The Kleiniverse Explained

In response to Greg Sargent's challenge to explain why he considers Atrios an 'ideological extremist', Klein deigns to define 'left-wing extremists' for the masses. 'Left-wing extremists', it seems, are people who have 'many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes' (which he lists).

Not surprisingly, it is a very silly list.

Some are ideas that are marginal in the liberal blogosphere:

--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

Some are misrepresentations of ideas that are widely held:

--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism....

--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

Some use loaded language to discredit ideas that do have merit:

--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement)....

--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.

Some are traps:

--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.

(So if you believe the Iraq invasion was an imperialist venture, and if you are not ignorant of America's recurrent bouts of imperialist behavior, does that mean you consider Iraq a 'consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature'? I think Klein would say yes.)

Some are just bizarre:

--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

(So being insufficiently enthusiastic about capitalism is a kind of left-wing extremism. Pardon my insolence, but given that we actually live under a more-or-less capitalist system, I think it's kind of a little more useful to focus on correcting flaws in the system than on its superiority to other systems not exactly relevant to our own.)

And finally there are two that illustrate the fundamental problem with Kleinism as practiced among the media elite:

--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage. [emphasis added]

--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

What's missing here? One word: proportionality. If certain religious beliefs are used in the political sphere to limit the rights of others, mocking them is entirely reasonable. Mocking non-political religious beliefs: not so much...but by and large, most of us don't really do that. (Remember that Amanda's most notorious comment was a direct response to the political use of a particular religious doctrine.) Klein fails to distinguish between the two, thus completely misses the point.

And while many of us (and especially Atrios) do use "harsh, vulgar...language to attack moderates or conservatives", this isn't (as Klein would have it) a matter of ideological intolerance; by and large, we're not attacking people for having different ideas from ours but for being dishonest or ignorant or bigoted or corrupt. Klein is a wanker not because he's a 'moderate' but because he engages in vague smears against people who criticize him. I mock Althouse not because she is more conservative than I am but because she is a shallow, self-absorbed, thin-skinned mediocrity, an anti-feminist who calls herself a 'feminist' and a Kool-Aid drinking conservative who calls herself a 'moderate', a smear artist incapable of tolerating criticism of her own precious self. By and large, what we're attacking here is not ideas so much as very bad behavior.

But in the Kleiniverse, none of that matters. There is 'left-wing extremism' and there is 'right-wing extremism' and they're both bad. Invective is naughty regardless of the target (unless, of course, it is invective from 'moderates', in which case it is by definition 'moderate'). Substance doesn't matter; what matters is that a false equivalence be maintained between two 'extremes' so that 'moderates' like Klein can continue to feel superior.