Good Faith & Bad Acting
How Jonathan Chait trolled the Internet for fun and profit
I wish the Internet came with a manual. I wish my parents had sat me down as a lad and told me, “John, this is when you should argue in good faith; this is when you should hold your tongue; and this is when you should just troll.” Of course the Internet is the Wild West, and my parents maybe knew how to use AOL when I was growing up, so, when New York Magazine let Jonathan Chait’s 5,000 words of #content slide onto the Internet, I had absolutely no idea what to do.
I confess my first impulse was to troll — or try to, anyway. I’m not a very adept troll. I read with relish Alex Pareene’s Gawker piece, “Punch-Drunk Jonathan Chait Takes on the Entire Internet” (of “here is sad white man Jonathan Chait” fame), posted it approvingly to Facebook, and tried to canoe myself into a couple of Twitter fights on the subject. No one bit. An old professor mentioned that this might be a time for holding my tongue, which was probably good advice.
Before I could turn off the part of my brain that gets annoyed at Internet-thinkpieceoffery, an old blogging friend decided to engage, approvingly posting Fredrick DeBoer’s first long response, “I don’t know what to do, you guys”. DeBoer notes that:
Jon Chait is a jerk who somehow manages to be both condescending and wounded in his piece on political correctness. He gets the basic nature of language policing wrong, and his solutions are wrong, and he’s a centrist Democrat scold who is just as eager to shut people out of the debate as the people he criticizes. That’s true.
DeBoer’s piece was exhilarating. It handily sidestepped Chait’s argument while making several good points about the excesses of what Chait would call “p.c. culture”. If I could, I would commission DeBoer to write Chait’s piece for him. I don’t doubt that it would still have inspired vociferous debate — DeBoer is a polarizing figure — but I think the debate would have been less sensational, less personal, and a whole lot more productive. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you write the thinkpiece about the other thinkpeice you have, not about the other thinkpiece you want.
Because of that vociferous debate, Chait released a follow-up piece, and let me tell you, he is shocked — shocked! — that people are reading him into his piece. In his new rebuttal, he quotes this tweet by Rebecca Schoenkopf: “[I]t’s a lot easier for you all to roll your eyes and go ‘white man’ than actually discuss whether chilling of disagreeable speech is okay.” I agree. It is easy to say that Chait is a manbaby whose #maletears taste good. (I don’t necessarily disagree that Chait is a manbaby whose #maletears taste good, but that’s another piece altogether). If Chait wants us to take him at his word that his piece — replete with sad ones who are being accused of mansplaining — is not about him, well, I suppose I ought to engage with that. So, let’s engage.
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How Chait conflates (chaitflates?) several different behaviors, not all of which are bad, and only a few of which are actually espoused by “the p.c. left.”
In her thoughtful response, Michelle Goldberg writes that there are at least these three behaviors represented in Chait’s piece:
First, there’s the genuine suppression of speech, as with Omar Mahmood, the University of Michigan student who was fired from his school newspaper, and whose apartment was vandalized, for running afoul of lefty sensitivities. Then there are the annoying rhetorical tropes of online discourse, which can make good-faith argument impossible. (Accusing every man who disagrees with you of “mansplaining” is one of these, even though mansplaining is a real phenomenon.) Finally, there is energetic debate.
As for the first category of behavior: I think it’s trollish strawmanning to claim that “the p.c. left” in all its cantankerous diversity is a big fan of getting college students fired and vandalizing their apartments. Yes, I’ve met people who probably wouldn’t have a problem with what happened to Mahmood, but there are bullies in every movement and to claim that they represent the totality is idiotic.
But Chait isn’t an idiot, so I don’t believe that he thinks that the left, p.c. or otherwise, supports this kind of bullying. I think he just used Mahmood’s story as a cheap ploy to up the stakes in the political correctness debate. He wanted a physical manifestation of “thought-policing” and he found it.
Of course, I could be wrong. Chait does write: “But Mahmood was widely seen as the perpetrator rather than the victim” — an empirical claim, which Chait leaves unsupported. He only quotes Mahmood’s side of the firing, and says nothing about the reaction on campus to the vandalization. I don’t know the details of the story, but it seems entirely plausible to me that one could reasonably support his ousting from a paper and not the vandalization of his home. It seems even more plausible to me that one could be a leftist and support neither. But I wasn’t there, and I have no idea if the mood on campus was such that Mahmood’s bullying was widely supported or opposed. From the looks of it, Chait doesn’t know either, since he couldn’t be bothered to give any evidence to support his strong claim.
