For the record, here's Jon Chait's response to me -- I think the view that The New Republic isn't committed to right-wing Israeli nationalism is pretty self-evidently absurd. Beyond that, what Kevin said and I agree with Kevin that Armando is making sense here.
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Chait Responds
03 May 2007 10:58 am
Comments (30)
I thought Chait made two good points in the response, which I will quote:
"Neither the David Broder method of establishing truth nor the Markos Moulitsas method of establishing truth is very reliable. Yet the reflexive equivocators use the bloggers to justify their reflexive equivocation, and the bloggers use the reflexive equivocators to justify their reflexive partisanship."
"There are three possible stances to take. One is that you should go out of your way to highlight your disagreements with the left, to show your independence. Another is that you should go out of your way to minimize your disagreements with the left, in order to avoid adverse political effects. The third is that you try to ignore the political effects and just say what you think."
Kevin Drum makes the point that he doesn't so much disagree with Chait on the substance of the piece as the tone. I think that's a correct interpretation, which is probably why I find Chait's restatement of his arguments in the response more agreeable than the original piece, even though he says the same thing.
And, and of course TNR has a committment to right-wing Israeli nationalism. I don't know if it's their main institutional committment though, which strikes me as hyperbole. Indeed, their main instituional committment seems to be not substantive but idealogical: a desire to occupy the center-left space between "reflexive equivocation" and "reflextive partisanship."
Going back to the original Chait Netroots piece:
One item that Chait basically ignored was the primacy of the Dean Experience in forming the fault lines of the Netroots relationship with the non-netroots party.
For example, while there are plenty of reasons why the Netroots would have a natural antipathy for the DLC and Joe Lieberman, the bloody shirt in those relationships was always events during the Dean Experience.
In early summer 2003, Al From started taking some pretty vicious shots at Dean. In late summer 2003, Joe Lieberman took some pretty vicious shots at Dean during a debate.
Prior to those shots, no one in the Party wanted to take any shots at Dean to avoid pissing off his supporters. The Dean folks though they were thus wearing a cloak of invulnerability from being slashed and burned that early in the process.
The reactions of folks in the Dean Experience was to go nuclear toward Lieberman and the DLC, and that general attitude remains in place today. For one example, I genuinely believe that the Lieberman primary challenge was considerably more motivated by the Dean Experience's desire for payback than it was motivated by Iraq policy.
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Someone in the blogosphere, maybe GFR(?), has threatened to write a book about the Dean campaign and how every single thing that has followed in Democratic politics can be traced back to some event in the Dean Experience.
She ought to write that book, as it'd be a great story, as well as being incredibly illuminating.
"My point is that the netroots have helped break down one epistemological prison but have created another."
The point Jon, is that one epistemological prison is the completely dominant political narrative over the last 30 years but you didn't rail daily against during its run of absolute dominance.
The point Jon, is that at the first emergence of another, liberal narrative, you pen a long article in your liberal journal about the danger of this liberal epistemological prison.
The point Jon, is that you are not spending your time writing like Glen Greenwald about the most important story of the last 6 years that the Bush presidency is out of control, but rather spending it pointing out some minor flaws of the people who are pointing out the most powerful man on the planet is an incompetent authoritarian.
Matt, you are allowed a big WFT.
Yeah, that was me.
"Yeah, that was me."
Write that damn book.
It'll be the greatest story ever told.
And while a bunch of folks would hate you for a few weeks, they'd get over it once they read the book from front to back, rather than just checking names in the Index.
Inasmuch as the Gaza withdrawal caused a major split within the Israeli right wing, and TNR endorsed the half that ended up more in the center, it's at least a bit fair to point out that "right-wing Israeli nationalism" in an older sense isn't quite where TNR is. Although it's obviously fair to say that their editorials and guest articles, overall, add up to a solidly right-of-center Israeli viewpoint vis-a-vis that conflict.
