Friday April 18, 2008

THEIR LITTLE ROCK AND ROLL. A few people who (lucky them) didn't know much about this blog crap before they read my Voice article have questions. The most common is, "Why would anyone want to read about this?" The next most common concerns those bloggers who, though their history and attitude show that they're extremely unlikely to vote Republican in November, still complain that my "arrogance" and "demonizing" are driving them away from the Democrats. What, they ask, is the point of this charade? Whom does it convince?

When short of time or just too drunk to speak, I hand them the glossary. Pretense of sympathy is one of those rhetorical tropes that even the unsophisticated can work, as seen on playground where kids yell, "Too bad you're such a retard."

The bigger question is, what is concern trolling and its home-field equivalents meant to achieve? Because I have never seen it even begin to change anyone's mind on issues or candidates.

The simple answer is, it's not about the argument, it's about keeping the crowds coming in. Like other kinds of masquerade, it's an easy way to make your blogging sexier.

In all but a few cases, political blogging is meant to reenforce the prejudices of its readers. Simple chest-pounding and foam-finger-waving get tiresome after a while, so bloggers who want to keep their audiences try to mix things up. But most don't have much in the way of mixers in their cabinets, and certainly can't write well enough to cruise on style.

So, as some of our ancestors developed prehensile thumbs, the more advanced bloggers develop more complicated arguments which, while they may lead to the same conclusions as before, take the reader on byways of reason that make the journey more rewarding and might even (if he is really ambitious) enrich the blogger's point of view, too. This is the point where, it may be said, blogging starts to turn into writing.

But if you're not interested in writing, or any more complex achievement than the leading of online pep rallies, there is a shortcut: instead of feeding complexities into your work, you feed them into your online persona.

Instead of merely being the member of the tribe who holds the talking stick, you can become a fascinating person with unexpected depths. It's not that hard. Since you are constructing rather than revealing a personality (you don't have the artistic control for that), you can start throwing quirky, contrarian things about yourself into your posts. Add as many as you like; you don't have to worry too much about making the effect believable or coherent. It's sort of like writing a screenplay for Madonna. Just make sure that, in the end, you make your readers feel good about themselves.

I just found a great example of this in one Rachel Lucas. In a recent tirade, "The Core of What Liberals Just Don't Get," she states:

If most of us do not, in fact, feel good about our country (which is a whole other question again), the source of that lack of good feeling stems almost completely from the results of liberal/progressive thinking and behavior. In other words, it’s people like Obama who make us feel bad about our country.

Okay. I guess we know how she feels... or do we?

This might be another great time to point out that I’m not even a conservative, and I still feel this way.

Following that last link, we hear about the things that exempt her from conservatism. Anyone want to guess... oh, I see you got it right away: pro-choice, pro-legalization of weed, not too religious. (Funny how easy that was; I said "wants national health care" just to mix things up and I got burned.)

But don't worry, she's not going to hassle you about that. Instead, she'll tell you how nice conservatives are, and that "liberals tend to be assholes."

To be fair, she does argue with conservatives sometimes: here's a post in which she chides them for insufficient enthusiasm for John McCain: "You’d rather have Hillary Clinton, a bona fide socialist, liar, all-around bad person, as president. You’d rather have Obama, the senator with the most liberal voting record, as president." Eventually she explains again that she's not a conservative, this time in all capital letters.

You may be asking yourself what the effective difference would be between this non-conservative and a conservative. The answer is marketing. She offers her conservative readers the thrill of apostasy -- someone who doesn't go to church hates Hillary too! -- without ever challenging or discomfiting them. For a few minutes, they can believe that no one would disagree with them if they knew them like Rachel knows them.

And we get what in American political discourse is the optimal result: no one learns anything and everybody's happy.

UPDATE. In comments, Susan of Texas finds the McArdle connection ("We all have multiple potential selves within us, none of which is more 'real' than any other..."), and better Susan than me, because if I said it you know it would be heteronormative, somehow.