Foggy Bloggom.

• Author: Frum, David
• Position: Oil, Oil, Toil & Trouble - Report

MY NAME is David Frum, and I am a blogger. Every day I post some hundreds of words of commentary at the National Review website--often (to fulfill the cliche) while still wearing my pajamas. But I am also a proud, suit-wearing member of the foreign-policy community, with my very own office in a think tank to prove it.

There is no avoiding the sad truth that my two communities despise each other.

The foreign-policy community (henceforward, "FPC") values moderation of views and modulation of tone. It insists upon formal credentials, either academic or bureaucratic (ideally both). It respects seniority, defers to office, mistrusts overt self-promotion and is easily offended by discourtesy.

As for the bloggers--well, they're pretty much the opposite, aren't they?

Here, for example, is the popular left-of-center blogger known as Atrios complaining that:

[Presidential] candidates are judged by the rather arbitrary rules of the "foreign policy community" which demand they engage in these absurd rhetorical dances so they can fit themselves into the Grand Foreign Policy Community Consensus. Anyone who just tells them to shove it is doing the right thing. (1) And here's another left-of-center blogger, Matthew Yglesias, quoting a third, Steve Clemons:

"People like me," [Clemons] says, "were being fed quite a bit of inside information from people who were every bit as horrified" [about Iraqi but very. few people said anything. And it's true-alongside the famously pro-war elements of the establishment, there's a shockingly large number of people at places like Brookings, csis, the cfr, etc. where if you try to look up what they said about Iraq it turns out that they said ... nothing at all.

His perspective, he says, is that Washington is "a corrupt town." From that perspective, he says that "the political-intellectual arena is essentially a cartel"--a cartel that's become extremely timid and risk-averse in the face of a neoconservative onslaught--and "blogs allow smart people to break the cartel." That all seems very true to me, and I'm not sure what I have to add. (2)

Finally, here is Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com:

The Foreign Policy Community ... is not some apolitical pool of dispassionate experts examining objective evidence and engaging in academic debates. Rather, it is a highly ideological and politicized establishment, and its dominant bipartisan ideology is defined by extreme hawkishness, the casual use of military force as a foreign policy tool, the belief that war is justified not only in self-defense but for any "good result," and most of all, the view that the U.S. is inherently good and therefore ought to rule the world through superior military force. (3) Such criticisms--so personal, so rude and so imperfectly grammatical--elicit only countervailing scorn from their targets.

In the summer of 2007, The Economist invited Gideon Rose to guest host their blog, Democracy in America. Rose is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, and thus ex officio a member in highest standing of the FPC, or at any rate, its recording secretary.

He responded at considerable length to accusations like those of Atrios, Yglesias, Clemons and Greenwald. Here's just a bit:

The lefty blogosphere ... has gotten itself all in a tizzy over the failings of the "foreign policy community." The funny thing is ... hell, I'll just come out and say it: the netroots' attitude toward professionals isn't that different from the neocons', both being convinced that the very concept of a foreign-policy clerisy is unjustified, anti-democratic and pernicious, and that the remedy is much tighter and more direct control by the principals over their supposed professional agents. The charges the bloggers are making now are very similar to those that the neocons made a few years ago: mainstream foreign-policy experts are politicised careerists, biased hacks, and hide-bound traditionalists who have gotten everything wrong in the past and don't deserve to be listened to in the future .... Back then, the neocons directed their fire primarily at the national security bureaucracies--freedom-hating mediocrities at the cia, pin-striped wussies at the State Department, cowardly soldiers at the Pentagon. Now the bloggers' attacks are generally aimed at the think-tank world. (4) Because the "neocons" are regarded as public-enemy number one by both lefty bloggers and most of the FPC, Rose's words put the cat among the pigeons. For all their ferocity, the bloggers as a group are intensely...