What's in a Pseudonym?

In response to yet another MSM whine about rude bloggers, Atrios and Digby are both reflecting today on the importance of blogger pseudonymity. I'll admit to being a late convert to the blogger ethos. My "civic republican" leanings had led me to believe that speech had consequences and that those who raised their voices should be willing to do so transparently, accepting the resulting credit or blame. Shades of both King's civil disobedience and Arendt's notion of performative virtue. When I thought about anonymity, I thought primarily of the unsavory merger of Klansmen and the ACLU fighting to protect the haters from the rebuking public gaze.

I was wrong. Like a lot of people with moderate and institutionalist biases who came of age after Vietnam and civil rights, I assumed the benevolence of the larger political culture. I hadn't anticipated an era of crushing right-wing conformity driven by a malevolent administration and its Quislings in the MSM. I worried about the internet's damaging implications for higher ed (on-line classes and point-and-click plagiarism being real threats) and its tendency to promote fringe cultures, often libertarian or fascist, two seeming opposites that actually share a common ground insofar as they both cultivate rootless, isolated, and fearful individualism. The Bushies are themselves the result of that ethos--lawless, authoritarian free-marketeers who rely on incivility and opacity as tools of blunt manipulation.

A few years ago, this world turned itself upside-down. The same individualistic fragmentations of our political culture that abetted the rise of our Narcissist-in-Chief began to offer a space for real dissent. If Rove and Cheney hid behind a wall of secrecy, bloggers could use that same veil, now democratized, to challenge the facile lickspittle coverage offered by the palace media. Blogger anonymity is the mirror image, the dialectical antithesis of Cheney's cloak and dagger Energy Task Force or Rummy's Office of Special Plans. It all reminds of V For Vendetta--a film with some otherwise serious flaws--where tyranny and terrorism become two sides of the same coin, but ultimately to happy final effect. The important difference is that blogging is not terrorist violence, which Arendt argued was defined by its "silence," but rather persuasive civic speech in a refreshingly direct and unmediated form. As Digby notes, you could finally separate the content of an argument from the credentials of its expositor. Of course, the MSM, frightfully oblivious to state secrecy, now saw the pseudonymous democratic dissenters as the real threat: What are all those lawyers and teachers and housewives hiding!? (Get Ken Starr on this, stat!)

The answers, I think, are identity and authority. Bushie secrecy is all about hiding corrupt authority behind the veil of identity politics, both the traditional "PC" kind ("Don't challenge Condi or Alberto, they've had to overcome 'obstacles' in life!") and its right-wing twin--rich, white, male Xian victimology ("We can trust W because he's got a "good heart" and comes from the 'right' people."). There may have been no better confluence of these two than Colin Powell's infamous speech to the UN, proving that Saddam had WMDs: "He must be right, he's the best credentialed black man in the GOP." By contrast, blogging challenges authority partly by concealing identity, allowing people to unite on grounds independent of race, class, gender, and credential. Which is confusing. Because you have to start evaluating arguments again. Now, there's no reason that one day "Atrios" or "Publius" can't become corroded to the same degree that David Broder, Joe Klein, and Robert Samuelson are today. But, for the moment at least, we've had to ask whether the arbiters of our political culture are really due the respect that we've afforded them for so long. We can thank the secretive bloggers that we can now confidently say "No."