Charges of hypocrisy are I think partly an epiphenomenon of social media, e.g., we are spending our time reading each other and doing a kind of formal textual analysis in a deeply tendentious spirit, sort of like Oxford debate gone amuck. If you're reading charitably, there is usually a way to make sense of what seem like "gotcha" contradictions. You've already pointed out that the "the offensive stuff is from outsiders" and "there are no outside agitators" are potentially quite consistent, but it takes actually having been materially present at one of the protests (or having experience in protesting) to see how that works. Briefly, at the big protests, there are people around the edges who are not really part of it who are just there screaming at anybody with a camera--some of them quite consciously trying to make the protests look bad, some of them just trolls looking for attention, some of them fringe people trying to hijack what's going on. When I went to the big airport protest at the beginning of the Trump Administration, there was a small group of six or seven idiots trying to provoke the cops (and trying to provoke the rest of the protesters) in the middle of a crowd of six or seven thousand people. They were 'outsiders' but not 'outside agitators' in the sense of being the secret leaders or masterminds of what was happening.
But this is the point: on all sides, we do not read charitably because the environment in which we're reading (social media) is full of anonymous strangers whose motives for participating are unknown--some of them may not even be a specific real individual with specific views. Because there are reward structures for drawing attention to oneself and antagonism and provocation are proven strategies for that. And because the *design* of most social media platforms promotes segregating oneself into an echo chamber rather than talking across divides or patiently working out what someone really means rather than just dumping on the words and yelling gotcha!
We also do not necessarily arrive at kumbaya! everybody has a valid point! when we do commit to that patience. Sometimes someone who on the page completely agrees with you is someone you would be profoundly antagonized by if you spent a lot of time with them on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes someone who drives you nuts on a blog would turn out to be very simpatico with you otherwise. But I do think that most of the time, in everyday life, we forgive people their inconsistencies if we understand their meaning, or we can see reasons why they are trying to hold to two different views of something. "Hypocrisy" in real, sustained human relationships is a completely different thing than reading people's writing and judging it to be contradictory. I only come to feel that someone is a hypocrite when there is a dramatic and sustained gap between what they say and what they do, where what they do is malevolent or harmful to me and others. (Notably, it is very rare for someone to talk in a very harmful or alarming way, while being benevolent and kind in what they do--I don't even know that we have a word for that, but it's not hypocrisy.)
I think the word "charitable" is a good one here, because that's the core of a lot of the problems with these arguments: they're rooted in the degree of charity people are willing to extend to the arguments of their opponents, and the degree of charity they demand regarding the arguments of their supporters. When someone will go three levels deep to find material to condemn one side and three levels deep to exonerate the other... I don't think there's much point to calling that out as hypocrisy, but it does drastically lower my level of interest in hearing more of that person's opinions.
I agree that this is exacerbated by the nature of modern social media, but I wouldn't say it's wholly a creation of it, or entirely confined to digital acquaintances. I'm sadly familiar with this sort of behavior taking place between people who know each other in "real life," but I probably shouldn't be too specific. Again, my level of interest in hearing anything further from some individuals is radically lower as a result.
I have a sort of half-baked Granny Weatherwax-ish theory around some of this, but I'm not sure it's possible to bake it fully enough to be worth committing to pixels. Maybe someday.
It's really nothing deeper at times than "I will go three levels deep to exonerate people whose basic commitments or overall viewpoint I support" and "I won't go an inch deep to charitably interpret the thoughts of someone whom I am certain bears me considerable ill will". In a sense, it's odd that we expect otherwise--it's the Ned Stark approach to life, which folks are quite right to think gets you nowhere if you're dealing with someone whose intentions are malign.
Very early in my blogging, I got an invite to engage with David Horowitz on one of his sites. I took it very seriously, and worked up a quite charitable engagement with the content of his thinking, and got nothing but a lot of really scurrilous abuse for it from him (or whomever was ghostwriting his responses). I did a lot of similar work for a long time, and once or twice I found someone who would respond to me in kind and we'd build a really good conversation full of charity. But mostly not, occasionally dangerously so. At some point, you stop reading for literal content and start reading for intention, sincerity, sympathy, connection, humanity. If you just stick with evaluating the words on the screen, you're frequently going to be in someone else's Skinner box, being pushed this way and that for instrumental purposes that have nothing to do with interpretative accuracy or empirical reality.
"Equally, this understanding suggests that democratic politics are not irredeemably doomed to be a benighted clash between ignorant armies. If people are obliged to respond to each other's better criticisms, rather than self-selecting into blobs of mutually reinforcing rationalizations, they are likely to end up better off. As Cosma and I have argued elsewhere, this is how democracy is supposed to work, and what it is supposed to do - not arrive at some common truth, but to create a system of competition, where different groups are free to discover their interests and organize in pursuit of them, but where they also have to grudgingly take account of each other's best arguments (and sometimes, if they can get away with it, steal them outright and pretend they were theirs in the first place)."
The one area where the hypocrisy argument has to be addressed is antisemitism. The Nazi Bar argument is central to modern critiques of conservatism, so we can't be lax with our own side. This is especially true when it comes to antizionism, which inevitably attracts antisemitism. "It was just one guy," and, "She doesn't represent the whole group" isn't acceptable. The moment anyone starts pointing to Jews in general, they need to be shouted down even if their other points are cromulent.
I agree with all of this, but I was hoping for some sort of mild "what reasonable people still CAN do, though, is..." bit at the end. Any thoughts? Like, if some regular person (not a celebrity, not a social media influencer) is convinced that one candidate is far better than the other, but is not into firing up the base, are there any non-ridiculous options that they might take that might have an impact?
I don't think there's anything simple and easy. I suspect the key to shifting people's positions is really to avoid being accusatory, and keep things positive. That's likely to be time-consuming, though, and very hard to maintain in the current moment when everybody ELSE is screaming accusations and insults at all times.
I've just been thinking about a post of political persuasion and I would say -- adding on to what you're saying -- that social media is a really good environment to rapidly evolve certain sorts of political arguments, but those tend to be arguments which are (a) easily understood by a large number of people, and therefore not particularly attuned to the specifics of a situation and (b) designed to push someone who is already somewhat convinced to feel more strongly about their position, rather than designed to engage with someone who starts from a skeptical point of view.
There are a lot of cases in which it's important and useful to make arguments that fit those criteria! But it does feel like a narrow slice of possible routes for persuasion.
But the "charge" of hypocrisy is to call the person back to their original correct position. It is not aimed at outsiders except as to urge them not to be put off by the more recent "hypocritical" position, but that the true position of "our side" is NOT the hypocritical position being charged.
Democrats charge Republicans for (in the past) having supposedly favored low deficits but now favoring tax cuts that increase the deficit. We want them to return to their former position and to tell outsiders that "we" still hold to the correct low deficit position. [I just wish the latter were true. :)]
I don't really disagree with this as a reframing, but I think it suffers the same weakness. That is, almost anyone you might be trying to "call back" by pointing out inconsistencies with past positions will be able to come up with reasons why whatever they're saying now is correct given some change in the larger environment, and thus not really inconsistent.
Charges of hypocrisy are I think partly an epiphenomenon of social media, e.g., we are spending our time reading each other and doing a kind of formal textual analysis in a deeply tendentious spirit, sort of like Oxford debate gone amuck. If you're reading charitably, there is usually a way to make sense of what seem like "gotcha" contradictions. You've already pointed out that the "the offensive stuff is from outsiders" and "there are no outside agitators" are potentially quite consistent, but it takes actually having been materially present at one of the protests (or having experience in protesting) to see how that works. Briefly, at the big protests, there are people around the edges who are not really part of it who are just there screaming at anybody with a camera--some of them quite consciously trying to make the protests look bad, some of them just trolls looking for attention, some of them fringe people trying to hijack what's going on. When I went to the big airport protest at the beginning of the Trump Administration, there was a small group of six or seven idiots trying to provoke the cops (and trying to provoke the rest of the protesters) in the middle of a crowd of six or seven thousand people. They were 'outsiders' but not 'outside agitators' in the sense of being the secret leaders or masterminds of what was happening.
But this is the point: on all sides, we do not read charitably because the environment in which we're reading (social media) is full of anonymous strangers whose motives for participating are unknown--some of them may not even be a specific real individual with specific views. Because there are reward structures for drawing attention to oneself and antagonism and provocation are proven strategies for that. And because the *design* of most social media platforms promotes segregating oneself into an echo chamber rather than talking across divides or patiently working out what someone really means rather than just dumping on the words and yelling gotcha!
We also do not necessarily arrive at kumbaya! everybody has a valid point! when we do commit to that patience. Sometimes someone who on the page completely agrees with you is someone you would be profoundly antagonized by if you spent a lot of time with them on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes someone who drives you nuts on a blog would turn out to be very simpatico with you otherwise. But I do think that most of the time, in everyday life, we forgive people their inconsistencies if we understand their meaning, or we can see reasons why they are trying to hold to two different views of something. "Hypocrisy" in real, sustained human relationships is a completely different thing than reading people's writing and judging it to be contradictory. I only come to feel that someone is a hypocrite when there is a dramatic and sustained gap between what they say and what they do, where what they do is malevolent or harmful to me and others. (Notably, it is very rare for someone to talk in a very harmful or alarming way, while being benevolent and kind in what they do--I don't even know that we have a word for that, but it's not hypocrisy.)
I think the word "charitable" is a good one here, because that's the core of a lot of the problems with these arguments: they're rooted in the degree of charity people are willing to extend to the arguments of their opponents, and the degree of charity they demand regarding the arguments of their supporters. When someone will go three levels deep to find material to condemn one side and three levels deep to exonerate the other... I don't think there's much point to calling that out as hypocrisy, but it does drastically lower my level of interest in hearing more of that person's opinions.
I agree that this is exacerbated by the nature of modern social media, but I wouldn't say it's wholly a creation of it, or entirely confined to digital acquaintances. I'm sadly familiar with this sort of behavior taking place between people who know each other in "real life," but I probably shouldn't be too specific. Again, my level of interest in hearing anything further from some individuals is radically lower as a result.
I have a sort of half-baked Granny Weatherwax-ish theory around some of this, but I'm not sure it's possible to bake it fully enough to be worth committing to pixels. Maybe someday.
It's really nothing deeper at times than "I will go three levels deep to exonerate people whose basic commitments or overall viewpoint I support" and "I won't go an inch deep to charitably interpret the thoughts of someone whom I am certain bears me considerable ill will". In a sense, it's odd that we expect otherwise--it's the Ned Stark approach to life, which folks are quite right to think gets you nowhere if you're dealing with someone whose intentions are malign.
Very early in my blogging, I got an invite to engage with David Horowitz on one of his sites. I took it very seriously, and worked up a quite charitable engagement with the content of his thinking, and got nothing but a lot of really scurrilous abuse for it from him (or whomever was ghostwriting his responses). I did a lot of similar work for a long time, and once or twice I found someone who would respond to me in kind and we'd build a really good conversation full of charity. But mostly not, occasionally dangerously so. At some point, you stop reading for literal content and start reading for intention, sincerity, sympathy, connection, humanity. If you just stick with evaluating the words on the screen, you're frequently going to be in someone else's Skinner box, being pushed this way and that for instrumental purposes that have nothing to do with interpretative accuracy or empirical reality.
I think both of your comments in the thread are spot on, and I really wish I had a better sense of what sort of environment would mitigate this.
I keep thinking about Henry Farrell's argument here, which I think makes a compelling case, but one I'm not sure how to act on: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/zombies-rabbit-holes-and-platform
"Equally, this understanding suggests that democratic politics are not irredeemably doomed to be a benighted clash between ignorant armies. If people are obliged to respond to each other's better criticisms, rather than self-selecting into blobs of mutually reinforcing rationalizations, they are likely to end up better off. As Cosma and I have argued elsewhere, this is how democracy is supposed to work, and what it is supposed to do - not arrive at some common truth, but to create a system of competition, where different groups are free to discover their interests and organize in pursuit of them, but where they also have to grudgingly take account of each other's best arguments (and sometimes, if they can get away with it, steal them outright and pretend they were theirs in the first place)."
The one area where the hypocrisy argument has to be addressed is antisemitism. The Nazi Bar argument is central to modern critiques of conservatism, so we can't be lax with our own side. This is especially true when it comes to antizionism, which inevitably attracts antisemitism. "It was just one guy," and, "She doesn't represent the whole group" isn't acceptable. The moment anyone starts pointing to Jews in general, they need to be shouted down even if their other points are cromulent.
I agree with all of this, but I was hoping for some sort of mild "what reasonable people still CAN do, though, is..." bit at the end. Any thoughts? Like, if some regular person (not a celebrity, not a social media influencer) is convinced that one candidate is far better than the other, but is not into firing up the base, are there any non-ridiculous options that they might take that might have an impact?
I don't think there's anything simple and easy. I suspect the key to shifting people's positions is really to avoid being accusatory, and keep things positive. That's likely to be time-consuming, though, and very hard to maintain in the current moment when everybody ELSE is screaming accusations and insults at all times.
I've just been thinking about a post of political persuasion and I would say -- adding on to what you're saying -- that social media is a really good environment to rapidly evolve certain sorts of political arguments, but those tend to be arguments which are (a) easily understood by a large number of people, and therefore not particularly attuned to the specifics of a situation and (b) designed to push someone who is already somewhat convinced to feel more strongly about their position, rather than designed to engage with someone who starts from a skeptical point of view.
There are a lot of cases in which it's important and useful to make arguments that fit those criteria! But it does feel like a narrow slice of possible routes for persuasion.
But the "charge" of hypocrisy is to call the person back to their original correct position. It is not aimed at outsiders except as to urge them not to be put off by the more recent "hypocritical" position, but that the true position of "our side" is NOT the hypocritical position being charged.
Democrats charge Republicans for (in the past) having supposedly favored low deficits but now favoring tax cuts that increase the deficit. We want them to return to their former position and to tell outsiders that "we" still hold to the correct low deficit position. [I just wish the latter were true. :)]
I don't really disagree with this as a reframing, but I think it suffers the same weakness. That is, almost anyone you might be trying to "call back" by pointing out inconsistencies with past positions will be able to come up with reasons why whatever they're saying now is correct given some change in the larger environment, and thus not really inconsistent.