Today we're making a quick stop at the Before Time to visit the early days of the Liberal blogosphere.
In and out, nobody gets hurt, OK?
To begin, it's critical to understand that, as cutting and as harsh as our prose might have been, all in all, the Liberal blogosphere was and is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise. A belief that we were not doomed. That the future could be better, and that it was worth fighting for.
First and foremost, it was about creating community with a "You're not crazy, I see it too" ethos. Back in the depths of the Bush regime, it felt as if a political apocalypse had happened right in our back yard: something so bad and so surreal that words frequently failed. And we were the ones slowly scanning the short wave radio bands in search of other survivors. At the time this was only possible through the blogs because, then as now, the Beltway media was dedicated to the proposition that we were crazy, that there was nothing to see here, so let's move along shall we.
But the hoped-for secondary effect of the blogs was a stubborn, Quixotic faith in something fundamental about the American people.
Or at least most of the American people.
Or at least a bare majority of the American people. Something that would be enough to beat the howling, brain-rotted Fox News zombie horde, if...
If people were presented with the facts of the case. If they could be shown, unequivocally, that Republican policies had fucked them over but good. That whatever opinion they had of the Democrats, Dems were, by every metric, vastly better for the public than the GOP.
It was towards those complacent, habitually fence-straddling Mopes in the Middle that much of our energies were directed. And there was a moment as the Bush regime was collapsing when we had the momentum of events and history at our backs. The Liberal blogosphere of the Before Time felt a little like the energy Hunter Thompson describe in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.
This, but angrier.
The feeling that, just maybe, together, we could outshout the narcotizing effect of the "Both Sides Do It" Beltway press and Sunday Shows had on the Mopes in the Middle. If we could pry their eyes open for just a moment -- force them to see what was really happening to their country in their name...
But it was a vain hope.
Perhaps, with 1000 times the media reach and firepower that the Liberal blogosphere had at its peak, we might have been able to pull it off. But by then the Republican base was hopelessly addicted to its own rage and racism and the lies Fox News and Hate Radio fed them every day.
And the Mopes in the Middle vastly preferred lolling in a tepid pool of Both Sides Do It goo to a cold shower of facts. Then as now, they don't know. They don't wanna know. And they get very angry if you try to make them know.
All available evidence shows that the only force that can pry them out of their False Equivalence Goo Spa and spur them in the general direction of productive (if fleeting) civic engagement is having the metaphorical red-hot poker of Republican corruption and catastrophe shoved straight up their metaphorical collective asses.
Or, to put it a little less graphically, the only time they can be moved to action is when economic and social pain affects them personally and profoundly. Then and only then can they be moved to lumber out of their comforting goo bath to go stumbling into the world looking for scapegoats.
Which, in itself, can be either good news for democracy, or bad news. Because once they are roused to action, the Mopes in the Middle are none too picky about who they blame for what has happened to them: they're as likely to hold trans people, Mexicans and Democrats responsible for their reduced circumstances as they are fascists, Republican looters and degenerates, and evil billionaires.
And any grifter running against "the system" or "the duopoly" or "politicians in Washington" will always have the inside track with these idiots.
We of what is left of the Liberal blogosphere will go right on writing. Some of us also podcast now or are frequent podcast/radio guests, so we'll go on with that as well because trying to make sense of the world and sharing it with others is why we do what we do. And there is intrinsic value in that. Every "I never thought of it from that perspective" or "Once you put it that way it started to make sense" or "I thought I was the only one" we get from readers or listeners is worth its weight in gold.
Of course, we'll gratefully take the gold too, but you get what I'm saying.
However, for the time being, I think many of us have lost much of our faith in both the utility of persuasion and in most of the American people. It is a loss that many of us are grieving.
From the Stay Human - Shape Tomorrow Substack
There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.
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