BOOKS IN QUANTITY ARE NOT DANGEROUS; A SINGLE BOOK IS

Brace yourself, cos this goes deep.
Milli Vanilli: Girl You Know It's True

Last night I mentioned Jonathan Chait's fantastic piece (reg req'd; bugmenot) in The New Republic on the good, bad, and the queen of the liberal netroots. Now, predictably enough, the bloggers are striking back. OMG ITZ TOTALLY ON.

Round one, Eric Alterman: "The main argument I want to have with Chait concerns what he deems to be the netroots' purposeful intellectual insularity with regard to the idealized platonic cosmopolitanism of establishment journalists and policy wonks."

Yes, Eric, we know what those words mean, thanks. ESCHEW OBFUSCATION.

Chait wins this one in a KO. The netroots are a useful thing, and it's true that journalists' presumptions of objectivity are always inherently flawed, BUT: If you don't at least accept the possibility of an objective truth outside your own mind, or if you choose to ignore same (as the netroots apparently sometimes do), then there's no reason *I*, the reader, need to believe your subjective truth. What's true in my mind might be different, after all.

The netroots, like the conservative movement, have as one of their enemies (consciously or not) the idea of an objective truth that exists outside whatever DailyKos or Grover Norquist decides. This is yucky. And it's inimicable to democracy. (Nor does it square well with Alterman's self-serving feints about "empiricism." Yeesh.)

An aside: Pop music criticism has a more confusing relationship with objective truth, but it doesn't obviate the need for such a concept. Because enjoying/appreciating music is in itself a highly personal, subjective experience, it can be important for critics to communicate the most personal, subjective aspects of their own experiences. However, because readers obviously have no way of verifying the personal, subjective experiences you say you had to an album, it's important not to be objectively full of shit. If you're just making up your personal experiences, pulling your opinions out of the air, you might still be doing interesting writing, but you're not a critic. Objectivity may not be required, but credibility-- a reader's assurance that there *is* some objective truth behind your subjective experiences-- is paramount.

Sorry, that was probably Kerry-esque in its tortured complexity, but it's important. Anyway Matthew Yglesias, predictably enough, acquits himself much more honorably, re-examining Chait's interpretation of Yglesias's independence (and the reasons Yglesias doesn't deviate from the netroots line more often, given the apparent financial benefits of doing so):

"All that said, Chait provides an admirable reconstruction of the intellectual origins of the netroots movement, its love/hate relationship with the conservative movement, and the logic of its objections to the 'centrist' political strategies that seemed so appealing in the 1990s--by far the best account by a true outsider that I'm aware of. He has attached to this, however, an over-complicated account of the netroots' relationship to the left-of-center pundit establishment, since the main story, in my view, is simply that liberal activists want to see liberalism represented on the country's op-ed pages and chat shows by liberal pundits who like liberals and treat them respectfully. The interesting question on this front isn't why this is what liberals want to see, but how it ever came to be the case that it was (and, indeed, continues to be) seen as de rigeur for the left side of the political spectrum to be represented in the MSM primarily by people who don't see the world this way."

UPDATE: What happens when you get a media cohort disinclined to care about objective truth? You get, years after the fact, a press corps still smilingly accepting explanations about Iraq that simply defy the chronological facts-- with most of the liberal netroots just as blissfully ignorant. And only Bob Somerby seems to care. [UPDATE UPDATE: And only Bob Somerby seems to correct his mistakes.]