The Master Shows How It's Done

The great Glenn Greenwald:

There's one final point worth making here as well. Before the bailout, [Stephen] Pearlstein's writing during the prior year on the looming housing and credit crises was actually quite good, at times even prescient. Everything changed when he turned himself into the chief defender of the original Paulson plan and thus became the target of substantial criticism from bloggers and their readers. Once that happened, the comment sections to his columns and his weekly chats became filled with negative feedback -- most of it substantive, some of it pure invective -- while Google searches of his name now produce conspicuous and aggressive critiques of his work. After that, Pearlstein became single-mindedly fixated on railing against bloggers and proving them to be ill-informed cretins, even at the expense of minimal coherence and consistency.

That happens quite frequently. People like Pearlstein are entirely unaccustomed to hearing widespread criticisms of their work, especially from the lowly masses (also known as his "readers" or, more distasteful still, from prize-less "bloggers"). When thin-skinned establishment mavens encounter such criticisms for the first time, they often develop resentment over their treatment and devote themselves to a crusade against those whom they blame for their terrible plight (nasty, disrespectful "bloggers"). Behind virtually every vocal establishment critic of "blogs" is some episode in the past where they were widely criticized by bloggers and their readers, and their lashing out -- though masquerading as devotion to high-minded, well-informed and civil discourse -- is, in reality, nothing more than self-absorbed and inextinguishable fury over being mistreated (i.e., criticized or opposed).

As these recent Pearlstein columns illustrate, those crusades almost always reflect far worse on the crusader than on anything or anyone else. People like Pearlstein have influential platforms. Criticisms of their arguments and behaviors are part of the price for that influence, and those criticisms ought to be engaged, not resented as improper disruptions of the proper social order.

These words apply to so many people who think they're above criticism, self-reflection, and improvement.