The Evolution of Blogging: An Interview with Kevin Drum

There are a few bloggers who have become household names in the blogosphere over the years: Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Matt Drudge, Markos Moulitsas, Mickey Kaus. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to exchange emails with a blogger of the same ilk who’s been around and writing since the very early days of the medium and has seen blogging evolve and change a great deal in that time: Kevin Drum.

Drum began blogging independently back in 2002, was then picked up by the Washington Monthly, and eventually found his current home at Mother Jones. A respected liberal blogger, Drum is considered by many to be a go to person for an insightful, intelligent, and grounded take on a host of issues.

Creator of Friday Cat Blogging, Drum’s long view of both US politics and blogging generally make him a valuable resource in a time when more people than ever are participating in what many still view as a burgeoning medium.

So what started you blogging seven years ago?

I quit my job in 2002 after we got bought out by a Swiss company and began doing consulting work.  But that left me with lots of free time, and to fill it I started reading political magazines on the internet.  That included Slate, where I read Mickey Kaus, and he eventually led me to Instapundit, which perplexed me.  What was the deal with this single column of short notes, all signed by the same guy?  It seemed strange.

But I followed the links around and soon figured out what it was all about.  A couple of hours later I had started reading blogs, and I started one of my own two days later.  Initially it was on blogspot, then on my own site, and in 2004 I got hired by the Washington Monthly.  I moved to Mother Jones in 2008.

One of my college roommates got in touch with me a few years ago after seeing the blog and said that it was a “perfect pairing of man and medium.”  That’s probably about right.  It’s hard to explain, but the moment I first understood what a blog was, I knew I had to do it.

2002, when you got started, was a pretty heady time politically. What was it like being one of relatively few voices (at least as compared to presently) online writing about what was going in the country at the time?

At the time, it didn’t seem like such a small number, actually.  After all, you can only personally read a certain number of blogs a day, and once you get to that number it doesn’t really matter much if the total universe of blogs gets bigger.

But the political blogosphere did have a bit more of a clubby feel to it back then.  Mainly, this is because we spent a lot of time talking to each other and nobody else really noticed us much.  It was sort of like joining a book club, where you talk about the same stuff as the big-time critics but it’s only between friends.

There was also a lot less expertise in the blogosphere back then.  There were a fair number of legal bloggers, and a few economists, but that was about it.  That gave the whole enterprise a very wide open feel.  We could all talk about anything we wanted to without having to contend with a bunch of genuine experts barging into the discussion to tell us where we’d gone wrong.

So would that anecdote suggest that over time the analysis of the blogosphere has gotten more accurate as more and a more varied cross-section of people have come to engage the medium? And if so, have we lost something if we’ve gained accuracy – has there been some kind of intrinsic trade off?

More accurate?  You kidder, you.

I’m not sure how to put it.  I’d say the blogosphere network has gotten denser in a way, but that’s not the same thing as being more accurate.  Besides, at the same time that more experts have entered the arena, the tribalism and partisanship of the rest of the blogosphere has increased.  So even if the experts have a positive influence — which I’m not sure of — I don’t think that’s translated into higher overall quality.

Basically, the experts provide us with more raw data than they used to, but it gets cherry picked and twisted as much or more than it ever has.

In your view, what has fueled that increase in tribalism, partisanship, and cherry-picking and does it appear to have occurred equally on “both sides”?

That’s pretty hard to pin down.  But if I had to guess, I’d toss out three reasons.

First, politics itself has gotten increasingly tribal and the blogosphere has followed along.

Second, as the blogosphere aged, bloggers started to realize that their opposite numbers were never going to change their minds.  As that became clearer and clearer, engaging with them got a lot less interesting.

And third, blogs became more important.  When you’re just talking amongst yourselves, there’s no harm in having an ordinary conversation.  But when blogs started having a genuine influence on public discourse, that began to seem a lot less appealing.  After all, if there’s something serious at stake, it makes sense to do whatever it takes to promote the cause.  Politics ain’t beanbag, and blogs these days are serious players in the political process.

Plus I suppose there’s just a tiredness factor.  After you’ve rehearsed the same arguments a dozen times, you just start to get more short-tempered about the whole thing.  That’s a vicious circle that’s hard to stop.

This all probably applies equally to both sides.

Conservative blogs have, I think, gotten objectively crazier in the Obama era than liberal blogs did even at the height of the Bush era.  Some of the stuff they’re pushing these days is just batshit nuts.  But solely on a partisanship scale, liberal blogs today strike me as just as partisan as conservative ones.

Frankly, there’s hardly anyone left on either side who isn’t almost completely partisan.  It’s a lot like talk radio.

That seems like a relatively grim prognosis. Are there elements of blogging that continue to inspire you as a veteran of the medium?

Sure. In fact, they’re mostly the flip side of the stuff I don’t like.

The rise of expert bloggers has made blogging a little less free wheeling, but it’s also made it way easier to learn — seriously learn — about complex new topics very quickly.  For example, I wouldn’t know 10% as much as I do about finance and the recent economic meltdown if it weren’t for expert economic bloggers.  There’s just no other place to get that kind of detailed knowledge in real time.  (No place free, anyway.)

And this is equally true whenever anything new happens.  When there are riots in Iran, within a day or two a few blogs suddenly become the go-to sources for expert commentary.  Ditto for healthcare reform or counterinsurgency practices, when those things became suddenly newsworthy.

Even the tribalism has a flip side: namely that it reflects the fact that political blogs have largely gone mainstream.

Politics itself is tribal, and the tribalism of the blogosphere is a direct result of the fact that blogs are taken seriously these days.  That’s pretty energizing, since it means that the things we write about might actually make a difference.  Five years ago, the odds that any of us could have said anything that had even the slightest effect on the overall political discourse was vanishingly small.

What is one thing you think bloggers could and should do differently to make the best use of this new found prominence and influence?

Actually, there probably isn’t all that much more they can do.

The only thing that comes to mind within the liberal blogosphere is using our platform to mobilize real-world action more effectively.  The August townhalls were a good example of being outhustled by conservatives on the ground, and liberal blogs could probably do a better job of ginning up this kind of enthusiasm.

Obviously this applies only to bloggers who consider themselves activists in the first place, which not everyone does.

Related posts...

• The Evolution of Blogging: An Interview with Charles Johnson
• America’s Next Top Pundit
• In Through the Out Door: An Interview with Alex Massie