Libtards and right-wingnuts — thoughts after an Instalanche
It was an interesting weekend at When Falls the Coliseum. On Saturday, Instapundit.com linked to three of our posts. Not all of our readers will know what this means. I don’t know if all of our writers know what this means. But I know what this means: lots of readers. This weekend, close to 20,000 people visited When Falls the Coliseum — on a weekend, when normally there are fewer visitors to the site than during the week. That might not be a lot of people for a major newspaper or magazine, but for us — a site that has never spent any money on marketing and has volunteer writers — 20,000 is a ton of readers (actually, quite a lot more than a ton, if my math is correct and the people are well-fed).
It isn’t the first time Instapundit has linked to us, and we’ve had links from other big sites and some days with lots of readers, but nothing quite like this (no one that I know of drives readers to a post as efficiently as Instapundit). Whenever we get a link from a big site, lots of people discover us and other smaller sites link to us. Since writers want to be read, this is good. We’d be happy to have Instapundit link to us every day (in case Glenn is reading this).
On Monday I noticed (these things are easily tracked) that quite a few other sites linked to us, having found us through Instapundit. I also noticed that one of our posts that had not been linked by Instapundit — a post about a recent study that claimed that the g-spot was mythical – was getting lots of comments. “Comments” might not be the right word. Some people had come to the post to type in all caps and insult the writer. I thought the post was obviously light-hearted, a bit of silliness about a story in the news. The vitriol aimed at the writer surprised me, which surprised me, because I’ve been blogging and reading blogs for a long time, and flame wars and shouting matches are common. Maybe I’m too sensitive. But I must not be sensitive enough, since I just didn’t see what the writer had said that was so offensive and called for such a reaction, because I didn’t take his post seriously, and because the battle of the sexes and gender stereotypes and the idea that men can’t satisfy women aren’t exactly new, edgy subjects for comedy or commentary. Isn’t the dumb dad a staple of sitcoms and television ads? (I leave aside the question of whether the g-spot post is funny, mildly amusing, or not. Decide for yourself. I know it being funny or unfunny was not what was driving the comments.)
What had happened was that getting some links from Instapundit over the last several weeks and especially getting three links in one day had convinced a couple of left-wing sites that When Falls the Coliseum was a right-wing site. It didn’t seem to matter that of the three Instapundit links on Saturday, one was about a humorous YouTube video that was not political and was posted by a contributor I know is not right wing; one was a humor piece that did not mention political parties and was posted by a contributor (a hilarious writer and former student of mine) I know is not right wing and who also posts at Huffington Post (the opposite of a right-wing site) and whose humor at our site is unique, for sure, but hardly right wing or left wing; and one was a post that argued that whenever Obama presses for healthcare reform, stock prices of healthcare providers go up. This last one was critical of Democrats and was arguing that big business likes when government — not just a particular party — regulates. Anyway, I don’t see how a reasonable person would look at these three posts by three writers, on a site that has more than 60 writers and 1,400 posts, and conclude that they add up to right wing. Or left wing. I don’t know why everything has to be defined that way. Maybe people love to define things.
Some people visiting our site toured around and found posts that they decided were right wing, and they concluded that our site is right wing, and they linked to the g-spot post and their readers came to yell at our writer. The writer in this case, Mike, can take it. I am not posting this because he was bothered by the shouting. I think he enjoys it. Maybe it’s a nice change from being around trees so much of the time. I am writing this post to talk about the nature of discourse and the apparent determination of some people to see everything in terms of left and right.
We have several writers who are self-described libertarians. I would count myself in that group, though I often write about non-political topics. We have a couple of writers who would describe themselves as conservatives. We have a few who would describe themselves as liberals. I have no doubt that several of our contributors voted for Obama, just as several did not. We have a bunch of writers who don’t write about anything remotely political and whose politics are a mystery. I don’t happen to think that “libertarian” equals “right wing,” but I guess some people do. It is true that currently more of our overt political commentary comes from our contributors who are libertarian or conservative than comes from our contributors who are not. But a look at our movie reviews, book reviews, TV column, parenting column, conversations, sports column, top ten lists, Frank Wilson’s reveries, and this and this and this (I could go on, but you get the point), should make it clear that there is no monolithic political or ideological agenda driving When Falls the Coliseum. Or, if you want to take the easy way out, see the FAQ and Welcome pages.
