War of the blogs

New books by Instapundit and Kos present dueling visions of the future -- as libertarian paradise or populist battleground.

By Scott Rosenberg

Read more: Books, Scott Rosenberg, Politics, New Media, Libertarians, Reviews, Book reviews, bloggers, Daily Kos

March 29, 2006 | Do bloggers lean left or right? Does the blogosphere have an ideological tilt? Such questions once engaged mainstream reporters and pundits struggling to understand an upstart online movement. During the post-9/11, pre-Iraq explosion of "warbloggers," we were told that blogs gave voice to red-state anger and conservative values. Then, during the heyday of Howard Dean's outsider campaign, we heard that they instead embodied a new progressive populism.

Now, the pointlessness of these questions seems plain. You might as well ask, "Do writers lean left or right?" -- or, "Does the world have an ideological tilt?" As millions of blogs reflect the passions of millions of people, statements that "Bloggers are [blank]" become indicators of ignorance. The only generalizations that have a prayer of holding up are those that zero in on particular blogging subcultures -- discrete continents on the face of the blogosphere, like the realms of open-source software developers or indie-music lovers, foodie bloggers or "mommy" bloggers.

If you look closely, Blogistan Left and Blogistan Right do have distinct tones, behavior patterns and community structures. These differences are on view in two new books by leading bloggers from opposite sides of the political spectrum -- "An Army of Davids," by Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), and "Crashing the Gate," by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (founder of Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD).

Instapundit launched before 9/11, but it only emerged as a central hub of the conservative blog universe in the wake of the al-Qaida attacks. Reynolds -- a law professor at the University of Tennessee who also dabbles in music, science fiction and a variety of other geekly enthusiasms -- is a classic instance of the species Malcolm Gladwell identified in his best-selling analysis of idea-propagation, "The Tipping Point," as "connectors." Tirelessly posting dozens, sometimes hundreds of brief links and snippets a day, Reynolds helped a new wave of bellicose bloggers find its group identity.

But he did it alone. Instapundit is a sole proprietorship; in that, it is an old-school blog, true to the form's earliest incarnation as a platform for self-publishing, self-expression and self-entertainment. Reynolds doesn't even allow blog visitors to post comments. The blogging "conversation" happens cross-blog, in links that follow the back-and-forth exchanges between the Instapundit site and its peers. This is all in keeping with the libertarian cast of Reynolds' brand of conservatism: The individual is the irreducible atomic force in the libertarian universe.

But there are other ways to blog. Moulitsas was a child of ethnically Greek emigres from El Salvador who spent four years in the Army before landing in Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble. He started Daily Kos in 2002 at a time when liberals, alarmed at the apparent rightward tilt of the blogosphere (or at least the part of it that was snagging media attention), began streaming onto the Internet in force. He always allowed his readers to add their own comments, and in the heady days of 2003, as the left found its voice in opposition to the Iraq war, he discovered -- just as the Howard Dean campaign was learning -- that the humble "post your comment" field could serve as a potent catalyst for online networking.

In October 2003, Moulitsas switched Daily Kos over to the open-source Scoop software platform, transforming the blog from a soapbox-with-comments to a community hub. In a vivid demonstration of Mitch Kapor's aphorism, "Architecture is politics," the choice of this site-building tool shaped a new set of possibilities for the site -- and accelerated its evolution from solo performance to cast-of-thousands drama.

It's a little too pat to look at this history and say, Aha! Right-wing bloggers are individualists, left-wingers are collectivists. The conservative Web has its venerable communities, and the progressive Web has its comment-free one-man bands. The different approaches to blogging that Reynolds and Moulitsas exemplify reflect not only their ideologies but also their different aims. The Instapundit remains a pundit, an armchair observer of the passing scene, dipping into the roaring flood of blog postings to fish out and chew on choice morsels. By contrast, Kos wants to move the needle of events; he is an activist first and foremost, who discovered that the Web is, as they say in the military, a "force multiplier."

This divergence of goals shapes the two volumes these blog luminaries have produced. Reynolds' book -- the full title is "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths" -- is a casual ramble through the landscape of Internet-driven changes in politics and culture. If you've been offline since, say, George W. Bush took office, you might find it a useful refresher; but there isn't a lot new here for readers who have been paying any attention at all to the online world over the last decade.

Reynolds starts off promisingly, with a pungent folksy anecdote comparing blogging and other do-it-yourself media with home brewing. Just as the beer you make yourself is less predictable and has more character than the stale, homogenized mass-market product, he says, bloggers' fizz is tastier than flat Big Media journalism. (I think this casts Salon and similar independent online publishers as microbreweries -- an analogy I'll happily embrace.)

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