In Defense of Throat Clearing

In a subscriber-only post on his Substack, Freddie deBoer reacts to a writer for something called Typebar Magazine beginning an endorsement of a piece deBoer wrote on abortion “People (justifiably) hate Freddie but . . . .”

One thing that has not changed in all my years of doing this has been the degree to which people who argue professionally for a living soil their fucking diapers at the thought of accidentally associating themselves with someone unclean. This tendency defines the trash-strewn sea of utter social cowardice I’ve been forced to swim in for almost twenty years now, simply to exist in this industry. And I just marvel at how deeply ingrained these behaviors are in this business, the absolute addiction to making sure that everyone knows that you are Good and that you know the Baddies are Bad and that you MOST CERTAINLY AREN’T praising a Baddie, you’re just maybe kinda sorta agreeing with some small part of a Baddie’s point, temporarily. Honestly, what is the fear here? What rational human being would ever look at this guy saying “Freddie makes a good point about abortion here” and then say “Ah, he’s endorsing deBoer as a human being in his totality, he must truly love Freddie deBoer and side with him on all matters of controversy?” It’s absurd. It’s asinine. It’s flagrantly inspired by fear of one’s peers. It’s constant in this world. And it never, ever changes.

There’s presumably more, but, while I’ve paid to read some of deBoer’s work, including his book The Cult of Smart, I am not a paid subscriber to his Substack. So, perhaps he deals with my reaction later in the piece.

While I fully agree that we ought to be able to evaluate arguments on their own merits without pro forma disclaimers, I would argue that there’s reason to do so beyond moral cowardice: almost nobody actually evaluates arguments on their own merits.

That’s most obvious in the pure politics space. We’ve seen time and again over the years that people will change their views on an issue 180 based on who a quote is attributed to. Hell, the entire Republican Party seems to have changed their opinion on every other issue simply because Donald Trump is now the head of the party.

But this is almost as true in the public intellectual space. I can’t quote, for instance, discuss a piece by Andrew Sullivan without the commentariat quickly dismissing it based on his decision to excerpt The Bell Curve when he edited TNR decades ago. This is true even if the issue being discussed has nothing to do with race or IQ. The same is true for even relatively innocuous columnists like Megan McArdle; any argument will be dismissed based on some random tweet from 2008 having nothing to do with the topic at hand. Hell, #NeverTrump Republicans making an argument that Democrats agree with will be dismissed because they once supported Mitt Romney or took the same position on the Iraq War as the entire 2008 Democratic primary field save Barack Obama.

In that environment, then, the only choices are to simply not cite those personalities or to attempt to preempt the reaction before doing so. Caveating likely objections makes for weaker prose, to be sure. But it’s a learned reaction if you’re publishing in a medium with immediate reader feedback.