Peretz' Israel blogging is in its own crazy place, more of a continuation of old-school right wing talking points that were most prominently represented in the US media for years in William Safire's columns.
"Neither the David Broder method of establishing truth nor the Markos Moulitsas method of establishing truth is very reliable."
He is so right. What the world of journalism needs right now is a guaranteed, scientific, unerring, foolproof, infallible, 100% accurate (and easy-to-use) method of establishing truth.
I hereby propose that the governments of all nations, working together, assemble a committee of trained truth scientists to devise such a method!
Chait's piece and his response are curious. He's clearly bending over backwards to be fair, but...the result somehow isn't. I wonder, a bit, if it's that he isn't much engaged by blogs as a reader (I don't know if that's true). Because posts are published daily, readers get a relatively robust sense of writers' personalities in some faint imitation of the way people manage sort out their co-workers. Does MY's claim that Kos tends towards the over-grand strike anyone as surprising? More surprising to me would be finding out that most of MY's readers don't agree. (I think I'd be a little surprised if Kos didn't agree.)
The Israel thing seems like a different kind of missing the point. There's a substantial difference between believing that Likud may be, on occasion, wrong, but is the appropriate vehicle for the hopes of a solution to the I/P problem, and a belief that Likudniks--and in specific American Likudniks--have provided sufficient evidence of wrongheadedness that the default posture toward them should be distrust.
, I genuinely believe that the Lieberman primary challenge was considerably more motivated by the Dean Experience's desire for payback than it was motivated by Iraq policy.
I think that's certainly true for some significant portion of relevant actors. I suspect the difference is that I think that's a good thing.
So, if the Dean campaign is the key to everything, isn't it relevant that back in 2003, Jonathan Chait wrote a blog called "DIARY OF A DEAN-O-PHOBE"?
I continue to be annoyed at how many people ignore or even acknowledge Chait’s empirical and analytical points, but direct a ton of antipathy towards the article because of his tone and past actions. You sound like conservatives talking about liberal media bias.
James Gary raises an excellent point of course. Very few people, even propagandists knowingly lie, and they tend to believe what they peddle is in fact very true. It makes a lot of sense to analyze the goals and history of where bloggers, and other writers, come from – but at some point you have to acknowledge then that no one is perfect and no one has objective truth. Chait would have been well served to make that post-modern point clear, but clearly the antipathy is so high that he would have been more well-served to just publish the piece anonymously.
Laslty: I’m pretty sure the anti-Lieberman primary can trace it’s roots back to 1998 impeachment, and if you had to find a single point of the most cause it would be when Joe penned a WSJ editorial attacking war critics, and a billionaire named Ned Lamont read it and said someone has to do something about this guy.
"Right-wing Israeli nationalism" is certainly not to be defined solely by the most right-wing parties in Israel. Any desire to keep Jewish settler colonies in and around East Jerusalem is objectively right-wing goal, just as any desire to keep French settlers in Algeria was an objectively right-wing goal, though both many 'left-wing' French parties of that time and 'left-wing' Israeli parties of today have absorbed such chauvinist and colonialist beliefs that they enable these right-wing projects, as does TNR. It's the attempted normalisation of Jewish colonial chauvinism into American liberalism which is one of the hallmarks of TNR's view of the Middle East.
I continue to be annoyed at how many people ignore or even acknowledge Chait’s empirical and analytical points, but direct a ton of antipathy towards the article because of his tone and past actions.
I never know what to make of this sort of objection. How do you divorce individual statements from context? If Petey says that AI lost the series for Denver, there is a very good chance that it means something very different than if I say the exact same words. Isn't it better to be aware of that probable difference?
Ned Lamont is a multi-millionare, not a billionare.
Mickslam at 11:32 nails it.
Also, the netroots are NOT partisan in the sense of being reflexively pro-Democratic. Joe Lieberman is a Democrat. They are partisan for particular ideas, like getting out of Iraq, preserving Social Security, etc. By and large most of those ideas are correct, and demonstrably so. Chait is simply not interested in engaging around ideas.
