The Ever Circled Wagons

The recent blog war between Kos and The New Republic has exposed a rift in Democratic politics as deep as it is tiresome. I've come away believing neither the Kos charge that TNR is a gay-friendly National Review, nor the TNR charge that Markos is Julius Streicher. Everyone's coming out of this looking pretty silly, while back in the grim world the tortures, the illegal detentions, and the ruinous Iraq policies of the Bush regime go on. I realize that nobody involved in this intra-blog squabble can actually do very much about these problems, but it would be nice if they could at least have some dignity in the face of them.

Then again, as George Constanza so aptly put it: "I lived my whole life in shame! Why should I die with dignity?"

With all the feces flying around, though, it's easy to forget that some good articles come out of TNR. Take this article by Rick Perlstein called "What Is Conservative Culture?" It addresses how the various factions of conservativism--from the vapid "South Park" conservatives to the prudish evangelicals; from the erudite, bespectacled scholars who've memorized Hayek and Friedman to the beer guts with pick'em up trucks who think that Straussianism refers to a fanatical belief in the power of loose fitting denim--hold themselves together by their common love of rebeling against a supposedly hegemonic liberalism (a belief that persists even though conservatives run almost everything worth running). I'd always wondered how these very different people succeed in getting along, and now I know. They hate me.

I'm not sure what it says about the left that we can despise George W. Bush but still have the energy to hate each other too, but four words spring to mind--The People's Front of Judea.