Gentleman and scholar David Adesnik of Oxblog responds to my post from yesterday with a post of his own questioning the suggestion that "un-smart partisanship is a problem mainly of the left."

A couple of quick points. First, I think David misses the mark by suggesting what I wrote could possibly be interpreted as "invective" (definitions include: 1) vehement or violent denunciation, 2) a railing accusation; vituperation, 3) an insulting or abusive word or expression). I also think he did a bit of disservice by clipping my quote to exclude the two reasons I list that drive a lot of the current partisan anger on the left. My point isn't that it's bad that the most active partisans on the left have been given a voice, but rather that the circumstances under which that voice has been found - the agonizing losses in 2000/2004 and the war in Iraq - have contributed to the tone of the partisan discourse on the left.

Did I mean to imply this type of "un-smart" partisanship is exclusive to the left? Certainly not. And it's not hard to imagine that if the blogosphere had exploded five or ten years earlier, right wing partisans would have been the ones struggling with the problem of managing their visceral dislike - hatred, even - of William Jefferson Clinton. Some still do.

But it's also hard to dispute that if you compare the largest and most highly partisan sites on both the left and the right, there is an obvious difference in style, tone and substance. Markos Moulitsas and Duncan Black seem to revel in the use of obscenities and of ridiculing people who disagree with them with terms like "wankers." Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake tosses around names like "Rape Gurney Joe" to describe Joe Lieberman - not to mention depicts him in blackface - and occasionally uses language so foul it would make a long-haul trucker blush (see her reference to Ana Marie Cox in this post as one example).

Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin and the guys at Powerline operate at very high-octane levels of conservative partisanship, to be sure, but they almost always manage to do so within the bounds of reasonable discourse. That doesn't necessarily make their ideas or argument any "smarter" than the ones that appear on left-wing sites, and they are often criticized - fairly in some cases, unfairly in others, in my opinion - for the partisanship of their views. But you certainly won't see Hugh Hewitt featuring a post on his site titled "Wanker of the Day."

David continues in his post to write something on which we can both agree:

After the discussion was over, I went over to Tom and made the following suggestion. Smart partisanship is partisanship that keeps the interest of the other side. Smart partisanship is something you disagree with, but feel that you have to read because you want to know what the best argument is for the other side.

That's the ideal I keep in my head when I blog. When I write, I keep an imaginary not-me on my shoulder that has the opposite opinion about everything. My goal isn't to get him to agree with me, but to prevent him for saying "This is a waste of time."

Of course, this method hasn't prevented lots of dumb partisanship from showing up on this blog. But I do believe that this ideal has helped make OxBlog a site that attempts to engage its critics rather than one that vents its authors' spleen.

Absolutely. I try to keep up with what Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Chris Bowers, Kevin Drum write precisely because they try (for the most part) to make smart, interesting arguments. Hopefully, they continue to read conservative-leaning sites for the same reason.

There is smart partisanship on both sides, though as I said it seems to me there is more of the invective filled, less substantive variety on the left these days. In my view that type of partisanship is easier to dismiss and in some ways counterproductive to goals of the people who practice it. But that's just my opinion.