Bloggers: The Anti-Boomers?

As I told a friend the other day, you know you're hooked on blogging when you feel uninformed because you can't get to a pc. And there's no doubt that at those times you're at least less informed than you need be. We hosted family this week, but I'm back at the keyboard.

On Tuesday I posted comments by Wilfred McClay, "The Passing of an Era?" (If you didn't read it, our upsurge in traffic tells me you may like it.) Two sentences of that fine blog stand out. To the question of why so many media elites, among them Chris Matthews and Tom Oliphant, are "reacting with such uncontained fury and condescension," McClay says:

"It’s because the case of Kerry is a proxy for a whole set of assumptions that the boomer elites have made about the world, and managed to install as our conventional wisdom, about the arrogance of American power, the unmitigated evil of Nixon, the goodness and altruism and truthfulness of the antiwar movement (and therefore themselves), and so on. That whole complacent and self-congratulatory narrative---which is, in some sense, encapsulated in Kerry’s famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee---is being implicitly challenged now."

He then writes: "It’s all very well to make the 'long march' to control institutions. But what happens when those institutions have lost their commanding authority? What kind of information environment are they, and we, now entering?"

Those are keen observations and crucial questions. What happens when the institutions through which a dominant elite exercises control over much of a society cease to enable the continuation of that control? The boomer elites are faced with a rear-guard action to preserve their status lest they descend into mere remnant status. But that action is bound to be futile if indeed central institutions have been so hollowed out through the perfidy of those same elites that they're significantly weaker than most people imagine.

The institutions in question -- the networks, many big newspapers, news magazines, academe -- have ridden the boomer wave for three and a half decades now. Partly through the spinelessness of the previous generation of academics, absurd and naive ideas were accorded a level of respect they never deserved. The anti-Americanism that passed for high thought in many quarters was never more than bastardized Marxism, but its dominance of university life allowed it to (temporarily) ignore its critics, many of whom moved to think tanks and conservative publications. And blogs.

But the blogosphere, joined by talk radio and the conservative press, is undercutting boomer elites by doing an end run around their declining institutions. It's helping new institutions and new communities to form around ideas, opinions, and shared interests. Big media hate that, since it breaks their comfortable monopoly, but they're powerless to stop it. Ranting is the natural reaction of a child who is denied his wants, since he possesses neither the reasoning power nor the vocabulary to formulate a rational response. We're seeing the rant of media (and academic) elites softened through decades of self-congratulatory success.

I'll have much more to say on the superb article recommended by Wilfred McClay, "Media Matters: A Devil's Bargain," by Frederick Turner. If you enjoy this and similar blogs, you'll find Turner's work well worth the time. But let me end with his concluding sentences:

"As such institutions as coffee-houses, town meetings, old fashioned barber shops, primary caucuses, soap box gatherings, debates, and suchlike fell into disuse, and the networks and newspapers took over, the Public itself began to disappear, to be replaced by a segmented demographic mass swayed by centralized journalistic voices and shaped by polls. What is now happening is that rather swiftly a new Public is forming, self-organizing around Google and link lists and blog chatrooms. And it will demand a new Res Publica."