Many writers are hated. But few are hated as intensely and by as many different groups of people as I am. It feels self-indulgent, but I’ve decided that it would be worthwhile to create a typology of critics. And plus, if you’re not going to be self-indulgent once in a while, what’s the point of having your own Substack?
A single criticism from any one individual may not tell us much. But when a criticism recurs and is common among a certain political community, it says something about me, that community itself, or both. At the end of this article, I’ll put forward a unified theory of Hanania-hate. Yes, as you might predict, it involves me being unusually brilliant and courageous, but it’ll hopefully include some things you don’t yet know.
Left-wingers want to feel smarter than others and exclude them based on having the wrong ideas. Right-wingers are paranoid and conspiratorial. Thus, the left will say I have really evil values, and their criticisms are aimed at others on their side of the political spectrum who talk to or associate with me. The right will accuse me of lying, because they are always on the lookout for someone trying to trick them. My views on liberals reading and conservatives watching TV are shaped to some extent by how each side reacts to me, as only one of them appears able to understand my views.
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I'm not sure what it says about me, a Democrat, that I actually enjoy your insightful but cruel commentaries, but keep it up. My main criticism would be that your writing is a little too in-crowd for my taste... kind of a substack version of inside the beltway.
I'm a leftist (a communist, even), but I like your matter-of-fact style. I enjoy disagreeing with you most of the time about many things (but not all). I don't hate you, because I think hate is bad both from a purely moral (thus relatively uninteresting) standpoint, but also hate is completely inefficient. If we can agree to build something together, we don't need to agree on anything but what's needed to actually complete the project. THAT'S democracy : we discuss about what we need or want to achieve, find a form on consensus, discuss on how to achieve it, then work at it. We don't need to agree on anything else to reach success.
I can play music with right-wingers. I can develop software with libertarians. We certainly don't need to agree on trans rights to fight efficiently climate change, and the reverse is true, too. It's actually pretty surprising how many people believe that you must agree on a whole bunch of unrelated things to simply work on THAT ONE thing, and that hinders almost every collective endeavour.