Jonah Goldberg hits the nail on the head in describing the phenomenon we might as well call Friedersdorfism:
When I first came to Washington, I hung around in very similar circles of young eager-beavers. I may not have been as smart as many of them, but I was just as determined to get my articles published and make my mark. We had many gripe sessions conversations about how hard it was to break-in at places like NR, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal etc. But, because Al Gore hadn’t gotten around to inventing the internet yet, there was no place for me to vent these complaints in print, never mind work them up into a meta-narrative about the decrepit state of conservatism.
That’s not the case for today’s 20-somethings who have the luxury of translating their frustration with “the business” into long cri de coeur blog posts and essays that tend to bounce off one another for reinforcement. Instead of late night griping at the Toledo Lounge, the way we did things in the 1990s, the conversation has gone public. Indeed, so public that it has become something of an intellectual grievance culture all its own.
Exactly. Given that I’m 10 years older than Goldberg, I was already well into my 30s before the Internet began to revolutionize publishing, and was past 40 when blogging became a phenomenon.
Friedersdorf, at 30, graduated college at the dawn of the blogging age, and never had to earn his living as a journalist in a world where there was no online alternative to print. (Marla Edwards, a reporter I worked with at the Rome [Ga.] News-Tribune in the 1990s, was one of the first hires at CNN’s Web site, and I remember how strange it seemed to the rest of us when she tried to explain her new job. How does that work? You mean, all you’re doing is writing updates for an Internet page?)
The impatience of ambitious youth is such that the Young Turks always resent the Old Guard — sic semper hoc — but this familiar situation is now aggravated by the ease with which Young Turks can find outlets for their resentment and have those resentments reinforced by their peers.
In a world where anybody with a Blogspot account can be a pundit, the genuinely ambitious youngsters now consider themselves failures if they’re not recognized as genuine public intellectuals by the time they attend their five-year college reunion. (When I attended my five-year reunion, I was the sports editor of a twice-weekly Georgia paper and counted that as success.)
Predictably, Friedersdorf responds to Goldberg with — what else? — a long cri de couer blog post, which is immediately seconded by Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress. (Yglesias mocks conservative journalism as a “nice, very cushy gravy train” — as opposed to the grueling conditions for Harvard grads at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. )
At some point, you think these kids would grow tired of their intellectual wankfests or at least realize they’re trapping themselves in a narrow career niche. But among other things, the Internet can foster the illusion that there is a vast market demand for such obscure political squabbles, when what the online world actually craves is chubby chicks in lingerie commercials.
(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)