StickWithANose

The political right has long occupied itself with the idea of media bias. Using such fanciful terms as “multi-cultural elite” and “drive-by media,” pols and pundits alike have managed to conceptually organize working-class grassroots activists, middle class college professors, middle class journalists and wealthy media personalities into a sinister political bloc intent on destroying the very fabric of the nation with its “liberal” agenda. It’s a concept that makes for great pulp literature, but it is of little value in understanding politics in our hyper-mediated society. Simply put, the idea that such a political bloc exists or could even be defined as being ‘elite’ is laughable, and the idea that this political bloc uses news and entertainment media owned and operated by some of the largest corporations in the world [I'm looking at you GE!] to carry out its “agenda” is nuts. [1] [2]

So, I’ve been watching with great interest over the past few years the emergence of a new concept from the blogosphere: “Villagers“.

“The Village” and “The Villagers” are terms frequently used in the liberal blogosphere as a derisive epithet for the Beltway media and political elite. The term “Village” appears to be a reference to a famous 1998 article written for The Washington Post by D.C. society hostess and WaPo writer Sally Quinn, in which she explained the Beltway establishment’s outrage over Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Quinn wrote, without irony, that Establishment Washington — which she described as “the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it” — is “not unlike any other small community in the country.” [...]

From this description of the Beltway the term “Village” was born. It is believed to have first been used in this fashion by Digby, though I have not yet confirmed this. It was popularized, and is still frequently used, by the blogger Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, as well as other bloggers such as Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Greenwald, and many others. [...]

In political terms, the term “Villagers” denotes a kind of small-minded refusal to think outside an “acceptable” center-right consensus, and a refusal to acknowledge it when a majority of the American people take a view on a particular issue that is not in line with that center-right consensus. Thus, the “Villagers” include, in part, Democratic elected officials and consultants who insist that their party can’t succeed unless they ally their party with that center-right consensus; think-tankers who churn out position papers designed to prop up this elite consensus view; and elite pundits who insist that mainstream liberal views are radically leftist and insist on “bipartisanship” for its own sake, damn the consequences.

Like any political concept, “Village” [or "Villagers"] has the potential to be a useful tool in political discourse, a semantic short-cut that conveys a lot of information efficiently. However, it is by no means cemented. All political concepts have the potential to be corrupted and hollowed out of meaning, such as progressive, conservative and liberal. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of this concept in popular discourse… I think that I see a future research project emerging here…