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The "iterative political doom spirals" that @DouthatNYT / @aaronsibarium worry about would be helped as much, if not more, by careful thinking and clear truth-telling about obvious asymmetries than by knee-jerk false equivalence and both-sidesism.
thread https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1347221050082406402
thread https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1347221050082406402
False equivalence is everywhere in Sibarium's piece about the roles of the left and right in Weimar:
EG:
"implicate the left no less than the right"
"An equal but opposite elision occurred on the left."
"both sides are behaving like radicals"
EG:
"implicate the left no less than the right"
"An equal but opposite elision occurred on the left."
"both sides are behaving like radicals"
Sibarium goes so far as to speculate that the Holocaust - or something like it - would still have happened if the left had won out in Weimar:
"It was the Nazis who were the greater of two evils—but only because they got the chance to be."
This is sloppy and misleading.
"It was the Nazis who were the greater of two evils—but only because they got the chance to be."
This is sloppy and misleading.
Douthat is more careful but still does some of this - minimizes the threat of Trump (and complicity of GOP), and exaggerates the threat posed by the left.
I said more about this here, in response to one of Douthat's columns: https://thebulwark.com/the-trouble-with-the-its-not-real-fascism-argument/
I said more about this here, in response to one of Douthat's columns: https://thebulwark.com/the-trouble-with-the-its-not-real-fascism-argument/
Douthat's response to my essay made some good points, but it was conceived around an awkward analogy between the anti-Trump resistance and the anti-Biden one, and ends up being a dodge.
It matters a lot that the anti-Biden efforts are based on lies. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/opinion/trump-election-defeat.html
It matters a lot that the anti-Biden efforts are based on lies. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/opinion/trump-election-defeat.html
And so, while escalation/iterative doom spiraling is a problem, in assigning responsibility for these dynamics it still matters which "side" is making better, truer judgments about reality.
Often - obviously! - that is very hard to know.
But right now it isn't.
Often - obviously! - that is very hard to know.
But right now it isn't.
In the present moment, worrying about spiraling whataboutism on "both sides" is, I worry, just another form of deflection - one more way to avoid talking about what is actually going on, and who is actually to blame for this awful mess.
More here: https://theconstitutionalist.org/2020/12/17/quick-response-to-ross-douthat/
More here: https://theconstitutionalist.org/2020/12/17/quick-response-to-ross-douthat/
