The comment threads have become a problem. Some people have forgotten they are interacting with fellow human beings. So we're going to take a little break. They'll be back in a while.
There is not doubt that there is a decent amount of nastiness surrounding this primary campaign, both online and off. Much of it has been charged with vicious gender and racial idioms, which probably makes things much worse for a female blogger like digby who has been focusing much of her writing of late on the gender-related comments of Chris Matthews.
The internet is a reflection of the public's sprawling and diverse views, which are brilliant, disgusting, mediocre, and everything in between. It's a big country, with lots of different people who talk about stuff in different ways. Some of them are mean. This isn't a problem, it's just humanity.
That is certainly true, and I think one of the reasons the Village often recoils at the tone of discourse online is because its inhabitants are so thoroughly distanced from the tones of discourse many Americans use when discussing politics. There is nothing unusual about Americans being extremely harsh in political discussions, as most Americans around the country already know. As a nation, we are not a genial country club. We are, instead, a diverse republic with a once mighty modernist public sphere that has rapidly deteriorated into hundreds of micro-spheres, all of their own norms, tones, and trolls.
However, the flame wars we are seeing online goes even beyond the diversity of American opinion and tone, and even beyond sexism and racism still running rampant through many of our micro-public spheres. It is also connected to how the leading Democratic campaigns themselves are functioning as leaders of the Democratic rank and file. First, the campaigns themselves have always been heavily charged with identity politics, no matter how much they claim otherwise:
Hillary and Obama -- and their surrogates -- would stop saying they don't want people to consider their race or gender in this election. You simply can't have it both ways. You can't highlight the historic nature of your candidacy in one breath and make jokes about blacks being better dancers or say that a black man named Barack Obama had to have hope to get here or ask voters to "help you make history" in the next.
Now, it is heavily ironic for a member of the media to point this out, even though the Nevada debate clearly showed that the Brian Williams and Chris Matthews of the world are the ones who most salivate over discussions of race and gender. Further, the race and gender cards have always been out there, and every President in history has played identity politics on some level. The age card, the region card, the masculinity card, the patriotism card--those are identity politics too, and everyone running for President has played that game. Still, the author has a point. If a campaign argues that being the first woman or being the first African-American to become President would be historic, then that campaign shouldn't pretend that it doesn't want to talk about gender or race. Granted, the campaign doesn't want to talk about it in the crude ways it has been discussed of late, but it still wants to talk about it none the less.
Further, supporters always take cues from the campaigns that they support. I have marveled at how many commenters in the blogosphere seem to be pretty much parroting talking points coming from campaigns. This isn't restricted to supporters of any one candidate. I have seen dozens of Obama, Edwards and Clinton supporters sound perfectly on message about how us vicious online partisans don't understand the national desire for more unity and less partisanship and / or ideology, about how us bloggers are complicit in the corporate blackout of John Edwards, and about how, unlike the unruly, snot-nosed kids online, rank and file Dems love Clinton because she is an experienced fighter for the middle class. I'm not writing this because I think it is something new or that I am in anyway above parroting campaign arguments. Hell, I saw it--and did this myself--back in 2003-4 when I was a Dean supporter. As though I was taking message lessons directly from Dean campaign HQ, I talked about the need to stand up to Republicans, to build a movement, and to favor pragmatism in government instead of ideology. I think the reason I did it this time is because I just didn't find any of the campaign arguments to be quite as compelling to my current political outlook..
Supporters are following the leads of the campaigns themselves, and the result is that the diversity of American opinion, tone, and micro-spheres are brushing up against each other in particularly nasty ways. It will tone down once the primary is over, but no matter who wins it will be a long healing process as supporters struggle with lingering feelings of voter suppression, corporate blackouts, racism, sexism, and other charges the campaigns have made themselves. Such feelings were unavoidable no matter how the primary went down, but both the national media and the campaigns themselves have functionally presented a form of negative leadership that is accentuating these unavoidable problems.
Now, I don't really know how things could have gone differently or better, but I think an increased focus on ideological and policy differences would have helped. Part of the problem with arguing over concepts like "change" and "experience" is that the terms are so empty and vacuous is that the people arguing have never even really made it clear what the arguing was all about. Then again, the media doesn't really cover ideological and policy differences very much, frontrunners always try to blur differences with the candidates they are leading, and there are some really nasty divisions in this country that we need to face up to.
I'm not really sure what to suggest, since there are a lot of factors at play. One thing I will say, however, is that no matter what some pundits and politicians think, the internet and the blogosphere are not the causes of this situation. What the internet has done is pull back the curtain on the myth of a congenial, bi-partisan, post-identity politics America. That was always a myth created by elite political and media types who operate in a privileged world of very narrow demographics that is wholly unreflective of the broader nation. What we are seeing now is very normal for our country. While the internet is simply revealing the true state of our normalcy to a sheltered elite, the truth is that the campaigns and more established media who claim to decry such politics are actually fueling it. There are some nasty divisions in America, and they aren't going away just because Joe Lieberman changed the seating chart on his Senate committee.
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