Dean Barnett notes a dynamic among left-wing bloggers, especially younger ones, that I addressed recently: “writing like they’re politically obsessed Quentin Tarantino characters.” Link via Instapundit. It may be morally satisfying to spew profanity-laced insults at anyone and everyone who disagrees with you (and not just Republicans; go search lefty blogs like Atrios and Kos for “DLC” and see what you come up with), but it’s no way to expand the tent.
3 thoughts on “Incivility”
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It may be true that leftwing/liberal blogs are vitriolic, but many are not, including http://www.thismodernworld.com, altercation.com, the american prospect blog. There is much incivility on the right, however. Rush Limbaugh crosses the line almost daily. Ann Coulter sounds like she is trying to sabotoge the conservative cause. I sometimes watch the O’Reilly Factor just to watch him meltdown and spew hyperbole and refer to dissenters as anti-american. Don’t forget Newt Gingrich, who instructed the class of 1994 to use extreme language in criticizing their opponents.
It’s certainly true that this is not a problem with all left/liberal blogs (Drum, Yglesias and Josh Marshall don’t write like this), just some of them.
It’s funny that the response to this is always Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s as much a populist as a conservative. Coulter, we can agree, is nuts. But what I was specifically focusing on was as much the ceaseless profanity as the content, and none of the broadcast corps has that problem.
There are certainly conservative bloggers who love their obscenities, but the top handful of right-wing blogs just don’t spew that sort of language the way Atrios and Kos do, and as Volokh pointed out, that makes them come accross as less angry and unhinged.
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