Comment, “See Me After Class,” 14 Aug. 2024
Getting some rote political discourse off my chest.
On August 6, maybe because the deadline reminder popped up on his phone, Bret Stephens logged onto The New York Times and wrote a bunch of facile bullshit. These specious opinions — along with his alleged similarities to a bedbug and love of the n-word — have made him semi-famous. How does he turn in copy week after week that any English 101 professor would give a D+? That takes dedication (or the fancy, paid-for ChatGPT). Lest you think that’s too harsh, free A.I. spit out almost the same concerns, and Stephens could certainly afford such a subscription, given that the median salary for opinion at the Times is a low six figures. Plus, he has a Pulitzer Prize for advocating his opinions, such as that Americans should kill more brown people abroad, and for examining the etiology behind “the disease of the Arab mind.”
This column follows Stephens’s oeuvre in tone and theme. He opens with a series of questions “for the next American president.” Either he omitted the candidates’ names because he wanted to sound smart and impartial, or because he doesn’t know and can’t bother googling it. Thereafter he strings together a collection of questions, sprinkling in phrases like “asymmetric threats” and “Leninist maxims.” Attempting to follow the cascading chain of fallacies, from the base-rate fallacy to argumentum ad lapidem, gives you something like a word search, but for logic mistakes. At one point, he says that the United States is not New Zealand; he thinks this profound insight proves that “nobody will protect us if we do not protect ourselves.” You can take the point or leave it, but you can’t deny we’re also part of NATO, and at least some of the thirty-two member countries have nukes they can drop. It’s the kind of logic that ignores how Canada fought the Nazis before we did or how France won the Revolutionary War for us or how Russia’s imminent land invasion (not dropping Fat Man and Little Boy) convinced the Japanese to surrender. He makes the same mistake by boiling all of World War II down to this pithy rejoinder: “We’ve also tried isolationism before, in the 1920s and 1930s. It ended badly.” Well, a few other things happened, too, champ. If you buy into American exceptionalism, everything’s your responsibility or your fault. It’s narcissism but you’ve projected it onto your country.
It’s not logic alone that escapes Stephens: He also struggles with basic facts. For example he demands to know if his next president is “prepared to increase military spending to Cold War levels.” That’s strange, since U.S. defense spending has risen 62% since 1980, adjusted for inflation. Some years we spent more and some less, but those are the facts — a search of academic and popular sources couldn’t produce one voice claiming otherwise. Maybe some crackpot think-tank has a whitepaper about this? Keeping your demands vague — “Cold War levels” — lets you claim people are misreading you. You’re the victim. Throwing in a bunch of random hyperlinks to articles about bad things happening in the world makes it look like you’ve done your homework about global politics. But by the time you come to his lame coup de grâce —
The invasion of Ukraine and Oct. 7 were supposed to be the alarms that the long nap from history was truly over. We can’t just keep hitting the snooze button.
— you’ve just made your way through an odd, boring slog about how someone needs to make America great again. Stephens also advocated for the Iraq War after 9/11. Every big geopolitical disaster, in his worldview, apparently, calls for deploying American power — which leads, in many cases, to suffering and bloodshed, and trillions of dollars wasted. He basically admits as much. His column is barely more cogent than your jingoistic, xenophobic uncle’s Facebook posts.
All this calls to mind Hannah Arendt, who wrote in The Life of the Mind that Immanuel Kant was wrong. He’d said a wicked heart causes stupidity; she said he’d got it backwards. She further refined Kant’s language of stupidity to thoughtlessness; she pointed out you could find this quality in intelligent people, too, and that a wicked heart isn’t what causes it — it’s the other way around. Not thinking, in other words, causes a wicked heart. Accepting arguments without interrogating them. Refusing to see the world in a creative, inclusive, or holistic way. Thinking you know best when all you know are clichés. Exerting control over situations you have no right to involve yourself in. Judging people you’ve never met and never will meet.
That The New York Times would publish thoughtless writing isn’t surprising. Thoughtless writing appears every day all across the Internet. Yes, some of it pops up in legacy media, but some of it’s on social-media sites or in newsletters. Conservatives and liberals engage in it. Thoughtlessness knows no ideological master. You don’t need a college degree to love or help or respect people; neither does having one mean your heart is somehow free of this cruelty. But thoughtlessness doesn’t have much to recommend it. For one thing you’ll find yourself so bound in clichés that you’re unable to breathe. For another you’ll be so boring that everyone around you wants to flee or die. You’ll find yourself unable to recognize patterns, think around corners, or have fun. You will say, with great confidence, that you’ve done your research, or that you are thinking for yourself, and then you’ll open your mouth and say the most idiotic thing anyone around you has ever heard. Especially now, as we head into another American election, we’re going to see this from our friends and family. We’ll also see it from political pundits because thoughtlessness is the noxious gas they breathe.
As Americans we should worry about the tyranny of political parties and our government but also about the tyranny of other people’s stupid ideas. Who needs Russian content farms pumping out A.I.-generated misinformation when we have the same kind of sloppy, weird thinking here at home? On one hand, it’s wrong to judge Stephens by these standards. He’s a political hack. He does exactly what he sets out to do. But he pretends he’s smart. People think he’s smart. His clichés are familiar, and like all familiar things, they’re comforting. Tempting. Junk food for the soul.
That’s what I’m thinking about today, wishing everyone could write and think and act in a more thoughtful way, one free of clichés and easy answers — an inclusive discourse where we’re not afraid to fight for what’s right and true and good, and that supports freedom of speech, human rights across races and genders and cultures, and political joy that offers real solutions to complex problems. Oh, and art. Art and wonder and love. We need to elevate our political discourse. That means we start by setting fire to political clichés; we aspire to be thoughtful every day. It’s time. Let’s go.