I find my diagnosis of the political Internet as depressing as I do fascinating: It — we — are having a breakdown. I admit the possibility of psychological projection, but the symptoms I see are indisputably everywhere. We are overloaded, frenzied, stressed out — and lost.
Online "aggregators" are largely collections of hyperpartisan bile; indeed, we have reverted to the intellectually opportunistic and decadent eras of yellow journalism and the infamous James Thomson Callender. Hysteria sells, Westbrook Peglers are ubiquitous, and thoughtful blogs are fleeing. "I couldn't imagine blogging the next election. I will not spend another minute of my time writing about the Clintons. Period. Or the Bushes" — Andrew Sullivan, March 2015; which is to say, even our political heavyweights (as it were) are deemed too absurdly dull to ponder. Real policy debates are few, and cradled in mostly unread sites. It is, to repeat, hysteria that sells. And social media direct us to it. Twitter, Facebook and all the other escapes from serious engagement positively thrive on the bizarre and subterranean, which is characteristically dark and, in the end, negligible. But by God it sells.
The fringe is still the fringe, but it's the fringe with Internet clout. That, in itself, drives the vast middle — i.e., the center-left as well as the center-right — from online interest, which in turn only intensifies the hyperpartisanship and thus re-feeds the fringe. I rarely read these yokels of The Fringe, in part because they have little to say, but mostly because what they do say is so poorly written. I adore eccentrics if they know how to write. Those birds, however, are rare.
One piece of the yokel variety has haunted me for days. I mentioned it earlier; I stumbled on it in a Google search of the Jade Helm Hysteria. It comes from one Stonekettle Station, and it's appallingly bad. Just awful. I first encountered this site's popular tripe maybe a year ago at a reader's suggestion. The "column" therein was lecturing readers on the deplorably ill-informed status of the American public (which is unarguable), but the only interesting thing about it was its own ill information. Months later, I encountered the site again. Sorry to say, things hadn't improved. This I noted here, and several of the site's zombie followers came rather unglued in indignation. The current piece — the one I noted that has haunted me for days — is nearly a textbook study in literary crudeness and even laughable contradiction. While heaving an astounding 2,200 words on the sideshow of Jade Helm, the writer announces: "This stupid shit isn't worth my time." It seems it is — and far, far too much of it. The piece is so bad, you really must read it yourself. Its awfulness is indescribable.
That, though, is not what haunts me. Bad writing, in its commonness, is scarcely anything horrifying. No, what haunts me is that this particular piece has, as of this morning, 44,354 Facebook "Likes." That's no typo. The zombies are on the loose, they're roaming and dominating the Internet in massive herds, and they wouldn't know thoughtful, sophisticated writing if it rammed through their brain-dead hearts.
Haunting and depressing, true, but also fascinating. What sells — and sells big — is not merely hysteria, but the most poorly articulated hysteria. We are overloaded with it and we are dumbing ourselves down into insanely popular yet isolated pockets of sheer doggerel. It's chasing the Sullivans away, alienating the thoughtful, and even causing me to write about zoos. I may yet move on to writing about history or literature, much as Christopher Hitchens had wanted to do. His patience with the political Internet's madness, ghastly writing and reigning doggerel had run its course.
Ultimately, will only the worst of writers and their zombies be left on the political Internet? At the rate we're going, they'll be welcome to it. The rest of us will be reading Gibbon, Hofstadter or Shakespeare.