the way we argue and liberal peacocking

In mixed martial arts, there's an old nostrum that the fighter who wins is the fighter who dictates where the fight happens. The world's best striker can't win if his opponent constantly puts him on the mat; a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt doesn't help you any if you can't get the fight to the floor. Dictate where the fight happens and you dictate the victor.*

This is also true in political debate. The writers and bloggers who typically succeed in argument are those who understand their relative strengths and know how and where to engage to maximize those strengths. This is a delicate business and one that is really only learned through experience. But some people are good at it and some people aren't, and there's a real consistency in the rhetorical stance of the former and the latter. In my own blogging, I have received my worst beatings exactly when I have been careless in assessing what the terrain of the argument would be, when I haven't taken the time to best position myself rhetorically. My sense is that many or most writers think this way, though they likely don't talk about it much. I don't see anything untoward about it. It's just the way it is.

Someone who is very, very good at playing on home ice, so to speak, is Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates is a veteran writer who worked as a journalist for years and years before he ever blogged, and that experience shines through in his writing. Professional writing is an interesting business; writing rightly is thought of as a noble and important enterprise, but you've got to make a living. And Coates has been savvier than most. He has a way of framing every discussion as a facet of his particular obsessions, which means that anyone arguing with him is playing on his terms. This is particularly evident in what is literally his space, the comments section of his blog, where he has cultivated a rabid fanbase that is endearing in its protectiveness towards him, if not always enlightened.

I suppose this sort of talk is the kind that gets me in trouble with people. Coates is a tough case. Like many black intellectuals, he labors in a context where much of his white audience interprets him and his work as a kind of font of endless gravitas, rather than than through interrogating his work as usual with any other writer. This isn't due to anything Coates has done or to any conscious choice made by such readers, but rather to the tangled relationships many white people have towards race and blackness, which are generally well-intentioned but can descend into a type of condescension if unchecked. I don't mean to sound hypercritical here; complicated feelings towards race and the racialized subject are an inevitable facet of intellectual life in a country with a hideously racist past and persistently racist present.

In any event, I bring this up because this post by Matt Yglesias about Lincoln references Coates's long war on calling the Civil War tragic. Apparently Coates has waged that war well, because Yglesias can't even bring himself to write the word tragic in this context without scare quotes. I suppose I don't blame him. This issue is the kind of issue on which most liberals will not risk appearing on the wrong side of the race question; after all, we're talking about events that happened 150 years ago. There's far less risk in getting on the consensus side of an issue of racial controversy.

For myself, I found the whole conversation a matter of people insisting on fighting a battle in a particular locale, as I identified above. There were and are two separate ideas being discussed, and yet they were relentlessly conflated. One, that the Civil War was tragic because the South had some positive elements like white women sunning themselves on the gothic porch and drinking sweet tea before the cotillion, the romantic South notion, the Lost Cause idea that Coates is always talking about. That's all inherently offensive. A second idea is that killing people is inherently tragic, that the death of well over 300,000 people is inherently tragic. That idea can be disputed, and many or most would dispute it. It cannot be fairly conflated with the first.

I'm a pacifist. I believe that the intentional taking of human life is permanently and unalterably immoral. To be a pacifist is to swim in a sea of hypotheticals and counterfactuals, and I have heard them all, about Hitler, and about terrorists with bombs and buses full of children, about the prevention of genocide and rape and nuclear war and all the rest. And my answer is the same. I recognize no difference between the moral status of the killing of Osama bin Laden or Mother Theresa. It's perfectly fine for people to dismiss that and dismiss me; I have been laughed at for my views since I was 15 years old, after all. But I do reject the notion that calling all of that death tragic is somehow the same as dreaming about Gothic architecture or taking the Confederacy or those who fought for it for anything but racist and evil. But Coates has consistently refused to think about the issue in any other way.

"The Civil War was tragic" is a statement with many interpretations, and no one is obligated to consider it in the way that most people prefer. But then, I suppose Coates isn't obligated to consider the issue in any way other than he wants to, either, and as I said, savvy political writers always bring the fight where they want to fight it.

As for the Lincoln discussion... at this point it seems quite useless to me. I pretty much agree with Corey Robin, though I admired the film more than he did despite my qualms. I think that the early moments of this discussion had value, but those moments are probably gone. What good remains will likely be drowned out by liberal peacocking, the ritualized performance through which various left-of-center types try to demonstrate their superior social liberalism and critical positioning through proxy discussions of news or media. That fate was probably certain for Lincoln; a movie about Abraham Lincoln by Steven Spielberg is the Platonic ideal of the middlebrow, and most of us love to distance ourselves from the middlebrow. (I know I do.) And it is a film about race made and told by white people, to a largely white audience, and few white lefties can resist the opportunity to distance themselves from what they see as the unenlightened white majority. As time goes on, the value of the conversation will shrink and the cultural competition will continue. Beware arguments where everyone feels obliged to weigh in.

Not that this means people should stop talking. Useless conversations can still be fun to have, as long as you're clear about the limitations.

* I had a particularly persistent troll for awhile who was convinced that it was hypocrisy for a pacifist to like mixed martial arts. I told him that it's as true in this instance as in so many others in life: consent is a powerful thing.