In Defense of Both Sides—and Neither

Too often people selectively invoke principles when it serves their purposes and discard them when it doesn’t.

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Dear Reader (including Britney Spears, who is finally free to read the G-File unsupervised),

Russia, Russia, Russia.

So I often write about how alienated I am from a lot of mainstream politics these days. This annoys a lot of people who think I’m under some obligation to pick a side, particularly the people who think that if I’m not wholly on their side I must be the other side. Anger at both-sides-ism is ironically one of the few areas of agreement between, well, both sides.

But let me take a moment to speak in praise of both-sides-ism.

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  1. Avatar photo
    SandyG

    Who are the political operators who tried to weaponize the dossier who said, in Jonah's paraphrase, just get the accusations out there and don’t worry if they’re true? Where is "out there"? To the FBI or to the press? It was BuzzFeed who published them.

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    1. H.Allen.irish@gmail.com

      And who exactly gave them to Buzzfeed?

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    Ivan Jankovic

    there is one more very important item when it comes to Trump-Putin cooperation tha you conveniently missed: he was negotiating with Russian government about Trump Tower Moscow until the election day on 2016! While lying that he did not have any business ties to Russia. When asked about this later, he said "I thought I was going to lose and why then miss the opportunity". Some "Russia hoax" indeed!

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    Ben Connelly

    Matt Labash had a piece defending bothsidesism quite recently. Seems like it’s in the air.

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  4. Deanjens

    "Whataboutism" is at its most relevant in response to claims, which we heard in abundance over the last several years, that something is "unprecedented". Following closely behind that is the related argument over what the norms are and in how many ways Chuck Schumer is responsible for violating them.

    I think something like this latter argument is the context in which we most frequently see it, but usually without enough context. I have beliefs that some norms are good and some are bad, and I believe that we ought to play by the same rules, and I like to think this is true of most people. If you're saying, well, I don't like this rule, but it's clear that it's the rule by which the other side is playing, it's useful to spell that out -- to make it clear that you're not defending the norm, exactly, but you're defending that, for the time being, it is the norm.

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    This comment has been deleted

  6. Andrewchida

    Love and agree with most the article. However, as a centrist, disagree with the view that centrism is just the ideological child of divorced parents compromising between left and right. For Joe Manchin it seems to be, and I actually have a little bit of disrespect for that, but I would argue he’s not a centrist, just a moderate democrat. Centrism shouldn’t be choosing 2 trillion in spending when one side wants 4 and the other wants 0, that’s just ideologically empty moderating. Centrism should be more focused on anti-radical good governance and maximizing efficiency, at least in my own definition. I really don’t agree with the lefts (and the rights when they are in power) wild deficit spending or the view that the state is the best controller of almost all things, but I’m also not reflexively opposed to government. I found the Trump rule of getting rid of 2 regulations for every one new regulation heinous because it was a completely thoughtless assumption that literally any regulation would be bad. Bad regulations should be fixed or eliminated, good should stay, and we should base that on observable effects of the regulations. Eliminating two good regulations every time a new bad regulation was introduced would be a net bad even if the total number of regulations decreased.

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    rlritt

    It seems as if Russia is taking advantage of the chaos and division they a instigating.

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  8. Scott O

    Love a great Churchill story… another one:
    Woman: “Winston, if I were your wife I’d poison your soup.”
    Churchill: “Madame, if I were your husband I’d drink it.”

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  9. David Shannon

    Can we simplify this to:judge each side by the same standard? If it’s wrong when your side does it, it’s wrong when my side does it.

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    Ted Gale

    "I’m not going to defend any of it."

    Bingo (or, if you prefer, "Dingo.")


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