A reader emailed me recently to say he disagreed with my position on an issue. That’s fine, I get such emails all the time, and I typically respond to them. I’ve had some good discussions that way.

The funny thing about this one, however, is that the reader never walked me through the substance of his counterargument. Instead, he told me he usually liked my stuff because it is pretty logical, but in his judgment this particular piece was not. He didn’t say what was illogical about it

He implied that he would stop reading my work if I persisted in these unspecified illogicalities. I think he intended that as a threat.

Then he implied that my position was not only illogical for unspecified reasons, but was aligned with the other tribe. The thrust was that the other tribe is always wrong, and so if I happen to agree with them on a given issue, that makes me wrong as well. In addition to being traitorous.

I think he intended that, too, as a threat. As in, “If you persist in being a traitor, I’ll stop reading you.”

I got to thinking. This reader is exactly the sort of person who should read me. By reading me, he occasionally gets exposed to a position outside his comfort zone, expressed by someone he has enough regard for to take the time to read regularly.

However, he evidently is not interested in being taken outside his comfort zone. He likes his comfort zone just fine. It’s comfortable, in fact. What he wants is validation of his comfortable comfort zone.

He’s not alone. In today’s political polarization, he’s the rule, not the exception.

Bloggers like me – and even many legacy news sources – have learned to pander to these millions of polarized partisans. They publish what they know the partisans want to hear. They seldom stray off the reservation, lest they lose a reader, and a click, and a dollar.

As for me, I don’t need readers or clicks or dollars. I’m not in this for money (thank goodness). There are no stakeholders or shareholders in my operation. Unlike the Washington Post, there’s no chance I’ll lay off a third of my staff tomorrow. When you have no staff, you have no staff to lose.

I truly do this because I’m a political junkie, because I enjoy writing, and because I like to interact with my readers. If you don’t like what I say, or even if you do, please free to let me know in an email or, preferably, a public comment.

I’m happy to interact in a substantive and sometimes personal way. I’ve made friends in my writing, though in some cases we still haven’t met. (You know who you are.) And I’m talking about real friends – the kind where we can disagree without being disagreeable.  

On the other hand, if reading something with which you disagree is intolerable to you – if you insist that everything you read be tribal orthodoxy – there are plenty of other blogger-whores out there happy to pander to you.

They’ll say what you want to hear, every single time. They’ll please and pleasure you, orgasmically, and even pretend to have a simultaneous one with you – so long as you keep clicking.