Have you watched Vox’s Netflix show “Explained”? No? Neither have I. The title of the show, a reference to the classic Vox headline style, “[Subject of Article], Explained,” is clearly appealing to somebody, enough to get the online media brand a show. But I find it off-putting to have magazine journalists explain something rather than argue it.
Apparently, I’m not the only one, since Vox’s “explainery” language has become a meme used to mock Vox when it screws up. In November, when Vox founder Matt Yglesias gormlessly tweeted, “I think the idea behind terrorizing [Tucker Carlson’s] family, like it or not as a strategy, is to make them feel some of the fear that the victims of MAGA-inspired violence feel thanks to Tucker, Trump, etc,” you could almost hear replies such as David Rutz’s “Domestic terrorism as a strategy, explained” coming.
The problem with this professorial language is that it attempts to leapfrog debate. Just by word choice, it implies that the person using it expects to convince but is not even theoretically open to being convinced back. Persuasion is monodirectional. I call these “rightness-smuggling” usages, and they are the rhetorical equivalent of a Ph.D. going by “doctor” in casual conversation; it’s intended to suggest an unanswerable credential.
It isn’t a strictly Left-Right thing. In foreign policy, “realists” such as Henry Kissinger have made repeated geostrategic blunders while insisting that they and only they have been able to see the world for what it is. The word “realism” implies that anything else is fantasy. (Ben Rhodes, the Obama policy adviser, speechwriter, Iran-handler, spin doctor, and all-around proto-Jared Kushner, tried to counter regular accusations that he had favored ideology over facts by appropriating the “realist” rhetorical gambit in the title of his book, The World As It Is.)
Clearly there is an audience and a constituency for rightness-smuggling, people who think someone trying to “educate” them is humble rather than arrogant and that an offer to “explain” the world should be received positively. Vox is, after all, a successful enterprise. I can only assume that constituency is made up of people who sat in the front of college lectures with a shiny apple and who would say I overvalue the mass appeal of words such as “debate” and “argument.” (They’re probably right.) So, maybe it’s just a matter of style. “De gustibus non est disputandum,” they say — there’s no arguing with taste. But if I could just dispute this one very slightly: Matt Yglesias should be nobody’s style icon.
