by Linda Hirshman

Cass Sunstein has done us all his usual good service by bringing some old-fashioned civic republican analysis to the newer phenomenon of the blogosphere. That similar trends have been observed in satellite TV and radio reflects, I fear, that the blogosphere at most, reinforces the polarization of the society. What interests me about the political effect of the blogosphere is something that divides the society into even smaller pieces than Sunstein fears, which is what I call the autobiography problem--the personal experience of the blogger becomes an unassailable source of information about the world. No amount of survey data, statistical analysis, or any other more conventional sources of fact can survive inconsistency with the blogger's own "personal" experience. George Will, whose views I do not normally agree with, made the point when asked about the blogosphere on George Stephanopolous's "This Week." "Humph [or some such Will mannerism]," he said. "So much of what is done on the web is people getting on there and writing their diaries as though everyone ought to care about everyone's inner turmoils." Political bloggers were not pleased, and rightly so. Of course there is influential and professional political analysis all over the Internet. But the criticism Will received overlooks how the unedited Internet is groaning with self-revelation. It would be harmless enough, I suppose, except to future job-seekers, for browsers to know about bloggers' drinking history, but the fact is that serious public policy initiatives are being defended or attacked based on the journal entries of self-created Internet personalities. Recently, The American Prospect published some papers about women's struggle with the claims of motherhood and of the workplace. One of the arguments the conferees made was that men were just as eager to reduce their market participation in favor of the household as women were. When I pointed out that the happy headlines of sensitive new age fathers in the report contradicted the census data about stay at home dads, who are no more than something like 2 percent of the parent population, and the census data about men's working rates, the Prospect, hardly MySpace, responded with an essay from a woman with a nice, liberated boyfriend and a description of home from a stay at home dad. I believe that both writers were sincere and idealistic young people, hoping to make lives that don't incorporate the worst of their cultural inheritance. However, if I am going to take a position on an important economic and social issue like paid maternity leave, I need to know how such an initiative would affect the current inequality between man and women, which means I need to know how most men actually behave, not what stories a few of them tell on the Internet. The next step from bloggers' diaries as political science is bloggers' "performance art," as political science. In performance blogging, the blogger creates a personam, which may or may not bear any relationship to his or her actual identity or beliefs at all. If the creation is operatic enough, it may even earn the performer a gig on the opinion page of The New York Times, as was the case recently with Ann Althouse, who can also be found performing on Bloggingheadstv. Althouse (who, I admit, had the extreme bad judgment to criticize me in an earlier performance) used her precious space on the Times op-ed page to defend Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani's commitment to appoint more Justices like Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. That would be the end of federally protected abortion rights, she admits. But it's okay, because Giuliani and his judges, according to Althouse, would be acting out of their humanity and a love for the structure of government, not just to stop women from getting abortions if they need them. Set aside that anti-abortion Justice Antonin Scalia was one of the most activist Justices in the history of the Supreme Court. The Internet point is this: Can you imagine the Times publishing the same old conservative federalism line from an out conservative, say, Jerry Falwell or Orrin Hatch? We are supposed to take this as a moderate opinion, because it comes from "Althouse," who performs a "moderate" personam on the Internet. Since she has never held public office, the moderation consists for example, of the claim to have voted for Russ Feingold and to "be" pro-gay and pro-choice. Of course, who knows what goes on in the covert precincts of the voting booth or the mind? On the Internet, it's all performance. Next post: Internet truthiness, or, will no one rid me of this meddlesome 50 percent divorce rate?