Thread by @tzimmer_history

Imagine looking at the path Republicans have taken *since* 2015 and thinking: “You know what we need more of? Both-sides false equivalence!”

It’s a proper “Tell me who you really are” moment from one of the high priests of white dude (increasingly reactionary) centrism.

As is often the case with Silver, and so typical of the white male reactionary centrist pundit brotherhood, what is presented here as bold out-of-the-box truth-telling is little more than silly contrarianism in style and well in line with white elite orthodoxy in substance.

Silver is a key figure in a group of ostensibly liberal pundits who have become widely revered apostles of centrist realignment in American politics. Almost all of them are white men in their late 30s to mid-40s - Silver, Yglesias, Barro, Mounk…

This type of pundit operates from the conviction that he is capable of superior judgment across a wide variety of fields and subjects - from pandemic response to American history, from the climate crisis to how (not) to tackle racism.

These self-proclaimed Arbiters of Reason owe much of their prominent status to the idea that they are unbiased, dispassionate truthtellers, all about data, all about objectivity, brave enough to give us the unvarnished facts in a heroic effort against conventional wisdom.

All of them are increasingly hostile to “the Left,” convinced that the excesses of “woke” liberalism are a real threat, that radical “woke” activists have too much power in the Democratic Party - equivalent to rightwing extremists in the GOP.

Because they believe themselves to be unbiased, they are easily irritated by discourses about race and identity. Whatever puts the emphasis on the fact that they might not be objective Arbiters of Reason, but arguing from a specific white male elite perspective is a threat.

That’s a big part of why these white male pundits are obsessed with pointing out supposed fallacies of leftwing activism and spend much of their energy on scolding “the Left”: To their own elite status, these lefties constitute more of a threat than rightwing authoritarians.

Let’s be skeptical of this industry of ostensibly liberal/moderate/centrist pundits who act like oracles of reason and feel entitled to offer a firm assessment of *anything* - yet all too often just end up judging the world by whether or not it’s in line with their sensibilities.

Addendum: Let it not go unnoticed how entirely ahistorical this statement is. According to Silver, “Both Sides” was a bad paradigm in the 1950s, a period of white elite consensus across party lines - but it’s good now that the parties are fully sorted and polarized. No, no, no.

“Let me just fire off a tweet to my millions of followers and casually distort U.S. history in the most misleading way” - It makes no sense to read this as an empirical assessment: It’s actually a purely ideological statement expressing how Silver thinks the world *should* work.

This kind of willfully ignorant distortion of history is a regular feature of this sort of white male reactionary centrist punditry. Here, for instance, is Mounk asserting that people in 1950s-Red Scare-Segregated-Patriarchy America enjoyed more “free speech” than today.

And here is Yglesias making an aggressively ignorant statement about the history of policing in America. Actual experts will, of course, call these pundits out - but that doesn’t seem to faze these guys at all.

That’s because this type of pundit doesn’t start from a position of trying to understand what strikes him as odd or surprising. Whatever doesn’t immediately and intuitively make sense to the Arbiter of Reason, whatever makes him uncomfortable, is derided as nonsense.

The astonishing lack of humility and unwillingness to listen is par for the course for this type of pundit. They don’t examine, they judge; they don’t reflect, they determine. Who needs real expertise when you are supposedly capable of superior judgment?

I’ve seen two responses to my criticism of the white male reactionary centrist pundit brotherhood on which I’d like to comment: Sone people are puzzled by the trajectory of these pundits who are ever more anti-Left above all else; others insist they were conservatives all along.

The rightward trajectory is to no small degree a result of their own supposedly superior political judgment being questioned so vehemently by current events. Instead of engaging in critical introspection, they double down, having fully bought into their own hype.

They simply cannot and will not admit that the leftwing critique - and I’m using the term “leftwing” broadly here - of what’s been happening on the Right and in U.S. politics generally has been correct and is being proven correct with everything that is unfolding.

This critique is most forcefully presented by exactly those “woke” radicals the centrist white male pundit class is always deriding as fundamentally unserious and irrational - their entire mystique is built on supposedly offering better judgment than those “biased” activists.

And so they will double down: Keep ridiculing the leftwing critique as “alarmism,” keep downplaying the threat from the Right and all the warnings about fascistic extremism as hysterical, keep playing up the threat of “woke” radicalism and the “illiberal Left.”

Weren’t they always just conservatives? It’s important to recognize that they have always considered themselves moderate or liberal or maybe libertarian-ish – and very much not conservative – because it informs their assessment of what is happening on the “Left.”

If you are convinced to be just the right kind of reasonable/liberal/moderate, then experiencing reactionary impulses creates a kind of intellectual and emotional dissonance that is often resolved by declaring that which makes you uncomfortable “radical” and “extreme.”

“I’m a true liberal – these people are radical, woke activists” feels better than “I always thought I was pretty liberal, but I must say I’m feeling uncomfortable about these calls for equality and respect, especially when they question my superior judgment and societal status.”

It’s a combination of performative and reactionary centrism, and no matter the exact mix between strategic, ideological, and psychological elements, the result is the same: An increasingly aggressive stance against the “woke” Left, ever more in line with reactionary moral panics.

Leave aside the bad-faith distortion of my argument and the complete non-engagement with any of the specific criticisms I raise: Imagine uttering the phrase “resistance woke elitism” and still somehow expecting to be taken seriously, intellectually or politically. Come on.

To argue that propagating a #BothSides framework while obsessively focusing on the supposed threat of the “radical Left” is *not* in line with white elite orthodoxy and instead somehow represents a brave stance against “woke elitism” is simply and utterly disqualifying.

You know, if my argument were “All white men are stupid and should forever shut up,” Yglesias would raise a really good point here!

Is this supposed to mean that white men should be barred from criticizing structures of white and/or male privilege? Well, isn’t that convenient!

I’ll finally add this: The elite male centrist punditry has an outsized influence on the conversation. It is something we are trying to counter on @USDemocracyPod. No #BothSides distortion, hiding behind electoralism, or railing against “wokeism.” Promise. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/is-…