How not to do "both sides"

Belated reflections on Eddington

Before I begin, I admit that it may seem insensitive to write about any political topic today other than the horrific events in Minneapolis—especially a post that, like this one, is more directly critical of liberals than of the monsters terrorizing and slandering our fellow human beings in that great city. But this is a post I’ve been chewing on all week as a way to build on some of the themes I discussed in Loser Behavior, and this is the time I have available to write, so I’m going to take the risk.

I’m also going to take the risk of doing something that always makes people angry online: revisiting debates from the pandemic era. Obviously my topic is the film Eddington, which positively wallows in those painful memories, but my prompt was a more mundane experience in my everyday life. We recently got a new bathroom cleaning spray that has a harsh scent and makes me cough. Conveniently, though, like most liberal households, we have a metric shit-ton of high-quality KN-95 masks leftover from the pandemic. After using them a couple weeks, I have two observations to share. The first is that the filtration effect is real—with the mask on, I do not smell the cleaning spray at all, and I experience no coughing or irritation. The second is that even after roughly 20 minutes of the very moderate physical activity of cleaning the bathroom, I feel a little short of breath.

Whenever I shared observations like that during the pandemic, people were quick to jump on me for “sounding like” a conservative. Apparently by acknowledging that there were any drawbacks to wearing masks, I was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. If I ever managed to wring the concession that wearing masks was not a totally enjoyable experience, they would declare that the tradeoff was well worth it—as though I was saying anything else. Those encounters encapsulate for me what is so unattractive about liberal culture. They were being judgmental and shaming on behalf of a position that, if push came to shove, they didn’t even really believe. Everyone knew that masking sucked and that no one would do it purely voluntarily for fun. Yet somehow “masking is easy and fun and only an evil idiot would feel anything other than joy in doing it” became the necessary party line to beat over the head of everyone, because otherwise we’d be granting an inch to the conservatives.

I thought of those encounters when watching the early scenes in Eddington where Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is resisting the mask mandate. On many levels, it’s clear he’s just being stubborn and contrary, but he does raise some good points. Isn’t it possible that someone might have trouble breathing in a mask, such as someone with asthma? Is the answer to that obviously “no, shut up”? Meanwhile, the liberal position appears both over-fussy and sinister, features that come together in the chilling scene where the grocery store patrons break into applause when an elderly man is kicked out of the store in response to his complaints that he can’t get enough air in his mask. And at the end of the day, the liberal political leaders themselves don’t live up to the regulations in private. The rules are flexible when insiders need to blow off some steam and socialize, but not when an old man is struggling to get the necessities of life.

Something similar happens with the rapid-fire transition into the Black Lives Matter protests. It is difficult to understand what the protestors believe they are opposing or achieving with their demonstrations in a town where the only visible Black character is precisely a police officer. And in retrospect, I found it painful to listen to the fatalistic Afropessimist rhetoric that dominated the scene—even though (because?) I would have been mostly on board with it at the time. How did it help the cause of social justice to redirect sincere, motivated white young people into rhetorical dead-ends that more or less posit racism as a transhistorical constant? Though they are indeed annoying in the way of all young people, these kids clearly want to help and are eager to give of themselves (moreso than their liberal parents, as shown by their studious observance of social distancing guidelines in their sad outdoor social gathering). Why did they have to be fobbed off with empty gestures and bullshit?

These types of scenes have prompted many commentators to proclaim that Eddington takes an unhelpful “both-sides” approach to our political divisions. This is true in the sense that it shows that both sides of the political debate have their flaws and hypocrisies, but the phrase is usually deployed to indicate that the scales are being artificially tilted so that both sides wind up looking equally bad. But in this movie, where the liberals are a little mean-spirited and hypocritical, Sheriff Cross does real, demonstrable harm. He decides to run against the liberal Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and immediately begins misappropriating government staff and resources for his campaign. He spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories, including even accusing the incumbent mayor of raping Cross’s own wife (a charge she immediately repudiates). He quite literally murders his opponent and his opponent’s son, to eliminate any witnesses, and—after grandstanding about the irrelevance of protests against police mistreatment of Black people in his sleepy town—plans to frame his Black colleague for the crime.

For a liberal viewer to conclude that the film’s perspective is unfairly critical of liberals and have that be their main takeaway seems frankly insane. It reflects a profoundly unhealthy level of thin-skinnedness—a thin-skinnedness I encounter almost any time I criticize the Democrats online. There is always someone ready to pop up and defend them by castigating my supposedly ignorance of “how the system works” and hinting that I am objectively working in favor of Trump. It’s the same dynamic as with the exaggerated rhetoric on the joys of masking. At the end of the day, even the most hardened partisan Democrat understands that what the Democrats actually do or achieve is not by definition the best and only thing that could have happened and that there is plenty of room for disagreement among people who categorically Trump and the Republicans. Hair-trigger judgmentalism and shaming is just all they know—it’s the way they perform their liberalism, the shibboleth that demonstrates their loyalty. The fact that it makes a genuine human encounter impossible isn’t relevant in that context.

Returning now to the film: just as the Democrats are clearly preferable to the Republicans, Mayor Garcia is very obviously the better choice to lead the community that Sheriff Cross. His approach to the pandemic or Black Lives Matter did not “force” Sheriff Cross to assassinate him, any more than wokeness is “forcing” conservatives into endorsing the violent fantasies of a madman. But like real-world liberals, Mayor Garcia was asleep at the wheel. He was very concerned that Sheriff Cross should wear a mask, but apparently had no idea that he had turned the sheriff’s office into his personal campaign staff. Indeed, he seemed to have very little interest into the day-to-day life of the town and to be more concerned with fundraising and arranging for an AI data center to the town. And once he is dead and Sheriff Cross wins by default despite being gravely wounded in an Antifa attack, the tech company is happy to work with him—or rather, for his conspiracy-addled mother-in-law, who is using him as a puppet in his nearly braindead state.

The revelation that there really is an organization called Antifa—an elite, lavishly funded squadron of left-wing terrorists that travels via private jet to sow chaos—is a hilarious spit-take moment. While it could be read as an attempt to rebalance the “both-sides” scale, everyone—even the most paranoid MAGA chud—knows that there is nothing equivalent in real life, whereas Sheriff Cross’s corruption and criminality is an exaggerated version of something real. And just to make sure no one makes the mistake of reading these scenes as a sincere critique of the left, we get zero hint of any coordination with the liberal politicians from the Very Real Antifa, or indeed any clear motives or goals at all. It’s as though the film needed to will them into existence to give Sheriff Cross any comeuppance at all—certainly the actual liberals are not going to do it.

To the extent that there’s a true “both-sides” narrative, it’s that both sides are ultimately a sideshow to distract from the actions of the real powerbrokers, who are happy to work with either side and indulge their fixations in turn. But at the same time, the film seems very clear as to which half of the sideshow is causing active harm and which side is merely guilty of not taking this whole thing seriously enough. Thankfully for the residents of Eddington, the stakes of their political feud turned out to be fairly low—but we are learning now how very high they can be, even if Democratic leaders apparently aren’t.