The Tired Old Sewing Circle

There’s a plethora or conservative blogs here in Montana now, quite a change from a few years back when we had two intellectual extremes, Dave Budge and Eric Coobs, and a few in between. These days, with Big Sky Cairn, The Hammond Report (Coobs’ replacement), Missoulapolis, the Hardliner, Rabid Sanity and a host of others, the Dextra is brimming with activity. And that’s a good thing – a few of us lefties love to make the rounds and stir things up.

A Pew Research Center study reports the following:

Judged by their answers to three news knowledge questions, the most informed audiences belong to the political magazines, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, the O’Reilly Factor, news magazines, and online news sources. Close behind are the regular audiences for NPR and the Daily Show.

Audiences with the highest educational achievement, by far, are the literary magazines and online news outlets. Readers of news magazines, political magazines and business magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR, and viewers of the Daily Show, and C-SPAN also are much more likely than the average person to have a college degree.

That makes sense – I’ve been encountering more and more smart conservatives, and debates are getting harder all the time. Just a couple of observations, however:

For one, conservatives usually know their own minds very well, but little of the other side. They are much more likely to draw caricatures of liberals and progressives, and attack those strawmen. The most ardent practitioner of this habit is Dave Rye (followed closely by Wiley Cody – read this for a classic example), who is perpetually framing his argument with the preface “Here’s what liberals think”. Dave is now a talk show host down in Billings, and not a blogger, and to fill air time, I am told, he allows liberals on. That’s unusual – his predecessor, Dave Berg, engaged in the Limbaugh method – he would allow opponents a narrow window up against the break or simply hang up on them. Truth is, with Berg and Limbaugh and all the other right wing yakkers, that they don’t want opposition viewpoints. Talk radio is a propaganda exercise, and balance is an anathema to propaganda.

The result is conservatives talking to other conservatives, backslapping, pontificating and validating one another without interferences from other viewpoints. I noticed this phenomenon in the blogs, and called it the “right wing circle jerk“, since I have no sense of propriety.

This is what I see in our new (and old) right wing bloggers. Craig Sprout was initially invited to be a writer at Montana Netroots, and very shortly after that announced he would not partake. Wiley Cody has some fancy explanation for why he never leaves that site. Dave Budge told me a few months back that he was not coming to this web site again. The right wing proprietors don’t get out much, and it’s a shame. The very best that we can do for one another is debate. It’s a complicated world, and odds are that everyone is partly right and partly wrong. (In the real world “free” markets have positive impacts, as do government-run social programs.) We create false dichotomies, we demonize. And the only outcome is polarization.

But in my experience it is mostly the righties who insulate themselves. Jay Stevens makes the rounds, as do I, as do Wulfgar and Lamnidae, Shane Mason and Colby Natale. We’re constantly stirring it up over there, but there’s nothing coming the other way. I am led to conclude that the conservative bloggers are not confident enough in their own ideas and abilities to withstand the heat of a fiery debate. They retreat to their circle, talk amongst themselves, talk about us, and only engage us unwillingly when we come visit them.

That’s a shame. The Montana blogs are rich now with smart and educated participants full of energy and ideas. We should be having more fun than we are. Pity the poor conservative who doesn’t know enough of his own mind to take it on a shopping trip.