What About Our Sanity?
By: Henry Wismayer
Tags: Rhetoric, Culture War, Social Media, Politics

Why has this happened?

Much of the blame must surely reside with an opportunistic political class whose pronouncements now seem to be entirely governed by the art of saying what your constituency (and donors) want to hear, rather than what is true. This tendency is exacerbated by the Fox News Effect, wherein media outlets have allowed unyielding bias to infiltrate purportedly “fair and balanced” reporting. Perhaps that’s where America’s obfuscator-in-chief, who infamously responded to condemnation of the alt-right rally in Charlottesville by asking “whatabout the alt-left…?”, picked up the habit.

But the enabling mechanism is, of course, the great accidental villain of our time: the internet, the mob-forum where the entire world gets to follow Lord Beaverbrook’s journalistic exhortation to “publish and be damned.” It’s an unfortunate product of (not just a backlash against) the liberal age that everyone feels entitled to believe whatever the hell they want, no matter how ill-informed or unsubstantiated those beliefs may be. And the web empowers us to scream those ill-informed or unsubstantiated views loud and clear.

The facets of online communication that foster whataboutism are well-known. The option of anonymity erodes the sense that our words are consequential. The medium tends to abbreviate debate, offering disproportionate reward for punchy one-liners in a way that infantilizes conversation, even though a sentiment that seems quite brilliant in 100 characters doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny when you you unpack it.

However, perhaps more significant for those seeking to understand the whatabout contagion is the role it plays in galvanizing online echo chambers. By offering up a means to parry every opposition blow, it helps people to erect near-impermeable battlements around their ideological viewpoints. I often wonder how chastening it must be when you write something so apocalyptically thick that you end up falling foul of “the ratio” — where the deluge of condemnatory replies elicited by a stupid tweet far outnumbers its likes and RTs. But I imagine that a determined partisan can brush it aside by merely retreating into his own virtual convention centre, where a million people will be more than happy to reinforce his notion that #pizzagate is indeed integral to a conversation about Trumpian immigration policy.

While cynical politicians and pundits exploit whataboutism to dissemble and foment partisan outrage, the rank and file seem more than happy to swallow it whole. It is increasingly evident from the way common or garden-variety whataboutists butt into more measured conversation, thinking they have something relevant to say, that they genuinely believe this brand of argumentation negates whatever facts you throw at them.

Whataboutism, in short, provides an answer for people who have none.

In scrabbling around for arguments to validate our existing partisanship, people at both ends of the political spectrum have lighted upon false equivalence as an instrument for defending indefensible positions. We have willfully fooled ourselves.

Confronted with this pigheadedness, even the most rational among us end up getting sucked into the vortex. It is simply not possible to argue with logical fallacies, so whataboutism has the knock-on effect of driving your interlocutor up the wall. Temperate debate descends into a mire of snark and circumlocution. Witness, for a depressing example, the level of whataboutism being volleyed back and forth online the next time America suffers a terrorist attack, as ordinarily sensible people start shrieking across the political chasm — “Whatabout the Islamists?” “Whatabout the far right?” — almost as if the entire nation was engaged in a high-stakes game of terrorist Top-Trumps.

[Quote retweet: “Kill me now.”]

That’s the crucial thing to understand about whataboutism. It’s not really about winning the argument and converting people to your way of thinking at all. Instead, it is just a corollary of tribalism and a means of entrenching biases — both those of your audience and your own. It might occasionally provide its deployer with the illusion of a hollow “win.” But as a means of bringing the opposition round to your point of view? Forget it. Because whataboutism empowers each side to wallow in ignorance and fallacy, the prospect of reconciliation over just about any policy issue grows more remote by the day.