In Defense of Blogger Collegiality

One of the big insults you can fire at a blogger is that blogging is one big group grope, the most self-referential and closed niche society around in a cultural milieu defined by them. What are all these fairly young, educated human beings doing, these people who all seem to know each other and speak only in first names and endlessly block-quote each other’s morning ruminations and think of this as some kind of respectable job? When has there ever been a sillier, less self-satisfied echo chamber?

I’d be a pretty crap blogger if I believed all this. (As it happens, I wouldn’t buy into this line of attack even if I weren’t in the business.) But since I strive not to be a crap blogger, I think one of my bloggerly duties is to say a few words about why this isn’t a problem.

Take, for example, what Brad DeLong calls “Ezra Klein’s Menagerie of Decent Conservatives.” Ezra names Megan, Ramesh, Dave, Ross, Reihan, Peter, and me. Obviously, I extend a big public thank you to Ezra for the good word, especially because I don’t know Ezra personally. But it got me thinking about two things.

First, I pondered my own menagerie of decent liberals, and true enough there were no surprises: Ezra, Brad, Matt, and Roy jumped to mind. I suspect the liberal menageries of the peeps listed by Ezra would look rather similar. Now this might be because blogging is just one big group grope, but I doubt it: Brad, for example, has accused me in the past of being morally defective, and Roy has accused me of fantasizing over a pre-technological past that makes a mockery of my commitment to internet publication. I promise there are great gulfs between my outlook and Ezra’s and Matt’s, as well.

A second-order attack on blogger collegiality, however, sees these differences as an even more invidious sign of in-group conspiracy: they take publicly opposed ideological positions but it’s chummy chummy behind closed doors! It’s the kind of charge leveled at Antonin Scalia, who dares to castigate Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions in print but share dinner with her in private! Such are the wages of elitism?

But what has drawn this motley crew of bloggers together in such a way? Surely not a freakish felicity with constitutional law, or even a common writing style. In fact, all of the bloggers mentioned in this post share what I at least think are fairly wild mutual divergences in style and tone, as well as in content and slant. If anything, there’s a vague libertarian consensus among those identified on the right. But Ramesh is a different kind of conservative than Ross, I am a different kind of conservative than both of them, and Reihan has just identified himself succinctly as a

Rawlsekian neoconservative singulitarian meliorist humanist neoliberal infosocialist Viridian postliberalincrementalist.

Add other blog greats with whom many of us are familiar, like Andrew and Daniel, and the valences of intellectual diversity are only intensified. The main common attribute, it seems to me, is idiosyncrasy, which isn’t necessarily correlated with collegiality in any way. What looks like a nonthreatening difference of opinion to one idiosyncratic blogger might strike another as a dangerously or dumbly uncategorizable source of opposition.

No, the big conspiracy here I think is one among people who like a good conversation, and have discovered a consistent set of conversation partners whose content and style best compare and contrast with their own. Professional bloggers are paid conversationalists — or should be, at least. And the good social art of collegiality well understood is an essential part of good conversation — especially good public conversation. People sometimes fear that the blogosphere will close itself off to new talent, but, based on the dynamic I’ve just outlined, that strikes me as impossible. The ‘gold rush’ is probably over, but blogging will probably take on the generational tempo of the music world, with big acts retiring for a while to pursue real lives and then making comeback tours after a suitable hiatus — and with lots and lots of new acts competing for attention. Sometimes attention is won by mere novelty, but more often it’s won by talent. That may be somewhat boring when the talent involved is taking ‘Baba O’Reily’ and turning it into a Nickelback-style gruntfest, but may be less so when the talent involves daily attention to political, economic and cultural life.