I make no apologies for our contributors who express right-wing views, or left-wing views, or libertarian views, or make crude jokes or write things that some think are in bad taste. The whole premise of this site was to find writers with different viewpoints and put them all in the same place. It was the founding premise in 1999, when we first started. I have serious disagreements with many of our contributors on one issue or another. I disagree with the right wing on certain issues, and disagree with the left wing on certain issues. (I probably would disagree with the middle, too, if I could figure out what it is they think.) But I don’t like those terms, “right wing” and “left wing” (some reject the left/right dichotomy as simplistic), or the blogosphere’s more sensitive versions, “right wingnut” or “libtard.”
These are terms that are used to express disdain and shut down discussion. If I can successfully position someone as a nut on either side, that allows lots of people who share my ideology to just ignore what that person is actually saying. They don’t have to engage in discussion or consider someone else’s view. Now, maybe that view doesn’t always warrant discussion or deserve much consideration, but ideally we would determine that after finding out what it actually is, rather than relying on labels applied by third parties to filter out and determine for us what ideas we should encounter openly and honestly and what ideas we should ignore or dismiss. These labels and making everything about politics also seems to make people too serious. Everything is an ideological fight to them, even if it’s something silly.
I have mocked plenty of people and actions and news stories and I will continue to do so. Our writers will continue to do so, if that is the sort of thing they do. And fair is fair and others may choose to mock what they read here on their own sites. But what I won’t do is see the world in terms of left and right only. I’d have to hate many members of my extended family, and some of my friends, and maybe most of my colleagues, and close to half of my site’s writers, if I were required to see as evil those people who don’t share my political views. I won’t use terms like “libtard” when I critique what I think is a stupid policy being promoted by people who define themselves as liberal. I’m no angel. I am sarcastic and aggressive and sometimes mean when I mock something I think is wrong. But I try to focus on the person, act, or decision, rather than some group to which they belong. Maybe I don’t always succeed.
I happen to think that most people, the larger non-blogging-not-obsessed-with-politics world, aren’t left wing or right wing. They aren’t even necessarily moderates. They might vote Democratic or Republican, they might have preconceived notions about one side or the other, but they have hardly engaged in real arguments about the issues and the ideas behind the positions people have on those issues. Many have inherited their political affiliations, like they inherited religious affiliations. They’re just democrats, or liberals, or republicans, or conservatives, because that’s who they are, how they were raised, where they’re from, what the media tells them — it’s the air they breathe. They might be smart people, in some cases very smart, but they are also people, and people tend to do what is easy, and what is easy is usually to go along with the prevailing view in your town, your field, your family.
Our political culture doesn’t encourage real discussion. Our news media is allergic to it. Presidential debates aren’t debates. Too many blog commenters have broken caps lock keys. I’m not blameless. I am not always subtle or trying to reach undecided people with nuance. Sometimes I’m writing for readers who share my views, hoping to amuse them as I aggressively make fun of something they agree should be mocked. But sometimes I’m writing for people who are open to being persuaded on an issue, to seeing someone else’s point of view, to not seeing the world only as left and right. Even if I don’t persuade them, I hope that they see some validity to my point of view, and that this makes them think. Usually, when I’m not identifying people who should be killed this week, I try to be civil. Not always. Some behavior calls for outrage. And sometimes I’m just going for a laugh.
I won’t insist that our writers share my views on this. Nor will I insist that our commenters all play nice and keep their elbows off the table. But I do want to note that we have comment policies. Now would seem a good time to ask you to read them.
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Scott, GREAT post. Started to skim through it … then stopped, refilled my coffee cup, and sat down to enjoy it at-length, in-depth.
By the way, good work on that day, posting greetings and encouragements to those new arivals that were following Instapundit’s links to WFTC.
Actually the SadlyNauts likely didn’t care what your site was, and just targeted the post and poster Instahayseed linked. Don’t flatter yourself.
