What’s the Point of Pundits?
When Function Trumps Substance (Or What Passes For It)
“Reading the morning newspaper is the morning prayer of the modern man,” proclaimed Hegel in the early 1800s. “One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.” More earthily, a guy I knew in high school back in the late 90s once observed that the best cigarette – and the hardest one to give up – was the one you’d light first thing in the morning, while on the toilet. “Shitting,” he said, between philosophical drags on a Parliament, “becomes incredible.”
Whether you find the German dialectician or my buddy from Staten Island more compelling is up to you, and a matter of taste. Me, I like thinking about the two observations in tandem, because they are, after a fashion, two sides of the same coin. Rising to meet the world, and going about your business, you develop a certain ritual. You consume information; you excrete. Before you get out the door, you need to know where you and things in general stand. And you need to spend some time sitting, to get your pipes moving, too. You check in on the movements of Geist; you move your bowels.
With all that in mind, let’s spell something out, a thing that probably should be obvious, but that, because it’s so obvious, we can spend a great deal of time forgetting.
The function of some things is often much more important than their ostensible purpose.
That sounds abstract, and it is, but I promise we’ll get concrete soon. Let’s say it again: the function of some things is often much more important their ostensible purpose. In other words: when a thing happens repeatedly in similar circumstances, we should probably evaluate it on not just on “its own terms,” but in light of how it keeps happening in those recurrent circumstances. That kind of examination is often more necessary, and more revealing, than insisting on our personal ideals, or collective social fictions, about what that thing could or should be. In fact, getting preoccupied over and over again with poring over what a thing says it is, or fixating one what we would prefer it to be, can come to obscure what it plainly does. In yet other words, thinking about what certain things do in their full context can reveal a lot more about their essential character than what may be offered as their abstract justification or reason for being. Again, bear with me, because I realize this may sound abstract, but it’s going to pay off in a minute.
What I’m talking about today is punditry, and to the class of mostly shabby and odious persons whom we call pundits. The term “pundit” itself has its roots in Sanskrit by way of Hindi, and originally referred to men with deep scholarly expertise in Vedic scripture. Recalling those valences of religion and caste has a certain value in the present, since today’s pundits do indeed often deal primarily in pieties, and represent a kind of priesthood that is defined by both impeccable credentials and, when put under pressure, their collective self-interest as a class. But I would argue that the best way to think about most of today’s pundits is in terms of their function, which trumps distinctions between various beliefs they may hold. Whatever they say they believe (which in fact they do only rarely, since their preferred mode is Just Asking Questions), whatever values they may profess (Free Speech, the Marketplace of Ideas, Democracy, etcetera), and whatever political orientations they may insist on (“Moderate” and “Centrist” being particular favorites), what most pundits actually are is what they do. And what they do is generate verbiage, day in and day out, to push shit along and through the pipes of discourse.
Sure, our pundits have developed all sorts of vocabulary about being Realistic and Mature and Balanced. And they deliver their Concerns about Trends in Society and their worry over the Principles (or lack thereof) behind their latest bugbears and what Those Might Mean for the Future. But rather than viewing them as clerics or prophets, I think we should see them through more functional metaphors. You could look at them as performing similar mechanistic activities, all as part of a bigger social machine, little nodes of ideological production in a giant apparatus that ultimately transcends the distinctions between their professed sympathies. Or – and this is a clarifying metaphor I favor – you can see them as functioning much like the flora that help your intestines do their business over the course of the day, whether or not you choose to help speed things along with a good dose of nicotine, caffeine, or whatever.
Now, I realize that by invoking this metaphor I may already have given any pundits who deign to read this an easy, and typical, recourse to whining and special pleading. To be clear: I am not saying that most pundits are literally gut biota, and I have no interest in “dehumanizing” them. To say that one thing is like another thing is not to say that those things are identical in all respects. Nor still do I have any desire to dehumanize people who are obviously human, all too human, and who in fact deserve calumny and rejection for being miserable and tendentious ones. Hopefully these caveats are enough to forestall their predictable objections, although that may be too optimistic, since the only thing many pundits like doing more than avoiding actual reasoning and mystifying literal violence against third parties is bellyaching over rhetorical violence supposedly being done to their precious selves. And it’s also worth saying that I make no pretense to know for certain what’s actually going on in any given pundit’s head, what their True Intentions and Sincere Beliefs are, or any of that. Not only are such things ultimately unknowable for most human beings in general, but pundits in particular can make a very nice living endlessly dancing around what they truly believe, if indeed they even believe anything at all. But the beauty of thinking in functional terms is that intentions matter a lot less than actions, and that the justifications they may offer for their actions is largely irrelevant for the effects those actions yield. Anyway, enough caveats.
