Who should we be friends with? | Bloomberg 2020 could be good for the left
In our divided and hypermoralized era, is it virtuous or traitorous to befriend someone from a different political tribe?
That’s the question surrounding a viral New York Times column last week celebrating a budding friendship between Eve Peyser, a Bernie Sanders-loving writer for Vice, and Bari Weiss, a conservative editor and writer for the New York Times’ op-ed section. The two journalists, who co-wrote the column in the form of a dialogue, describe hating each other on Twitter but then discovering upon meeting in person that they can actually get along quite well. To their surprise, by doing things like swimming and eating homemade bread together and avoiding much talk about politics, they’ve apparently been able to build something of a bond. At the end of the column the Times encourages readers to invite their own social media foes out to coffee.
Here’s what I learned from this column: nothing. It should not be a revelation to anyone that two thoughtful people who have the intention of being kind to each other and avoid any actual issues that cause friction can have a pretty good time together, especially when they’ve got a lot in common demographically speaking. Most people possess this ability and exercise it regularly with no expectation of public celebration (see: most Thanksgiving dinners in America). The column was well-intentioned, but it would’ve been far more illuminating if they had discussed how they dealt with navigating actual points of disagreement — the reason they disliked each other in the first place!
What’s been more interesting to me than the article itself, however, has been the reaction to it. For some swaths of the Internet left, it appears that Peyser has committed a bigger sin: selling out. On social media she’s been criticized and mocked relentlessly for betraying leftists by being chummy with Weiss, and in the week since then her tweets unrelated to the column and even her Instagram account has been met with Weiss-related harassment.
I don’t have any interest in defending the column. But I think some of the responses to it, which amount to an attempt at revoking Peyser’s leftie credentials, are … disconcerting. Like the column itself, they fail to clarify how we should think about the ethics of friendship with ideological adversaries. And they show a left that values the instant satisfaction of cliquishness over the hard, patient work required to grow.
The simplest and strongest moral argument from the left against Peyser’s relationship with Weiss is that one must be intolerant of intolerance, and that being overly chummy with her and not discussing their points of disagreement raises the specter of complicity with Weiss’s pushback against #MeToo and her reactionary politics on Israel, liberal multiculturalism, and so on. Will Peyser temper her public criticism of Weiss and her crowd because of her new social initiative?
But instead of asking Peyser that question or encouraging her to have those difficult conversations with Weiss, lots of leftie Twitter instantly decided that Peyser had already gone too far, deeming her a grifter.
In particular, people pointed out that Peyser's ability to sit down with a right-wing opponent is an elite luxury. It speaks to a kind of privilege many people whose very existence is under siege in the Trump era can’t afford, and plays into the Beltway trope of politics as tribal quirk or irrational preoccupation rather than an expression of one’s actual values and interests. “You can only be friends with someone you disagree with politically if the issues don’t really matter to you,” said one critic of the article.
While these ideas can be true in some situations, I think that they be can be taken too far — and be dangerous.
Is sitting down with an ideological opponent only an elite endeavor? Well, no. Most people are capable of compartmentalizing emotions and managing close relationships with people they have sharp ideological disagreements with: family members, childhood friends, co-workers, soccer teammates, fellow church members, etc. It can be very trying, and it doesn’t always work out, but it’s pretty common, and certainly not something that only elites do. I am surprised this isn’t self-evident. I think love is naturally multifaceted and pluralistic, and this ability to co-exist with people we have problems with is key to human flourishing.
Can you only be friends with someone you disagree with if the issues don’t matter to you? The simplest counter-argument to this I can think of comes in the form of two documentaries: “Accidental Courtesy” and “White Right: Meeting the enemy.” In “Accidental Courtesy,” Daryl Davis, a black musician, explains how in his spare time he befriends members of the KKK and seeks to get them to answer the question: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” He claims he has used the friendships, which often span years, to convince over 200 Klansmen to give up their robes.
In “White Right,” Khan, a filmmaker whose parents are from Afghanistan and Pakistan, sits down with various kinds of neo-Nazis and interrogates them about their beliefs. In the making of the documentary, she seeks to understand her subjects intimately and get along with them. By the end of the documentary, multiple Nazis describe either stepping back from or disavowing their white supremacist beliefs and specifically cite her friendship as a part of the reason.
