Two Jewish women who work in New York media met in person for the first time and got along. This shouldn’t be remotely considered an act of radicalism, yet the meet-up of Eve Peyser and Bari Weiss has predictably proven a lightning rod of controversy, one which proves their very point: Without the defense of the Internet, a permanent screen which allows you to dehumanize your political adversaries, most people are very capable of not just civility, but friendship.
Peyser, a self-described leftist and politics writer for Vice, and Weiss, a fairly neoliberal Zionist who writes and edits for the New York Times opinion section, published a chronicle of their journey from Twitter enemies to real-life friends earlier this morning. It should be easy for journalists such as the two, quick-witted and subversive writers, to get along, but of course, our current political climate and the even more toxic battlefield of Twitter doesn’t lend itself to such simple niceties. So even though the Peyser-Weiss farewell to arms shouldn’t receive more than a nod, in this day and age, it’s a commendable effort.
Naturally, the dregs of the Internet went berserk.
“Imagine believing that the fraying of the social fabric (the consequence of growing inequality & regional disparities) can be repaired by having members of the elite be polite to each other,” wrote the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, lambasting “civility fetishists.”
“I am not going to meet my primary nemesis and discover that we can be friends and write an essay about it. She is my enemy,” wrote Roxane Gay in an oh-so-subtle subtweet of Weiss. “That is her rightful place because she is the enemy!!!”
“Bari Weiss deserves to be ridiculed and banished to australia for all the platforming she’s done for polite fascists [sic],” said Hasan Piker of the Young Turks.
Natalie Shure claimed that the piece “serves an insidious political purpose.” In a comment on a post from the NYT’s Opinion section sharing the piece, a random Twitter user wrote, “Two white women, both alike in victimhood, form bond by not speaking about anything real. Groundbreaking.” The original post has 175 likes. The comment has nearly double that.
Needless to say, civility is now radical.
As Peyser rightly notes, a piece like this published in 2015 would likely be received with a “So what?” The decline of civility in the public sphere has been rapid and vicious, catalyzed not just by the election of Donald Trump but by the false apparatus of us vs. them promulgated by the leaders of both political sides. Just as conservatives who don’t approve of Trump personally are constantly pressured to get on the Trump Train or always disavow him, liberals have been pushed to the Left at the risk of getting left behind in an increasingly discontented center.
So although the backlash is a predictable impulse to embrace the id over logic, Weiss and Peyser’s haters would be wise to reconsider what they win in alienating all who refuse to bend the knee to their respective political tribes. It may be brief emotional catharsis, but it’s certainly not political clout.
