Goldilocks Punditry

by digby

The bloggers are too hot and the villagers are too cold. But Joe Klein is just right:

In the snarkier precincts of the left-wing blogosphere, mainstream journalists like me are often called villagers. The reference, so far as I can tell, has to do with isolation: we live in this little village on the Potomac — actually, I don’t, but no matter — constantly intermingling over hors d’oeuvres, deciding who is “serious” (a term of derision in the blogosphere) and who is not, regurgitating spin spoon-fed by our sources or conjuring a witless conventional wisdom that has nothing to do with reality as it is lived outside the village. There is, of course, some truth to this. Washington is insular; certain local shamans are celebrated beyond all logic; some of my columnar colleagues have lost touch with everything beyond their armchairs and egos.

But there is a great irony here: villagery is a trope more applicable to those making the accusation than to those being snarked upon. The left-wing blogosphere, at its worst, is a claustrophobic hamlet of the well educated, less interested in meaningful debate than the “village” it mocks. (At its best, it is a source of clever and well-informed anti-Establishment commentary.) Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum.

The truth is that the left-blogosphere is a bunch of individual actors and discrete communities who have many different opinions about the Democratic Party, President Obama and the current state of progressive politics. We also mostly agree that the right wing is a collection of hypocritical corporate sponsored wealth protectors and resentful, reactionary stooges. But the one thing we all pretty much agree on is that Villagers will be Villagers — and forming false equivalences between the left and right is a defining characteristic.

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