Reactionaryism, Reynolds, and the Journolist Story

I try to avoid political posts -- these days, as I try to finish my books, I try to avoid posting altogether -- but occasionally something will get under my skin.  The last couple of days have given me a couple of log-sized splinters.  

The first was a recommendation by a Facebook friend whom I respect for a post by Glenn Reynolds.  Now, I don't generally bother reading Instapundit, but on the strength of that recommendation I turned to Reynolds' post.  Here is a salient except:

WHAT TO DO? In response to this piece by Angelo Codevilla on America’s ruling class, readers wonder what to do. Well, a few things suggest themselves.

First: Mockery. They are very mockable, and they are very thin-skinned. That leads them to erupt in embarrassing ways. Use their sense of entitlement against them. . . . 

Third: Money. Codevilla writes: “Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.” The coming budget crisis — already here, really, but still largely denied by the rulers — is an opportunity to defund a lot of this patronage stuff. They’ll try, of course, to cut the muscle and preserve the fat, but that won’t work very well if they’re closely watched (see above). Cut them off in other ways, too. Don’t support the media, nonprofits, and politicians who support them with your money. . . . 

Fourth: Organize and infiltrate. Take over party apparats from the ground up. Create your own organizations that can focus sustained attention — the “ruling class” relies on others having short attention spans while it stays focused on amassing and protecting power.

My Facebook friend called this a "great" post.  My reaction was different.  It is a remarkable post, I would say.  But it is remarkable because it is so extraordinarily reactionary.  

Leaving aside the accuracy of any description of America's "ruling class" -- a description that may have germs of truth but that is so protean that it ultimately serves as a proxy for one's own political views -- what is startling about this post is that it is so substantively empty and procedurally amoral.  It is substantively empty because it proposes no program other than reaction, no values or precepts of its own.  I have nothing against mockery -- although I prefer self-mockery to any other kind -- but one must note that the great value of mockery, to the mocker, is that it reveals nothing about himself except, perhaps, his own wit.  This is a clever strategic and rhetorical move, but also a substantively empty one.  (Incidentally,everyone in politics is thin-skinned.  If Reynolds is trying to suggest that the populist right is not thin-skinned, he is of course mistaken.)  And it is procedurally amoral in that there is no sense whatsoever in Reynolds' post that there are right or wrong ways to do things -- only effective or ineffective ways.  Anyone who looks occasionally at conservative blog comments will see copious references to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.  Sometimes, the point of those comments will be that there is something insidious and wrong about the Administration ostensibly using Alinsky as its guidebook.  But it should be clear from posts like these that the real voice here is one of envy and admiration, even if it is envy and admiration of a fiction.  Among other things, Reynolds here also gives the same advice that was long a byword of the radical left: make the long march through the institutions.  Is there any sense here of what procedural propriety, the demands of civil society, or any other system of integrity demands?  No.  I cannot easily come up with a more definitive combination of reactionaryism, substantive emptiness, and amorality.

The other thing that is interesting is the series of stories in recent days taken from the email traffic of Journolist, which was a listserv of generally liberal and left-leaning journalists.  Jim Lindgren provides an example on today's VC, and the New Republic's blog has a reasonably good response to yesterday's Journolist stories.  (I don't agree with all of it.)  The gist of these stories is that left-leaning journalists revealed their true colors by suggesting a variety of actions intended to shut down the right and aid the Obama campaign.

I am not defending that email traffic.  I dislike it.  It would help if the stories about Journolist -- which, not coincidentally, were printed by an openly and programatically conservative web site -- had reprinted the entire exchange, not least so we could see how representative those comments were and how many journalists on the list either ignored or disagreed with them, and whether anyone acted on those suggestions.  The actual evidence suggests that many people on the list, notwithstanding the fact that it already was tilted leftward, disagreed either silently or vocally with such suggestions and in any event did nothing to advance them.  But I am no fan of this kind of talk, especially from journalists.  I don't like it when memos come from on high at Fox News telling reporters how to spin the news, and I don't like it when the same thing comes from the left.

On the other hand, the people who made those remarks were, for the most part, partisan journalists and commentators, not mainline reporters.  It is no more shocking that Spencer Ackerman, when in the company of friends, rants in favor of the left than that Rush Limbaugh might rant from the right.  Didn't we already know that?  Don't many of the voices now promulgating this story actually believe that what we need is more opinionated journalism and less "objectivity?"  What we have learned from this email traffic is that people who trade in ideologically charged opinions in public also do so in private.  Was this a surprise to anyone?  And can anyone who believes that the modern media would benefit from more opinionated journalists have any grounds for objecting to this as a factual or tactical matter?  Shouldn't they be applauding?  

Again, I'm not defending the emails themselves.  I am one of those who believes in the possibility that there is room in professional journalism for, well, professionalism, including the kind of professionalism that is more interested in following norms of attempted neutrality than in simply stumping for one side or the other.  But it seems to me that those who believe otherwise have no grounds for complaining about these emails.  

Indeed, they are not really complaining about them.  They are using them, amorally, as a rhetorical tactic.  They hope to convince us that if some self-described commentators and/or ideological journalists are what they say they are, then every other journalist must be what he says she is not.  That one does not follow from the other should be obvious.  That those who favor opinion journalism have no cause to complain that some people will actually have opinions should not stop us from disliking that whole line of journalism.  But it should lead us to ask those who have used the Journolist story a simple question, instead of allowing them to conceal their own views from within a position of "mockery": What do you actually want -- from both sides?  Do you have an end in mind?  And does it have anything to do with a set of procedural rules that should bind every journalist, including both opinion-mongers and straight reporters, those on the left, those on the right, and those who are interested in neither?  Or is this just another example of the right wing having bought far more copies of Rules for Radicals than Alinsky could have hoped to sell to the left in two lifetimes -- and actually reading and following it?