The thing to know about your gut is that it’s a downright wild universe of amazing bacteria. In fact, there are over one hundred trillion of those little guys, technically called “microbiota,” burbling away inside you right now! Spread throughout the digestive tract, and particularly active in your colon (which “contains the highest microbial density recorded in any habitat on Earth”) these industrious critters ideally work in glorious symbiosis to break down the things you eat, extract vital nutrients, and send the rest onwards on waste. Isn’t that magical? Sure, I’m probably simplifying things, but hey, I’m not a science doctor, and if you want to learn more, you can always read a book on the subject (there are lots). For the purposes of our metaphor, we can consider our social order in general, and the rarefied sphere of ideological production in particular (AKA The Discourse), as operating as a kind of giant organism with its own metabolic processes. The organism has to keep going, the resources it consumes must be broken down, and waste dispensed with. One way or another, shit has to keep moving through the pipes.
In this scheme, the pundit’s role is simple. They must break down complex things such that vital processes of extraction can proceed more or less smoothly, over and over, and such that the organism can keep going as usual, without blockage, interruption, or arrest. Dramatic emergencies and quotidian tragedies alike must steadily be processed, one way or another, such that general homeostasis is maintained. The important thing is that no one – or rather, no one important – winds up in the unpleasant position of having to think too long or too hard about what that homeostasis truly looks like, who or what gets consumed to maintain it, and where the whole enterprise might be headed. This, in so many words, is what the pundit ensures. Whether the topic at hand is extrajudicial killings by police, the steady rollback of abortion rights, voter disenfranchisement, the dismantling of higher education, the banning of books, mass death from preventable disease, environmental catastrophe, the persecution of minorities (more on this in a moment), or pretty much any other transparently scandalous injustice, political inertia must be ensured, the homeostasis of inequality maintained, and the broader processes that turn ever-more vulnerable human beings into sites of ruthless extraction and objects of wanton cruelty turned into so much shit you can just flush down the toilet and forget. The most successful pundits, in other words, don’t just help the shit get pushed through – they’ll also wipe your ass for you and give you a pat on the head for reading them.
This also goes a long way towards explaining why so many pundits are so fundamentally mediocre – as thinkers, stylists, and moral agents – and so generically interchangeable. The $60 billion market for prebiotics, probiotics, and noöbiotics asides, your gut biota are at their best, and their most useful, when you don’t have to think about them. You have a busy day ahead of you, and your own worries to attend to. Quite understandably, you don’t need to shit out an origami crane or a well-wrought Grecian urn – you need that business done till nature obliges you to do it all again, and indigestion between then and now is best kept to a minimum. Also understandably, most people don’t want to read something that feels like a (figurative) kick in the gut, that will bubble up and come back to make them feel queasy later on, or that (heaven forfend) will make them emit some sort of crass, socially noisome observation at work or in mixed company. The only thing more offensive than a fart, after all, is an attack of sudden moral clarity that might lead you to challenge either specific authorities or the diffuse authority of received opinion. In the face of widespread, grinding trauma, and in the teeth of mounting anxieties over the legitimacy of institutions, it’s natural to prefer the semblance of thinking over actually uncomfortable ideas. You can take a certain refuge in knowing that our best minds are examining the issue, and have already reached the conclusion that things can simultaneously be fine, only getting better, and that the usual suspects are the ones to blame for their own suffering, which will never happen to you – unless, of course, we let them get away with the threat to social norms they represent. And if those best minds are actually deeply mediocre, if their arguments boil down to just the same recycled tropes and rhetorical gestures, there’s a kind of comfort in that also. Whether blithe or shrill, pap that reinforces and validates our own prejudices, whether inchoate or conscious, always goes down easy, and passes through real smooth.
