Who do we want in power?
In defense of bad tweets from good people
I’ve written about Neera Tanden and how her nomination may be tanked by Twitter way too much this week, but let’s go for one more. Tanden is in the midst of Senate confirmation hearings after President Joe Biden nominated her to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Republicans and conservative Democrat Joe Manchin may vote against her on account of Tanden’s old tweets, many of which are barbed and condemnatory of Republicans. Those tweets are too overtly partisan, Manchin says. According to Maine’s Susan Collins, they show that Tanden has a problem of “temperament.”
All of this is of course extremely rich coming from a GOP that supported a president who was so abusive, dangerous, and misleading on Twitter that he eventually got banned from the platform, but that’s been pretty well covered. What hasn’t been discussed in nearly as much detail is what happens going forward if tweets sharply critical of those in power can thwart a career in politics.
Here’s what happens: There will be fewer people from disadvantaged, working-class, and under-represented backgrounds in politics. There will be less space for those who come to politics out of passion and a desire to make change rather than a desire for power. And there will be even greater advantage given to plotting, planning power-seekers from the most elite backgrounds, who have little real-world experience, a dearth of intellectual curiosity, and a low tolerance for risk-taking.
This is not a defense of all bad tweets. It is an argument to resist lumping all bad social media behavior in the same bucket, and to expand our capacity for forgiveness. If a person has a history of using social media to be cruel, or to attack people based on who they are, that’s certainly relevant to their character. And of course what a person tweets is relevant to their judgment. Grown adults who use Twitter to threaten or harass, to demean other people for their race or gender or other immutable characteristic, or to knowingly spread conspiracy theories and disinformation should not hold public office.
But we’re just entering an era in politics in which the elevation of young people will mean the elevation of people who have had access to social media since their teens, or earlier. Up until this point, American teenagers have generally been able to make huge but noncriminal errors in judgment, ideology, and opinion and find that, as they entered adulthood, those errors might have imparted important lessons or gotten them into some contemporaneous trouble or made them feel very stupid later on, but as far as just about everyone else was concerned they were left to history — certainly if those errors involved the expression of bad ideas, as opposed to engaging in bad acts. And American teenagers and college students have largely been able to experiment with intellectual inquiry and political opinion, to be, as Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren were, children who grew up in conservative homes and evolved into adult liberals.
The political evolutions of Warren and Clinton no doubt came with their share of intellectual experimentation, and with ideas both women might today believe to be out of line with their current politics or policy goals or strategy. Whatever radical feminist discourse was happening at Wellesley in the late '60s, and whatever smack was talked about the men in charge, is not a permanent part of Hillary Clinton’s record. That’s a good thing. And it’s nearly guaranteed that her views have shifted and shaped since she was a politically engaged college student in her early 20s. I would bet, too, that Bernie Sanders had some pretty out-there conversations as a young idealist — he put a few of those ideas to paper, and they became a minor liability for him. And I would guess that the ones he didn’t write for publication would be even less broadly palatable today. But I’m glad Bernie Sanders is in the Senate. I’m glad he’s not forced to answer for an idea he shot off at 2am when he was a college student in protracted debates with other advocates for civil rights and economic justice.
I have to imagine that this is true of just about anyone who has spent years engaged in political discussion, thought, and debate. I was raised in a pretty progressive environment, but certainly had some ideas in college — and some ideas much later than that! — that I now think were dumb, wrong, misguided, naive, or bad. Many of those ideas are archived online, to my great chagrin; many, blessedly, are not. I often change my mind when confronted with new information, and I think that’s a good thing. I’ve also been lucky to have friends and comrades with whom I can debate, discuss, and try on various ideas and arguments until I can hone in on where I really stand.
Today’s politically-engaged young people don’t have the benefit of their early ideas being lost to history. When so much of our political discourse is online, so are the most passionate young people — and those who stay offline and want to discuss their thoughts and ideas are still living in a surveillance culture where there’s no guarantee their words won’t wind up on Twitter or Facebook, even if they don’t put them there. That means many of the brightest, most passionate, and most intellectually curious young people are going to post their thoughts and responses to platforms like Twitter, or whatever replaces Twitter as the online public square. Those thoughts and responses are not always going to be particularly good, or particularly polite. Sometimes, in their pursuit of what they believe to be justice, they will write incredibly crappy things; if they’re the kind of self-reflective people we want in positions of power, they’ll have the courage of their mistakes and see their past transgressions as opening up space for growth. My worry, though, is that we may not allow much space for forgiveness, and that their words online will hang over them forever.
