Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I try to answer this question, in about 1460 words. This will sound self serving, but I’d really like if other bloggers read this post — especially my fellow liberals. I think about this topic quite a bit and I feel it should be discussed openly and honestly. My thoughts here are provisional and I really just want to talk about this entire issue, so please comment and blog away in response. Check it out after the flip.

Mike Meginnis discusses Dana Goldstein’s post on how male bloggers rarely write about “domestic social justice crusades centered around identity.”

…experience has told me that I, as a white male blogger, don’t really get to talk about these things in a more specific manner without being subjected to all manner of ugliness. The most traffic I ever got was from the day Amanda Marcotte basically called me an idiot for having the gall to disagree with her on a truly minor issue.

Basically, all a male blogger can do when it comes to sex or race without fear of getting it from every side is to link approvingly to the comments of other persons with more “authoritative” or “authentic” identities — black women like Pam Spaulding, etc. That’s a decent use of our time and page space, and I occasionally do it, but as a writer I find the whole thing tremendously boring. I like having the room to critique the people I link, endorsing parts of their arguments or perspectives while arguing against others. This doesn’t mean I shut up on those issues all together, as I think perusal of my blog will make clear, but it does mean I tend not to invest a lot of energy in them unless it’s worth being condescended to by Pandagon’s entire readership, or other people who would never read my work except as part of their daily five-minute-hate.

As I documented recently, the people at Femeniste still don’t know for sure whether men are even allowed to be feminists. In that kind of climate, it’s really stunning that white guys don’t tend to focus a lot on issues “centered around identity” (her framing, not mine) isn’t it?

Mike’s experience, which I have read first hand, is broadly applicable across the blogosphere. I like writing about “social justice” and “identity” issues. Some of my favorite posts have been about marriage, abortion and the pay gap. The problem is that when I wrote about how feminists approach marriage, I would get comments from Marcotte and others that because I was a white male and obviously had so much to gain from marriage, of course I would support it. Well, that’s just a pointless debate to have, why talk about these things if your interlocutors are just going to throw up the “privilege” flag, essentially ending discussion? So, if there are social pressures against openly and vigorously disagreeing with the people who drive the “social justice crusades focuses around identity” discussions, then you might as well not even engage in them.

But surely you narcissistic males can blog about identity politics issues even if you don’t have some vigorous disagreement or argument to make, right? Well, maybe, but if there’s one thing most bloggers — especially male ones — like to do, it’s fighting. It’s arguing, it’s trying to make your opponent or whoever you disagree with look foolish. So, what would I rather write: a post lambasting a coal liquefaction bill or a post measly agreeing and linking to something Jill Filipovic wrote? Certainly the former. Considering that at Feministe, as Mike points out, there’s a debate going on as to whether men can be feminists, why should I even try to write about these issues when my allies think I’m intrinsically unable to do so as well as others?

A deeper issue, beyond the personality of many bloggers, is an ideological faultline, that runs very deep among the contemporary net-left. The basic political ideology of the netroots, which Dana hints at, is also not very amenable to narrow, identity based concerns. The netroots – Kos, Atrios, FDL etc — was born fighting, born opposing the Bush administration and all it stood for. And you don’t fight a war, you don’t win Matt Stoller’s “bar fight primary” by being splintered over identity issues. You have to stand together to fight the baddies in the Bush administration, instead of constantly fretting over seemingly tangential issues of identity. When inequality is skyrocketing, we’re in Iraq and the Bush administration is essentially a gang of criminals on the loose, we have to do some prioritizing. If it’s white men leading the fight, so be it, it’s a fight that must be fought.

This approach to liberal politics, however, is much older than blogs themselves. In so much as the netroots has a philosophical backing, I think it can be located in the post New Left “revaluation”. Thinkers, some of whom were student radicals in their own right, like Todd Gitlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Michael Tomasky and Richard Rorty became skeptical of identity politics. For them, the liberal intelligentsia’s retreat into the academy — especially in the 80s — and a focus on more and more specific identity struggles, disabled any strong progressive vision for America, and thus came the Reagan years. In many ways, this was recalling (in Rorty’s case, very explicitly) the grand olde Socialism of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas – while they were the most progressive American political figures on civil rights, they understood that you need to have a broad based class struggle before you can engage in any other. Even radical Continental thinkers — like Slavoj Zizek or Alain Badiou– in their own obtuse ways, came around to this conclusion.

The harshest exposition of this mind set was Matt Taibii’s screed, “The American’s Left Silly Victim Complex” which depicted a liberal movement of pantywaist pseudo-intellectuals who didn’t have the balls to get us out of Iraq and fight a class war. Not surprisingly, feminist bloggers reacted negatively to the piece — as well they should have, it was attack on their very form of politics. The piece, however, captured the progressive zeitgeist remarkably well. Even though we won the 2006 elections, Clinton and the triangulators were well on their way to the Democratic nomination, while the most active anti war group wore pink — and was mighty proud of it. At the same time, as Taibbi put it “someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.”

While the rise of the netroots and blogs more generally has given this strong, unabashedly universalistic voice within American liberalism a prominent place within the contemporary left, it also enabled the more identity oriented voices to be heard more widely. John Edwards, who could easily have been the avatar of this post-identity, populist politics, hired (well, his campaign did) Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte to be his blogmasters. Marcotte, Pandagon and McEwan weren’t afraid of going after liberals on identity based grounds, and in many ways represent a divergence from the standard net roots ideology.

The irony is that they are as firmly anti-Bush, anti GOP as anyone in my narrowly defined netroots. So are these differences actually illusory? In a way they are — if you were to poll your average lefty blogger on various policy preferences and attitudes, I imagine that Marcotte, Pam Spaulding and Jill Filipovic would be well within the normal range for “leftiness.” The thing that’s makes them special, or at least Pam, is a post like this, calling out the progressive blogosphere for not paying attention to the Jena 6 story, before it hit the major media outlets. This was the identity-universal struggle in microcosm. The Jena 6 case, as I’ve argued before, just isn’t on scale with the war in Iraq, various Bush administration perfidy or most of what the Bush administration talks about. Upon reflection, most will see the Jena story as a truly local issue, if you want to talk about systematic judicial disadvantage towards blacks, look to the drug war — where disproportionately harsh sentences are passed down by perfectly fair and non racist prosecutors. Yet various major progressive bloggers were somehow derelict of duty for not paying the same amount of attention as blogs focused towards a primarily black audience, who of course would pay more attention. And so disagreement among people who agree politically about 95-100% of issues was manufactured — over a “domestic social justice crusade centered around identity.”

I’m not saying that blogs whose main focus is women’s, black, latino/a or whatever identity group are somehow worse than blogs with a wide focus. But we should acknowledge that there’s a sense of incommensurability in these writers mission and their approach to the world. So if this accusation of privilege is to be taken seriously, if white male bloggers are really going to be harried for not judging the importance of events the same as every other ethno-gender blogger, then we can expect some more conflict and some serious disagreements.