Why the Political Blogosphere Reminds Me of High School
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- I know that many people look back at their high school years as their glory days but there’s not enough money in anyone’s bank to pay me to repeat mine.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the target of abuse by the “mean girls”. Thank goodness.
In my case there were just too many cliques to count and my best friends and I didn’t fit into any of them. The camps were clearly established and if you were a member of one group you didn’t dare interact with someone from another.
I thought that those days were behind me forever.
These days the political blogosphere reminds me of high school. There’s the progressive camp and the neocon camp and “never the twain shall meet”1.
There are the cool kids and the wannabes in both camps. But if you’re a moderate who believes that there is common ground between the left and the right and that the two sides should talk to each other, then face it, you’re an outsider.
In a recent post for The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder issued a challenge, Get Out Of Your D$*#( Shells
Ambinder wrote:
“Righties interviewing righties has gotten so boring and repetitive; lefties fawning over lefties is lazy. Who’s going to be brave enough to reach out to an ideological or intellectual opponent, promote their new book, or interview them?”
I couldn’t agree more. All you have to do is read the blogosphere’s analyses of President Obama’s attempts at bipartisanship and you quickly realize that most people at just too happy with being partisan.
I’m proud to say that I’m affiliated with two blogs, The Political Voices of Women and Hypocrisy.com, which honestly try to bring all voices to the table. But our culture has grown accustom to talking at rather than talking to the other side that there still isn’t a lot of cross-communication.
So I hope that this weekend, we’ll all reflect on Marc Ambinder’s challenge and consider reaching out to someone from the other side.
I’m trying, will you join me. After all, the problems facing this country and the globe probably won’t be solved by someone in high school.
Of course, I could be wrong about that last part 
1. from The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling.
Comment by Snark Twain on 27 February 2009:
Right on pamelalyn! We seem to be channeling each other! I blogged on the same subject that you and Ambinder wrote about a mere day before your excellent post. Check it out here http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/02/26/mostly-we-are-idiots-so-how-did-we-elect-a-genius/ or simply go to Snark Twain’s blog and click on my latest entry, entitled “Mostly we are idiots. So how did we elect a genius.”
Now if we can only get, oh, maybe a few million bloggers who feel like you and I do and are tired of the twits leading the twits, maybe we’ll get somewhere!
Thank you so much for your great start on that noble mission.
Comment by Jason Blanchard on 27 February 2009:
Kudos to you both for an excellent comparison. I agree with what SOME what the jocks say, a bit from the computer club, notes from the marching band, but never fit in perfectly with any of them. I enjoyed all points of view, and that clearly made me an outsider in school, and again in the political world. As I’ve grown older, I lean more one way or the other, but find it impossible to call myself a Republican or Democrat. Both names make my skin crawl. We moderates should OWN this country but it continues to be run, and argued, from the extremes.
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