The Chait Goes On -

The Chait Goes On - Quick, where did the following come from:

A recent article of mine in ______ defending Bush hatred seems to have worked like some kind of conservative dog whistle, silently summoning drooling right-wingers out of their lairs to bay at the moon...Wait. Did I just lump David Brooks together with a bunch of incoherent right-wing knuckle-draggers?

Who wrote this piece? Was it:

A) StarRabbit Eikenson-Filck, posting on Indymedia.com?
B) Jonathan Chait, writing for The New Republic?
C) Moonbat lefty blogger Hesiod?
D) An anonymous writer on lefty conspiracy site "Democrats.com"?
E) What's the Difference?

If you answered E, you know where this is going.

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Wait, I'm being unfair. Let's start at the beginning.

Last week, Jonathan Chait, a "senior" editor at The New Republic, posted an article, "Mad About You: the Case for Bush Hatred".

A chorus of voices rose to attack the article and the sentiments behind it:

• Hugh Hewitt, who featured the article on his nationwide talk show,
• Powerline's Rocket Man, Trunk and Deacon with a total of five articles covering everything from Chait's many factual miscues to the wider implications of the cultural war,
• Michael Novak, who carves up the Chait's whiny approach; "Sensing desperation, Chait's comments about the younger Bush's accent, posture, and mannerisms come down to ethnic prejudice and intellectual bigotry. None of this is remotely rational."
• David Brooks in the NYTimes, who summed up Chait's overall approach "The quintessential new warrior scans the Web for confirmation of the president's villainy. He avoids facts that might complicate his hatred. He doesn't weigh the sins of his friends against the sins of his enemies. But about the president he will believe anything."
• Exultate Justi with a fine counterattack,
• Finally, my own piece

Is Chait right or wrong to hate - not disagree with, not oppose, but hate the President, with all the moral and political ramifications (to say nothing of journalistic ones)? You be the judge.

Was Chait's article a petulant, misguided display that proves the old saw "Hatred is Ignorance?" Was it chock full of inaccuracies, factual errors and personal grudgemongering that reads as if it dates back to high school ("He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school - the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it")? Read the articles above. I link, you decide.

Yesterday, Chait responded.

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In one of my favorite Saturday Night Live bits ever, Heather Locklear plays a deranged Cable Sales Channel hucksterette.

Locklear did a perfect rendition of a QVC shill, pitching yet another jar of snake oil (or in this case, a Ronco-ish pasta maker, invented by Mike Myers) - with a difference. Amid the patter, completely by surprise, Locklear threw in little bon mots of corrosive racism [I'm paraphrasing here - I can't find a script for the sketch online]:

"...just add your ingredients, and bingo! Instant Pasta! Why, this machine is so easy to use, even a Puerto Rican can figure it out!"

And, as a horrified Myers tried to explain the simple instructions...:

I'm glad this machine is easy to figure out. Because normally when a product says it has easy instructions, I think it's a big fat lie. Like the Holocaust.

What made the sketch so hilarious was that the caustic racism slipped into the most innocuous places, and was all the more notable for the banality of its surroundings.

In yesterday's New Republic piece, Chait does much the same.

He goes to great lengths - in both articles - to prove his bona fides as an open-minded person and legitimate commentator:

I spend far more time reading the conservative media--in addition to National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Andrew Sullivan's website are all part of my daily fare--than I do reading liberal commentary.

In his first article, he said:

Antipathy to Bush has, for example, led many liberals not only to believe the costs of the Iraq war outweigh the benefits but to refuse to acknowledge any benefits at all, even freeing the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. And it has caused them to look for the presidential nominee who can best stoke their own anger, not the one who can win over a majority of voters--who, they forget, still like Bush.

Reasonable, no?

And yet there are the outbursts - like Locklear's comic surprise trips into bigotry, only serious this time:

A recent article of mine in TNR defending Bush hatred seems to have worked like some kind of conservative dog whistle, silently summoning drooling right-wingers out of their lairs to bay at the moon. Writing in The Weekly Standard, a conservative talk-show host named Hugh Hewitt calls my piece "much-ridiculed," the entirety of his evidence consisting of the fact that a few conservative bloggers dislike it.

Those few bloggers were Powerline, the Monkeys, Exultate Justi and myself.

Drooling, baying dogs? Read the bios of Powerline's Hindrocket, Big Trunk, and Deacon. Compare them with Chait's bio. You be the judge.

And this:

Did I just lump David Brooks together with a bunch of incoherent right-wing knuckle-draggers?

Knuckle-draggers? ("Oh, Jon - I bet you say that to all the conservatives...").

While I get around in four languages, play ten musical instruments and can do everything from the Brandenburg Concertos to Anarchy in the UK from memory, am passionate about classical Russian literature and am raising a writer and an artist, I guess the dragging knuckles would explain all this gravel in my lunch.