It's important here to note that whether or not such behavior represents hypocrisy, special pleading, pathological histrionics, or even “identity politics” on the part of pundits is irrelevant. This is because logical contradiction is no hurdle to accomplishing their functional role. In fact, just the opposite, since a core part of their job is to reconcile blatant contradictions both within hegemonic ideology and between conventional platitudes and actual real life by variously embodying, displacing, delegitimizing, and outright ignoring them. Being cocksure, incurious, misguided, cynical, perverse, dogged, or just plain vapid can all help enormously to this end, and might as well be part of the job description. These traits certainly help pundits do what they do day in and day out, namely validating some of the worst things people feel about one another, and the worst features of our social order, by giving them back to us repeatedly. Their tools to this end include dignifying those attitudes in the mode of “just asking questions,” laundering realities of actual violence into worries over hypothetical harms, flattening real-world differentials in power into formalist abstractions, and the like. And failing that, the pundit will earn their salary by turning to what is invariably the real injustice, the real victim, the innocent blood spilled on the earth that cries out to heaven: namely, pundits themselves. It’s just tragic and dispositive how they, personally, have been so profoundly misunderstood, how their enemies are driven by Bad Faith, how the nuances of their selfless delivered points have been so tragically lost (which just proves their points, naturally). Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, O tempora! O mores! For when push comes to shove, part of the pundit’s job is to be Job on a weekly basis, and even, if they’re a real glutton for punishment, to also do so constantly online. At which point their appeals will invariably be addressed not to God, but to what “normal” or “reasonable” or “most people” think, to the merits of “open debate,” and, above all, to “context,” the scope of which they can once define as tightly or vaguely as they feel any given moment. Suffering so exemplarily – and loudly - the pundit can transmute practically any social nightmare into the most urgent of all possible stories, namely stories about themselves. And by so selfless fighting on behalf of What’s Reasonable, by showcasing how Unreasonable their opponents are, they can underscore how important they are to the health of the overall social organism.
In this last aspect, the pundits do have a point, despite themselves. Their role is vital, since the legitimacy and smooth operation of our social order very much depends upon the mystification of actual balances of power. When people on the margins are caught up in battles for attention, recognition, and literal life-or-death struggles, social homeostasis requires a class of persons paid to invoke a position of objective above-the-fray neutrality whence they can preside over both sides (which of course must be the totality of any and all sides, of all perspectives on any issue), counsel the desperate about tactics and What You Would Be Doing if You Really Wanted to Make a Difference, and the like. They can transform concrete transactions over actual power into horse trading over “policy,” sports and game metaphors, points-scoring in “culture wars,” and tidy, false distinctions between “objective” and “activist” stances. For those in power, for those who identify with power, and for those who have enough to worry about and would simply rather not be bothered, there is something so deeply reassuring about this too. It reassures everybody, or rather everybody who is not personally on the front lines of the issue in question, who loves or knows someone who is, or who has the moral imagination to perceive as actual human beings those whom the pundit treats as pieces to be taken off the board in endless games of n-dimensional chess, whom the pundit casually volunteers as an unwilling sacrifice for some abstract principle, or whose experience and vulnerability the pundit can simply wave away as irrelevant, hysterical, illegitimate, or nonexistent. Too bad for them, really. Meanwhile, the pundit stays standing, the ultimate survivor. And in the rare chance any given pundit does grow a conscience or, more likely, commits one of the rare faux pas they cannot monetize into an iconoclastic rebranding, open letter, or other comeback, well, the mediocrity and interchangeability of pundits means they’re easily enough replaced. If only our gut biota could be so resourceful, we could eat more things than goats!
Before I wrap this up, I would remiss not to point to the specific recent incident that drove me to this post. You may perhaps already be familiar with the (latest) antics of Jonathan Chait, a paradigmatic (and paradigmatically contemptible) pundit. Chait recently took some bait boosted by Bari Weiss (another luminary of the profession), and raised the alarm about the latest ludicrous artifact in America’s accelerating persecution of trans people in general and trans children specifically, namely, the affidavit filed by one Jamie Reed, who also made similar allegations in an essay in Bari Weiss’s brave and inventively named “Free Press.” In the former document, which you can read online here, Reed, a former employee at Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and self-described “whistleblower,” claimed to have observed “hundreds” of child patients and their parents at the Center being variously prescribed hormones, pressured into gender reassignment surgery, and the like, all with callous and reckless disregard for their well-being. Setting aside what should already have been a red flag (IE, any story about families getting remarkably easy and rapid access to healthcare in the United States of America), the affidavit itself includes such gobsmacking claims as:
Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like “mushroom,” “rock,” or “helicopter.” Children come into the clinic saying they want hormones because they do not want to be gay. Children come in changing their identities on a day-to-day basis. Children come in under clear pressure by a parent to identify in a way inconsistent with the child’s actual identity. In all these cases, the doctors decide to issue puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
Many of Reed’s allegations have already fallen apart under even cursory scrutiny, and have been disputed in both specifics and general presentation by the Center, parents, and patients alike. Yet Chait, who had earlier opined that “If Reed’s allegations are proved correct, it will take its place among the gravest medical scandals in modern American history,” has proceeded to first double- and then triple- down on the urgency of the Questions he was Just Asking. Among other things, this involved him demanding that some rightly outraged interlocutors answer for whether Reed’s allegations were “remotely plausible” and then that they spell out whether “if proven to be mostly/entirely correct, would the practices she is alleging be bad?” When pressed on actual empirics over how many children have been pressured into such procedures, and confronted with the fact that Chait himself had been previously contacted by people from whom he was now demanding “accountability” Chait proceeded to first proclaim that actually “I don’t think it’s important whether a mentally ill child said they identify as an attack helicopter. I want to understand your views on the central questions of whether the allegations are 1) plausible and 2) bad, if true” and then accuse of his interlocutors of being “bad faith actors” who “simply refuse to state a clear position on the most basic question, so that you can instead hop from accusation to accusation.”
