Swan Song Part II - The Game (Or, What Do These People Even Believe?)

We've spent a lot of time railing against the scourge of bothsiderism, that insistence that Both Sides are symmetrical in their awfulness and bear comparable weight for every social problem we have, with the right answer inevitably lying in some hypothetical spot in the middle. Most of the authors I've featured here have been bothsiderists/Sensible Centrists/Very Serious People/whatever else you care to call them, and I've learned a few things from reading their horrible books and columns and peeking in on their doomed projects du jour and tearing it all apart. In the interest of proving that I've gotten something out of all of this, here is my final report.

Bothsiderism: The Basics

So let's start off with the obvious: Bothsiderists are to the right of center. This shouldn't be a shock to anyone who's familiar with this terminology; "Sensible Centrist" is a misnomer, although it does reflect how they view themselves (but we'll get to that). Most of these pundits got their start writing for conservative opinion journals or working for the Reagan or George W. Bush administrations before realizing that the "conservative" label was holding back their careers and identifying as a "moderate" or "independent" was much smarter. It's funny how so many independents appeared in elite media circles after the Dubya White House imploded in 2007, isn't it?

To be fair, most of these "independents" are not doctrinaire movement conservatives - they only agree with Republicans on 90% of all issues. In practice, they are conservative on all issues except for those areas where liberals are obviously winning. They were ahead of the curve on LGBT issues (although they're still not sure about transgender issues), hold some kind of mushy, halfway-there environmentalist stance on climate change, and generally don't exhibit the xenophobia of the sweaty GOP masses. Move beyond those mostly social issues and into the realm of fiscal or international policy and they're pretty hardline conservatives.

In the past, I've suggested that bothsiderists are a people obsessed with avoiding conflict, and this aversion to controversy is their primary motivator. When No Labels released a policy guide that they had literally focus tested, it seemed to back that up. But lately, I've been questioning this. If they really wanted to be popular (or at least not unpopular), they'd keep moving to the left, but they haven't. If anything, this recent obsession with "identity politics" and their constant complaints about college students, transgender activists, and unruly minority types suggest that if anything they're trying to pull back to the right, using the insanity of the current White House (and to a much lesser extent, the Congress) as a cover.

If bothsiderists aren't just paleocons trying to get a seat at the popular table, then is it possible that they have an ideology all their own? I think so, and while that worldview is still fundamentally conservative, it is quite distinct from what we would consider "conservatism."

American Aristocracy

I established in Part I that one of the central beliefs in the Club is that the affluent are superior to the underclasses for reasons aside from money - that indeed, money isn't even the critical difference between the two. This is central to the elite worldview, but it's not the whole thing. Studying the thoughts of the bothsiderist and his allies, I've winnowed the ideology down to nine basic tenets:

1. A declinist worldview in which (regardless of tangible progress) some notion of morality and civility is in decay;
2. A general disdain for politics, particularly for grassroots activism aimed at fixing specific problems;
3. A noblesse oblige-like view that social elites ought to take charge of the underclasses, whom they view as unable to manage their own lives;
4. An extreme skepticism of utopian ideas, resulting in a view that all "serious" policy is zero-sum and must be considered in terms of winners and losers;
5. A defensive respect toward "institutions," namely the military, organized religion, "the family," and the media;
6. A consequent fear of other influential organizations, especially those involving the internet;
7. A belief in the need for a strong national identity that replaces all other "identities" in the political sphere;
8. A perception of strong political beliefs as "orthodoxies" passed on solely through indoctrination, and therefore not worth engaging;
9. A consequent view of their own political beliefs as rational/pragmatic/common sense policies that are in some way beyond partisan politics.

If you had a mind to, you could refine this even further. For example, let's winnow it down to what bothsiderists view as our main problems:

• Lack of unity/civility
• Lack of humility as seen in insufficient deference to tradition/one's superiors
• An unwillingness to sacrifice

We could play this game all day, but you get the point.

Does all of this seem vaguely aristocratic to you? Especially in light of the last post? To me, it sounds like the cries of the old noble class in the waning generations of the birthright system, bemoaning the rise of money and the growing power of that gaudy peasant capitalist class.

The complaints from our betters are different only in context - the sentiment is the same. Social media (or blogs back in the day) is evil because it gives power to ignorant peasants who don't know how to properly wield it. People agitating for their own interests are practicing "tribalism" - they'd be better served if they just quieted down and let more neutral minds do what's good for everyone. And "populism" - whatever the fuck that even means from moment to moment - is the absolute worst because it means that the peasants think they're able to make decisions for themselves.

Bothsiderist pundits are upset because they don't have the influence they feel they should have. That's a weird thing to say given that half the books I read contain fawning, ebullient praise of David Brooks. Yes, he has a tremendous amount of influence...among other elites. The hoi polloi clearly don't give a shit what he has to say. There was a time (possibly a mythical time) when "public intellectuals" held a lot more sway over the voting habits of the simple, humble folk, but they're just not listening anymore. Perhaps if we all humbly read more popular autobiographies, then "WWDBD?" wristbands would surge in popularity.

An implication of all of this is that democracy has come under threat precisely because we've stopped listening to Very Serious bothsiderist types. Some pundits love to make doomsday predictions about the end of democracy, based on evidence as nebulous as "incivility" or as concrete as a garbage poll of college students presented by Even the Liberal Brookings Institution. We wouldn't have this civility problem (the worst problem we as a nation have, according to affluent white men) if the voters would just listen to the adults like they did in the Good Old Days. They are sincere about wanting democracy, but not American democracy, which has been an ugly and rancorous affair for over two hundred years. The ideal system is one in which we privilege the children to speak and listen to them, but never defer to them - something more like Hong Kong democracy.

