We started For the Record on 6 December 2003. This was an especially dark time in US politics: the Iraq war was only nine months old at the time, 9/11 just over two years old. The Bush Gang, and the right wing more broadly, still maintained an incredibly intimidating stranglehold over the national discourse.
Many of our interlocutors still bought into all those comfortable political myths of the 90s -- the third way, globalism, corporations are great for prosperity, the rising tide lifts all boats, the Dems need to give up on the New Deal, efficiency is the prime institutional virtue, the US government is controlled by law and basically wisely stewarded by competent technocrats acting in the public interest, US foreign policy is basically benign, American exceptionalism, the institutional goal of big corporate journalism is to speak truth to power and serve as the fourth estate.
We had recently discovered Chomsky and Krugman, so we had replaced those comfortable myths with ugly and depressing realities. We felt that the nation and the world were going down the tubes in terms of economic and social justice, the environment, and the ability of institutions to preserve and maintain a decent society. We felt that it was essential to shake people awake, to alert them not only to the long-standing Chomsky line that the US is not benevolent in foreign relations, that corporate journalism plays a propaganda role, that unregulated corporate capitalism is neither natural nor just, that comfortable myths blind us to the atrocities the state commits on our behalf -- but also to the alarming Krugman line that the Bush gang had summoned up a new era of corruption, amorality, immorality: that the US would now be brazenly vicious in foreign relations, that corporate journalism would distribute naked propaganda, that the economic system would be geared increasingly toward vacuuming wealth and power upward, that the public mind would manifest increasingly irrational jingoism.
At the time there were of course voices on our side -- The Nation's and Harper's's longstanding advocacy journalism; Kos, Atrios, JMM, digby, billmon, Gilliard, Needlenose; in the philosophical community, Brian Leiter, with whom we maintained a close and cooperative blogging relationship; and of course Chomsky and Krugman. Still, it was our feeling that we had a distinctive contribution to make, by focusing on issues and generating a narrative that tracked our specific interests, and by reaching a distinctive audience that at the time was, it is my sense, not awake to the issues we stressed.
Now, four years and 1200 posts later, we feel it is time to hang up our blogging pen. Thanks to the herculean efforts of many of the voices listed above, political blogging has become a full time job; fatigue finally set in for us. But on the bright side, we feel as though there has been a genuine shift of the tide in terms of political opinion, both in the nation at large, and among our interlocutors. Obviously the country as a whole has woken up to the hideousness of the Republican Party; in terms of our local social circle, I know of few people who encounter political thinking with the naive optimism of the 90s. To the extent that any of this was our work, we feel as though our work is done.
We intend, unlike Billmon, to preserve these records of the last four years, both since we wish to continue to endorse for the most part the stands we took during this dark period, and as a record for the future of how things can go wrong. However, it is not our intention to continue to update this blog.
Thanks for your attention.
