Getting Too Pissed Off to Blog

I started this blog back in 2003, for a couple of reasons.

First, I was alarmed and angered by the irrational and dishonest actions of the Bush administration. Second, plagued by a long-term, debilitating case of insomnia, I found myself unable to make any progress on my research projects. I'd been basically a zombie for about four years by that point, and I just couldn't write. So, to get myself back on the horse, I started blogging. Do a little informal political writing, I thought, and eventually work your way back up to what you really need to be doing.

I also had high hopes of trying to convince people that they needed to strive mightily to resist the ravages of partisanship and groupthink.

I've thought about quitting several times, but something Mark Kleiman wrote to me always prevented me: it beats yelling at the t.v.

Thing is, I'm worried that it's become little more than yelling at the t.v. for me.

At heart I'm quite the sappy patriot. I became fascinated by the Revolution and by the Founders when I was a kid. We had few books on the farm...but we did have an oldish set of encyclopedias and facsimile copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg address. Though I've rarely been subject to the kind of mindless, uncritical adoration for America that plagues so many people, I've nevertheless always loved the country very deeply, and held it in high esteem even when I've disagreed with its direction.

I became less interested in politics after Iran-Contra, and after I went to grad school and had too much to do to think about anything other than philosophy. I began to become interested in American politics again when the right's anti-Clinton hysteria became difficult to ignore. I'd never cared much about Clinton, recognizing him as fairly good and fairly competent, but I found the crazed tone of the right's criticisms extremely worrisome. I became passionately interested in politics again after the election of 2000, an event I followed more closely than anyone I know, and more closely than any other event in my life. I think it must be clear to anyone who did follow that election and the subsequent semi-recount closely that there are dangerous elements in American conservative. It is fairly clear that the Bush team and its cohorts exhibited a willingness to steal an American election. And I simply don't know what to say to you if that doesn't make you angry as hell.

Although I advocated deposing Saddam in the first Gulf War, I did not advocate the invasion of the second Gulf War. Although I thought that there were decently strong humanitarian reasons for deposing Saddam, I thought that the time was wrong, that our energy should be focused on al Qaeda, and that the administration was clearly lying to us about its reasons and the strength of the evidence. I have remained passionate about politics in part because I believe that the deception surrounding the decision to invade Iraq was a travesty, one of the most shameful episodes in American political history.

I was raised to avoid strong partisan attachments. In fact, though I'm basically a liberal, I'm not much of a Democrat. However I have, over the course of my life, become fairly strongly anti-Republican. My deep commitment to the principles of American democracy make it almost impossible for me to witness abuses of power such as those involved in Iran-Contra, or the repeated and continuing abuses of the Bush administration, without becoming outraged.

Since 1992 I believe that something very worrisome has been happening. A perfectly competent, reasonably honest, fairly centrist American president--was demonized, and a demented group of conservatives fabricated scandal after scandal in an attempt to discredit him and drive him out of office. They began calling for impeachment even before he was sworn in, and finally, with his complicity, managed to accomplish it. Even ignoring the travesty of the election of 2000, the events of the Bush administration have been the flip-side of the Clinton travesty. Bush is demonstrably unqualified for the job of president, he is neither intelligent nor knowledgeable, and he is, seemingly, rather vindictive. Despite his false campaign assertion that he was "a uniter, not a divider," he immediately began pursuing an extremely conservative agenda that almost seemed calculated to divide the country. He lied to us about the invasion of Iraq, violating his most sacred trust as president. And his prosecution of the war has been incompetent in the extreme. Yet a sizable percentage of conservatives continue to support him.

The question that arises naturally in the inquiring mind is this: if these conservatives will not tolerate a smart, competent, reasonably centrist Democrat like Clinton, and if they will defend even the most egregious crimes of someone like George W. Bush...where is this country headed? Are we headed for a state of affairs in which a relatively small group of extreme conservative partisans exerts undue influence on the country by senselessly and mercilessly attacking even the most centrist Democrats and mindlessly supporting even the most extreme and incompetent Republicans? Will this not inevitably generate corresponding partisanship among Democrats? And how can such polarization not be disastrous?

There's been much talk about polarization in recent years, but, as careful studies as well as casual observation have indicated, what's really happened is that the right has moved farther right while the left has more-or-less stayed put. Which puts someone in my position in a rather bad place: I want to preach against partisanship, but I also have reason to believe that it's the other guys who are most responsible for it. So I have to say something like "hey, don't be partisan like those other guys! Be more like us!" And that's something it's hard to say with a straight face, even if you believe it's right.

So that's all a pretty long road to the following small house:
I'm starting to wonder whether I'm just getting too pissed off to blog anymore. Every day seems to bring some new outrage by this administration, along with a flurry of intellectually and morally bankrupt attempts by blogospheric Bushies to defend the indefensible. There are cooler heads than mind, and it may be time to defer to them. Even when one can no longer control one's fury, at least one can recognize that one can't control it.

I'm not calling it quits just yet, but I am going to throttle back a bit for awhile. What started as a safety valve to keep me from yelling at the t.v. has become more of a catalyst. The insomnia that drove me to start blogging is finally in remission, and it's become possible for me to get back to the book project that I had to set aside. Small blogs are waning in influence, anyway, as full-time professional bloggers like Kevin Drum have begun doing it so much better.

So don't be surprised if posting gets a bit sparser. I gotta go read some Marcus Aurelius or something.