While the insults were the low-rent stuff of the college newspapers (that had found their way for whatever reason in a respected national liberal magazine), they were indeed part of the key to Chait's article. Read all the commentary above - the David Brooks piece, Mike Novak's article, the five Powerline posts, Exultate Justi's post and my screed. While each piece was different, and most took slightly different tacks on the story (leaving aside Powerline, whose overlapping expertises allow them to divide and conquer like few blogs this side of the Volokh Clan), in the end all eight made similar points - read for yourself, note the overlap - all say, essentially, that Chait's original article was factually challenged, relied as much on what appeared to be personal, petulant emotional slights stemming from an academically-bred sense of entitlement as on whatever "facts" he presented, evinced no understanding of conservatives or the reasons for Bush's popularity, and was a poorly-written rant that reflected very badly on what has always been considered a respectable magazine.

Despite the similarity in content, tone and style among the eight pieces, though, Chait observes a strict hierarchy:

1. David Brooks, being from the New York Times, gets a collegial nod of respect: "Brooks is intelligent and an excellent writer".
2. The National Review's Michael Novak, on the other hand, is of a lower caste, but at least gets a special dispensation: "Novak's column was a semi-literate rant about me, filled with sweeping invective, bizarre digressions, and, strangely-enough, phrases in bold-face seemingly at random." He's semi-literate - but, along with the likes of "National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Andrew Sullivan's website", as he puts it, he's at least one of the right semi-literates, the ones that work in the same corner of the industry he does.
3. Trunk, Hindrocket, Deacon, Exultate Justi, Hugh Hewitt and myself, on the other hand working as we do in the nekulturny wild frontier of talk radio and the blogophere? No matter how many ways we fold, spindle and mutilate his article (and let's be honest - we did), we're like the Indian untouchable caste - beneath contempt, much less consideration.

Old-media bigotry in action? The actions of someone who would never try for a gig at the National Review, but just might want a job at the Times one day? Or just the sign of a guy who can't argue the facts?

Hewitt said:

This is a reaction that suggests our collective analysis of Chait's screed scored, I think, and the Powerline gents, Mitch at ShotintheDark and other bloggers who took Chait apart line by line must also be pleased to have been so denounced.

What is curious, however, is why Peter Beinart is allowing a much respected magazine to be hijacked by a feverish writer resorting to the sort of tactics associated with the paranoid of both right and left. A loose cannon like Chait may be a subscription magnet for the MoveOn.org crowd, but hardly representative of the writing style that has marked TNR for its many decades of responsible commentary.

I think Hugh's right - Chait's response is a churlish, defensive jumble.

Caste systems aside, Chait's second piece was no better than the first, of course; fisking it is almost a rote exercise. Chait says:

The irony is that the exertions of the anti Bush-haters lack even an attempt at analytical rigor. Brooks does not even mention, let alone try to refute, my argument.

Buncombe. First, at least three of the eight posts listed above specifically addressed the points in your article, showing them to be groundless, specious, hopeless.

Second: There was little to refute! The article was like a kid's tantrum - impossible to refute, something you'd ignore if you weren't worry about reinforcing the behavior!

Novak and Hewitt's responses are on the level of discourse you'd find at a Howard Dean rally.

And yet, given the intellectual vacuity of the original article, that level of discourse may have been more than Chait deserved - again, read the original, and you can be the judge.

Here's a howler:

The most glaring absence in Brooks's column is the word "impeachment." In exploring the cause of liberal anger, it would seem relevant that Republicans took the highly unusual step of setting a perjury trap and impeaching a popular Democratic president.

Ah. It's the GOP's fault! If only we hadn't held Clinton accountable for his behavior, they'd cut Bush a break!

Chait closes:

The timing of Brooks's plea for civility is a tad suspicious. After Republican culture wars softened up Clinton, and tainted Al Gore, paving the way for Bush's election, suddenly it's time to declare president-hating out of bounds.

No. It's time to move it to the fringe - where it was during the Clinton years, and where it should be today.

Yes, Brooks criticized some of the excesses of Clinton-hatred, but he vigorously supported impeachment.

Right. Rather than succumb to irrational hatred - the thing Chait himself glorified in his first piece, with its endless, niggling references to Bush's accent, his walk, his childhood - Brooks (and many of us) favored settling the argument through a dispassionate, legal procedure. Rather than flailing away in an endless, circular emotional argument pitting poles of fringe partisan hatred against fringe partisan forgiveness.

It's true that some of the Bush-haters go way too far--Michael Moore comes to mind. But if Brooks wants to proscribe all Bush-haters, not just the conspiracy-mongers, then what he seeks isn't a higher level of discourse but raw partisan advantage

For starters - let's remember what this is about; this is Jonathan Chait defending his justification of hatred, an ignorant, uncultured, ugly emotion that masks ignorance, bigotry and most of the ignoble side of the human condition. It's not defensible.

And not to speak for Brooks, but I suspect the real goal is to identify and castigate the lunatic fringe.

Which is what Jonathan Chait is - and where he's dragging The New Republic.

Posted by Mitch at October 2, 2003 10:26 AM