Wednesday, November 10, 2004
(11:10 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Hack Gap Reconsidered
A brief thought on the meme of the "hack gap," popularized by Matt Yglesias. The idea here is that "liberals" are more likely to be "just liberals" instead of partisan Democrats, whereas on the "conservative" side of things, identification between the broad ideology and partisanship is much, much closer. Thus, liberal pundits are supposedly just promoting liberal views, whereas conservative pundits are Republican party hacks.It's possible that this is true in general terms -- i.e., that liberals are simply more self-critical and more critical of their political representatives than are conservatives, or some other such explanation. But couldn't we explain this phenomenon, which seems to me to be accurate in contemporary political discourse, at least in part by the fact that the Democrats have been, on average, the losing team ever since around 1980? Doing apologetics for unsuccessful political strategies doesn't seem like a fun thing to do for either liberals or conservatives, so that might be why there are apparently fewer Democratic party hacks than Republican party hacks out there.
(This post was unconsciously inspired by a lengthy conversation I overheard in Powell's yesterday between two very disaffected Yankees fans. Neither of them were party hacks for the Yankee ownership.)