SCMT: I’m pretty sure this series of posts has covered “yes many members of the media are liberal but you have to judge what they produce, and not just suppose everything they say is nothing but propaganda”. In fact, I think MY even said (or quoted) the Derrida “there is just the text”. So yeah, let’s make some attempt to judge this article on it’s own terms?
PS: This may seem at odds with the way Chait covers the netroots as non-objective, but he really is mostly looking at the source material and what they say. He makes special note of the non-partisan background of many bloggers, in fact.
I mean seriously, as best I can tell what Chait did when writing this article was read a bunch of BLOGS (which are notoriously introspective), and write what they said about themselves. Which may seem lazy, but is far from unfair.
I don't know why I bother to read the comments at TNR. I think they are written by TNR editors. Sort of a group sock puppet.
With regard to the "right-wing Israeli nationalism" line I suppose it's true that, like Ariel Sharon, TNR's editorial line evolved over the years from a hard-right position (no such thing as a Palestinian, no need for a Palestinian state) to a center-right positions (the Palestinians are welcome to keep Gaza and which ever parts of the West Bank we don't happen to want).
My main point wasn't, however, merely that I find those views objectionable or "right-wing." It's that TNR adheres to them with an incredible level of vehemence and with precisely the same activist-consciousness Chait claims to deplore in the blogosphere. You can say their main emotional and institutional commitment is to a center-right brand of Israeli nationalism if you prefer and the point still stands.
If Petey says that AI lost the series for Denver, there is a very good chance that it means something very different than if I say the exact same words.
Bad example. Petey would never say such a thing.
In fact, I think MY even said (or quoted) the Derrida “there is just the text”. So yeah, let’s make some attempt to judge this article on it’s own terms?
"Text" has to mean "body of work" in that context, doesn't it? (I might be wrong--I can't remember the instance to which you're referring.) It's a pretty small bore complaint if the claim is only that a specific article was somehow unfair. But "body of work" is all that's available to most readers of the Chait piece; most of us (I assume) don't know him personally.
I'm not quite sure what your objection is, I guess.
My main point wasn't, however, merely that I find those views objectionable or "right-wing." It's that TNR adheres to them with an incredible level of vehemence and with precisely the same activist-consciousness Chait claims to deplore in the blogosphere. You can say their main emotional and institutional commitment is to a center-right brand of Israeli nationalism if you prefer and the point still stands.
Right. Once the terms are properly defined and/or understood, your point is certainly correct.
MY: Your post clears this the essential point in debate quite nicely. But, frankly, using the term "center-right" (like John Major or Francois Bayrou) for the project of Israeli colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (aka giving the Palestinians which ever parts of the West Bank the Israeli Jews don't happen to want) is something of a travesty.
This policy is hard-right nuttery, not to be normalised or underplayed because there are many Israelis who have even more extreme right-wing opinions.
Delong's view on the wild, paranoid distortions of Matt Yglesias:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/05/the_wild_parano.html
Yglesias writes:
TNR's editorial line evolved over the years from a hard-right position (no such thing as a Palestinian, no need for a Palestinian state) to a center-right positions (the Palestinians are welcome to keep Gaza and which ever parts of the West Bank we don't happen to want).
The view of the TNR Editor-in-Chief does not seem to have evolved much. Two days ago Martin Peretz wrote:
There is even a question as to whether the Palestinian people really exists, except in the realm of conflicted ideology.
"What he wrote in the post I cited was, "I don't write about this issue much because, hey, I don't want to be a wanker." He now says his point was, "I don't go out of my way to harp on points of disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy." But that just isn't what he wrote. "
This is the part where he confirms that he doesn't know the meaning of the term "wanker". One clear meaning of the word is: "a person who goes out of their way to harp on points of disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy."
