Mean Drunks and Hair Triggers
The effects of political addiction
Don’t Have to Go Home, Just Can’t Stay Here
When I was in college, there was a wide receiver on the Georgia football team named Fred Gibson. He was sort of an interesting story. He was a great football player — he ended up being one of the best receivers in school history — but he didn’t particularly like football. He didn’t even play football until 10th grade, and after college he went through the motions of trying to make it in the NFL, but he never got past a spot on the practice squad. I remember reading an article in the school paper about him, where they interviewed [I think] a former teammate, who was just baffled that Gibson didn’t make more of an NFL career for himself. I can’t find the article now, but one of the quotes stuck with me — it was something along the lines of “I don't understand how you can be so good at something but not have passion for it.”
I think about that concept sort of a lot. Talent, in most cases, isn’t enough. There has to be ambition. I have a little experience with it. As some of you may know, I am/was a somewhat accomplished pianist. It’s something I enjoy doing and briefly — incredibly briefly, hardly at all — considered doing it as a career. But as much as I enjoy doing it, and as much as it came naturally to me, I figured that to make a living as a pianist, it required a level of dedication that I simply did not possess. Meanwhile, you can just be a so-so technical writer and do pretty well. So I did that instead. Work smarter not harder, y’know?
Another area where I seem to have the skills but not the zeal is, well, political argumentation. It makes me quite a strange person, I admit. It’s also sort of a weird thing to say for a guy who writes a lot about politics as a hobby. So yes, I have a lot of hard opinions. I know what I believe and why I believe it. I even enjoy talking about politics and political philosophy. But I haaaaate arguing about it. That surprises a lot of people. I’ve had friends attempt to recruit me to join social media arguments in which they’re engaged as some sort of political mercenary, and they’re baffled when I inform them that I’d rather slide down a sandpaper hill into a pond of rubbing alcohol. I am so allergic to confrontation that I can think of few things less pleasant than a contentious political argument. (My wife has needled me on more than one occasion for pretending to agree with something she knows I completely disagree with just so a social situation wouldn’t get uncomfortable.) As singer-songwriter Elliott Smith once relayed to fellow musician (and personal favorite of mine) Ben Folds: “When you grow up with yelling in your house, the last thing you want to do is make records of yelling.” Folds went on to say “That, I think, speaks volumes about what's been wrong with modern rock music, which is that we have a lot of people who are yelling as a recreation. [...] They're just acting.” Replace “rock music” in that sentence with “political commentary” and I think it’s every bit as applicable. It is utterly bizarre to me that people yell about politics as a recreation. But many people do, and they do so performatively. There’s a lot of money to be made in the perpetual outrage and grievance game.
To be fair, I’m not blameless in this. As much as I’m allergic to confrontation and yelling, I'm not above snark. In college, I wrote for (and later ran) a conservative student newspaper; and I got a kick out of ruffling feathers. I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about how Cameron Diaz’s political activism was a convincing argument for repealing women’s suffrage. And when a professor on campus gave a quote to the school newspaper about how he wanted to be the “Moses” of the gun control movement, I snarked that I was completely on board with him aimlessly wandering the desert for decades before his eventual death. Am I proud of that? I mean, as a joke I think it’s pretty solid, but as political discourse it was...unhelpful. In my defense, however, I was 20 years old. Which isn’t to say that I grew out of it quickly. My friends who were fans of Barack Obama certainly didn’t care for my Facebook posts from 2008-2016. And then my friends (and relatives) who are/were fans of Donald Trump really haven’t cared for my Facebook posts since, oh, 2015. A friend of mine often jokes that I lost most of my Facebook friends during the Obama presidency, and then the rest during the Trump presidency.
I’ll definitely cop to likely being the most-hidden person on Facebook, and even though I have an almost pathological inability to keep my opinions to myself, I nevertheless pride myself on being able to maintain friendships across the political spectrum. An old pollster friend of mine mentioned an AEI study from last year that found that 28% of progressives and 10% of conservatives reported ending a friendship over politics. I'd be curious to get more granular on that — i.e., are these people ending friendships because of disagreements on policy issues, or how those disagreements manifest themselves? I look at it like drugs and alcohol. I don’t particularly care if my friends drink or even do recreational drugs. None of my business. But if the booze and/or drugs turned them into belligerent pricks, I would almost certainly remove myself from their lives. Would I be ending a friendship over drugs and alcohol? Not really. It’s just that hanging out with mean-drunks is a drag.
I personally cannot imagine ending a friendship over mere policy disagreements; even on highly contentious issues like abortion, guns, centralized medicine, whatever. I couldn’t live where I live and work where I work if I was cutting people off because of their politics. It would be a lonely existence. But I will end (and have ended) friendships over people being assholes about their politics. You can believe whatever you want, but if you’re pleasant to be around we’ll get along just fine. I have friends who, in another time, would’ve been Bastille-storming Jacobins. We get past it. Similarly, I don't care if we agree on every single issue — if you’re a petulant troll, I’m not going to enjoy your company. And tragically, one of the major political developments over the last several years is the fact that petulant trollery has become the defining characteristic for most of one major party in America and [at least] the base of the other. A sizable portion of the electorate has pushed all-in on cranky assholery. It’s been instructive, I guess, albeit disappointing.