Wonderin’, I am not referring to that site, but a different one that linked and defined WFTC as right wing. I’d never heard of SadlyNo until they also linked to us. So I wouldn’t be flattering myself to think that a site I’d never heard of wrote about us. But your response here is sort of what I’m talking about in this post. No desire to engage in the discussion. Just looking for a chance to insult or be snarky. Thanks for demonstrating.
Are you so sure it would have mattered what I said? You’re apparently as ready to presuppose agendas on the people who came here to post as you accuse them of being about your site.
I based my comment on what you wrote. Had you written something different, my comment would have been different. We won’t ever know, since you wrote what you wrote.
What agenda did I presuppose? Go back and read the tone of the comments on the g-spot post. Read the reader comments on the sites that linked to that post. Then tell me what I am basing my comments on.
Maybe you should re-read this post. I solicit writing from people I disagree with, I encourage them to post on our (my) site, and I even try to catch their typos so their work will reflect well on them, and on the site.
I also teach in a university English department. You might guess that I work with and teach many people whose views are different from my own. I’ve had students write persuasive papers on positions that I strongly object to, yet if the papers were good, the students received good grades. I’ve had students submit papers with conclusions that I strongly agreed with, and if the papers were not good, they received low grades.
If you want a real discussion, I’m right here.
I use the phrases “libtard” and “wingnut” to describe those who deserve the title. Nothing worse than a Republican/Democrat zombie who does nothing but toe the party line with no thought at all.
And yes, I do enjoy heated arguments, and I can hold my own in the flaming contests. I was the only self described “conservative” (even though I’m a libertarian) in the PolySci grad program I was in, so as you can imagine, I’ve had plenty of practice with both.
What really bothers me though is the idea that freedom of speech is only as free as the weakest stomach in the room. The idea behind freedom of speech is to pretect an individual’s right to say things, even socially incorrect things, that no one else agrees with. After all, today’s blasphemy is tomorrow’s orthodoxy. We all need to be a little less sensitive about the mere words another throws at us.
For the record, I am not a conservative but a radical anarchist; I’m for smashin’ (or starving) a significant fraction of whatever it is we are sending so much of our paychecks to and since that is almost by definition progress, you will also find me sometimes calling meself progressive, but not “a progressive”. I’ve made a concious decision to engage in polemic here at the Coliseum, keeping Cicero vs Mark Antony in mind. I would submit that many of the seminar posters from the Left… even to the Left of the Democrats are acting by rote. Often the comments reveal an ignorance that would have been remedied by reading the post in question. But whatever. Bottom line: traffic is traffic.
Yes, but Mike, there is a problem when people try to shout down speech they don’t like, drown it out, as has happened when certain speakers have been invited to college campuses and been shouted off the stage. Maybe this is a stretch of an analogy, but when dozens of people come to a post and start typing in all caps and cursing and calling someone fat, that person might be able to take it, and it’s protected speech (though ours is not a public forum but a private entity, so we can set our own rules), but it is often intended to discredit the writer and prevent an actual discussion about the content from happening. Not that the post in question here required a discussion.
Ken, traffic is indeed traffic. I don’t care where it comes from.
Good thoughts from Scott. I agree that we shouldn’t pigeon-hole people as left or right, in general. But there’s a danger at the other extreme as well: a kind of ideological illiteracy that considers all ideology distasteful or unnecessary. Actually, it is delicious and necessary to the democratic process. And however nuanced or ideosyncratic a particular person’s politics may be, if he or she is a thoughtful person there will be some internal consistency to the thoughts: a consistency of values as much as of intellect. That is why the broad left-right spectrum (a metaphor to be sure; it could be up-down or black-white (oops, forget that one) is permanently descriptive of the range of normative views in a democracy. That is why left and right won’t go away. The spectrum describes the range of views on parallel issues: equality, complexity, regulation vs. free market, personal freedom vs. security, etc. As long as we have differences (which capitalism guarantees by generating inequalities) and as long as we can argue about those differences (which democracy guarantees by generating forms of political equality including the right to talk and to vote) we will have a left-right spectrum. And don’t believe those who tell you it should go away, or already has. They are the political charlatans.
