Punditry: A Necessary Evil?

There was something sharp and bitter in a recent newsletter from Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic, as he was writing about the bubble that is cultural criticism, that struck me deeply. It was an aside about how people inflate the purpose of their work to give it meaning.

He ascribed this tendency in particular to cultural critics and journalists alike, seeking to give heft and value to what is basically complaining for a living. And sometimes, in the maelstrom of Twitter, it really does feel vapid and useless. Take an idea and turn it over until it is unrecognizable. Find the rarest, least reasonable angle on a topic, and noisily bang the drum about it until the inevitable outrage follows. We are in an age of attention grifters, by any means necessary, and it has largely made our discourse loud and stupid. What, if anything, is the point?

This is the kind of thing you grapple with when

a) you’ve made writing your actual livelihood

b) Black womanhood has forced you to justify your own existence from the start

The deep frustration that (not occasionally) pours out of me springs from the incessantly nagging sense that the white patriarchal structures of American journalism are happy to be lazy at their jobs, which, ironically, turn out to be quite important. And in being so entirely hapless, they create both the impression that the work they do is unimportant, and that it requires no depth or skill.

The first thought is unspeakably feckless in such an uncertain time; the second is an insult to a great and essential tradition.

Coming of age with Thomas Friedman’s “flat” worlds, the Mean Girl posturing of Maureen Dowd, and the empty nostalgic moral chiding of George Will, I hadn’t had much appreciation for political punditry or its value until I started a research project on behalf of author Kristie Miller. I was supposed to read through every copy of the New York Journal (American), a William Randolph Hearst daily, from 1896 (its inaugural year) through 1901 (when McKinley was assassinated). There were no digital archives of this paper; I did the whole process on microfiche, scanning manually, double- and triple-checking pages for any mention of the name Mark Hanna — political boss, McKinley kingmaker, and head of the Republican National Committee.

Hanna had plenty of mentions in the regular news section — including his midterm attempts to bribe his way into the US Senate — but it was the editorial page and the satirical cartoons where his name came alive.

In researching Mark Hanna, I learned about the Gilded Age, its corruption and mismanagement, and its eventual dissolution and replacement by the Progressive Age. I learned about the concerns and events and joys and miseries of people living at the turn of the last century, seeing their every day lives on display in black and white. And I read editorials about the present and the future, about what we owe each other and what we should abandon, about the essence of the American experience when its leading city was transforming as rapidly as the country soon would. I read all of their anxieties and aspirations, knowing that I already had all of the answers.

You can learn a lot about a person from their satire

And it was that foreknowledge that allowed me to see how essential punditry was in getting them there.

Because I realized that history is not a set of facts or discrete and inevitable events. It is an active, alive thing, that is crafted as the people of the present make choices. People in 1896 didn’t think they were doing something special, and they did not see themselves as agents of the past; they were just living, with all the consequences and choices therein.

Editorials helped clarify those choices and consequences, gave voice to the ridiculous and the ponderous, illuminated the options of the world they existed in, and the one they could yet create.

The early bones of the 16th and 17th Amendments showed up on these pages. Pushes for anti-corruption laws, labor protections, anti-smoking campaigns (really), castigations of lynching and the Wilmington coup, and both pro- and anti-women cyclist arguments (chortle) flashed past my eyes as I read up on two presidential campaigns (both for William Jennings Bryant), a midterm, New York City’s incorporation, and the celebration of the (then-upcoming) 20th century.

These were the discussions that had shaped an era and a country, and I got to watch them come alive with no promise that they would actually come true. I watched as people organized and voted and shouted them into existence. I saw public opinion see-saw between positions, and choose some of the ones that form the bedrock of my current reality — and fail to choose others, to be lifted up by subsequent generations.

We are at the same space. We need the same choices laid before us. We must build a path forward, just as the people of different eras and times did for themselves, just as our great-grandparents and grandparents, and parents have done for us. We are the successors of a past, and the descendants of the future.

We deserve arguments that clarify our moment, and people who have the vision and understanding to grasp what our options are, and what it will cost us if we do not choose between them.

Punditry seems a silly and superfluous way to do such a thing. And in the hands of the current batch of white men, I suppose it is. We get thoughtless takes and shallow perspectives that are more about comforting us about the broken status quo than preparing us for an uncertain future. But I still believe in the power of words and arguments to shape our minds and bolster our resolve.

This, to me, is the purpose of punditry: to set the world on a path, by simply making it possible.