Badthink

Do you think the right thoughts, netizen? [Link]

The piece is written, as is the meme it describes, in the default code of today’s online social progressives, which I like to call We Are All Already Decided. This is the form of argument, and of comedy, that takes as its presumption that all good and decent people are already agreed on the issue in question. In fact, We Are All Already Decided presumes that the offense is not just in thinking the wrong thing you think but in not realizing that We Are All Already Decided that the thing you think is deeply ridiculous. And the embedded argument, such as it is, is not on the merits of whatever issue people are disagreeing about, but on the assumed social costs of being wrong about an issue on which We Are All Already Decided. Which is great, provided everybody you need to convince cares about being part of your little koffee klatsch. If not, well….

All of this, frankly, is politically ruinous. I meet and interact with a lot of young lefties who are just stunning rhetorically weak; they feel all of their politics very intensely but can’t articulate them to anyone who doesn’t share the same vocabulary, the same set of cultural and social signifiers that are used to demonstrate you’re one of the “right sort of people.” These kids are often great, they’re smart and passionate, I agree with them on most things, but they have no ability at all to express themselves to those who are not already in their tribe. They say terms like “privilege” or “mansplain” or “tone policing” and expect the conversation to somehow just stop, that if you say the magic words, you have won that round and the world is supposed to roll over to what you want. Zimmerman mocks the bingo-card nature of the sexism denialists and other assorted stupid creeps, but it’s hard to imagine a more formulaic political style than the kind she’s celebrating in her post. It’s a kind of faux-political parochialism where you have the same kind of lame in-jokes and worn-out slang that you did with the people you hung out with in high school, only instead of the topic being what Lorraine wore to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, it’s the most morally pressing issues of equal rights and social justice. But I can’t really blame them; that’s what they get rewarded for, online. They don’t get reblogs and likes and retweets for convincing people who aren’t already convinced. They get those digital strokes for making jokes. That’s what gets rewarded so that’s what gets repeated.

Unfortunately, those rewards are only social, not substantive. We have not, I’m sorry, moved to a “one zinger, one vote” system of government. And the self-same attitude that works great if you treat all of politics as a competition to see who can be the most clever does not work so hot if you treat politics as a way to get people to come around to your side. Not out of a desire to be nice; not because you want to make friends with them. Because that’s what politics is, trying to convince people of stuff. And you have to do that in a broken world. But the idiom of aggressive condescension and blank derision is not going to convince anybody, no matter how well trained people are to ape it.