@ Jeff
Beautifully put, my good sir! Since the beginning of time, there have been two types of people: Those who want to preserve the status quo, and those who want to experiment. They have each had their high points, and their low points, but neither has ever removed the other mindset from existence, nor will they ever do so.
I hold a different view of the political spectrum than most people, and I’ve described my view in other pieces I’ve written here, but based on that, the vast majority of people in the US are left-wing/statist, they just don’t agree on what the state should be doing.
I’m not even a real “right wing” type of person because I argue for the existence of the state, just in a very constrained state. I’m a Constitutional Moderate, and I LOVE the freedom of Americans to voice their minds on just about any topic. It’s a wonderful, beautiful thing.
Except, Jeff, as I assume you know, libertarians reject that these left/right views are necessarily parallel or consistent.
Someone who opposes government interference with the right to an abortion on the grounds that people own their bodies and then favors high taxation on fatty foods to make it difficult for people to choose to put certain foods in their bodies is not acting consistently. There are many examples of these inconsistencies across many issues, on both sides of the political aisle, all along the left/right spectrum. We could make a case that the reason left/right isn’t going away isn’t because it represents a real consistency or logically parallel views, but because entrenched powers and interest groups have firm holds on both parties, and the patchwork of constituencies must be held together to get elected. Promise something to everyone and hope to get their votes.
I do agree that ideology is fine. A point of view is fine. Necessary even. If we don’t let it blind us. But that it has to be left or right or that this represents something real or inherently logical, I reject.
Scott:
An excellent post….and for the record, I’m one of the (far) left of center posters here who make it difficult to call this site exclusively libertarian, right wing, left wing, or whatever.
I very much, however, appreciate the (frequently irreverent) dialog across political spectrum(s), etc.
Personally, I hate ideologues (aside from myself of course) of any stripe whose rhetorical techniques….And, if one takes a two-party worldview (which is, of course, a bit of a pragmatic falsehood), I find myself frequently annoyed by thoughtless diatribes that stifle debate–regardless of whether those diatribes flow forth from the lips of Glenn Beck or Jeanine Garofalo.
If you must diatribe, please, please, focus on something that we can all agree on…..like general misanthropy.
Again, nice work….thanks and you’ll see more from me sometime soon.
Les
Well, I’ve never met a conservative who didn’t believe in less government and less equality or a liberal who didn’t believe in more. That of course is mostly true by definition. But the fact is that there are certain scales on which our beliefs are tested by politics, such as how much government we want in our lives and the lives of others, and those scales tend to run parallel, more or less, in reliable ways. That doesn’t mean everyone is easy to identify. But if you can’t be located, at least vaguely, on the left-right spectrum, it may be because you are all over the place. (As libertarians are, in a peculiarly compelling, consistent, and in my view simlistic or at least simple way.) I have argued in The Sound Bite Society that complexity is in fact the generative idea underlying the political spectrum, and there are virtues to both the simpler and the more complex worldview. But don’t take it from a liberal — read A Conflict of Visions by the conservative Thomas Sowell, who makes a very similar argument.
Jeff,
I’ve read A Conflict of Visions and think it is very good at explaining the point you’re making about the prevailing way of looking at politics. I recommend it to others.
But I disagree with your comments.
You’ve never a met conservative who didn’t believe in stronger/larger government in such areas as police, military, the war on drugs, pornography, morality? They are stereotyped as wanting that.
You’ve never met a liberal who didn’t want smaller/less powerful government in drugs, prostitution, morality, religion, military, police? They are stereotyped as wanting that.
Isn’t the liberal anger at the Patriot Act based on their view that the government shouldn’t infringe on civil liberties, that it should be smaller and less powerful in that area?
Don’t conservatives argue against affirmative action on the grounds of equality before the law?
The list can go on. I maintain that your description of the left and the right does not match the reality. I would argue that if libertarianism can be considered simplistic for its demand for consistency, the left/right dichotomy is simplistic and lacking in nuance, looking at surface and party affiliation and not how issues are connected philosophically, and generalizing about the left and right in ways that are contradicted by lots of specific issues.
