Interesting Piece on the Kos Wars

Here (via Instapundit). While you're there, make sure to click through to this by Richard Silverstein. (The comments are also instructive.)

I don't think the Kos skeptics (TNR et. al.) have acquitted themselves terribly well in all this, but the Kossacs have generally been worse. As Silverstein and O'Connor point out, dKos can often seem rather cultish, and criticism of the orthodoxy and the leader are met with often nasty condemnation.

Take Jonathan Chait's post today. (You know it's promising since Atrios declares him "wanker of the day." Well, at least he's no WATB...) Chait's post is puzzling...lots of good reasons to be anti-Lieberman, followed by two short paragraphs to the effect that he's hesitant to be, though, since the Kossacs are so venemous in their anti-Liebermanism. No doubt about it, it's not his best work. And it's been widely ridiculed by some of the usual suspects. But it's not an irrational piece in any way. In fact, I find myself rather sympathetic to his position. I don't like Lieberman, but I'm worried about the Kossacks.

Now, the Kossacs are a diverse group, so one can't generalize too much. Most of them are smart and sane and good to have on our side. But it's obvious that there's a large dose of cultish, venemous irrationality there, of a kind that one might expect to find on Free Republic rather than on the flagship of the leftosphere. Groupthink and incestuous amplification are terrible and dangerous things, and liberals are in no way immune from them. It's fairly obvious to almost everybody that dKos has a problem. This doesn't mean that the Kossacs are irredeemably bad, or worse than the Freepers, or wrong about everything, or any such thing. But they do have a problem. We mercilessly ridicule such actions when they show up on the right--the least we can do when they show up on the left is to acknowledge them and try to correct them. These are problems that can be fixed, but they'd better be fixed sooner rather than later.

The first step to take, I think, is to encourage more civility and a more rational response to criticism. I've sometimes been ridiculed for pushing this point in the past, but this is one thing I'm definitely right about. There's a meme in the leftosphere to the effect that to advocate civility is somehow to play into the hands of the right. That's false, of course, and the very fact that that meme was not immediately stamped out should worry us all.

At any rate, the first step here might be to try to lower the temperature in the Kos wars. Kos and his liberal critics are basically on the same side, and, as it is, the only people benefitting from this are the Republicans.