MAGNETIC FIELD POLITICS. I used to religiously read every damned word of the gibberish dissected here at alicublog, but I've been at this game for so long that I've become like an old country doctor who takes one look at the lumps on your ring finger and announces, "Pleursy!"

Small examples can be mightily instructive of larger maladies in logic, anyway. These two grafs from Harry's Place, excerpted by the Ole Perfesser, leapt at me like rabid hamsters, and I had to deal with them:

It is clear that the Iraq war has shown that a certain section of the left really has nowhere to go except self-hatred and that a reactionary antipathy to the US and the western democracies has moved from beyond the ultra-left fringes into the mainstream of left-liberal oppositionalism.

It is precisely the spreading of 'pure oppositionalism' that makes it worthwhile looking closely at the activities of the Socialist Workers Party and others. Because while the details of their quasi-Trotskyist ideology remain restricted to a tiny minority, their broader outlook has gained something close to hegemony on the radical left.

If I'm reading this right, and I fear that I am, Harry is allowing his subject to glide rather easily between "a certain section of the left" and the Socialist Workers Party, a highly suggestive and misleading tactic that suggests quick contagion from one tiny splinter group to a somewhat larger one, and thence to the whole "radical left" (which might mean everyone left of the DLC for all I can tell). One may as well speak of the demoralizing power of white supremacist cells over Focus on the Family.

Now, we have to understand for starters that Harry was inspired by Andrew Sullivan, and nothing healthy can grow from such a poisoned root. (Okay, I cheated, and looked at the actual post. This ole hoss cain't git out of his harness nohow!) The conflation of, say, Howard Dean supporters with the Stalinist hordes is an old rhetorical gambit ("If you're not with us, you're against us"), but it seems here to have been taken fatally to heart, to have gone from a trick to a tic -- the SWP, though small and impotent (allegedly reduced to mining radical Islamicists for "supporters for their marches, buyers for their newspaper and maybe even the odd recruit"), is magically infecting the whole of the Left with its "nihilism":

...the growth of nihilism, allied with the different but growing cynicism in our societies, weakens the ability of democrats to win their battles -- at home and abroad. Democracy, even the limited version that we live with, survives to a degree on a level of participation or at least voluntary acceptance. Nihilism, the rejection of politics, is corrosive.

Here's what's really crazy about this: some people, it is true, are rejectors. They stand outside the tent pissing in, in LBJ's colorful locution. But they are brought into the mainstream of whatever movement only insofar as they are worth the trouble to the majority. Otherwise they are left to non-join as they please, at a high risk of irrelevance. Is the Left, as such, really reaching out to the SWP? Is National Review begging Pat Buchanan for forgiveness?

Harry seems to think the "nihilism" of the fringe will automatically drag down everyone around it. What's missing from his analysis is any sense that leftists have discernment enough to make decisions about who does or doesn't get into their tent. He seems to view politics as a magnetic field which distributes forces according to immutable physical laws, not as the actions of human beings.

Well might he see it that way. In the Blogosphere, so many writers have been working so long from such reductive templates, dismissing their opponents as "objectively pro-Saddam" automatons and so forth, that when they examine any given situation, they see, in place of the literally millions of people who don't agree with them, a bunch of electric football game figurines reacting to the shaking of a motor.

Me too, of course. But I'm right!