One of the things I noticed during the past month’s media nothingburger was just how much hot air was being blown around over… well, it’s tough to call it “nothing” without context, but it’s definitely The Wrong Thing, so wrong about the thing it purported to concern, that it might as well have been “nothing”. In other words, a bunch of Serious People said a bunch of Serious Things about Afghanistan And Just How Bad It Is, and they were for the most part full of shit — idiots and/or liars distracting from the real core problems with the intervention.
To shorthand where I stand, I basically side with my usual podcasters: Ezra Klein, Pod Save The World, etc. The whole idea of Afghanistan as a “national humiliation” is the sort of toxically dumb1 geopolitics that caused WWI and should be consigned to the wastebin of history, let alone applied to one measly, misbegotten, red-headed stepchild of a military intervention in the 21st frigging century. The neocons who caused the war to be such a cockup, are now the ones leading the media charge to condemn Biden’s evacuation, all because if they admit that there wasn’t much Biden could have humanly done to improve on the outcome, then the question turns to how we ended up in such a hopeless situation to begin with — which directly implicates the mistakes said neocons want to paper over. That they’re being taken seriously at all by the media right now is probably a symptom of the terminal sensationalism and both-sides-ism that currently plague said media and undermine our democracy.
But it’s not just both-sides-ism. Writer Martin Gurri deftly identified the larger challenge in his book “The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium”. Every age of major innovation in media has been followed by a destabilization of existing power structures: the Reformation from the printing press, the Age of Revolution (IE the series of Western revolutions starting with the American Revolution and proceeding to those of Haiti, France, Spanish America, and Europe in the 1820s, 1848, and 1860s) from the rise of newspapers, the final fall of monarchy in the early 20th century from telegraph and radio, the demystification of the American presidency from the advent of television, and now the tandem undermining of expert consensus and proliferation of fringe and conspiracy theories from the internet age. What one can see is that this is accelerating — exponential technological progress is shortening the time between innovations — and also that as living standards, literacy rates, and access to media technology improves and democratizes, ever-larger proportions of the population become involved.
While Gurri concludes that this threatens to devolve into a permanent state of destabilization, I’m a bit more sanguine that things will settle down once again. Most realistically, the pace of innovation will either accelerate until it blurs together into a new environment requiring constant adaptation, or, since the internet as a democratized, globalized, anonymized paradigm doesn’t fundamentally change, anything based on it (Twitter, Reddit, Substack, what-have-you) basically just constitutes endless variations on the core paradigm which suit the needs of any given historical moment, but don’t actually change the paradigm and lead to destabilizations. Either way, things end up stabilizing, and we move on.2
What this does leave us with, though, is what I named this article for: a “Surfeit of Criticism”. Put simply, most people have access to the public sphere now, and while it’d be facile and arrogant to insist they’re all inherently stupid or uneducated, the threshold for being able to cogently and comprehensively analyze a situation and propose a solution that is remotely both politically and practically feasible, let alone solves the problem, is actually quite high. Our best talents, best experts, best politicians can’t even do this reliably at a satisfactory level; the common man doesn’t stand a chance.
But what the common man can do today is criticize. Criticism is far easier than devising solutions. Under feudalism and tyranny, criticism was (oft-detrimentally) ignored and silenced. Aristocracy and elitism likewise had their extreme flaws, but cracked open the forum of criticism just enough to fatally undermine feudalism and tyranny, and pave the way for the justice of republicanism, liberalism, and democracy. That trio, for all their injustices, finally brought with them the promise of enabling the common man to join in criticism, although this promise has only recently been fully realized with the advent of the globalized, socially-inflected mediasphere.
Today, the Surfeit of Criticism undermines every attempt at effective governance. The challenge isn’t the mere presence of criticism, but rather the fact that criticisms outnumber the solutions3. This creates a false narrative of leaders perpetually under siege, perpetually failing. Even when they succeed, their opponents unfailingly have a loud and populous jeering section, proudly declaring failure.
Where this all loops back to Afghanistan is that here, even the left — who were right — were nevertheless guilty of participating in the Surfeit of Criticism. The main thrust of leftist critique on Afghanistan for the past 20 years can basically be summed up as “WAR BAD! NEO-IMPERIALISM BAD! TORTURE BAD! IGNORANCE ABOUT MAPS BAD! IGNORANCE ABOUT FOREIGN LANGUAGES BAD! REPUBLICANS BAD! HUBRIS BAD!”. Sorry, but you only get so many brownie points for being right about what’s wrong, but having no clue what’s actually right. Even ignoring the idiosyncratically shitty dysfunctions of American politics, you’re always going to expect a constant stream of dumb ideas coming from the fringes, some of which occasionally manage to make it into the mainstream and from there policy, but it’s remarkable just how few workable alternatives the Democrats ever had to what Bush was doing. Much of this was due to the lack of workable alternatives overall, and the inherent political difficulty of selling people on such a hopeless situation, but Democrats never bothered building a stronger ideological, historical, and factual foundation for what to do, despite being the burgeoning home of an intellectualism that loves to pride itself on such endeavors.
That’s not to absolve the neocons of their role in the cockup, of course. But it does make me wonder — is the Afghanistan debacle’s true legacy that of the first foreign policy boondoggle (predating Iraq by a year and a half) to be affected by the internet-age Surfeit of Criticism? That is to say, I wonder what role the Surfeit played in our leaders’ inability to turn around the Graveyard of Empires, versus other narratives that I also generally agree with.
Apologies, Joe Caratenuto. Not to single you out, but I’m sticking to this hot take.
Modern teens and Zoomers would recognize both sides of this coin in the lightning-fast evolution from Facebook to Instagram, to Snapchat, to Vine, to a half dozen other apps, with today’s current King Of The Hill being Tik Tok. Whether you want to see this as a “blurring-together”, or as the core paradigm not changing across multiple apps, it leads to the same result: we’re stabilizing, despite what could be superficially cast as “constant innovation”.
Perhaps this is the origin of the ever-folksily-arrogant “opinions are like assholes…” adage.