Wonks

Background: Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes a profile of Kos in the Washington Monthly, which, in part, bemoans a lack of blogosphere wonkery. (Kos has issued his first response to the piece.) Responding to the woe-is-wonkery angle are Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped and Kevin Drum. Drum notes:

All political movements have both tacticians and theoreticians, so there's nothing odd that Kos is all about tactics and prefers to leave the ideology to others. But there's more to it than that. To a large extent, I think Kos is symbolic of nearly the entire political blogosphere, which tends to be far more a partisan wrecking crew than a genuine force for either progressive or conservative thought.

I'm honestly not sure what I think of that. Maybe it's just the nature of the medium, and we should be happy to leave the serious thinking to the think tanks. At the same time, I have a feeling that it's also a reflection of something that's been obscured by the ever shriller noise machines on both sides: the death of ideology. Partisanship may be at an all-time high in Washington DC, but when you cut through the chatter, ideology may be at an all-time low.

Atrios responds by pointing out there’s a lack of space (and purpose) for wonkery in the current political climate.

I’ll probably write more on this later, but my immediate reaction is that there’s some truth in what both are saying, as regards wonkery on specific subjects—those most closely associated with the blogosphere’s definition of wonkishness: Social Security, healthcare, the tax structure, the economy. (I think it’s also, in part, a function of the average blogger not being an expert on policy issues. It’s always easy to offer an opinion; it’s harder to offer a truly informed opinion, and gets exponentially more difficult with complex policies.)

That said, there is plenty of good policy debate about issues that “don’t matter”—reproductive rights, women’s issues, gay rights, etc. On the gay marriage issue alone, I can point in the direction of pieces and associated discussions about court opinions, specifically what legal benefits would be conferred by marriage rights, framing, history, and specific policy prescriptions: civil unions v. marriage, government civil unions as the default for all people with religious ceremonies left to churches, equality amendments in the mold of the ERA, etc. Endless policy-specific information can be found on abortion, emergency contraception, and access to birth control. Ditto abstinence-only sex education. And all of these are inevitably discussed with an ideological context. Necessarily so, in fact, because neither party particularly considers them winning issues, and they are quick to be compromised by both politicians looking for a win and blogosphere partisans in search of the same.

I’m not convinced there’s a lack of wonkery in the blogosphere. At first blush, my thought is that there’s simply a lack of wonkery on particular issues, and that this is of a feather with the generally lower profile in the upper echelons of women bloggers. I could well be wrong; I need to think about it some more.

In the meantime, what do you think?