When I was 20 years old and my chief objective was to upset progressives, this sort of environment would’ve been perfect. But now that I’m pushing 40 (buh), trolling the libs just seems like a waste of everyone’s time. And it’s weird — I these days I get labeled a moderate squish because I’m not a spittle-flecked ogre; even though I haven’t moved left on a single policy and the Republican platform has adopted multiple traditionally Democrat issues from restrictionist trade to dovish foreign policy. But “the Right,” broadly understood, no longer measures politics by policy issues and where they are in relation to the center. It’s simply a matter of how aggressively you oppose “the Left” and how angry you are while doing it. A sizable portion of the electorate, particularly among those who identify as Republicans, have made performative anger and “recreational yelling” about politics a core of their identity. There is no issue too small about which to have an angry opinion, and every cultural development is a conspiracy against the good standing order of America and much be opposed as such. And, at least in my experience, such people are just human toothaches to be around. So I spend my time elsewhere. Does that count as “ending friendships” (or familial relationships) over politics? I've been accused of it, but I don’t think that’s fair.
It took me a long time (almost 40 years!) to realize that I wasn’t obligated to humor people who made life unenjoyable. But no one would ever argue that you had to let a mean-drunk ruin your cookout otherwise you weren’t being a good friend. Or if, say, you disinvited your mean-drunk uncle from Thanksgiving. It just so happens that our political culture is turning a lot of our fellow citizens into mean-drunks. At a certain point we have to recognize these people’s agency. They’re within their rights to be mean-drunks, but that doesn’t obligate the rest of us to let them continue to ruin birthday parties and holidays. If they aren’t willing to rein in their behavior, we’re within our rights to show them the door.
Cannibalistic Cancel Culture
The Washington Post on Monday suspended for a month one of its most prominent political reporters, Dave Weigel, for his retweet of an untoward joke. Just so you know what level of joke we’re talking about here, it was: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” As a joke, I give it a C-. It’s more clever than funny.
But one of Weigel’s Post colleagues, Felicia Sonmez, took to Twitter to lambast Weigel for his indiscretion; after which Weigel removed the retweet and publicly apologized. That apparently wasn’t penance enough for Sonmez, who also raised the issue on the Post’s internal messaging platform (which includes Post leadership).
Another Post writer, Jose Del Real, offered a tepid defense of Weigel and slight criticism of Sonmez’s public handling of it:
To which Sonmez replied:
Sonmez continued to go after the Post and Weigel, sharing internal emails from the Post’s executive editor:
…and retweeting criticism of her colleagues:
So Dave Weigel gets suspended for a month — without pay, it should be noted — for a vaguely inappropriate joke; meanwhile Felicia Sonmez can publicly criticize her colleagues with the resulting Twitter mob and receives no consequences. Hmm.
Not for nothing, but I did some quick back of the envelope math. Assuming Dave Weigel makes $90,000 a year, he probably takes home around $5,000 a month after taxes and benefits. So he’s essentially being fined $5,000 for retweeting a dumb joke.
I ran that by some lawyer friends of mine just to see what kind of crime you would have to commit to get fined $5,000, and it’s surprisingly difficult. You basically have to commit a federal felony or various enhanced misdemeanors, probably something to do with selling illegal drugs and/or guns. But a journalist retweeting a gag about women? That’ll do it for the Post.
I mostly think the panic around “Cancel Culture” is overblown; but it’s undeniable that there are people out there like Felicia Sonmez who have axes to grind and are watching people with the intensity of a gameshow contestant eager to buzz in, just waiting for their opportunity to mash that button at the first sign of a misstep. And for what?
Is this the kind of culture we want to foster? Where even the most inconsequential infractions — it was a retweet of a dumb joke, for God’s sake! — lead to substantial professional consequences? Would that be an improvement of our society?
I don’t know Dave Weigel personally, but I have read his work for years, he’s probably one of the people I’ve followed on Twitter the longest, and I’ve listened to him on many o’ podcast. All indications are he’s a decent guy. Certainly not some virulent sexist or chauvinist. Moreover, he apologized genuinely, immediately, and publicly. We should be encouraging such apologies to be accepted, not ignoring them and instead demanding the proverbial pound of flesh.
The irony is that we’re getting to a point where such culture is mostly affecting the Left. Any organization to the right of the Post would have told Sonmez to get a grip and subjected Weigel to maybe an HR presentation. To suspend the guy for a month and fine him like a drug dealer is almost incomprehensible to me, and I think unsustainable. And any system that is not sustainable must eventually stop.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Languages
Clue: Until the 20th century, this was the international language of diplomacy.
French
Today’s clue:
Category: Legal Vocabulary
Clue: Someone who dies intestate did so without one of these in place.
Dispatches from the Homefront
This morning my older daughter wanted to take one of her toys to school for Show and Share. I had to explain to her that Show and Share was on Friday, and that it was only Wednesday. And after spending more time than I should’ve on that, she then simply insisted it was Friday all along.