with those positions.  Admittedly, I’m not entirely certain if that’s technically the case with single-payer health care since I don’t know if many Americans even understand what that really means, but certainly there is widespread support for the other initiatives.  Any bets on how many of those policies the folks at Poligazzette, as with most bloggers on the right, would present as being “radical” and “far left” positions?

Also important, people are far more sensitive to attacks on the groups they identify with than they are on others.  This election season provided numerous examples of the phenomena.  Hillary Clinton supporters were far more touchy about perceived sexism than anyone else, something many Republicans also suddenly discovered when Sarah Palin was picked.  Die-hard Obama fanatics saw racism everywhere, and both the Clinton and subsequently the McCain campaigns were swift to become overly defensive when accused of being racist, and normally blamed Obama for “playing the race card” to deflect criticism.  And just think about how touchy conservatives got over any statement that they felt might be a sly implication about McCain’s age.

You can even see it in the continuing war over Sarah Palin on the Republican side.  Go to this post by Claudia, which to my reading doesn’t appear too controversial, and for the most part is actually defending Palin as being the target of those in the party who see her as a threat to their power.  The comments by her co-bloggers remind me of nothing more than the pro-Hillary blogs at the end of the primaries warning all those brainwashed chauvinists who were supporting that race-baiting woman-hater that they should be more respectful and understanding.  I mean, don’t they realize they’ve won?  And that just because we keep complaining that he’s an empty suit that will surely go down in flames is certainly no reason to get all defensive.

Ultimately, in any discussion like this, I always come back to the quote by the extraordinarily perceptive George Orwell.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Nations, in this day and age of electronic communications, can be formed out of political ideologies as easily as geographical boundaries, and not only do we all tend to overlook or dismiss the worst impulses of our chosen sides, but we almost seem to seek out the worst examples of what our opponents are producing.  Such examples make the less egregious examples from own side seem less worthy of scrutiny, and so we can happily continue along secure in the knowledge our chosen side stands on the moral high ground, and makes the blanket denunciations of the less-than-gracious other side no more than a simple statement of fact, at least in our skewed perception.

Knowing this, and knowing that the increasingly important blogosphere tends to magnify the effects of these kinds of narrow viewpoints, I am left to wonder if there is any real hope in the future for truly non-partisan discussions of issues across ideological lines, or if we’re doomed to further fragmentation.

Knowing human nature, probably the latter.