But Where Does "Both Sides" Enter Into It?

That's a very good question, as tenets #8 and #9 don't quite fit in with the ones above them. There's a very notable uptick in bothsiderism any time conservatism takes a hit in the public eye, so the most obvious explanation is that it's all about saving face. There's certainly truth to that, but I think the notion of symmetrical badness actually stems from the ideology itself.

As you might guess from the "no labels" and "country over party" rhetoric, bothsiderists like to place themselves above mere politics. The best explanation for this appeared in the middle of Tom Scocca's epic-length 2013 article "On Smarm":

The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm. Smarm, whether political or literary, insists that the audience accept the priors it has been given...

...In this, as in so many other parts of contemporary politics, members of the self-identified center are in some important sense unable to accept opposition. Through smarm, they have cut themselves off from the language of actual dispute. An entire political agenda—privatization of government services, aggressive policing, charter schooling, cuts in Social Security—has been packaged as apolitical, a reasonable consensus about necessity. Those who oppose the agenda are "interest groups," whose selfish greed makes them unable to see reason, or "ideologues." Those who promote it are disinterested and nonideological. There is no reason for the latter to even engage the former. In smarm is power.

This is a dead-on description of the bothsiderist agenda. Your ideas on policy are ideological, my ideas on policy are ideological, and their ideas on policy are the rational ideal for what a government should be. The goal of the bothsiderist is not to move the much-referenced Overton Window, but rather to narrow it. But rather than promote their own beliefs (which aren't of interest to most of the peasants), they work the other way and strive to depict beliefs outside of their own as radical, dangerous, selfish, short-sighted or thoughtless. And this leads me to #8.

Coincidentally, a perfect example of this popped up as I was writing the first part. As with so many awful political articles, it first appeared in Politico. Either you've already seen it or you'll recognize the style very quickly:

On a recent March morning, as a nor’easter walloped an idyllic Brooklyn street with snow, members of the Park Slope Food Coop ambled inside, shopping for bargains on broccolini and organic wheatgrass. I was here under somewhat false pretenses, as a reporter from out of state to tour the co-op—the truth, but not the whole truth.

At the door, a young blond woman told me I wasn’t welcome to roam a single organic-mango punctuated aisle unless under the supervision of a co-op member. She instructed me to take an elevator upstairs, where I would find a customer service desk. There, I met several members. I told them I had traveled here to take the political temperature of Clinton Country. This place, I explained, seemed to be the epicenter of liberal consensus.

6,000 words of this, folks. Adam Wren, the author, claimed it was "satire" when people called him out on it. Like Yastreblyansky, I'm willing to believe him, but only in that sense that the author still  believes that what he's writing is accurate on some level.

Broad stereotypes like the ones in that article live on in part because they are very useful to bothsiderists. Articles like this, with their japes about "bubbles" and presumption that, in Yas's words, that "all 66 million of us lived within three miles of the Brooklyn Bridge," make it easier to depict divergent ideas as mere orthodoxy.

Perhaps there is some truth to that. After all, didn't I get my ideas from a "bubble" on the Upper East Side? Some of that article rings true - the regular trips to co-ops and farmer's markets for organic produce, the multicultural educational programs with teachers carefully selected to represent the whole spectrum of human diversity. The cocktail parties, too - not that I ever partook, but I remember listening to in-depth conversations on the plight of the poor and American imperialism. It was the same thing I heard from my teachers and relatives and, down the line, other kids. No one ever explicitly stifled conservative thought, but it was silently muted through the gag of acceptable discourse. Was I really given a choice to make up my own mind when every pair of lips spoke in the same voice?

Actually, the above paragraph is a total lie.

...Well, let's call it "satire."

In reality, I grew up in western Kansas in a small town that served as a trial balloon in the effort to get "intelligent design" into schools via Of Pandas and People. We had textbooks with "Only a theory" stickers in the front and teachers who warned us not to take the Lord's name in vain when getting our grades because this was offensive to Christians. There were kids who told lynching jokes (because it was so outrageous) and, after 9/11, some of them even talked openly about how we should be killing more Arabs. There was even a lovely group of football players who threatened a kid because they thought he was anti-American.

There was no "liberal orthodoxy" or "blue bubble." I considered myself a Republican (if only because all the teachers were) until I took a political position test in the 8th grade that revealed that I really far to the left. No indoctrination, just the same life experience that shapes anyone's personal philosophy.

But as far as the bothsiderists are concerned, I can't exist, nor can the millions of others just like me. Their philosophy is based on the notion that their own beliefs (which they view not as "beliefs" but as basic facts) are the default and people only hold those other, wrong beliefs if they've been inducted into some radical orthodoxy. Everyone is born seeing the logic in small, sensible government with technocratic "pro-growth" policies and efforts to promote marriage as the sole fix for poverty, and only constant brainwashing from the moment of birth can change that.

If my beliefs resulted from my own rationality, morals, and personal experiences, then they are legitimate; if I've built a case from those beliefs, then they are worthy of engagement. If, on the other hand, my beliefs stem from some faith-like orthodoxy, implying that I've never thought about them, then they are illegitimate and much easier to dismiss. Thus, to the bothsiderist, ever belief outside of their own narrow center-right selection of preferred policies can be ignored - not because those policies are wrong (which they assume anyway) but because the people espousing them are not being Sensible. It's the ad hominem attack turned into a whole philosophy that, ironically, accuses others of being excessively negative and hostile.

But then again, a radical and inferior peasant like me would say that.

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Thanks for sitting through all of this nonsense. If you're interested in keeping up with whatever bullshit I try and accomplish down the line, I have a Twitter account that I'm sure I won't abandon inside of a month.