I don’t really care about the Atlanta Falcons. As a Jets fan, I’m obviously obligated to root against the Patriots, and am utterly unable to forgive Bill Belichick’s deplorable act of treachery 17 years ago.
After watching the Falcons out-Jets the Jets in Super Bowl LI, blowing a 25-point third-quarter lead to Coach Evil and his douchebag Mini-Me — which, for some reason, felt a lot like election night — I made a comment on social media that “I just can’t get used to watching evil people win.” The comments I got were mostly simpatico, with some smug gloating from Patriots fans sprinkled in (which I’m fine with, BTW), but one comment really pissed me off: paraphrasing, “Well, the Falcons were fined by the NFL for pumping fake crowd noise into the Georgia Dome, so they’re not completely innocent.”
For the record, that did happen. But the comment pissed me off so much that I instantly deleted it, although I wasn’t quite sure why it upset me. Forget the fact that it was beside the point, as far as I know the person is not a Patriots fan, and as I said before, I don’t give one whit about the Atlanta Falcons. But as I thought about it, the more I realized what actually bothered me: It was an automatic, knee-jerk, instant false equivalence. The first reaction to a negative comment about a person or organization is to immediately and reflexively throw up a false equivalence about another person or organization. That’s the first response, the first reflex, the first instinct; say anything about anything, “[X] is [Y],” and someone just has to chime in with “Well, [Z] is [Y] too” or “[Z] is just as [Y].”
Except, most of the time, it’s not.
As I’ve written before, I’ve been avoiding political talk since the election. I’ve been skimming the commentary about “fake news” and “alternative facts” and reviewing (along with everyone else) the key passages of Orwell’s 1984, but apart from the occasional comment here at Kos I’ve been avoiding the fever swamps. But the more I think about it the more I realize that out of all the “fake news” and “alternative facts” and everything else that I’ve always filed under the banner of Republican Fan Fiction, the worst variety of that, and the most despicable rhetorical tactic associated with it, is false equivalence.
Friday night on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill brought up the Republicans’ theft of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court Seat — perhaps the most despicable partisan power grab in American history — to which his guest, the cuteyoungblonde right-wing firebrand Tomi Lahren, immediately and reflexively pointed out, in words to the effect, “Joe Biden did the same thing.” Instead of calling her out on the false equivalence, Bill full-heartedly agreed with her, to the effect, “Yes, absolutely, and Democrats cannot run from that.” And that was the end of it.
It’s a shame that it has to be explained, again, that in 1992 Biden was speaking in the hypothetical, in late June, and said only that if a seat opened up before the election the President “should not nominate” anyone. He did not say, suggest, imply, or declare an intention that if President Bush did nominate someone less than five months before an election, that the Senate should, let alone would, refuse to hold confirmation hearings and steal that seat for the next President. We all know this; we all know that that [insert expletive here, because I can’t even] Mitch McConnell’s invocation of the so-called imaginary made-up “Biden Rule” was pure hogwash.
Last year I was having one of those interminable discussions about “religious liberty” vis-à-vis commercial discrimination, making the point that the latter has nothing to do with the former. Someone asked the question, paraphrasing, “When is it appropriate to allow moral values to influence commercial decisions?” to which I replied, “When it’s not against the law.” The person came back with some nonsense about Harriet Tubman, again paraphrasing, “So you’re saying that what Harriet Tubman did was wrong?” Because, you know, slavery was “the law” and helping people escape slavery was a “commercial decision” that was “against the law.”
No, slavery was not “the law.” Slavery was an absolute evil that the law to that point had tolerated and failed/declined to remedy. Even if one could argue with a straight face that Tubman’s work was “against the law” (let alone that it was a “commercial decision”), she accepted and took the risks associated with “breaking” the “law” and did not go around demanding or expecting to be exempt from those risks because she “felt” that the law was “immoral.” And that’s to say nothing about the implication that shopping-while-gay, or a statutory cause of action for commercial discrimination, is an absolute evil on par with slavery.
The “Bowling Green Massacre” [that didn’t happen] and the resulting “Obama ban on immigration from Iraq” [that also didn’t happen] is only the latest in a long line of false equivalencies that pervade Republican propaganda; I could go on and on and on with example after example of all the false equivalencies by which Republican politicians and partisans comfort and congratulate themselves that they, their party and their cohort are not nearly as evil, depraved, selfish, solipsistic, cynical, vicious, dishonest, cruel, inhumane and wrong as the rest of the world thinks they are.
It’s that self-admiration that has always bothered me more than anything else about 21st-century Republican politics. It’s that nauseating strain of selfishness and self-hero-worship and martyrdom and delusions of persecution that makes Republican partisans so difficult to listen to and talk to. But it’s the penchant for false equivalence, I think, more than anything else, that makes them so difficult to reason with. Getting someone to understand and recognize the difference between [X] and [Y] — and, more importantly, why the distinction is meaningful — when they have a deep, desperate, critical need to believe that [X] and [Y] are exactly the same is about as uphill a battle as there can be in discourse and debate.
One of the first things one learns in law school is how to analogize and distinguish case law from similar-but-not-identical fact patterns. As one learns to do that, one also learns to recognize whether, to what extent, and why the similarities are important, the distinctions are important, the similarities are more important than the distinctions and vice-versa. The classic example is the Trolley Problem: Why is it OK for the driver of a runaway trolley to throw a switch that will result in the death of one track worker when doing nothing would kill three, but not OK for a doctor to euthanize a healthy patient and give his organs to three terminally-ill patients and thereby save their lives? Why do two men who made the exact same moral choice for the exact same reason with the exact same outcome deserve two different legal fates?
No matter what the answer is, the answer is not that the two men don’t deserve two different legal fates and that to suggest otherwise is hypocritical and dishonest and a “double standard.” The fact is there’s nothing wrong with applying “double standards” to situations that are not the same. But it is important to understand not only how they are different, but why the difference between them is important and thus requires a different “standard” and/or a different result.
This is why I think false equivalency is the worst, most insidious, most dangerous, and most difficult-to-overcome aspect of political discourse and propaganda, especially in the era of “fake news” and “alternative facts.” I’ve found that most people, no matter how smart or knowledgeable they are, cannot solve the Trolley Problem; they agree that what the driver did was right and what the doctor did was wrong but they can’t explain precisely why, or articulate what the key difference is; indeed, most of the distinctions they try to make are actually the same in each scenario. And the solution has nothing to do with subjective morality; there is a sound, objective public-policy reason for the law to treat the driver’s choice and the doctor’s choice differently that doesn’t require anyone to feel that what either of them did was right or wrong.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s difficult to get someone to understand the difference between [X] and [Y] when his political affiliations and prejudices (and whatever self-worth he attaches thereto) require him to believe that [X] and [Y] are the same. I think that’s true whether the prejudice is “my side is good and the other side is bad,” or “both sides are equally bad.” I would distinguish false equivalency as a rhetorical tactic from “both-siderism,” viz., the idea that “both sides are equally [insert negative characteristic here]” as a political theme. I think they’re related, in that the former is a key component of the latter, but I’m more interested in the technique than the purpose or effect. And I don’t think we can address both-siderism without first addressing false equivalence. And we can’t address false equivalence without addressing why it is so often the first, reflexive, immediate, automatic response to practically any statement on practically any subject.