"Again, he's making my point for me. There are three possible stances to take. One is that you should go out of your way to highlight your disagreements with the left, to show your independence. Another is that you should go out of your way to minimize your disagreements with the left, in order to avoid adverse political effects. The third is that you try to ignore the political effects and just say what you think. He explicitly renounces options number one and number three."
He somehow forgets that number three implies you have to make a value judgement and resource allocation. You have limited space to make your opinions known. If you spend your time talking about how you disagree with most liberals about gun control, you are not talking about the incredible flaws of the conservative movement. Matt isn't rejecting number three, he is applying it effectively.
Jon is a wanker because he thinks all of his views are equally important, and that all problems in our political environment are equally important. This is fundamentally flawed view. Nobody would cop to holding this view explicitly. However, he spends much of his response dissing Matt for not just saying what he thinks, when Matt is saying what he thinks. He thinks what he chooses to write about is far more important that what he chooses not to write about. I can't see Matt, stewing, "I wish I could write about GUN CONTROL, but I can't because I don't want to be seen as dissing liberals." No, he thinks, "I am not going to waste my breath talking about gun control, its an unimportant issue to me. If I wrote about Gun Control much more than I do, I would be a wanker."
Matt, I read you everyday, because you know this.
I think, like everyone around here, its all the more sad because at one point, Jon Chait was one of my favorite writers too. He was one of the first people who even remotely represented my views in something that could be considered to be the major media.
My main point wasn't, however, merely that I find those views objectionable or "right-wing." It's that TNR adheres to them with an incredible level of vehemence and with precisely the same activist-consciousness Chait claims to deplore in the blogosphere. You can say their main emotional and institutional commitment is to a center-right brand of Israeli nationalism if you prefer and the point still stands.
Mislabeling TNR's Zionism as "right-wing" as opposed to "mainstream" or "center-right" is hardly trivial. It is the difference between an intellectually honest critique and an effort to "move the goalposts" of the debate, accuracy be damned.
But holding onto the claim that any form Zionism is the "main" institutional commitment of TNR is also misleading. Love it or hate it, TNR is about a lot more than Zionism. Its Wilsonian, interventionist take on foreign policy is by no means confined to the Middle East (see TNR on Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, Taiwan). Similarly, TNR has a commitment on domestic issues to neoliberalism, (or more accurately "progressive" politics in the early 20the century meaning) - activist liberal government that relies on pragmatism and elite expertise, but is hostile towards populism and left-wing ideology.
There are publications devoted to right-wing and right-of-center Zionism - Azure for serious thinking, and Arutz Sheva and a host of genuinely Likudnik blogs which engage in pure advocacy.
Good points, Mickslam. Putting aside whether or not TNR stresses results as much as process (I think they obviously seek to influence policy -- see the Hillarycare takedown), Chait's issue about intellectual dishonesty doesn't really hold water.
The fundamental flaw in Chait's thinking is the idea that High Broderism and "advocacy blogging" are equally intellectually dishonest (with the caveat that advocacy blogging is okay because it balances out right-wing propaganda). Essentially, he's suggesting that maniacal even-handedness and selective griping are equally bad. But that's just not the case, especially not in the current environment. For example, say Dad is wrong 80% of the time and sorta right 20%. Conversely, Mom is right 80% of the time and wrong 20%. You have a column/blog to talk about Mom and Dad. Is it more intellectually honest to: (a) spend your time obsessively calling out Mom for being wrong 20% of the time (e.g., Mickey Kaus); (b) insist in obnoxiously condescending fashion that Mom and Dad are equally wrong (e.g., David Broder); or (c) constantly lambast Dad for being wrong and praising Mom for being right (liberal bloggers)?
It seems to me (c) is more honest than the other two, since it's true that Mom is mostly right and Dad is mostly wrong. The (b) position is just false. It's simply just not the case that Mom and Dad are equally at fault, just as it's not the case that Al Gonzales and Harry Reid are equally noxious. And (a) isn't wrong per se but seems to miss the point, especially if Dad is the domineering, pernicious parent.