Davis and Khan are people of color — they put their lives at risk during these interactions, which involved blunt confrontations with their interlocutors. And they formed friendships with people who want them extinct precisely because they cared about the issues. I’m not necessarily advocating for this model of activism, and I don’t think it’s particularly efficient, but the point is that sitting down with adversaries is not just the province of apolitical elites who put nothing on the line.
In addition to changing minds, there are of course other reasons to befriend an ideological opponent. Friendship can help sparring intellectuals understand each other's worldviews, it can help warring politicians generate the trust required to govern, it can help activists form coalitions around shared interests. (It is of course crucial to communicate moral objections during this process.)
In my eyes, the most disheartening element of all of this has been the impulse to expel someone from the left. Currently the left is ascendant and has brighter prospects than it’s had in decades, and yet it has a contingent that’s ready to pounce on people’s departures from the online playbook of Acceptable Leftie Activity. At a moment of historic opportunity for expansion, there are people who are eager to restrict access. At a moment when the left needs to experiment with how to increase its appeal to different kinds of communities, there are people keen on policing its borders, patrolling with one hand on their baton at all times. This tendency is underpinned by a binary moral code in which people are swiftly deemed, in millennial Internet parlance, either "good" or "bad."
I often feel nostalgia for the Occupy movement — for the big tent leftism, the abundance of good faith among those who gathered under its banner, the feeling that like at a religious temple, that one could make mistakes and be forgiven. I think we need more of that today.
In the Guardian: A Bloomberg 2020 run would help the left – by failing spectacularly
I had an op-ed in the Guardian last week, check it out:
"The former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is seriously considering running for president as a Democrat – a prospect that has horrified many progressives. At a time when the Democratic party appears to be moving swiftly to the left, the candidacy of a white, centrist Wall Street billionaire feels like a big step backwards.
But a Bloomberg run should ultimately benefit the left more than hurt it. Between his stale politics, his stiffness as a campaigner, and his identity as a restrained elite in an era of raucous populism, Bloomberg’s bid to secure the Democratic nomination seems destined to fail spectacularly. More importantly, the pushback he’d experience on the campaign trail would help the left form clearer standards for more viable candidates – and indict the Democratic establishment that helped get us into the mess we’re in today.
As one of the richest men in America, Bloomberg has a colossal war chest, an ego to match it, and substantial name recognition. But he’s also woefully out of touch with the political moment: the Democratic party – and progressive politics more broadly – have changed a great deal since he left politics five years ago.
Read the rest in the Guardian!
Clarification
In the last newsletter, I linked to Neil deGrasse Tyson's response to sexual misconduct allegations and called it "fishy." It appears that some people thought I was referring to the accusations as fishy when in fact I was trying to cast doubt on Tyson's account! In particular I was shocked by what seems to be an attempt at slut-shaming a woman who accused him of rape by sharing how she had gotten pregnant out of wedlock some years later.
What I'm reading
I've always been torn between Lena Dunham's intelligence as a writer and her stupidity in her public commentary outside the writer's room, but this appalling incident has finally pushed me to realize that she just sucks and that her ego is her principal project.
This potent quote from Michelle Obama is probably more radical than most anything her husband has said during his career: "I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of, I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the U.N.: They are not that smart."
Should leftie freshmen in Congress take a cue from the infamous Freedom Caucus?
Chart: extreme poverty is on the rise in the US.
The Pentagon's $21 trillion accounting fraud.
The planet's worst mass extinction may parallel climate change today.
Maybe more Democratic stars should be thinking about running for senate in 2020 instead of president.
Freddie deBoer critiques comic book movies: "In life you should want there to be an arc to your tastes."
The podcast Chapo Trap House's takedown of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, which is shuttering, is fun and informative. Listen to it here (link should start around 35:30). I was surprised to learn that Weekly Standard founder Bill Krisol effectively drafted Sarah Palin into John McCain's campaign in 2008 — an incredible data point connecting high-brow conservatism and Trumpism.
Long read
The Trump-era threat to democracy is the opposite of populism
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