Litmus of Rage

Dean Barnett wrote an interesting bit in yesterday's Standard, on the new Democrat litmus test.

It starts with the Special Election in Ohio, in which an extremely vituperative (but not very Democrat) Democrat ran up against a fairly middle-of-the-road Republican.

Barnett's thesis - that the leftyblog establishment, the überblogs like Kos and Atrios, are ushering in an era in Democrat politics where appearances - rhetorically, here - matter more than the message itself:

DOES HACKETT'S RHETORIC portend the Democratic politics of the future as politicians try to sound angry enough to please the party's e-base [bloggers like Kos]? Don't bet against it. As Republican political consultant Mike Murphy observes, "The liberal blogosphere continues to grow in power," while acidly likening the situation to an "8 year-old with a machine gun."

Look at blogs like Kos and Atrios and Jesus General - blogs that get, among them, immense traffic, and feature a tone (and a quality of writing) that would fit in with foul-mouthed semi-liberate rabble-rousing conservative blogs near the bottom of the food chain; snarky rather than logical, absolutist rather than political.

While just a few weeks ago it seemed that liberal bloggers wanted Democratic politicians to mirror not just their rhetoric, but their substantive politics as well, the Hackett campaign suggests something else entirely: In spite of being a moderate, bloggers fell in love with Hackett based on little more than a shared fondness for juvenile insults and a mutual loathing of George W. Bush.

Indeed, prominent left-wing bloggers such as Steve Gilliard and Markos Moulitsas are in the process of formulating and promulgating a "litmus test" for Democratic politicians that is literally--and intentionally--devoid of any substantive issues. Instead, the emphasis is exclusively on style. A few of the newly-minted litmus test's requirements are that the candidate "make it clear that he opposes Bush and the Republicans, . . . act like he wants to win, . . . not distance himself from the party [and] be proud to be a Democrat."

On the one hand, someone understands that form leads function, that the rhetorical packaging of an idea can matter more to people than the idea itself. Maybe it's the influence of George Lakoff, a Chomskyite linguist retained by the Democrats to figure out how to win by (Mitch puts his linguistics hat on) attacking the language itself.

Of course, I have to hope that packaging such ideas in a form like the Daily Kos, Eschaton is a good way to ensure that the vast majority of Americans never see them; they may be a huge echo chamber by blogosphere standards, but they're still an echo chamber.

Posted by Mitch at August 16, 2005 05:57 AM | TrackBack