Neithersideism

Sometimes, I’m asked by readers, “You’re kind of hard to make, politically, these days. Whose side are you on, anyway?” To which I respond: “You’ve heard of bothsidesism? Well in the last decade or so, I’ve become an adherent of neithersideism.”  

Why should I have to pledge my troth to chiselers, demagogues, and performing monkeys? To partisan gasbags and green-room gangsters and social-media harlots? AOC vs. MTG — to take but two party mascots — ain’t really a choice I’m interested in making, no matter how many partisan hacks stick a gun in my back and tell me it’s my God-appointed duty to do so. 

Neither, best I can tell, has any real interest in setting our country right. They’re much more interested in outrage — both provoking it and feigning it. Exhibitionistic rage is the fuel that fires their engines. And they’re not opposites, so much as bookends: professional hysterics whose entire careers are designed to agitate and inflame.

-- Matt Labash, Against Performing Monkeys

...a tidal wave of political narcissism opposed to the idea of social responsibility.

-- Garrison Keillor

My main thought is that too many view this all as a game. For whatever reason — maybe they're young and childless, or their kids aren't actually in school? — they see things in the abstract. You age into a community with other people's families and children and you get along to go along and you grow to love their kids and you find that most people on the local level just want to live reasonable, decent lives, because caring about other people is the only reason to be alive. This discourse is so divorced from that. I don't know how to square it. At the school bus stop, at the ice rink: I am awash in people just being people, regular people. The gender wars, the fascism this-or-that: none of it registers. Whence all the alarmism? The discourse is alarming. I get that. It really is. But if you quit participating in it..."

-- Ben McGrath