In Through the Out Door: An Interview with Alex Massie

As much as I enjoy observing, analyzing, and commenting on American politics and cultural issues, there invariably comes that point where my having not lived in the country of my attention results in perceptive opaqueness. At times, the foreign elements of my unfamiliarity can seem helpful in shining a light into corners where other would customarily fail to do so. Other times, it seems as though I am ever trying to build a puzzle with missing pieces.

As my attention has refocused towards a balancing on the politics of what is arguably the most powerful nation on the planet — the proverbial “900 pound gorilla” of a nieghbour with whom I’ve lived my entire life — and the machinations of my own home country, the dynamics of this careful ballet become increasingly pronounced and of interest to me. I thought it might be useful to speak with another blogger who straddles worlds in a similar and far more successful manner.

Alex Massie, former authour of The Debatable Land, Washington Correspondent for The Scotsman, and current blogger for the Spectator was kind enough to take the time to trade some emails with me about his experience writing about US politics and culture as an “outsider”.

Check out the interview below the fold.

So how is it that you came to be so involved in commentary on US politics and occupy an orbit so close to the US blogosphere/pundit class?

Location, location, location. One of the great things about the blogosphere is the way that it often makes geography redundant. It doesn’t matter where you happen to be based yourself; if you write interestingly or amusingly or with authority you can be heard and build a following. That’s the theory anyway. My experience was a little different: I started blogging because so many people I knew in Washington were blogging.

Two friends in particular, Megan McArdle and Garance Franke-Ruta, were instrumental in chivvying me to start my own blog. After some procrastination I finally did so in April 2007, making me something of a latecomer to the blogosphere.

I’d actually done some blogging before that, guesting at the New Republic and, in December 2006, for Andrew Sullivan while he took a well-deserved Christmas break.

That meant that I actually knew quite a number of bloggers before I actually started my own. Some of them were friends, others friends of friends. So it was probably easier for me to get started and to get at least some attention from established voices than might be the case for many people.

That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been living in DC and working as a correspondent for The Scotsman and various other papers.

And because I was in DC it was natural for me to write a lot about American politics. Although US politics is, and always has been, an interest of mine if I’d started a blog while living in Edinburgh or Dublin or wherever I doubt I’d have ended up writing as much about the US as I do.

So to the extent – which I think you exaggerate! – that I “occupy an orbit so close to the US blogosphere” it’s purely because I’m friends with the likes of Megan, Garance and Mike Crowley as well as a number of other prominent DC-based bloggers.

In other words, I’ve been very lucky. As I say, location was very important and, in some respects, starting a blog of my own was a natural extension of my social life. You’d meet people at parties or at Reason’s monthly happy hour and everyone else seemed to be blogging, so why not give it a go oneself?

And though I moved back to the UK last year, that didn’t mean that one need cease writing about American politics. Many, perhaps most, of the blogs I read are American so it’s natural that I continue to blog from, if you like, a mid-Atlantic perspective.

Often times, I will be told that as much as I might observe and comment on US politics, as an outsider there are certain things that I just won’t be able to understand no matter how hard I try because I don’t and have not lived in the US. To what degree do you feel like the time you spent in the US helped you to better understand some of the dynamics at play in US politics and to what degree do elements of those dynamics remain opaque to you? And as a follow up, what elements of US culture are difficult for an outsider to grasp in analyzing US politics?

Oh yes, one hears that quite a lot. It’s often followed by the suggestion that as a foreigner not only is one plain wrong but one doesn’t even have the right to hold an opinion. And besides, don’t you know that in the 20th century the US of A saved your sorry asses not once, but twice?

Still, obviously, any foreigner writing about the US (or anywhere else for that matter) needs to be aware of the limitations of their knowledge. That said, I think there’s a value to being an outsider. It’s like a guide book – say, the Lonely Planet – you might disagree with their interpretation, but you can learn something from their outsider’s perspective.

In the case of the US, I don’t think you need to live in the States to write well and with some insight about national politics. However I do think it helps enormously to have spent quite a bit of time there. This is a convenient view to hold since it’s the position I find myself in. For instance, Mitt Romney looks like a decent candidate from the outside, but it helps to have watched him close up to appreciate how awful he really is.

I spent five years in DC which is not a small amount of time. Furthermore, that was time in which one’s sole focus, really, was on American politics. So it was a kind of intensive, immersion course. And DC is a good place to be based not least because so many smart and different types of smart people from all over America move there so that you have, to some extent, a lot of America gathered in one small city. That’s not enough since you have to travel beyond the Beltway but it’s not a bad start.

Just as importantly, I think you need to have an open mind, empathy and imagination. I don’t think it’s possible to be a good historian without those qualities and I think something similar may be said of journalists and, yes, bloggers too. So going to places is important, but it’s not everything. There’s a lot that can be done with reading too.

My writing, then, tries, however imperfectly, to explain America to my non-American readers while offering, I hope, an informed outsider’s perspective to my American readers. Sometimes there’s a tension between those objectives, but most of the time the balance just about holds.

That said, writing is always dependent upon the intended audience. For instance, I wrote a piece for the Daily Beast recently on how Glenn Beck’s brand of populism seems to people over here, but I’m also in the midst of writing an essay on Beck that’s trying to explain him to a non-American audience, putting his movement in its proper political, cultural and historical perspective (there’s that word again!)

