By Emily Jashinsky
Monday, November 12, 2018
Matt Yglesias had a really bad opinion Thursday. He’s had
them on other days as well.
Tweeting in reaction to the demented mob that gathered
outside Tucker Carlson’s home Wednesday night, Yglesias, a writer for Vox,
asserted, “I think the idea behind terrorizing his family, like it or not as a
strategy, is to make them feel some of the fear that the victims of
MAGA-inspired violence feel thanks to the non-stop racial incitement coming
from Tucker, Trump, etc.”
He added, “I agree that this is probably not tactically
sound but if your instinct is to empathize with the fear of the Carlson family
rather than with the fear of his victims then you should take a moment to
reflect on why that is.”
Then it got worse. “I honestly cannot empathize with
Tucker Carlson’s wife at all — I agree that protesting at her house was
tactically unwise and shouldn’t be done — but I am utterly unable to identify
with her plight on any level,” Yglesias concluded.
Crucially, Yglesias’s argument is predicated on the
notion that Carlson’s conservative approach to immigration amounts to racism.
If you accept that premise (and you shouldn’t), the stakes are obviously
higher.
It reminds me of a bit in Louis C.K.’s last stand-up
special where he made an argument defending the intensity of pro-life
opposition to abortion. “They think babies are being murdered! What are they
supposed to be like? ‘Huh, it’s not cool, I don’t want to be a dick about it,
though. I don’t want to ruin their day as they murder several babies all the
time,'” the comedian quipped.
Yglesias’s tweet was obviously wrong-minded and
dangerous. It was also disturbingly cruel, which is made more disturbing by the
reality that others on the left likely share his sentiments. That’s exactly why
I’m glad he tweeted it.
After pushback from people across the political spectrum,
Yglesias wiped his decade-old Twitter account clean on Thursday. Deleting the
tweets was a wise move, especially as the handful in question seemed,
intentionally or otherwise, to justify threats of political violence. His
platform is serious enough to make that unsafe. But garbage opinions don’t
necessarily have to fall in the simple binary between
never-should-have-been-posted and should-have-been-deleted. Yglesias’s act of
deletion was, in effect, a concession that his take was very wrong. That seems
healthy.
It actually reminds me of the Megyn Kelly controversy.
Given that her remarks on blackface last month had been beamed into homes
around the country, Kelly couldn’t exactly delete what she said. But she was rebutted by her panel in real time
as the segment aired. Her bad opinion was immediately drowned out by better
ones.
In an email to her then-coworkers, Kelly noted that
disagreement “from friends and colleagues” had persuaded her to change her mind
on the matter. She said as much on air the following day, before NBC took the
opportunity to part ways.
Kelly’s bad opinion wasn’t quite on the same scale as a
justification (bordering on an endorsement) of threats of political violence.
Both she and Yglesias deserved pushback. Neither person had his or her First
Amendment rights threatened, or was censored by the government.
But the dilemma with social media culture in general, and
on Twitter especially, is how to push back on bad opinions without chilling
debate. I don’t like the notion that Yglesias should be intimidated out of
sharing bad opinions that obviously need to be rebutted in the public square,
especially since he was almost certainly speaking for others on the left.
We’ll all be better off if we have the space to
persuasively rebut those arguments. The question is how to engage with bad
ideas without helping cultivate an atmosphere that would prevent them from ever
having been said. Otherwise we’ll basically be left with vanilla centrism and
bad-faith provocation.
There are no easy answers. In the case of Yglesias, that
task was tougher given the way he often used the platform. Unnecessarily
mean-spirited attacks may make likes and retweets easy to come by, but the
coarsened culture of political Twitter contributes to the coarsening of our
larger political dialogue. That may sound silly, but if we can’t have
good-faith debates about bad ideas, they’ll fester in echo chambers, away from
the powerful influence of persuasive critique. It’s the problem with college
campuses.
Plenty of people pushed back on Yglesias intensely, but
in good faith. Others did not. What we don’t want to do is intimidate people
with bad opinions out of giving us the opportunity to explain why they’re
wrong. I begrudgingly suppose it’s good news, then, that Yglesias is already
back on Twitter.
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