Over the years I've come to realize that what I'm doing, at this very moment, is the world's most colossal waste of time: writing about politics on the Internet.
For a number of years I wrote columns here, on my own site, which were picked up by various progressive Web sites. The sociopolitical benefit? Absolutely none, since only like-minded progressives read them. Oh how we love to be comforted. I then moved directly to a progressive Web site, where I wrote for more than two years. At first I supplied some familiar comfort to readers, but increasingly I introduced some rather uncomfortable truths (at least I was pretty sure they were truths, which I still believe). The sociopolitical benefit? Absolutely none, since "progressive" readers simply tuned out or denounced that which they found uncomfortable.
In various other venues there are ultraconservatives -- more accurately, pseudoconservatives, since they're far more reactionary than genuinely conservative in political sentiment -- who publish their columns, which are then picked up by ultrapseudoconservative Web sites, to the same wasted effect: preaching to the choir, to deploy the anticipated cliche. And, as well, there have been some on the other side -- say, David Frum, David Weigel, Christopher Buckley -- who on occasion broke with their ideological ranks and published what they regarded as alternative, respectable, albeit uncomfortable truths. The benefit of it all? In effect, online assassinations, since "conservative" readers simply tuned out or denounced that which they found uncomfortable.
We are fast arriving at the contemptible and utterly counterproductive point in which we chat only with ourselves, assuming, of course, that we agree with one another in virtual entirety. No dissent, no dissenters, need apply. And I'm grieved that we progressives have become as guilty as those close-minded right wingers we once belittled for such. We have become a politically activist nation of absolutists only, since those activists who seek de-escalation, compromise and the political spirit LBJ once evoked -- that of Come let us reason together -- are quickly sidelined, either by one's own private yearning, as in my case, or forced resignations, such as the cases of Messrs. Frum and Weigel and Buckley.
What haunts me, in practical terms, are the acute words, from March of this year, of the conservative (not ultra, not pseudo, just conservative) David Brooks. Haunting, because the absolutist left and right are now so deluded as to the unmistakable virtues of their likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds, arguments and idealisms that it now takes a conservative columnist to keenly understand our progressive president:
"In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism.... But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office."
I'd quibble only about the "many" people, for the many by now may be the most -- which leaves exhortations of compromise, de-escalation, reason etc. etc. as merely the raw meat of a very negligible minority.
I've tapped out this little piece of introspection in only the last 15 minutes or so, applying a trifle less linear thought than usual, so perhaps by tomorrow morning I'll regret it; perhaps by then I'll see it as whiny or shallow or whatever. But frankly, right now, at this very moment, I see it as one of the truest expressions of political opinion just about anywhere within our insular Webs.