You Should Not Treat Your Political Opponents as a Homogenous Group Made up of Their Least Defensible Members
How to turn politics into all out war
A very common line in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk was some variation of “they killed Charlie Kirk,” or “the left killed Charlie Kirk.” People constantly say stuff like, “the left did X,” and then point to a thing that either one or a small number of left-wingers did. Some examples (many of them taken from Richard Hanania’s excellent article):
Thou hypocrite! You claim one thing, but there is at least one other member of your political party, located somewhere in the world, who disagrees with that thing.
This is an extremely bad feature of political discourse. It is bad because it makes our politics both dumber and more divisive. “They” did not kill Charlie Kirk. The Democratic party did not kill Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk, without previously consulting the DNC, Obama, or random Democrats who warned about the risks of right-wing violence.
The left did not respond to Matt Walsh’s claims about the Renee Good shooting by threatening to kill him. The left did not have a planned and organized response. Instead, a small number of unhinged people on Twitter responded that way. A more common response was to explain why he was wrong, and a more common response than that was to ignore him.
Similarly, the Democratic party did not make fun of the way Karoline Leavitt looked. Instead, one person did, and some other people liked the Tweet expressing that sentiment. I am a Democrat. I care about shrimp welfare. This does not mean that the Democratic party supports shrimp welfare!
This is an extremely basic point. It should be obvious to everyone, and no doubt if people really reflected, it would be obvious. But if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it. If you are going to imply that the random people on Twitter who send death threats to Matt Walsh are representative of the Democratic party, then you should seriously reconsider the quality of your political reasoning. You have become less like an agent and more like a set of conditioned reflexes—willing to do whatever is “based” and throws shade on the party you don’t like, even if it’s obviously totally braindead.
One helpful standard to apply in politics is to ask whether you’d be outraged if the other side did the same to you. When right-wingers commit political murders, would Republicans think it fair to say that they are the party of murder? Even if every high-profile Republican denounced those political murders?
This is totally destructive to peaceable political dialogue. The worst people on the other side are really bad. So are the worst people on your side. Political parties have tens of millions of registered members. There are murderers, rapists, and cannibals on both sides. If you treat the worst member of the other side as if they were representative, that is a recipe for turning politics into an all out war of extermination.
In politics, especially on the internet, there is a strong incentive to see the very worst in your political opponents. Tweets don’t go viral saying “while I oppose the Democrats, this criticism of them is slightly overstated.” Instead, Tweets that go viral say stuff like “the Democrats want to kill you and take your kids.”
If you’re incentivized to find fault with the other side, and your standard for “the other side supports X,” is that one person on the other side does or supports X, then you can manufacture any number of fictitious vices of your political opponents. This tendency, and others like it, has been a serious contributor to politics getting more hateful, divisive, and stupid. You should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made up of their least defensible members, and if you do, you can have no consistent complaint when the other side does the same to you.
>Thou hypocrite! You claim one thing, but there is at least one other member of your political party, located somewhere in the world, who disagrees with that thing.
I think what makes this kind of thinking so pervasive is that partisan individuals don't really put much energy into denouncing the worst members of their own side, even if they disagree with them. To outsiders, this might look like silent approval or selective outrage. The hypocrisy then, wouldn't be that they agree with them but that they put so much energy into condemning bad behavior on the other side while not having much to say about the same behavior happening on their own side. Of course, this kind of criticism is not always a fair one to levy at someone, but it is sometimes.
I hate to reveal my potential bias, but I really feel that the right wing does this more. In fact, they talk more about left-wing issues than people on the left. They spend more time talking about transgender than people on the left do. The whole situation with the Sydney Sweeney jeans as was discussed or cited probably at least 10 times more often by people on the right than anyone on the left. I could not find anyone on the left who in fact cared about the ad.