The phenomenon of ideology as a commercial opportunity and a generator of celebrity seems to be very little noticed. The creation of entire industries by lobbyists, media flacks and hacks, and theme bloggers and their aggressive insertion of bias into intellectual life and politics seems to me to cry out for serious investigation. One of the most important and potentially malignant roles of these ideological industries is their power to bend the media. The various industries that push ideological positions on the "Constitution" and "The Bill of Rights" are some of the most seriously dangerous. That which includes the Federalist Society and corporate funded ideological efforts is a clear and present danger. The Cato Institute seems to be one of the weirdest of these industrial efforts in that their research "papers" which, strangely, never seem to fail to support their preexisting ideological positions are taken as definitive by such parts of the media as NPR. That real life continually generates evidence that those positions are horse feathers never breaks through the pose of authority that is an basic part of the snake oil show that these industrial advocacy organizations are.
I don't believe for a minute that most of the hired hacks and flacks believe all of what they say, they are paid to lie when that's what is either commercially or ideologically useful. I doubt that a lot of them would fail to move over to the other side if that side paid better and provided more to them. As it is, making a career of lying benefits them and doing it on one side is easier for them.
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About A Blog Anniversary
Along with its potential to promote some important voices, blogging has allowed many otherwise forgettable people to become celebrities due to their ideological advocacy. In some cases it appears to allow people who would, otherwise, be unknown associate professors in obscure universities to become famous merely through their advocacy of ideological positions. That's especially true of right-wing ideologues, many of whom don't even need that level of bona fides to set up shop as an instant expert for purposes of financial reward. But it's true of those setting themselves up as being on the left as well. Apropos of my blogging last week, of particular interest to me are those who peddle materialistic clap trap and set up a following on blogs which declares that anything that deviates from that materialism is uncool and a betrayal of all that is respectable. But, as I've said, my chosen theme is why liberalism has failed and is in danger of dying.
Three years ago I read an online magazine post that asked two of the independent leftish bloggers I followed about the decline in independent blogging. They both reported a decline in their readership and, also, their financial position due to that. It was about the same time that I noticed an ossification into a position of ideological correctness on those blogs, one far more than the other, and also the concentration of their commenting communities into a tightly definable in crowd. I've also noticed that happening on science themed blogs to an even greater extent and even earlier. The house ideology of materialism at those blogs seemed to be the reason that ideological deviation, even slight deviation from the common received POV were not allowable. I used to welcome going to political blogs as a breath of fresh air after some of the brawls at those places but the atmosphere at the political blogs is often as stale as on the science blogs these days. The heady freedom of thought at the fondly recalled Media Whores Online and on the leftist blogs that held through about 2007 has declined into ideological conformity on way too many of them.
Maybe there is something like a natural life cycle of blogs that is represented in this phenomenon. Maybe the commercial necessity of servicing a reader base leads to blogs becoming rigidly ideological. I wouldn't know as nothing I've ever written has attracted a wide reader base. I try to avoid taking ideological positions because they become institutionalized and all human institutions carry their own limits and their own defects. About the only ideas I've considered as absolute in my blogging are that living beings are not objects, that it is wrong to treat living beings as objects and their lives must be treated as important. Politically, that leads to the position that people, whatever else they are, possess free will, inherent rights and real equality. I hold that human experience and human history provide evidence that those are real and important and effective in giving people power to do good that definitively overrules any kind of assertion to the contrary. Those positions have led me, inevitably, into conflict with the materialist, pseudo-leftist fashions of many bloggers and their commenting communities. I think they account for a lot of the more thoughtful commentators on blogs who have left the blogs they used to frequent.
I doubt that leftist blogs will play an important role in the continuation of liberalism into the future because too many of their owners and commentators really don't believe in liberalism, they believe in some libertarian pantomime of liberalism. The resultant positions often amount to a hollowing out of liberalism from the bottom, leaving a weak libertarian surface that has no political force behind it.
Liberalism is incompatible with materialism, I doubt it can be made compatible with it. I doubt that the contemporary fashions that go by the name of liberalism and leftism will have the energy behind it take do that most radical of all actions, change the laws and the culture to make life better. Materialism contains the poison of disbelief in those things which have powered liberalism to success in the past. The fashionable poses that are what remains of the cultural habits of that liberalism are ineffective.
Will a real liberalism arise to replace the wreck that is seen everywhere? That's one of the most important political questions that goes unasked, that, I'm certain, is a forbidden topic on the self-promoted leftish blogs.
It is corporate interest that funds the right-wing ideology industries, the left doesn't have that funding source and it never will. The left used to be powered by moral force, by its fundamental morality of equality and equal rights. Like it or not, liberalism is absolutely dependent on some rather complicated metaphysical foundations that are incompatible with materialism, scientism and, let me be frank, the new atheism. That is what it has, the intellectual positions of liberalism either serve those or it devolves into inequality and the negation of rights.
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