I used to follow the liberal writer Matt Bruenig’s columns on politics and economics, but I stopped reading a while ago. Although I agreed with him more often than not, he radiated an attitude of aggressive contempt for anyone who disagreed with him that I found insufferable. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to hear about this:
After multiple conversations, Matt Bruenig and Demos have agreed to disagree on the value of the attack mode on Twitter. We part ways on the effectiveness of these kinds of personalized, online fights and so we are parting ways as colleagues today. And just as we did with Matt three years ago when he first joined our blog, Demos will continue to find and amplify the voices of lesser-known progressive policy commentators to make for a more inclusive public sphere.
Bruenig was fired by his employer, the progressive think tank Demos, after getting in a Twitter spat with two other liberal writers, Joan Walsh and Neera Tanden, whom he called “dishonest”, “geriatric”, “scumbag”, and accused them of “starving poor mothers”, among other epithets. This was the culmination of a long pattern of belligerent behavior on Bruenig’s part. Disturbingly, many observers said that he was far more likely to engage in this hostile, abusive rhetoric against women and people of color.
Given that Bruenig is a Sanders supporter and Walsh and Tanden are backing Clinton, there’s a political element to this as well. As the Democratic primary winds down, some of Sanders’ most fervent supporters are becoming prone to raging outbursts and conspiratorial thinking about how the nomination was “stolen” from them. We especially saw this in the Nevada fracas, where Sanders die-hards erupted in fury and death threats against the state party chair. Most disappointing to me, Bernie Sanders himself has fed the fire with inflammatory rhetoric which implied that his supporters were justified in lashing out against a corrupt establishment.
This attitude parallels something I’m used to from evangelical proselytizers who claim that the only reason people choose not to be Christian is because they want to sin and be evil: they “love darkness rather than light” (to use William Lane Craig’s phrasing), or to excuse their “sexual promiscuity and drug-taking” (Peter Hitchens). It’s also omnipresent in Ayn Randian philosophy, obviously: she maintained that all people who don’t share her political views are leeching subhumans who worship death and want to drain the lifeblood of the true producers and innovators who exemplify greatness.
The hostile rhetoric from some corners of the progressive movement about how Clinton supporters are corporate shills, unprincipled sellouts, or ignorantly voting against their own best interests, is just the liberal version of this well-poisoning rhetorical style. To be fair, it’s not confined to so-called Berniebros: Hillary Clinton-supporting “PUMAs” put forth similar arguments in 2008 when it became clear she was losing to Barack Obama.
In every case, it’s the same condescending and obnoxious assumption: that no one who disagrees with me could be doing so in good faith. Usually, it comes accompanied by the dogmatic belief that the absolute rightness of my beliefs is so plainly obvious that no one could possibly have legitimate reasons to see things differently than I do. It follows trivially that people who disagree must be doing so for illegitimate reasons, which makes them bad people who deserve to be shamed and berated until they admit how wrong they are.
If we reject this rhetoric when it comes from conservative Christians, rabid libertarians and other partisans of the right, then we have to reject it when it comes from our own side as well. We have to accept that people make the decisions they do because of reasons that make sense to them – not because they’re perverse devils who see the shining truth of your vision and maliciously want to keep it from getting out.
Now, obviously, this doesn’t mean that every belief is just as good as every other. Clearly, there are objective truths. Some opinions are true and others are false. But if you want to overcome this division and get everyone to agree on what the truth is, this is the first step: acknowledging that other people have reasons for what they believe, even if those reasons are only convincing to them. Only when you understand why people believe what they do can you have any hope of changing their minds. As long as you persist in asserting that the truth is obvious and you just have to bludgeon everyone into admitting it, the only thing you’ll achieve is to drive people further away and get them to dig in deeper.
That’s not to say that no one ever acts in bad faith. Again, this is a fact of human nature that should be obvious: some people obfuscate, mislead or just flat-out lie about their real intentions. But that should be a conclusion to draw as a last resort, with abundant evidence to support it, not the first explanation to reach for when confronted with someone who persists in what you see as error. And if your beliefs lead you to conclude that everyone who’s against you is acting in bad faith, you’ve almost certainly made an error somewhere.
This also doesn’t mean that heated rhetoric is always wrong. We should care deeply and passionately about injustices that weigh on people’s lives. And it’s true that “civility” has been misused to silence the grievances of the marginalized (“why are you atheists so angry?“). But you can be impassioned and even angry without being gratuitously abusive. It’s not “tone trolling” to say that violent, harassing rhetoric should have no place in discourse, no matter who it’s directed against. On the contrary, a basic level of civility is necessary for debate to happen at all.
Only when you know what people care about and what reasons they have for their views will you have a chance of persuading them, even if you think they’re completely wrong. That’s a lesson that applies alike to atheists and Christians, liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians. You don’t have to agree with your opponents’ reasons, but you have to know what they are. That’s why effective advocacy demands empathy – demands that we practice seeing the world from another point of view – and it’s not coincidental that this would also put an end to abuse and harassment as an instrument of persuasion.