Orcs and Republicans
By Lance has a classic post on the relationship between orcs and warbloggers:
Sometimes I wish we bloggers on the Left would just ignore those on the Right. There’s no gain in it. A moment or two of easy feelings of moral and intellectual superiority bracketed by a lot of frustration, anger, and utter dismay that people of such low standards and stunted emotional growth command a hearing and boast large, loyal followings.
We know what they are, and there’s no arguing with them.
It’s not just their illogic, their mean-spiritedness, their placing of anything that looks like a fact out of bounds. Not just their many and varied hypocrisies and their ability to change opinions at the drop of a hat—or a nod from Karl Rove—totally contradicting what they were ready to go to the wall for only last week if that’s what serves the Agenda this week.
And it’s not just that they really don’t represent anything in themselves. They are no more responsible for the “ideas” they spout than a secretary running the Xerox machine is responsible for what’s in the latest memo from the boss.
It’s not just all that.
It is their bloody evil-mindedness.
They think like the squabbling orcs in The Two Towers who start a conversation cursing the elf warrior they’ve imagined has left the paralyzed Frodo to be eaten by Shelob—“regular elvish trick”—and finish it laughing about the time they left a paralyzed comrade to be eaten by Shelob.
There’s no surer way of getting lots of hits and a few trackbacks than trolling the wingnut blogs until you find something particularly appalling. It’s fun, if you can stand the stench. Like Lance, I’m not sure that it serves any greater purpose. Would it really help anyone on the left to know if Assrocket thought nuking Toronto was a good idea? I suppose, though I have my doubts.
For me, the ability to change attitudes, opinions, and entire ways of thinking is the most troubling part of the right half of the blogosphere. Perhaps, if we were in power, we would find ways to do the same thing, but I doubt it. Left, and even liberal, opinion on the Clinton administration was hopelessly divided from the day he took office. Few, if any, on the left were willing to construct the same sort of justifications of his vacation time that you find on any given right wing blog. Imagine, for a moment, the reaction on the right side of the blogosphere if W were found in an office with an intern. A few, at the margins, would slip away. The rest would start by denying, continue by blaming the media, follow up by pointing out how his intern was better than Clintons, and conclude by explaining, carefully, how the entire episode served some purpose necessary to the defense of the nation, democracy, mom, and apple pie.
This isn’t limited to right wing bloggers. I think that this tendency, this hivemind need, infects the entire right. I’ve talked before about the astonishing change of attitude regarding humanitarian intervention on the part of my conservative students after a similar shift from the Bush administration. It’s disheartening, because I know that, on the right and even in the Republican party, there still are some who are genuinely interested in policy and in principle. However, it’s not even as if these voices are drowned out; those with a genuine concern for actual political questions have decided to prostitute themselves in service of the Bush/Rove/Delay political machine. Why? I suspect, in the end, it has to do with some vague fear of the “left”, in all of its forms, that these people can’t even quite articulate. They don’t quite understand what they hate, but they know that they need to hate it, and if hating it means getting in bed with Tom Delay, well, sacrifices have to be made.
The fate of independent thought on the right carries with it a warning for us. We need to make certain that the hivemind mentality never seizes our side. This involves calling out the nonsense and the brutishness in our own camp when we find it, and recognizing the fact of pluralism. This doesn’t mean we should abandon core values; indeed, the opposite. George Bush has abandoned, discredited, ignored, and shat upon many of the values that his supporters have held. It does mean that we have to hold ourselves, our leaders, and our spokespersons accountable.