There's nothing intellectually dishonest about a liberal spending most of their time calling out conservatives in an era where conservatives wield the power, and when the conservative movement by and large adhere to ideas that have been widely disproven or have no factual basis.
Ryan, thanks for the kudos, and I think you are correct as well.
To your classifications and the possible reactions, it is pretty much a moral imperative to choose (c). Thats what Chait, Kaus and many if not most mainstream liberals miss. We're not living in an age where equal power is wielded by both points of view. We're not living in a age where both sides are "playing fair". We're not even in an age where any liberal ideas get a reasonable defense in the media. We live in an age where until recently, no democrats would even admit they were liberal.
I guess its a little shocking to me to be attacking this guy Chait, but this article has really angered me.
Look at the title of his response "Paranoid Delusions". Here, we have a person who is nominally a liberal, saying that someone who is mildly more liberal than him is expressing him self in a manner that shows "Paranoid Deliusions": "My point was that this disagreement often manifests itself in the form of paranoia and wild distortion". Is it any wonder why we call people like him a triangulating wanker? Is it any wonder why we are paranoid? He spends 7000 words on the problems with the netroots, how many words would then be appropriate to spend on the Rush Limbaugh and the noise machine thats been in place for about 15 years? Well I have the answer. If the netroots is worth 7000 words, you should spend essentially all of the rest of the year on that noise machine. But, TNR doesn't. Not even close. The most important political story of the last 15 years makes barely any waves over at good ol liberal TNR. Not the poisoning of our debate, or the uncountable lies, no this is not a story. But those darn netroots, who have been correct on essentially every issue of the last 6 years, now there lies danger. He doesn't see the stupidity of this position. Thats why I cancelled my subscription and read Matt instead. Plus, Matt seems cooler.
One more thing, and tis a big one. One of the major premises of his story is that the new netroots is as concerned with propaganda as the right wing noise machine. This is false, demonstrably false. I don't have time to go into this here, but this is the primary reason I am so angry at Jon. He, like almost all wankers, is unable to see the difference between advocacy and propaganda. Its just a political game, about winning a debate, to him. This is the very thing the netroots is most united about. It isn't a game, this is real life, not some verbal debate about the game itself.
This is the very model of the world to the right which they exploit to great success. Where they understand the consequences, but the mainstream liberals think that its a highschool debate. Jon Chait wants to win arguments. He doesn't want to engage the world. So by his world model, advocacy and propaganda must be the same, because for him it is only about winning arguments.
7,000 words about how the people who are correct on the issues are dangerous group-thinkers during arguably the most radical presidency in history. WTF?
"There are three possible stances to take. One is that you should go out of your way to highlight your disagreements with the left, to show your independence. Another is that you should go out of your way to minimize your disagreements with the left, in order to avoid adverse political effects. The third is that you try to ignore the political effects and just say what you think."
This is where Chait just doesn't get it. It's not about saying what's true versus saying what's useful propaganda. There's an infinite number of true statements in the world. You have to prioritize your expression of the truths--the number of hours in the day is limited. So do you spend time talking to show your independence, do you spend time talking about what's politically important? Presumably, you join a party based on your stance on the issues most important to you, therefore if you talk about what's important to you, usually you'll agree with your party.
Chait's third option is little more than a tautology--post about whatever you're thinking about. Well, okay, now I have to know what I should be thinking about.
Also cute how he italicized "go out of my way" and omitted "much" from the original quote which means basically the same thing.
Here's my stab at what I think Chait was doing/getting at. I admit my first read was very positive on what he was doing, my second very negative and my third much more nuanced. I think he complicated a good argument (whether or not you agree with it) with animosity that got in the way of the argument. Unfortunate.
"Jonathan Chait - Enemy Of My Enemy".
Comments closed May 17, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Chait has decided to go a round of "I know what you are, but what am I?" Pretty pathetic really.
Posted by Dan the Man | May 3, 2007 11:17 AM