There are some young people who will dodge most of these landmines, and they will largely be those raised in a cocoon of privilege. These are the kids with savvy parents and engaged teachers who can teach them that a tweet is forever, and who are raised with the kind of assumption of ambition that would allow one to even contemplate a senate confirmation hearing before one graduates from high school. The adults who can credibly impart to children a vision of a career in politics and can map out the road to get there? Those are the white-collar (and mostly white) well-connected highly-educated urbane parents of means. Some of them won’t see power and success as the end game, and will encourage their children to be part of the public discourse online and off. Many of their kids will be passionate enough to engage anyway, even if it’s potentially professionally risky.
But the well-connected and well-bred young people who are primarily concerned about their own political futures and their own personal paths to power will mostly stay out of the social media fray. And if we keep walking the path we’re on, they’ll be the ones on the inside track.
Those same benefits won’t accrue for the many of who have traditionally been shut out of politics, or who live in communities where the adults do not know how to prepare a child for a hypothetical future in politics (or the white-collar world generally) because that skill set is largely irrelevant to their lives. While students everywhere now get the message that online bullying isn’t ok, they aren’t being told that they shouldn’t use social media platforms to engage in hot-button political debates, or to try out new ideas, or to try on new identities, or to participate in the loud cacophony of online public discourse.
And why should we tell them that? Don’t we want to give young people the freedom to be out there, to take some risks, and to engage publicly on the issues they care about?
When they do that, though, a lot of young people are going to use the kind of “overtly partisan” language conservatives are pointing to as evidence of Tanden’s poor temperament and unfitness for the job. They’re going to call people “the worst.” They’re going to compare powerful politicians to villains like Voldemort. They’re going to use silly viral nicknames like “Moscow Mitch,” although hopefully theirs will be more clever.
And because our baked-in ideas about propriety and behavior shape-shift based on a person’s race or gender, the people we expect to be accommodating, docile, and warm — women — will face a higher penalty when their words diverge from expectations; they’ll be quicker to be seen as mean, rude, or aggressive, and it will be easier to make the case that those characteristics are disqualifying. The people who are often read as aggressive, scary, and threatening — African-Americas — will see those biases bleed into how their words are read and understood. Those who already have plentiful space for public assertiveness, combativeness, and even name-calling and rage will be fine — just look at Republican Senator John Kennedy, who called Interior secretary nominee Deb Haaland a “neo-socialist left-of-Lenin whackjob” while also claiming that rude tweets, such as calling someone “Voldemort,” are disqualifying for senate confirmation. Those guys aren’t going to be the ones who are kept out of power by narrowing rules of social media propriety. It’s the folks who already have the highest walls to scale who will see bad tweets thrown up as yet another blockade.
Neera Tanden wasn’t a teenager or a college student when she sent her bad tweets. But neither are a whole lot of sometimes-bad tweeters who would frankly make very fine political appointees or candidates. And the standards we create now will impact how we navigate similar questions in the future, especially given that we are remarkably unforgiving of young people.
Twitter was launched in 2006 — those who were teenagers or college students in its earliest days are just hitting the age in which they’re running for office, or potentially being confirmed to various political appointments. And since then, we’ve broadly agreed that what a person says online is fair game for question, critique, or censure — a fair conclusion to be sure — but we have not agreed on the bounds of that censure, and how to make consequences proportionate, consistent, and reasonably related to any harm caused, as opposed to punitive, power-seeking, and outrage-driven.
We’ve seen the danger in allowing the powerful to use social media platforms to conspiracy-monger, to spread hate, to disseminate lies, and to fuel violence. Your Twitter feed is probably not very representative of the real world, but Twitter is still a part of real life. This isn’t a call to ignore tweets from the powerful or those who want to be powerful. It is a call for discernment: To separate out bad takes from intentional lies, and to know the difference between impoliteness and cruelty. And it’s a call to recognize what we lose when we require our leaders to put perfection ahead of passion.
xx Jill
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1968 Wellesley College Government presidential candidates (from left) Nonna Nolo, Hillary Rodham, and Francille Rusan at a panel. Credit: Penny Ortner[1], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons