LUDIC LOG

Political writing is a curious animal. Restrained by too strong an attempt at 'objectivity', and it is nothing more than journalism; given completely free rein and stripped of even the pretense of fairness, it's pure demagoguery. It's such a tricky beast to pin down that we don't really have a name for it; what we call it depends on who's doing it. Gore Vidal is old, rich and respectable enough to call an essayist; George Will, still persistently identified as a newspaperman, is usually referred to as an editorialist; Glenn Reynolds and his blog-spewing ilk, the barbarians at the gate of the gleaming citadel of advocy journalism, are known as pundits. If you put your words into action, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, you are called an activist (unless, of course, you shoot a cop, and then they just call you another brother in lock-up).

Myself, I prefer the unwieldy but precise phrase political criticism to describe what people from the heights of Renata Adler to the depths of Ann Coulter do for a living. They are, after all, fulfilling much the same role as does a critic of film, of art, or of music. (And I use the word 'critic', with all the respect it deserves, not the base, degraded, horrible word 'reviewer', with its connotation of a shopper-friendly consumer advocate. Criticism is an art in itself, like the arts to which it applies itself; reviewing is a market tool not altogether different from a tip calculator.) The film critic and the political writer share the qualities of applying a number of criteria -- aesthetic, personal, ethical, technical -- to a human expression translated to action; both do so with a mind towards finding flaws, analyzing patterns, detecting imperfections, suggesting corrections, and praising a job well done.

It is a failure to recognize this aspect of the political writer as a critic of public policy (a failure which dovetails nicely into American society's failure to recognize that it is the job of every intelligent person to be a critic) that no doubt helps to explain the rather dismal level of discourse in contemporary American punditry. This country has always had a difficult relationship with its critics, after all; the abovementioned tendency to treat them as if they are tools of the savvy shopper, rather than artists in their own right, combines with a somewhat baffling tendency to regard them as a class of intellectual bullies who get off on telling other people what to think, has led to an inherent confusion about the role of the critic in the United States. But it's more than this contempt for a critical approach that has landed us in our momentary sorry state.

The best critics have, naturally, been great artists -- that is to say, if they are not accomplished artists in other media, they are at least masters of the art of criticism. Since this is not something commonly accepted as a desirable trait, our political critics tend to dress themselves up as something else in order to gain some measure of respect they mistakenly assume their audience has to bestow. Generally, this expresses itself as the ridiculous notion that pundits are journalists, with some bloggers even claiming 'scoops' based on having been the first to link to a particular piece of news. However, it is almost as frequently disguised as some other misconception -- advocacy, activism, armchair psychologizing, public relations, cheerleading, mudslinging, history, or even as politics itself. This profoundly misguided idea is not only foolish on its face (a political writer is not a journalist any more than she is a historian or a celebrity endorser), but it's completely unneccesary. We already have people to do our journalism for us; they're called journalists, and while they may not be the best they are at what they do, they're more qualified than someone who gets a column in the newspaper just because he doesn't like Democrats.

It's really too bad that we don't realize the role of the political writer as critic of public policy. Doing so would not only raise the level of discourse and encourage better writing amongst the people who practice it, but it would help to eliminate the worrying tendency to treat pundits as if they are movie reviewers; already, too many ignorant, know-nothing ideologues have been launched into a circle of fame and prestige despite having absolutely no critical knowledge or credibility. Their only skills are a talent for hyperbole and a good line in trashing what they don't like. They're the political equivalent of the no-name critics for phantom publications like 'Hollywood Review' who can be counted on to provide a rave for any crappy movie that comes down the pike. Indeed, you can probably judge the quality of a piece of legislation or a move by the government by how many of the pundits rave about it; a mention on Little Green Footballs would be equatable to those commercials where they get people who just saw the movie to say something nice about it.

Of course, it's all well and good for me to talk; I'm not a political writer. I write about politics, to be sure -- I'm doing it right now -- but I don't fancy myself important, influential or in touch with any sort of social pulse. So I'm perfectly free to say baseless stuff like how I think the President doesn't give two wet fucks about the freedom of the Iraqi people. However, anyone who places himself in the role of a legitimate political writer cannot do this, any more than a music critic can write an essay in which his only criticism is that the concert sucked. If you're going to come, you better come correct. A new generation of political writers has emerged, and they have begun, almost instinctually, to understand the true nature of political criticism: they rightly see themselves as analysts and inspectors of an important social expression, as people who are not part of that expression but who craft something vital from it. They're making the claim that they're doing something different, something meaningful, something needed -- and they're right. Now it's time to act like it.