Now, following Twitter threads, and posts about Twitter threads, can be exhausting, but this is remarkable stuff. That is, when challenged about reproducing a patently ludicrous series of claims about healthcare for trans children, and asked to speak to the actual empirics of the issue, Chait instead insisted that the people calling him out either condone or condemn those claims regardless of whether the claims were true, and then accused them of merely levelling sensationalist accusations without engaging with the real issues. In other words, after first penning a call for “Accountability,” Chait insisted on the priority of third parties’ answering hypothetical questions over and against either taking any responsibility for himself or for the actual veridical status of the issue at hand, while simultaneously owning that he himself did not really care whether those claims were factually true. Chait has since gone on blame yet others for “bad faith” for detecting in his own fearmongering, callous disregard for accountability, and indifference to inconvenient matters of truth even the hint of transphobia, to whine about the need to take his work in more context, etcetera.
Again, this is all very, very stupid, and thus, for Chait, very, very par for the course. The man himself is, in my opinion, a mediocrity in everything from his prose to his thought, and even, if such a thing can be said to be possible, a mediocrity when it comes to doing banal evil. This is arguably his job in nutshell, and has been for nearly three decades. But the reason I’m rehashing it is because it almost painfully recapitulates what I’ve laid out above. That is, in the mode of Just Asking Questions, and with the usual, rote fig leaves of caveats and disclaimers about hedging grotesque accusations he previously devoted nearly 2200 words to boosting, Chait has done nothing but launder into punditry some of the ugliest tropes of contemporary transphobia. Insisting, as he has, on the letter of his prose is more than just silly and insulting (since what he wrote stands for itself): it ignores how his work has a transparent and pernicious function. In so many words – and at risk of Chait seeing this as another example of “bad faith” – his sputtering boils down to “How dare you! I never said I find trans people “icky,” or condone this ludicrous libel about how trans identity is actually a kind of medical malpractice being perpetrated on vulnerable kids. I merely broadcasted someone else’s sensational claims about trans identity as a kind of medical malpractice being perpetrated on vulnerable kids and suggested it could be a crime of historical proportions.” Given the other things Chait has written about the subject – which you can find and read for yourself – this can be reduced, formally speaking, to “I have never said I find the existence of such and such a minority group distasteful per se, I have merely proven myself extremely receptive to leaping to assist those who do, and myself repeatedly questioned whether that minority deserves basic care.” Even when he is literally demanding “Accountability,” Chait is a truth-seeking pundit Just Asking Questions, you see, not someone with a disregard for truth or who hops from allegation to allegation. If you take issue with how his Just Asking Questions seems fixated on reinforcing what you could call The Trans Question (no overtones there!), well, that’s bad faith, and you’re just refusing to take a stand on the Real and Urgent Question of whether, if trans identity is a kind of child abuse being done by sicko doctors, that would be bad or not. Show some accountability, people!
A pundit to the core, of course Chait is bothered by people reading what he says in light of the fact that he keeps saying it, and in light of the function it serves. He’s also vexed by people reading things he wrote years ago and noting how similar they are, in tone, substance, and what passes for logic, to whatever he’s decided to go on about in the moment. This, too, is part of his deal as a Pundit: he Just Asks Some Questions, puts some stuff out there, lets what happens happen, and then – and here’s some accountability for you – makes some gestures about Lessons Learned, Bayesian Priors to be Adjusted, or some other tedious absurdity. The effect is always to make readers’ eyes glaze over while conveying that he is a very sober, serious, and thoughtful man, a man whose judgment and impulses should still be trusted, and in fact a man whose errors seem only more understandable, even sympathetic in retrospect. Thus, for example, runs his characteristically put-upon apologia (if you could even call it that) for his full-throated support of the Iraq war a decade and half a million dead Iraqis later. “The absence of weapons of mass destruction is the most crucial element of my argument that I got wrong,” wrote Chait, “though the part I have the least regret for getting wrong, as it was very hard to know at the time.” The miracle that he managed to type all this with both hands nailed to the Cross of his critics’ baleful calumnies should not distract from the fact that he may well, years from know, use the same reasoning to wash his hands of pandering to grotesque transphobia. My man, after all, can pull a Christ and a Pilate at once. You can almost visualize the essay from 2033 now: “The absence of Gender Mengeles castrating children is the most crucial element of my argument that I got wrong, though the part I have the least regret for getting wrong, as it was very hard to know at the time.” Poor Jonathan Chait, you can’t blame him, since his heart was in the right place, and the stakes were so high. Why, the proof of The Great Transgender Child Mutilation Plot could have come in the form of a Giant Trans Mushroom Cloud. And Lord knows by then he may have plenty of junior comrades-in-punditry to defend him, if the current wave of trans persecution, like the runup to the Iraq nightmare, becomes yet another pundit tenure jobs program for ghouls ready to prove they’ll say anything. Or, and this may even be a darker prospect, the horrors of the present, and Chait’s role in them, may get forgotten in the wash, turning into something that only arises when Old Heads wish to jeer him, or he wants to bring up himself in maudlin bids for sympathy.