(To briefly defend Chait: Pareene, in his Gawker piece, more or less says that Chait is a hypocrite. Pareene notes that in 2009, Chait called for heads to roll over a Detroit Free Press article. I initially found this rather persuasive; after reading what Chait actually wrote, however, it’s hard to see how the two are truly akin. Chait was angered by what he saw as journalistic malpractice and not by putatively-threatening satire.)
The other example Chait gives of genuine suppression of speech would be the seizure of a sign and shoving of an anti-choice activist. What is the evidence he gives to support his implication that this is part-and-parcel of the left’s disdain for free speech? It’s a statement by a student group and an article in The Feminist Wire.
As for the second category of behavior (the annoying tropes employed that chill debate): Goldberg notes that disentangling these from energetic debate is “pretty subjective”, a sentiment with which I tend to agree. Yes, I’ve seen plenty of discussions where good faith is withheld for no reason (or, worse, for cheap rhetorical points); hell, I’ve been in plenty of them. Chait seems to claim that the absence of good-faith arguments from some discussions is adequate to claim that “the p.c. left” stands in opposition to free speech. This is laughable. Moreover, saying mean things to try to shut up political opponents is an old and storied tradition. Chait acts like its supposed resurgence (as though people didn’t try to cudgel their political opponents into silence during the glorious Clinton years) comes as a surprise. The whole thing strains credulity.
As for the third category (energetic debate): Goldberg is correct that Chait probably puts speech acts in different buckets than she — or I — would. Some of the online invective Chait describes sounds fairly mild — not much worse than the “gentle tone of mockery” he ascribes to Mahmood. When it’s strident speech acts that make Jonathan Chait uncomfortable, that’s icky thought policing, but when it’s conservatives’ gentle tone of mockery, that’s — what? — a noble exercise of free speech? I, for one, wonder what Chait considers to be unacceptable and acceptable speech acts, what counts as chilling and what counts as merely loud. And I’m not alone. As Amanda Marcotte writes:
The irony begins to collapse in on itself and form a black hole from which no self-awareness can escape with this sentence: “It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called ‘tone policing.’” Got it. Demanding that someone adopt more P.C. language to step around the sensitivities of liberals is unconscionable, but demanding that lefties on Twitter adopt a softened tone to step around the sensitivities of Jonathan Chait is just good sense.
To recap: in the two examples of true suppression of speech that he gives, Chait makes an empirical claim in the first, and an inference in the second, and neither one is supported by his evidence. In his examples of non-good-faith arguments, he talks about mansplaining, and all-caps pleas on Binders Full of Women Writers, which we’re supposed to take as a philosophical threat to democracy. And he doesn’t touch on the way that new media (i.e. blogs, Twitter, etc.) and p.c. empowerment mean that a whole range of new voices have been added to the vibrant, and, yes, at-its-worst mean-spirited, debate on the left and throughout culture.
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Interrogating Chait’s desire to be considered a good-faith actor in the left’s ongoing argument about the ethics and efficacy of “p.c. culture”
Part of me wants to make the broader argument: When confronted by the evils of white supremacy, of the patriarchy, of all the myriad systems of oppression that bind and disease us, for Even The Liberal Jonathan Chait to spend 5,000 words and god knows how many news cycles on the potentially overzealous efforts of a few to combat those systems is a frustrating waste of time and resources.
But that argument cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Chait would probably argue that to spend god knows how many words and god knows how many news cycles on being overzealous is a frustrating waste of time and resources. He in fact does argue that it’s bad tactics, writing “p.c. provokes a backlash that hinders the struggle against bias.”
But that’s not really the argument that Chait was making in his original piece. No, we’re “philosophically threatening”; we’re espousers of “an undemocratic creed.” It’s all gross hyperbole and threats to democracy. This leads me to wonder — since Chait is so eager to assign monetary motive to the writers of the p.c. left — how many clicks did this sensational piece about the existential threat to American democracy posed by college students and The Feminist Wire get? And how many clicks would a piece about the tactical inefficacy of overzealousness get?
His second rebuttal to my argument that he’s wasting energy is one to which I’m sympathetic: “We can oppose both racism and inappropriate responses to racism,” he writes. “Indeed, that kind of multifaceted thinking is a special responsibility for liberals.” I really am sympathetic to that; this is no “Jonathan Chait is an honorable man”. But Chait, for all his talk about being vast and containing multitudes completely overlooked — or misunderstood — what p.c. culture aims to do. In his meandering 5,000 words, he didn’t seem to get the reason why p.c. culture exists — or what good it can do.
“My interlocutors have little appetite to defend the norms of p.c. culture,” he writes. “[T]he personalized character of the response also shows my critics are not so much pro-p.c. as anti-anti-p.c., which is not exactly the same thing.” It’s a bizarre argument to make, considering that several of the people he quotes in his rebuttal actually do make arguments for aspects of political correctness.
