Is Heckling Effective?
What's the best way to get political attention in an age of toxic politics?
Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash
Last week, I went to a local political event for a candidate running for Senate. It’s a hot race in our state, and I was curious to learn more about this guy. He was a few minutes into his speech, telling us about his reasons for running and track record, when a woman standing in the back suddenly yelled: “HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT THE GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE! CEASEFIRE NOW! CEASEFIRE NOW!”
The candidate waited for fifteen seconds and when she didn’t shut up, he walked to the back of the room to talk to her. “DEAD CHILDREN! GENOCIDE!”
While I was curious about the candidate’s positions on Gaza and other issues, I had zero interest in this rude random woman with her face obscured about a mask. I hadn’t left my autistic kid at home on a Thursday night to listen to her. So I started to heckle her, “OH COME ON! BOO! BE QUIET!” Steve hushed me, because he wanted to see how the candidate handled it.
Hecklers have become an expected presence at all political events these days. They stand up as a group and turn their backs to the speaker to block the views of other audience members. They shouts slogans to drown out and derail speakers. Some will walk to the front of the room to grab the microphone from the speaker. Heckling is effective, social media savvy, and, at the same time, totally toxic — a zit on the face of democracy.
There is an obvious generational gap on heckling. Ancient Gen Xers like myself are horrified. For us, it’s uncomfortably rude.
Heckling is disrespectful to the person on the stage, who has taken the time to get on the stage, discuss their ideas, travel long distance, and talk, often times, for free. It’s rude to the audience members, who blocked out an hour of their day to listen to the speaker. It’s rude to the group of organizers, who arranged the logistics of the event. It disrupts a whole lot of nerdy people, who just want to hear about ideas for an hour.
But the pro-heckler crowd doesn’t care about ideas. As children of the Internet age, they want their political messages distilled to slogans to be tweeted or turned into a TikTok video. A long conversation with pros and cons based on facts, evidence, and logical arguments is just plain boring to them.
Heckling are stunts that are tailor-made for the social media era, where a viral tweet can garner millions of hits. One gaff in response to an unscripted moment could be political death or a career ender. Even outside of social media, heckling has an impact.
Heckling forces people on the stage to respond to uncomfortable questions. Last week, the candidate at my local event had to walk to the back of the room, listen to the heckler for a minute, tell his people to set up a time to talk, and then walk back to the front of the room. It utterly derailed his train of thought. It obviously shook him up, and made the whole audience uncomfortable. And that was her goal.
So, points to the heckler. She was a memorable part of the evening. One week later, I’m still thinking and writing a newsletter about her. But I also still hate her. She didn’t use enough words to provide me with real information. I need more than a slogan on a topic as complicated as the Israel-Gaza war. I’m still offended by her disregard for me and my time. If anything, she turned me off to her position.
The pro-heckler crowd would say that their methods are necessary when facing power structures that do not acknowledge their positions. Minorities must resort to any methods possible to have their voices heard. Rudeness is a necessary evil when combatting injustice. Besides they have to be rude, when the other side is rude. Trump and his MAGA contemporaries are hardly “nice,” they say.
Yet, I will always side with intelligent debate. You can’t take the political science PhD out of this old girl. And that’s why I’m turned off by all kinds of group think.
In the Atlantic, Adam Rubenstein wrote a viral article this week about an incident at the New York Times involving a chicken sandwich.
In one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.
The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.
Insane political correctness wasn’t an unusual incident at most popular media sources a few years back, when the editors were extremely young, and the protests were still fresh. I actually think things have calmed down a bit since then, though we still need voices like Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss. I’m a free thinking liberal with an allergy to group think.
So, as effective as heckling may be, I remain opposed to it. It’s totalitarian, illiberal, and meant to shutdown intelligent debate. I actually think that there should be classes in high schools and colleges talking about positive political deliberation versus toxic political deliberation. Maybe we need classes in political debate. We need to apply some acne creme on the toxic political landscape right now, so we don’t turn off more voters.
LINKS
Full fledged insanity about Kate Middleton this week. From the Atlantic: “In this way, the Middleton story is a collision of two popular cultures: conspiracy theorizing, now fully mainstream, and classic celebrity gossip. It makes for a weird scene. Here is an extremely public person’s private health matter being dissected with the rabidity of an Infowars segment, while accompanied by ironic internet jokes that mimic the Alex Jones vibe even as they mock it.”
This week, my family and I battled the norovirus. I ran a webinar to help get autistic kids into college. I did local advocacy for those autistic kids. We’re recovered, so we’re meeting friends for Happy Hour tonight, taking Ian to a concert in Newark on Saturday, and celebrating my dad’s 86th birthday on Sunday. Really looking forward to a trip to Cancun later this month.
In education news. Great discussion about math education on the horizon. Will talk about that soon. I’ll also need to chat about the upcoming fiscal cliff, predicted school shutdowns, and growing privatization.
Tim (Not sure if this comment is replying properly to yours. I hope so. The "reply" button isn't working properly.) I wasn't advocating for a diversity of viewpoints in my post. This post was simply about having civil discourse. Heckling kills civil discourse. Having a diversity of viewpoints in the public sphere -- which includes ill informed and rude viewpoints, I suppose -- is different. I would advocate having the rude people hold their own events to express their views, which I would attend politely. I get really annoyed when people hijack other people's events.
If a group of checker players had regular meetings, and one day, someone walked in yelling "Chess is Best! Chess is Best!" and disrupted their checker playing so badly that they had to stop playing checkers, then that would be a sad thing.
As always, the problem is that appeals for positive political conversations only work on people who share the value assumptions that underlie such conversations. Or the people who feel comfortable with articulating their views in a way that opens them up to disagreement or critique. Some people aren't sure what they think; some people think things but don't know how to articulate them; some people know their views are indefensible in a "rational conversation" but they still hold to those views.
I think it's roughly the same problem as saying "you should invest effort in trying to understand people you strongly disagree with, and you should try to create a space for them to be part of the sociopolitical world you belong to". When that's said by by conservatives, it's essentially concern trolling: they feel no such obligation themselves. You are never going to hear Chris Rufo talking about why he values having liberals or leftists around him and how he wants to learn more about how they think. When we say these things--or have them said to us--we are situating ourselves as reasonable people who can hear all sides of an issue and situating ourselves as the desired "normal" of democratic life, as a kind of universal political subject. But we're not: it's a very particular mindset that happens to play to our strengths (educated, cosmopolitan, comfortable speaking and writing, etc.) and what we say we want only works with people who have roughly the same mindset and roughly the same strengths and skills.
The heckler already knows what they think is true and is fundamentally uninterested in discussing it with you or anybody else. That's a coherent disposition; if we really wanted to be totally open to viewpoint diversity etc. we would have to acknowledge the coherency of that position. But we don't want to. (I'm with you on not wanting it.) But we have trouble articulating our preferences as a particular kind of ideological commitment, a particular vision of political personhood, and thus the limits of our preferences are hard for us to fully process.