Chait’s handwaving aside, and his protestations about what he would like to imagine he’s saying bedamned, it is imperative not to lose sight of what he is doing, what he is selling, and what his role is. Chait has recently rejected – with typical pique – the “epithet” of “reactionary centrist.” It’s possible that, now more than ever, he may feels a certain pressure to distinguish himself from reactionaries who celebrate the idea that “transgenderism” “must be eradicated from public life entirety.” Chait, after all, is not the kind of pundit to say that trans people represent Life Unworthy of Living, are threatening The Future We Must Secure For Our Children, or must be otherwise eliminated from the body politic. That would be gross. Instead, and again, he Just Has Questions About whether they should access to have gender-affirming medical care, whether they are not actually just misguided, depraved and/or sick in some unspecified way, and whether they are part of a malevolent force joined with reckless doctors in doing irreparable harm to our nation’s kids. Sure, underwriting all these Questions seems to be the conviction that there are too many trans people out there, and that Society is making too many more of them, but that is a world of difference from saying they should be eradicated. Of course, as this excellent conversation with Jacob Bacharach unpacks, people like Chait never really say how many trans people he believes there should be. By the same token, I would observe that Chait has never really said what he believes the optimum or even an acceptable amount of extrajudicial killings by US police should be. But if you think his Just Asking Questions about The Trans Question or The Implications of the Defend the Police Slogan puts his Centrism on a continuum with the position of QAnon and/or Blue Lives Matter reactionaries, that Bad Faith is on you. A Pundit may rail against Identity Politics, after all, but their right to self-identify politically as they see fit is a very different thing, and sacrosanct.
Finally, it’s worth saying too, how slippery Chait’s appeals to the Classic Pundit (TM) idea of “context” are, and how his whining about readers’ lack of charity and inability to appreciate nuance comes with a vision of “context” that is only ever what he wants it be (if he even goes that far). That context will never include things like: the acute risk of suicide among trans people, and trans teens in particular, which has risen distressingly; the burgeoning onslaught in legislation targeting transgender people (some 150 laws in 2022 alone); or specific laws like the one currently being considered in Florida, which will empower the state to seize children from parents who dare to seek gender-affirming medical care for them at places like the St. Louis Center. The context in which the Pundit operates, and the function of what the Pundit does is, are not for you to decide, and shame on you for mentioning them. What matters is your and Chait’s critics’ answering for hypotheticals, not actual things. And if those hypotheticals simultaneously mystify harms occurring in the actual state of affairs while reaffirming the bigotries that make those harms possible in the first place, so much the better. We should be talking about principle here, not human lives. How dare any of you sully The Discourse with that kind of shit?
On an entirely different note, you may have noticed this Substack now has some awesome art, featuring a suitably apocalyptic Sigmund Freud. It’s drawn by my dear friend, Dan Yowell, whose amazing art you can follow on Instagram (he sells merch, takes commissions, and is particularly amazing at beer labels!). Dan is also one third of the delightful Horror / Slasher / Exploitation podcast Stabby Stabby, which I’ve had the privilege of being on and listen to religiously. And in his prodigiously multi-talented capacity as producer, artist, and interlocutor, Dan is the producer of the upcoming podcast the redoubtable Abby Kluchin (who is also my brilliant, wonderful wife) and I will soon be launching in partnership with our friends at Parapraxis Magazine. It’s called Ordinary Unhappiness, and will traffic in psychoanalysis you can use to navigate politics, pop culture, and everyday life. Our first episode will drop 4/1; you can sign up for our mailing list, and get exclusive content, here. It’s gonna be good times, folks; no knowledge of psychoanalysis, or really anything in particular, required, I promise.