Why Blogs Trample on Leftist Traditions

Blogging necessarily involves picking apart the stories told to us, and the Left has a long tradition of taking part in a similar exercise in deconstruction. But, I do not believe information and opinion completely capture what politics is.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Arianna Huffington recently appeared at a Yale Political Union debate centered around whether blogs are good for democracy. Several Yale students gave speeches at the debate, and we have highlighted some of them on the Huffington Post. Read all of the published speeches by clicking here.

Surely everyone has had the experience of getting up from a theater seat or shutting a back cover of a book with their chest stirred or warmed. But a few months ago I had a strange experience as I was walking out of a theater with a couple of friends. As I dwelled on the soaring landscapes and intricate plot, they picked apart and intellectualized the beauty in the movie until the gestalt that could please the eye or tug at the heartstrings or stir one to action completely disintegrated.

Blogs are much the same way. It's not that blogs are driven by sensationalism like the mainstream media, but uniquely by a need for originality. In a universe of millions of blogs - in this free marketplace of ideas - one is noticed for saying something new; demand is for new answers and new questions like: What's the take or interpretation that no one else has thought of? What's the real motive? What's lurking behind the surface?

This necessarily involves picking apart - de-spinning if you will - the stories told to us.

Now, the Left has a long tradition of taking part in a similar exercise in deconstruction - in fact we call it deconstructionism - of the symbology and narratives in our world. Foucault on sexuality, Barthes on wine, and Derrida on just about everything expose the way seemingly innocuous facets of our culture buttress power, and insodoing sweep out the rug from underneath power's feet.

By revealing prevailing narratives and divesting them of sanctity, we seek to deprive them of their power.

And it works. Blogs help us see the political world for what it really is.

But, I do not believe information and opinion completely capture what politics is. Politics is also theater. And like my fellow moviegoers, bloggers are ruining the theater.

I hate to consider what the blog posts would have looked like the day after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Rosa Parks was trained at the Highlander Folk School in social leadership. Her decision to stay in her seat was calculated. But did that make it any less significant?

More recently, John Edwards had an affair and said some moving words about what it's like to balance being a person with being a person with power - the blogosphere again wanted to consider everything but what it is he was trying to say.

Not every narrative is engineered by the powerful nor towards sinister ends, and so we should be wary of a medium that so relentlessly robs narrative of its power, no matter how instinctual that impulse is for the Left.

We've convinced ourselves that the right course of action is to consider how Rosa Parks came to stay in her seat, allowing us to sidestep with great cowardice the nagging questions like what one woman's courage means for the way we live our lives.

But it strikes me that some myths will always persist - and so I ask the body to consider, which narratives are blogs best at scuttling?

Those that have been embedded the deepest in our consciousness by the most entrenched interests - the patriarchy, the church, and the state - don't seem like the likeliest targets, even though they are the most deserving. The narratives constructed by individuals and activists like Rosa Parks are the most vulnerable, and blogs seek to vivisect them at their birth. Blogs thus aren't about empowering activists - they make it more difficult for new narratives to take hold.

It's not that meta-narrative "distracts us from the issues". It's that as it insists that the important thing is to find the hidden side of everything, it ensures that instead of letting politics stir something in our chests, we create a culture that cackles at conviction and calls passion puerile - it insists that politics be solely a sport of the mind and that belief and inspiration - the prerequisites to participation - are naïve and intellectually immature. Bloggers are ruining the movie.

Some may say the alternative isn't much better. Without quoting Churchill on democracy, I am confident that I would rather live in a society stirred by rhetoric towards the occasional ill-advised cause than one paralyzed by disbelief, sapped of passion, and thus left prostrate.

If we are to truly follow in the traditions of the Left, let us also ask what interests blogs' institutionalization of knee-jerk cynicism in our civil society serves. Calling people to action is the one mechanism leaders have always retained - and with blogging, power has finally found a way to cripple even that.

Rosa Parks wrote, "People say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Those words were essentially a lie. But they were good theater, and they changed the world.

So may we have the courage to be moved.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot