Biden calling some Republicans semi-fascist (I would have preferred losing the “semi-“) is, of course, sending a bunch of pundits to the fainting couch. John Ganz takes apart one of those pundits, Shandi Hamid, in a really interesting (and long) post:
The fact of the matter I don’t know Hamid or really wish him ill, but to me he emblematizes a certain public mode of expression that I’ve grown to detest: the banalities of the pundit class disguised as daring counterpoints to popular delusions. These are always sprinkled with brow-furrowed concern that whatever the public seems to be enthusiastic about in the moment will lead to some disaster. In the construction of his arguments he closely follows something similar to A.O. Hirschman’s famous theses from his Rhetoric of Reaction: the “perversity thesis,” where any action actually result in the opposite of its intent, the “futility thesis,” where any action will actually accomplish nothing, and the “jeopardy thesis,” where any action will threaten some already accomplished social good. These three simple guides provide a template for the pundit for a long career in journalism. They give the appearance of thoughtfulness and counter-intuitive brilliance, when they are just methods to generate rote responses.
This is what angers me so much: this is all about posing as an intellectual without actually saying much of anything of actual substance. […]
Ganz has a couple of paragraphs discussing Hamid’s style of argument, which is slippery, laced with appeals to authority and credentialism ,and generally a reflection of someone who expects that his words have more meaning simply because he typed them.
Anyway, it’s a good read, courtesy of Cheryl Rofer on Twitter. Something to ponder while we wonder if the DoJ will charge Trump for obvious violations of important laws.
Parfigliano
First?
Old School
@Parfigliano: Congrats!
RaflW
This pleases me, as I had some choice words for Mr. Hamdi the other night on some other BJ thread. And if it has Cheryl’s imprimatur as well, then it’s all the more delish.
Matt McIrvin
I remember thinking about Hirschman’s “perversity thesis” when pondering right-wing rhetoric on environmental regulations. It’s reasonable to believe that sometimes, a measure intended to help the environment will sometimes have the opposite effect. It does happen. It’s a thing to watch out for, and if you’re a good thoughtful liberal, you’ll be on the lookout for it.
But anti-environmentalists wielding the perversity thesis game this tendency to a degree that, once you notice the pattern, becomes ridiculous. Is it logical to propose that EVERY SINGLE measure to help the environment somehow has the opposite perverse effect, by means that are somehow different but still coincidentally perverse in every case? That’s what they end up claiming.
Old School
To me, the prefix of semi was to prevent even more hand-ringing and pearl clutching from the pundits. It’s getting the point across even though it softens the blow.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
This what DougJ been saying for, what two decades now.
Matt McIrvin
This is what I’ve always thought of as “John Stossel disease.” “Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?”, a potentially interesting thesis but it just turns out to be warmed-over industry-hack propaganda delivered with an arch tone.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
They take advantage of the desire of liberals to find perfect solutions.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: And the desire of liberals to not be stupid hacks. That’s the old Hack Gap. It is the basis of Conor Friedersdorf’s entire career.
Geminid
@Old School: I think “semi-fascist” was just fine. The people complaining about this are not the audience. I don’t want Biden preaching to the choir, I want him preaching to the larger congregation.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ve always opposed gay marriage because I fear it will lead to gay divorce.
Ken
@Baud: And also the failure of liberals to recognize that there is one perfect solution to every problem, tax cuts.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I remember literally seeing that one in the wild.
Mike E
rotating tag nominee
MattF
To take a specific case, Ganz pretty much nails what consistently pisses me off about Matt Yglesias. It’s not exactly Yglesias’ contrarianism or his claims of expertise, but the feeling that there’s a reflexive method underlying all of his contrarian viewpoints.
Kay
This is the second time in ten years a Republican governor has been unwilling or unable to provide reliable water to a city in their state. It’s Flint, Michigan all over again.
When do you think people will figure out they’re incompetent and their economic theories are an unworkable disaster?
Emmanuel Felton @emmanuelfelton
Just got to Jackson and what stands out is the lack of chaos. There hasn’t been safe driving water in the city for a month and there have been frequent boil water adversaries in some neighborhoods for years. These people have already adapted to catastrophic government failure
Hoodie
Yeah, those are shopworn formulae for keeping you in pundit money. Beyond that, however, seems like everyone is so smart they’re over thinking this. Trump blatantly broke laws that many people – including people with pretty exemplary careers (e.g., Petraeus) – have been vigorously punished for breaking. This isn’t one or two de minimis emails with ambiguous classification that were held on a secure server while you were still Secretary of State and ostensibly authorized to possess this information. His actions meet all the elements of the crime, including a specific intent to do what the law proscribes, i.e., possess and hide defense related documents that do not belong to him and that he is not authorized to possess. At this point, it does not really matter why he was doing it (that might matter when it comes to sentencing). The only considerations should be whether Garland thinks he can obtain a conviction and what plea deal might be acceptable to make the point that rules matter, irrespective of your status or your intentions. Even people who practice civil disobedience of what they believe to be unjust laws fully expect to be arrested and put in jail. Trump is a criminal asshole who thinks rules are for suckers and letting him get off will further normalize that mentality. That is how countries go to shit very quickly.
Tom Levenson
That is an excellent post.
Pundiiting is a job that almost always requires one to become stupid. Not unclever, perhaps, but false in thought and reason.
BC in Illinois
On another social media platform, I have discovered a true loon. I sometimes check in on that person’s page to see what the RWNJs have to say. This is what they say today.
Responses: lots of amens and hallelujahs.
Betty Cracker
It’ll be interesting to see if Biden expands on the “semi-fascist” theme in his speech tomorrow. Does anyone remember when he first said it? I have a vague recollection of a clip of him speaking to reporters on the way to the helicopter, so maybe it was off the cuff.
Anyhoo, I hope he DOES expand on it. My dream scenario, which will almost certainly not happen, would be Biden using Republicans like Lindsey Graham as examples of “semi-fascists” and Republicans currently serving as executives in states like DeSantis and Abbott as real-deal “fascists.”
Do we want to see what’s happening in places like TX and FL replicated nationwide? No? Then vote blue.
UncleEbeneezer
We can also use “Semi” in the Urban Dictionary sense:
semi Not quite an erection, but getting there.
Ex: When they saw Trump’s Fascist language and goals, all of his supporters got a semi.
Geminid
@Tom Levenson: @(((BuffaloMeg))) once speculated that Twitter pundits lost 20 IQ points when given a blue check.
UncleEbeneezer
Since this is OT, I’m now on a Semi-Vacation for our 10th Anniversary. We booked a place down the street (literally less than a mile away) that is a guest house with a private pool to deal with the 100+ degree heat of the next two days. We’ll be soaking in the pool, grilling (they have a bbq) and watching the US Open (GO SERENA/RAFA!!!).
On Sat Kelly is off to Texas for the weekend to visit her Mom who is still in the hospital. On Sunday I will be playing a jazz/funk set at an annual pool party/local music festival at my buddy’s house in Van Nuys. It’s gonna be 110 degrees but at least there will be a pool.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
Bite your tongue – my single largest family law fee came from a four year lesbian divorce/custody battle. By the time the dust settled, I earned $80K, most of it due to petty squabbles that I tried my damnedest to tell them not to get into.
El Muneco
@Old School: “the prefix of semi was to prevent even more hand-ringing and pearl clutching”
Don’t forget that there were two baskets, only one of which contained deplorables, who in turn were just a fraction of the most committed of the base. Maybe 10% of Republicans, and less than half that of the general population.
Remember how well that prevented mass popular outrage, much less media pearl-clutching?
scav
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Huzzah! Concrete movement towards a world where everyone is free not to be a role-model 24/7.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Matt McIrvin:
For a long time now, I’ve noticed that our pundits are increasingly coming to high profile pundit gigs without having really done anything but punditry. No leadership or managerial experience in government or in business, no experience as war correspondents or investigative reporters. They just natter about, offering opinions about things they seldom understand and ignoring solutions they’re incapable of imagining.
UncleEbeneezer
The truth of the matter is that while many Trump voters may not support full-blown Fascism, they are all happy to move things TOWARDS it and enable the worst people to be in positions to get us there.
Like Racism, LGBTQphobia, Sexism etc., it’s not really useful to treat them as binary Are/Not categories but as spectrums. You don’t have to join the Proud Boys to be misogynist. You don’t have to join the KKK to be racist. Etc. Trying to frame Fascism in the same you-must-pass-this-threshold way serves the same purpose as doing so for Racism: it lets a bunch of people who are complicit, off the hook. And that’s the whole point of arguments like Hamid is making.
Baud
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Nominated!!!
Elizabelle
@UncleEbeneezer: Sounds lovely. A good pool makes for a good afternoon/evening. Especially a largely private one!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I suppose one could have a debate over are Republicans really fascists, Mussolini did have economic and labor policies that made him quite popular with both the rich and the working class after all (until he stuck Italy’s peepee in the meat grind that was WW2) while the Republicans seem to think laissez-faire capitalism is horrible government overreach. But I do like the “semi” in Semi Fachists, the Republicans are such a pack of mediocrities to get even fascism right.
Hoodie
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Not unique to punditry. My son is friends with several twentysomething recent grads that Bain rents out at hundreds of dollars per hour as “consultants,” even though they’ve never run a business or met a payroll. Those consultants are often used to provide a permission structure for management to do what it wants while deflecting blame if it goes wrong. Punditry is just a product that is sold to content providers for resale to end consumers. It has no particular need to be informed.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@scav:
Exactly! Back 20-25 years ago when I was conservative-curious and hanging out with right-wing nutjob lawyers, I viewed the coming wave on gay marriage with happiness with the statement that that the LGBTQ community had “every right to be as miserable about their choices in intimate partners as everyone else, and that the fees will flow like water over Niagara Falls”.
My progressive brethren seemed to feel like it would be like the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and didn’t realize the coming opportunity afforded in the form of dissolving the formerly happy unions….
different-church-lady
Oh my, I GOTTA read that book!
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
This is why I am so enthusiastic about Baud 2024. “I have no solutions in mind, so I won’t be promising anything” could knock Yang’s Forward Party out of the mix.
different-church-lady
Just looked a the description on Wikipedia. Hirschman wrote it well before the invention of the very-online-liberal, but it seems to me they’ve become very adept at using the perversity and futility modules in reaction to any and every small thing mainstream Democrats try to achieve.
different-church-lady
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
You saying this is the year Baud breaks through to 2% of the vote?
different-church-lady
@UncleEbeneezer:
But that’s only because it hasn’t been explained to them correctly.
Elizabelle
Are we beset with all these pundits because it’s cheaper to have them filling airtime/column space than to pay for actual newsgathering?
ETA: Ganz might have something to say about that. Off to read his article.
different-church-lady
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Tongue in cheek, I did say back then that the thing that would really make gay marriage take off is when the marriage industry realized their customer base would immediately expand.
Same thing with legal pot: I think the industry lobbyists and investors were a much bigger push than any public demand.
Betty Cracker
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: LOL! My sister is gay, and I used to think it was super-unfair that older relatives felt free to bug me about when I was going to get married while she got to fly under their radar. True equality means the same access to the joys and miseries of the institution!
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker:
Wait, seriously for a second, your sister didn’t get relentless questions about when she was going to go straight?
different-church-lady
@Hoodie:
Hey, c’mon, you can’t get that kind of talent just anywhere!
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@different-church-lady:
Absolutely – I’ll be proud to support his pointless endeavor to make government work about as well as calamine lotion on a really widespread case of poison ivy.
The Moar You Know
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I just finished a biography of Davy Crockett, and this was the pitch he used to get into Congress.
That and free booze to all comers at his rallies. That was it.
Take notes, Baud.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Betty Cracker:
Some of my biggest delights have come from fielding calls from gay folks who discovered that their partners were cheating.
Mentally, I’m like “congrats, you’ve arrived at the truest form of equality where you realize that people are miserable, untrustworthy cheating assholes all over”.
different-church-lady
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Hey, one thing you can say for poison ivy is it’s resolute about it’s job.
Soprano2
@Kay: I’ve been seeing links to articles about the problem in Jackson for months in my industry publication e-mails, so I’ve known for a long time they have a infrastructure problem there. They’re not the only city with this kind of problem, too – lots of our water and wastewater infrastructure is 50-100 years old! Since it’s underground it doesn’t get the attention roads and bridges do.
different-church-lady
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Well that was sly of you!
Paul in KY
@UncleEbeneezer: Sounds cool. Hope you & missus have a great vacay!
CaseyL
@UncleEbeneezer: Ditto reporters. They “report” (i.e., read pre-digested conventional wisdom) on the economy, on environmental issues, and on politics in particular – and they have no actual substantive background or knowledge of any of it.
‘Swhy I don’t watch any news anymore, or even pay much attention to streaming/televised analysis. It’s all warmed over CW.
Matt McIrvin
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I do remember a lot of Henny Youngman-style jibes from those guys who apparently all hate their wives: “now the gays can be as miserable as the rest of us HAW HAW HAW”…
If I recall correctly, the first same-sex couple to be legally married in Massachusetts got divorced a few years later. It happens.
But the anti-SSM argument I remember hearing was that same-sex marriages would be treated more casually than opposite-sex ones (based on nothing but stereotypes about promiscuous gay men), they’d be these fleeting ephemeral things, and that that would somehow cheapen and erode marriage in general. Some of it was the lesbian erasure that always seems to happen in these debates.
rikyrah
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
4 years?
Roger Moore
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
I think you can view the arguments about marriage equality as a fight between people who see family law as prescriptive vs. those who see it as descriptive. Prescriptive people want the law to recognize only some kinds of relationships as a way of encouraging people to participate only in approved types. Descriptive people think relationships will form regardless of what the government approves of, so we need to recognize the relationships that actually exist so everyone has access to family law.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tom Levenson: The between smart ass and dumb ass is exceedingly fine.
Uncle Cosmo
Had a coworker once with a mug he claimed his ladyfriend had given him. Caption: You turn my software to hardware. I went over and said, At your age and condition, firmware is the best you can hope for. ;^p
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Or they still think of it as prescriptive but just don’t think there’s anything wrong with same-sex relationships (I guess Andrew Sullivan would be the extreme case there, making the “conservative case for SSM”).
geg6
@different-church-lady:
There are a number of jackals who seem to have a PhD in it.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, because people like Trump haven’t cheapened marriage at all. Seriously, the big threat to marriage Jesus was always getting on about was divorce, not homosexuality. Somehow the “Christians” fighting hardest against marriage equality don’t want to talk about that.
Elizabelle
@geg6: Yep. Can’t let that get to critical mass.
Montanareddog
@different-church-lady: i am sure she got plenty of remarks that she would grow out of it once she met the right man.
UncleEbeneezer
@CaseyL: Totally. I gave up watching news shows several years ago and have never looked back. They are all either:
1.) Batshit, GOP puke-funnel propaganda (Fox/OAN)
2.) Maddow/Hayes/MSNBC shows that will point out how bad GOP is but also thrive on ginning up outrage/panic towards Dems, Garland etc. and
3.) NPR/PBS comfort news that still bends over backwards to make GOP seem reasonable and far too often plays He Said, She Said, Who’s to Say? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ journalism and uncritically accepts GOP talking points (Mishandled Documents!) and phony crises (Caravan, Afghanistan withdrawal, Inflation!!1!)
H-Bob
“These three simple guides provide a template for the pundit for a long career in journalism.” Agreed, but you omitted the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum arguments:
–If different categories are treated differently, then argue “There needs to be a level playing field”!
–If everyone is treated the same, then argue “One size fits all won’t work”!
That pair of arguments will work every time!
pluky
Is it too late to resurrect ‘sophist’?
tybee
@Elizabelle:
amen