Arthur Silber has written another installment in his “Dominion Over the World” series. And he’s rightfully pissed off at the failings of many nice liberal writers:
I will frankly admit that one of my ongoing and often severe disappointments with regard to some of even the most intelligent of liberal-progressive writers and bloggers is their seeming inability to appreciate the continuity and uniformity of American foreign policy over the last century, and particularly since World War II. It appears that their determination to turn virtually every episode in our national life, no matter how disastrous, into an opportunity for partisan advantage and electoral victory overcomes analytic abilities which can often be very insightful on more limited questions…
To put it another way, and this is the issue that mere Democratic partisans adamantly refuse to acknowledge: Bush would not have been possible but for the Democrats who had preceded him…As the inconceivable dangers of wider war, including possible nuclear exchanges, loom over us all, petty partisanship and party loyalty as the primary concern are morally distasteful at a minimum, and occasionally abhorrent in their worst manifestations, intellectually irresponsible, and immensely dangerous. Such an approach does nothing to decrease the continuing calamities that confront us, but only worsens them.
It should also be noted that, while many liberal-progressive writers and bloggers appear to imagine they are challenging “conventional wisdom,” this mode of analysis only strengthens that “wisdom” and ensures that the governing class will never be seriously challenge…In this manner, many liberal-progressive bloggers and writers have been entirely coopted by the establishment elites, certainly insofar as foreign policy is concerned. The elites know it; many liberals and progressives haven’t figured it out yet. I would say the joke’s on them, but for the fact that the stakes involved may literally be the future of the world itself.
Be sure to read the rest.
What’s weird about the blogosphere is that there are no material reasons for people to be partisan in this sense. (Unlike professional pundits, for whom there are real economic pressures to line up with one team or the other.) And yet both bloggers and blog readers usually do it anyway. We love our tribes, even when it’s killing us.