Both Siderism Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

Like the Coronavirus,  the time to stop Both Siderism from becoming a chronic disease of the mainstream media has long since passed.  Now we're stuck with it.  Forever.  Sometimes it wanes.  Sometimes, when things gets scary enough,  enough people can raise the alarm loud enough that it's effects can be temporarily mitigated.  But the dogma of the cult of Both Siderism is now so much a part of the firmware of press that it will always surge back into our lives the minute our guard is down.    

Consider an otherwise excellent segment of The Last Word that I just happened to catch last night.  Lawrence O'Donnell, Stuart Steven, Richard Stengel, and Peter Beinart (who you may remember as the guy whose media profile was rapidly elevated by being the "Liberal" who most vociferously supported Dubya's Iraq Clusterfuck.)  During the segment Lawrence quotes both Adam Davidson (formerly of the NYT) and Jay Rosen on the laziness and toxicity of Both Siderism.  How prioritizing the appearance of neutrality over telling the truth "does violence to the truth" and is the exact opposite of what journalists are supposed to to.  

I swear, it's like they were cribbing straight from my blog from 2005.  And 2006.  And 2007.   And 2008.  And 2009.  And 2010.  And 2011.  And...well, you get the idea.      

Anyway, the only parts of the segment that MSNBC has made available online are Lawrence O'Donnell's ten minute introduction, and Stuart Steven's thoughts on the subject.  And they're both just fine and worthy of your attention.  

However, what MSNBC did not post -- and what prompted my "Oh Fuck You" riposte -- was Richard Stengel reflexively blurting out "this is not about parties" during the middle of a discussion that was explicitly about the parties. Explicitly about how one party -- the Republican party -- is now an active enemy of democracy.  This is  how deeply the dogma of the Both Siderist cult has been internalized by media; that former editor of Time magazine just couldn't help himself.  Just had to leap in with some variation of the "It's not about Left or Right.  It's not about Republican or Democrat" that you see everywhere these days when it bloody well is about exactly that and everyone bloody well knows it.

It's just that automatic with these people.  That much a part of their nervous system.  

But otherwise the rest of it could have been said by any of us Liberal bloggers who were too shrill in our assessments of the Right to be allowed anywhere near a microphone anytime over the past 20 years.  So I should have stopped there,  Should have taken the "W" and retired.

But I didn't.

Instead, this very long article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt --

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

It’s not just a phase.

-- floated up to my attention.

In case you are unfamiliar, Jonathan Haidt is basically David Brooks with a PhD in psychology.  He  refers to himself as -- surprise! -- a "political centrist" and runs the Institute for Civility and Moral Feeling Goodness or some such thing.  I will spare you the effort of wading through this very long article by giving you the utterly predictable highlights.

First, the history of the myth of the Tower of Babel.

Yadda yadda yadda.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community...

Yadda yadda.

 A brief history of chat rooms and message boards.

More padding.

Facebook bad!

Yadda yadda.

Facebook really bad! You can see where this is going, right?

Yadda yadda.

Facebook wins!  James Madison and Federalist No. 10 loses!

And then we arrive at the place where we were headed all along.

Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? 

Around that familiar, cozy, Both Siderist hearth -- 

On the right, the term RINO (Republican in Name Only) was superseded in 2015 by the more contemptuous term cuckservative, popularized on Twitter by Trump supporters. On the left, social media launched callout culture in the years after 2012, with transformative effects on university life and later on politics and culture throughout the English-speaking world.

-- around which wise and morally superior "independents" and political centrists can warm themselves and tsk-tsk Both Sides as equally savage, de-evolved barbarians -- 

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways.

-- who fail to be sufficiently appreciative -- 

The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. “Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection...

The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way...

-- of our democratic institutions.

And it goes on like that.  

And on.  

And on.  

And on.  It's literally nothing more than the same Both Siderist goo that David Brooks has been extruding at The New York Times for nearly 20 years, poured into an Ant Man suit --

-- and embiggened to 20 times its original size.  

So applause for Lawrence O'Donnell for at least taking a stab at killing the Both Siderist blob using a platform bigger than a tiny blog in the middle of Middle America.  

But please also take Richard Stengel's reflexive recitation of Both Siderist scripture during the middle of that discussion as the sober warning that it should be.

That the relentless production of Both Siderist fiction by Important Publications is now wired into the DNA of American political media.  And while it may occasionally recede or momentary reined in, it is now a chronic condition that we will never be rid of it.  

Burn The Lifeboats