Of Malice and Men

This post is co-written with Mark Mancini

Suppose you say something on Twitter that you wish you hadn’t said. No, actually―if you’re on Twitter―remember that time you said something you wish you hadn’t said? How would you hope that the rest of us would react? For our part, a sad bemused shrug and, perhaps, a friendly private word of reproof sound about right. Well, this is a post about doing unto others, etc.

When Emmett Macfarlane tweeted about “burning down” the US Congress to prevent a successor to the late Justice Ginsburg being confirmed before the presidential election, we cringed a bit. There is too much hyperbole out there, too much violent imagery, too much speaking as if the next election, or the next judicial appointment, is―literally―the end of the world. Twitter makes this phenomenon worse. As Justice Stratas of the Federal Court of Appeal noted in a recent talk, the Twitter world is like the Holodeck from Star Trek―a convincing pastiche of reality. Twitter, in many cases, magnifies our worst impulses.

There is too much of this nonsense on all sides. President Obama, who often modelled grace and calm when his political opponents and supporters alike lacked both, now suggests that questions such as “whether or not our economy is fair, our society is just, women are treated equally, our planet survives, and our democracy endures” turn on who replaces the late Justice Ginsburg. On US political right, the 2016 election was notoriously compared to Flight 93―the plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 after the passengers stormed the cabin to prevent hijackers from turning it on their intended target. Similar arguments are being made again. The message is that even death―or at any rate a vote for an avowedly appalling man who would uphold none of the principles one claims to believe―is preferable to the other side taking power until the next election.

So, to repeat, we cringed at Professor Macfarlane’s “burn it down” tweet. And yet we knew full well―as does anyone with a brain and even a modicum of good faith―that it is only a hyperbolic, spur-of-the-moment outburst, not an actual call to arson and violence. Professor Macfarlane’s Twitter persona may be cantankerous, but he is a genuine scholar and a decent man. (Disclosure: one of us (Sirota) has contributed a chapter to a book project Professor Macfarlane edits. You can discount our arguments accordingly, but the diversity of views represented in that project speaks to Professor Macfarlane’s scholarly seriousness and open-mindedness.)

Sadly, there are people who do not operate in good faith at all. They affect to think, or at any rate they say, that Professor Macfarlane was actually threatening violence, and profess worry for the safety of his Trump-supporting students. This is arrant nonsense, a smear with no factual basis whatsoever. Professor Macfarlane’s opinions are neither new nor secret, and those who now betake themselves to the fainting couch haven’t paused for a second to inquire whether he has ever been so much as unfair, let alone threatening, to his students.

These people are as uninterested in truth as they are lacking in charity. They see a political opponent say something that can be―at least to those equally uncharitable―made to look like a threat or a sign of depravity, and pounce to virtue-signal on Twitter, to whip up their allies’ outrage, and thereby to increase their own standing with their in-group. They are hypocrites too, with their feigned outrage about hyperbolic rhetoric which is no worse than that in which they themselves engage. They deserve nothing but unreserved rejection.

A couple of weeks ago, another scholar, Dwight Newman, was disparaged by people who engaged in an uncharitable if not outright twisted reading of his work to impugn his integrity. That was an attack from the left on someone perceived to be on the right. We were proud to give Professor Newman an opportunity to refute their smears (and one of us (Sirota) added a further response of his own). Now Professor Macfarlane is being vilified by people who are trying to make him into an avatar of the unhinged left. Although both the targets of these attacks (an article in one case; a tweet in the other) and their perpetrators (fellow scholars, alas, in the former case; anti-intellectual populists in the latter) are different, they have much in common.

Both need to be defeated. As Justin Amash pointed out just yesterday, limited government―that is, a government that respects democracy and human rights―cannot exist without trust among citizens. To be sure, we need not pretend that our fellow-citizens, let alone our governments, are better and more trustworthy than they really are. But, if we want to continue living together in peace and freedom, we must not pretend that they are worse people than we know them to be for the sake of scoring some political points. To quote another American politician, we must go forward with malice toward none, and charity for all.