To answer your last point, I think it’s hardest for Britons and other foreigners to appreciate the south and the evangelical movement respectively. That’s part of the American experience that is “foreign” in a way that, for example, New York City is not foreign. So cliches abound about gun-toting, bible-thumping rednecks who could scarcely be more alien to our “sophisticated” mores. Those are areas where, again, I think you need empathy and imagination to try and understand people whose lives and views might be very different from your own. They’re different, not mad.

Also: I think many foreigners struggle with the sheer vastness of America and its diversity. Diversity in everything – culture, politics, history, geography and, sure, race.

Politically, of course, the misconception is that the President has much more power than the Constitution actually grants him. Life is not actually “The West Wing”.

Finally, since this is a long answer already, while one’s knowledge of America is always imperfect, the sheer volume of commentary and the vibrancy of the blogosphere makes it easier to immerse yourself in American politics and to learn about it than is the case for any other country on earth. To some extent, then, america is a quick study that’s never actually finished.

Oh, and health care is also impossible for foreigners to understand. I confess that I don’t even try to understand it myself.

And, as the French put it, here’s a pensee d’escalier:

America is like learning a language. Spending time in the US gives you a necessary grip on the grammar that, if done rigourously, stays with you forever. It might become a little rusty, but it can always be buffed-up and refreshed by return visits.

I’m curious to explore this notion you raise about explaining US politics to your non-US readers. This idea seems to suggest a sort of translation that needs to take place in order for their to be an overlap in shared meaning between people of different, though not disparate cultures. As someone who tries to engage in this kind of political/cultural translation, what is it that you perceive yourself to be doing?

There’s a lot of terrible commentary about the United States here and there’s a lot terrible commentary about the rest of the world in the United States too. So I guess that one of the things I attempt to do (some of the time at least) is correct some of those misapprehensions on each side of the Atlantic.

In that sense, I think that blogging is really just another way of being a particular type of foreign correspondent. Except that blogging, in many ways, is a better medium for this (at least it is for me) because it’s not filtered through an editor’s preconceptions of what the audience might be interested in and, also, because it’s much more of a conversation. Nor are you constrained by word-counts.

I should say that this also applies in other areas. When I write about Scotland and Scottish politics there’s the obvious “this is what I think about this” aspect to my posts, but there’s also an element in which I’m trying, I hope, to give readers in England a greater understanding of Scotland and its politics.

For instance, I spent quite a lot of time recently writing about the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber. Much of that was predicated upon what I considered the seriously misinformed commentary about Scotland and Scots Law that was produced elsewhere in the media. So, without wanting to seem desperately pompous, I was trying to correct that or at least offer an alternative perspective. It’s fair to say that many, though not all, readers disagreed with me. But that’s fine.

All this, mind you, risks fostering the impression that I’m embarked on some kind of missionary work, trying to bring different people together. That’s not really the case: I just write about what interests me and hope that it doesn’t bore other people. I’m a generalist, not a specialist and I view writing a blog as producing a daily column. Many of the things I write about won’t interest most readers but I hope everything I write interests at least some of them and that, consequently, there’s enough to keep them coming back.

That’s the idea anyway.

A lot of non-American bloggers see it as necessary to split their time between writing about their home politics and US politics because of the disproportionate footprint that the US has on the blogosphere. There are obvious reasons for this because of the size and prominence of US politics on the “world stage”, but, at times, it can feel like a required compromise in the name of traffic and relevance. Do you think the blogosphere would benefit from a more equalized representation of national voices and interests and, if so, how might non-American bloggers work to increase the size, vibrancy, and visibliity of their own nation’s blogopsheric activities?

I don’t know about “necessary” but perhaps that applies to some people. I think that if you’re interested in politics in a given country there’s a pretty good chance you have at least some interest in American politics, particularly in a Presidential election year.

I’m also not sure how useful it is to talk about the “blogosphere” in this instance. As with galaxies, so with the blogosphere: there are thousands of them. But you can travel between them very easily. So, for instance, when you have a big event such as this year’s Iranian elections you suddenly become aware of – and visit – a very different blogosphere from that which you normally inhabit and you become aware of new blogs, new writers from whom you can learn and with whom you can engage.

Language is an obvious barrier, but even so there are ways round this difficulty these days. I don’t think bloggers need to “work” to increase the “size, vibrancy and visibility of their own nation’s blogospheric activities”, I think that will happen anyway. It’s like rock’n'roll – it began in America but it’s not confined to America and will spread of its own accord.

The British blogosphere, for instance, still lags behind its American equivalent in terms of its impact upon national discourse. But it’s catching up. Next year’s election will be, to trot out a familiar phrase, “the first internet election”. At Westminster at least, there are a number of bloggers considered vital, daily reads within the parliamentary and media villages.

And what’s true of Britain is, I would assume, likely to be true of other countries too. If not now then soon and forever.

Ultimately, however, the internet and the blogosphere is what you make of it. It’s a giant coffee house and library combined and a place in which you are limited only by the limits of your curiosity. That’s one reason why it’s such a marvelous thing.

Any thoughts on why the American blogospheric galaxy has become broadly more prominent and influential in terms of national discourse than, say, the UK’s?

Oh, I think that’s because UK politics often copies American political trends. For instance, Tony Blair learnt a lot from Clinton’s campaign in 1992.

But I think the internet’s influence on the media and politics in Britain has taken time to build in part because the British press, for all its faults, is a much more open, raucous and cacophonous creature than it’s American counterpart. In other words, it shares some qualities with the blogosphere. In other words, there was less need for the blogosphere than there was in the US. At least in terms of holding politician’s feet to the fire.

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