Someone can believe in drug legalization, gay rights and gay marriage, legalized prostitution, be against military spending, be against police brutality, and be protective of civil liberties, and be called right wing because they also think the government should keep taxes low and social spending low.
We can talk about the Nolan Chart, which tries to visualize political ideology differently. But I suppose these are arguments for another time. It’s one others have made better than I can. There are probably whole books and political movements making these points. And we’re straying pretty far from the post topic.
But I appreciate the discussion, and, back to the point of my post, the tone of the discussion.
The real political spectrum, displayed as left/right.
100% gov’t control —————– 0% gov’t control
Anyone hoping to use the government to force their ideas/desires on others, be they Republican or Democrat, is farther to the left wing than I am.
The only thing I want the government to force others to do is leave me the heck alone!
My last comment on this, as I have had my fill of political discussion for the day. I wanted to clarify a couple of points.
Jeff, I do get Sowell’s explanations and find them compelling, and I do think that what he describes is largely a consistent vision at bottom on both sides. I just don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions about the policies and attitudes that inevitably follow from the premises he attributes to the sides. And while I, just as a quick example, understand and even agree with Sowell about the value of institutions that have evolved over many generations, I think he sticks to that in a more strict way than does F.A. Hayek and others, who recognized their value as well. Anyway, I don’t mean any of the above in any of the comments to be a final statement of my specific political philosophy. My views are what they are. I sometimes agree with Sowell, sometimes with Hayek, sometimes with both or others, and you might fit me on that straight line if fitting people on a straight line is important. But I still think there are alternative ways of viewing these things and that the limitations of the straight line are significant.
I thought I was done commenting on this, but think I handled the discussion of Sowell badly, so though maybe no one is interested, I want to clarify my clarification.
In my initial post, I note that I think many people, if not most, don’t think much about politics and don’t choose political affiliations based on evidence or argument or even necessarily a worldview, so much as inherit political affiliation and attitudes. Not in all cases, of course, but in many.
Still, I agree with Sowell that there is a coherent worldview of both left and right — a vision they have of human nature and the limits of possibilities (read the book yourself for his excellent explanation) and that this implies certain conclusions and policies.
I have already said that the actual policies and attitudes of the people on the left and the right are often not as coherent as predicted by the vision that Sowell discussed. Partly this is because the people with the vision that he discusses are the ideologues, the true believers, the party faithful, whatever we call them. Most people don’t fall into this category. They vote one way or another based on the political affiliation they inherited, or based on a particular issue or two that they care a lot about. But they don’t necessarily have a coherent worldview or vision that would fit left or right. The people driving the debate, the passionate people reading blogs or listening to talk radio, the people Sowell is talking about, maybe do have a vision and views that follow from that vision.
I would argue that many, if not most people, do not fit neatly on that left/right line. It isn’t just libertarians. As Chris Rock joked in a recent stand-up special, he is conservative on crime and liberal on prostitution.
Scott: Reality is a mess — I agree on that much at least. (Could someone please clean it up a bit?) And on the right to self-describe as neither right nor left. As for the rest, I think it may depend in part on how much stock one puts in abstractions as vs. responses to the messy world.
The big/small government issue of course relates to regulation, taxation, redistribution, and the economy — the spectrum is different if not reversed when it comes to privacy and civil liberties.
I would just note further that I also believe in a kind of ideological agnosticism — that however one shapes the spectrum, there is no final “right” or “wrong” position within the bounds of tolerance and non-bigotry. That’s part of my (and inferentially at least, Sowell’s) argument about complexity. We choose, consciously or otherwise, at what level of complexity to engage with each other and with society. It’s a choice that has moral implications but one that cannot necessarily be subjected to moral scrutiny.
Enough opacity from me…
I obviously deeply misunderestimated the intellectual depth of your site on the internets.
Any website that would post that wonderful missive on fat piggy videogame nerds farting wet egg-nog scented air biscuits in public and laughing as people run off?
Pure fuckin’ Pulitzer material. Pat yerself on the back for being the maestro of such an orchestra of deep thought.