Il.Duce.blogspot.com

I violated Godwin's Law a few weeks ago. No, not William Godwin, Shelley's mentor and the proto-socialist husband of Mary Wollstonecraft. That's too old. I mean Mike Godwin, the American computer law attorney. He drew up his law in 1990. It states that the longer an online discussion, the more likely it is that someone will compare someone else to a Nazi or to Hitler. At that point, tradition commands that the thread shall be shut down. I ran afoul of the law in a very big way. On my own New Republic blog, I called the entire political blogosphere fascistic and coined the term "blogofascism." Everybody went nuts. I was a "douchebag." I was "mentally unbalanced." My writing was "spittle." According to one cognitively inclined blogger, "Lee Siegel has comprehension problems." One reply was especially hurtful: "I don't know what Lee Siegel looks like, but in my mind I picture a confused, angry Burt Reynolds."I don't blame people for getting upset. The word "fascist" summons up historical nightmares, yet it also puts you in mind of the infantile left's hotheaded invective. Both associations were, in fact, my hotheaded point. Godwin's Law didn't come out of nowhere. The left-liberal blogs have become a playground of reckless, bullying invective. (I expect it on the right.) The Iraq war fomented a polarized politics more antagonistic than at any time since the Vietnam war, and that condition crystallized the left-liberal blogosphere's obstreperousness. Like its right-wing counterpart, polarization and rage are its meat and drink. George W. Bush's criminal incompetence is the engine that drives it. But it's not exactly effectual to be sustained by what you hate. Politics is about persuading your adversary's supporters to come to your side. It's not about reassuring everyone on your side--under the guise of "thinking strategically"--that you and they are absolutely right. The Republican right wing pushed its party to an extremist fundamentalism. That, in turn, created its mirror image in the fevers of the left-liberal blogosphere, which is now trying to push the Democrats to an extremist fundamentalism. Fascism, having begun as a syncretic socialism, wasn't always evil. It started out in radically polarized circumstances and consisted of extremist and fundamentalist rhetoric. It was a style before it became a movement. I wasn't stigmatizing a politics. I was characterizing a mode of expression. A good fight is certainly not something I mind--if you dish it out, et cetera. Yet, having been stung by my charges of dictatorial bullying, the left- liberal blogs proceeded to prove my point. They bunched together in a corner of the schoolyard and solicited one another's approval by heaving bigger and sloppier mudpies. It wasn't a good intellectual and rhetorical fight at all. But, beyond the blogofascist aside, I had made an argument that I waited futilely for someone to address. I had questioned the effectiveness of blogospheric rage and suggested that blogger fanaticism had a lot to do with the inability of bloggers to apply themselves to serious reflection. All the bite-sized thoughts, rapid disses, and inanely meandering threads make it hard to concentrate on anything for very long. Linking is no substitute for thinking. So people scream because they can't focus. You have the impression of bloggers who are so pacified by shouting their rage--and so appeased by smugly shared sentiments--that they turn off their computers at night and go to sleep feeling empowered and relaxed. No wonder, several years after the blogosphere allegedly became a people powerhouse, the country is mired even deeper in Iraq and successfully distracted by one false public alarm after another. Catharsis is for art, not politics. All this is fairly tragic, because blogging is full of promise. Blogs--and I don't mean only political blogs--offer newer and wider opportunities to all sorts of people. We all know by now how they can shame the mainstream media for its uptight passivity, its infinite degrees of complicity with the status quo, its sight- and hearing-impaired hubris. But maybe blogs' brightest capacity is to create new inroads for gifted writers and thinkers excluded, by the whimsy of circumstance, from the established venues. Why did so many powerful mainstream editors finally bend both ears to the bloggers? Because, throughout their lives, their elite social reflexes had prompted them to avoid friction or antagonism at all costs. And here were these sudden antagonists, inhabiting an unfamiliar environment, loudly and publicly attacking them right where they lived. So the powerful, prestigious editors heeded their social reflexes, reached out to the bloggers, and opened a few doors for them. Yet the specter of the blogosphere's gradual assimilation into the mainstream is just as disheartening as the blogosphere's complacent groupthink and insular chitchat. It points to a certain buried diffidence, which you can see in the mask of anonymity so many bloggers hide behind. Is it too much to ask people to put their name where their mouth is? Even for bloggers who use their own names, all the compulsive linking--to a degree, linking is the new logrolling--is a way never to say anything provocative without nervously assuring the reader that someone else said it first. Maybe the blogosphere is in such danger of slipping into the status quo because a lot of bloggers have the mainstream editors' very same social reflexes, but in reverse. I would love to see a million blogs bloom with real idiosyncratic thinking, real provocation outside any group's agenda, real argument, real eloquence, and even real investigative reporting. "People power" doesn't have to be a synonym for "lack of daring and originality." The question the blogosphere has to ask itself is whether it truly has become a rejuvenating alternative to the status quo in journalism and politics or a dumping ground for the mainstream's worst aspects--political extremism, narcissistic fantasy, cowardly herding. Or, as Burt Reynolds put it in Sharky's Machine, "You know, Frisco, when we used to flush the toilet upstairs, we always wondered where it came to."

By lee siegel