Digby writes:
But so-called “PC Police” are among those critics who are actually making a difference, even if it is uncomfortable and frustrating to be on the receiving end. My own response to being “called out” is often anger at first just like Chait. It’s very hurtful and I’m human. But I’ve learned that when I feel that very particular kind of anger that comes from being attacked for my privilege, it is often a useful signal that I probably need to step back think a little harder about something.
Megan Garber writes:
We might also think of “p.c. culture” as “empathy culture.” The culture Chait describes, to the extent it can be called a culture at all, doesn’t impede progress. To the contrary, it helps progress along. It is a way of adjusting — fitfully, awkwardly — to an environment, political and otherwise, that gives so many of us newfound exposure to each other.
Anne Theriault writes:
Rather than understand how trauma works, or recognize that trigger warnings are, in fact, about giving people the choice when and where to engage with potentially upsetting content, Chait prefers to patronizingly pooh-pooh the whole idea. Instead of recognizing that most people use trigger warnings as a way to facilitate the “controlled exposure” to trauma experts recommend — because, again, trigger warnings give readers the choice to make sure that they are in a safe space and a healthy mindset before engaging with potentially triggering content — he prefers to believe that anyone who asks for a content warning is a mewling infant who should just get over it already.
Chait can’t see these people arguing with him. He read the pieces, obviously; he just got the wrong thing out of them. So, when Michelle Goldberg, whom he name-checks several times, writes:
At one point, Chait describes a torrent of online derision directed at his friend Hanna Rosin under the hashtag #RIPpatriarchy. In Chait’s version, the hashtag is a reaction to her book, The End of Men, which, he writes, “argued that a confluence of social and economic changes left women in a better position going forward than men, who were struggling to adapt to a new postindustrial order.” In fact, the hashtag was spurred by a related Slate piece with the trollish headline, “The Patriarchy is Dead: Feminists, accept it.” The patriarchy not being dead, feminists did not accept it. That’s not stifling political correctness. It’s responding to speech with more speech.
He doesn’t respond to that. He instead responds, every word oozing smugness, to the crazy idea that a white, cisgender, heterosexual male shaking his head at mansplaining, whitesplaining, and straightsplaining might have some skin in the game: “That settling these questions through reason rather than through appeals to identity has become controversial is, of course, my point.”
He doesn’t want us to focus on the clickbait-y title — “Can a white male liberal critique the country’s current political-correctness craze (which, by the way, hurts liberals most)? We’re sure you’ll let us know.” (Chait calls it “playful” and provocative). Heavens no, he doesn’t want us to focus on him . He doesn’t want us to focus on his Draco Malfoy-worthy sneer and his Lucius Malfoy-worthy condescension. He wants us to focus on his content, which transparently chaitflates, which never gives a fair definition of the p.c. culture it aims to attack, which makes claims it never backs up, which writes checks it never cashes. He wants us to focus on his rebuttals, which misread and elide the inconvenient arguments mustered by his interlocutors.
We’ll start, again, from the premise that Jonathan Chait isn’t an idiot and can, in fact, read. Start there, and you are kind of forced to the conclusion that he’s eminently full of shit.
Chait wants to be considered a good-faith actor in all of this. I suppose that means his sin is my sin: I, too, want nothing more than to both troll and to be taken seriously. The difference is that Chait is a well-known and well-respected writer, and I’m, well, Some Guy with a Twitter Account — which I think makes his sin a little more galling.
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I was going to write an affirmative case for p.c. culture, but after all that, I’m just too damn tired. Chait’s a smart man, and he can read just fine. If he deigns to figure out how microaggressions are, in fact, still aggressions or why it’s good that it’s becoming evermore déclassé to voice racist/misogynistic/transphobic/homophobic drivel, then he can Google just as well as I can.
It should be self-evident, too, that there are times and places where speech acts should be considered inappropriate. While certainly governed by the same laws, safe spaces shouldn’t be governed by the same social norms as op-ed pages. Similarly, just as some speech acts are too outside the bounds of the mainstream to be taken seriously by society writ large, some speech acts are too outside the bounds of liberal thought to be taken seriously by liberals.
I’m a leftist. I’m a proud p.c.-er. I believe fervently that words can be dangerous (just look at what Anita Sarkeesian released — and on the same day as Chait’s piece no less) and that the safety of oppressed groups should be every progressive’s priority. I also believe that there’s a time and a place for fighting words and a time and a place for safety. The question of how much, where, and when we should fight and how much, where, and when we should shame into silence is a fair and good question. It’s also one that needs a serious answer — and quickly.
But it’s not a question for trolls to answer. It’s not a question for Jonathan Chait.
