It used to be that if your neighbor had a yard sign for a political candidate you despised, that didn’t prevent you from having pleasant neighborly chats about how well their garden is growing this year, or inviting them to your BBQ, or whatever. I think this is another area where we’re still adjusting to social media. The anti-Gnus were always anxious to reduce everything to personal relationships: Richard Dawkins writing a book titled “The God Delusion” was supposedly the equivalent of telling grandma (it was always grandma for some reason) on her deathbed that her religious beliefs are silly, Christopher Hitchens being harsh in a public debate was the same as telling your uncle at Thanksgiving dinner that he’s evil for going to church, etc. It reminds me of the old debates about Gnu Atheism. We don’t have to work with them, we don’t see them in the halls every day. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us should mince words about what the conservative justices are doing. It would have made the job really miserable, and wouldn’t have accomplished anything: Scalia wasn’t going to suddenly support women’s rights because of a scowl from a colleague. There’s no reason that, e.g., Ginsburg should have gone to work every day dreading seeing Scalia in the courtroom and avoiding him in the hallways and shooting nasty glances across the conference room table because they are ideologically opposed. And I think that was a good thing for them, and did no harm to the causes they each supported. They all tended to speak highly of their colleagues and how well they got along personally. I think Ginsburg and Scalia went to the opera together some of the others were regular bridge partners. I don’t want to “unify” with someone like that, and as I’m unlikely to ever meet or work with Douthat, I couldn’t give a shit if he’s offended by people like me characterizing his views harshly.Įxample 2: This has changed in recent years for reasons that are all too apparent, but it used to be the case that some people were surprised by how well some Supreme Court justices got along. But that doesn’t change the fact that Douthat is (among other things) a theocrat who thinks The Handmaid’s Tale is an aspirational story. If I ever met him, I’d be polite and chances are we’d have a perfectly civil encounter. And if you’re Klein in particular, who is a NYT colleague, you kind of need to get along professionally. I have no doubt that liberals like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias genuinely like the guy, and probably for good personal reasons. He seems nice in the podcasts and dialogues I’ve heard him have with liberals over the years, and that’s quite a few since he used to be a semi-regular on Bloggingheads back when I followed it.
I’m sure Ross Douthat is a swell guy and easy to get along with. I just mean that the stakes are different for them, in both directions: they’re often insulated from the consequences of the other side’s policies, yet they feel conflict more sharply because of the work and social circles in which they live.Įxample 1: Opinion columnists/pundits. I don’t mean just “they’re the elite and we’re the common folk,” though that can be part of it. I think part of the problem is that these pundits live in a different world than the rest of us. For those of us who were considered at the extreme, but suddenly find the Overton window shifted so that the extreme is actually now extreme, but being mainstreamed, making nice isn’t always a good answer. The problem is, the extremes and fringes are so ridiculous and so shouty.
It is fine to divide into different sides if you have different values and different goals. Acquiescing to nonsense, whether from the right or the left, is not going to get us a better world. In many issues, too, the answer could lie at one of the extremes, somewhere between but closer to one of the extremes, or many other places. If I say 2+2=4, and you say 2+2=6, we aren’t going to get a better answer by saying 2+2=5.
News flash for pundits: The “middle” doesn’t always hold the answer. So we are supposed to give up half of what we believe, and they are? To meet halfway between? In some utopian middle? They don’t indicate which side we should unify around, but for some reason, it always becomes some vague, nebulous “middle”. But the problem with the columnists who say this, and which my husband was mocking, is that they don’t realize that for many of us, that means walking in lockstep with someone whom we disagree with on most things. In some ways, that’s right, we do need strength in numbers. My husband was highly critical this morning of something he read saying we need to unify.
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