On Conservative Blogging
Posted on June 28th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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There has been a fair amount of blog commentary already on Brooks’ column, some of which has focused on discussing the list of younger conservative bloggers and what it represents for the future of conservatism and/or the GOP.
Isaac Chotiner notes the lack of agreement among us, which is true, but that may at least be a welcome sign of vitality. If you took away from the column that all of the named bloggers were the advance forces of the Sam’s Club agenda, you would certainly be on the wrong track, but I don’t think that this is what Brooks is suggesting. Brooks is saying that the agenda Ross and Reihan are laying out and the kind of politics they advocate will eventually triumph in the GOP, ultimately because this is the agenda, or something like it, that its voters will embrace or perhaps even demand. (By the way, James will object strongly to being called a “voice.”)
Ezra Klein observes that most of the ten named in the column aren’t Republicans, but I think that’s probably wrong, and John Schwenkler agrees. While it’s certainly true of me, I’m not sure that it applies to most of the others. Reihan and James are appropriately hard to pin down, but in practice I am guessing that they would gravitate towards and be ”engaged” with the GOP. Of course, I don’t know whether the others are registered with a certain party affiliation, but it certainly seems wrong to say, as Klein does, “Reading that list, I’d score it almost evenly for Obama.” Aside from Megan McArdle, I don’t know that any of the bloggers mentioned support Obama. James argues that Obama represents the best kind of defeat Republicans could hope for, but that is a lot less than full support.
Speaking of John Schwenkler, he is a newer blogger who has risen quickly to become an important advocate of traditional conservatism, and I’m glad to say that TAC has been among the first publications to notice his talents. John has the cover story in the forthcoming issue on conservatism and food culture in what I suppose you could call our “crunchy” con issue–we also have Rod Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan, whose book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Caleb Stegall has recently discussed here. I mention John as an example of what Brooks was arguing when he talked about writers rising through unconventional channels outside of the normal movement structures, because John has started writing in magazines and journals just as I did, which is to say by first being a blogger.
Filed under: miscellaneous, politics
Thank you very much for the kind words and the link, Daniel, and for your support throughout all of this. It was what you said in the comments to this post – that “speaking on the things that matter to me, however little influence it may have, has been the right thing to do and really the only thing that I could have done” – that got me to go public with things I used to think only in secret. So you, more than anyone, are due a lot of credit (or blame) here.
[...] As James and Daniel Larison before him have noted, this is in many ways another example of David Brooks’s observation that an open, meritocratic, and (time commitments aside) low-overhead medium like a blog makes it especially easy for an aspiring writer or public thinker to get his proverbial foot in that proverbial door. In my own case, there have of course been some institutional connections and old friendships that have helped things along, and in many other instances – the AmCon essay most striking among them – I have simply managed to be in the right place at the right time. So far, though, and with the necessary caveats about watching and waiting to see if my long-term career ends up in the tank, I do think that this tale should be an encouraging one. [...]