An outraged acquaintance of mine spent 2016 circulating examples of political correctness —each one an act of silencing and bureaucratic cruelty done for the sake of a protected class.
What were once annoying social media tropes have become for many evidence that the excesses of political correctness are to blame for the 2016 election upset. The Democrats lost, the argument goes, because they privileged identity politics over economic and social stability for all. The conceit of liberal hypocrisy is the supposed moral of the story.
But that argument confuses irony for hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is an internal contradiction. It is the result of trying to occupy two opposing positions at once, such as campaigning on an America-first platform while investing primarily in businesses overseas.
Irony is a split perspective. Kenneth Burke calls irony "the perspective of perspectives." In ironic moments, we hold a single position but suddenly see how it leads in two opposing directions. If hypocrisy takes us off course, irony spins us around in place. It is disorienting, and, unlike hypocrisy, it cannot be repaired. We can't un-see multiple perspectives once we have seen them.
Irony is often unintentional. An animal rights activist interviewed by the Guardian did not intend to be ironic when he argued that asking him his opinion on human rights and human suffering was "a form of deflection."
One essayist years ago declared September 11th the end of irony. Cool distance, he believed, had given way to moral clarity leaving us only one way of seeing everything. After the 2016 election, Christy Wampole again declared the end of irony, which she defined as apolitical hipsterism. Those arguments, likewise, confuse irony for cynicism.
Irony is not the result of distance. It is the product of intimacy. A statement feels ironic when it folds back on itself and we come up against the full implications of our position.
I once thought the show Modern Family reflected a permanent movement away from crude bigotry until I suddenly saw the resemblances between it and the new first family: an older man remarried to a trophy immigrant wife with a thick accent, an Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, a daughter who converted to Judaism, and a blended family of kids from different marriages.
It is tempting to cast them as a family of hypocrites (as they will do to those who do not embrace them). Doing so misses the irony. Look close and all the differences look the same. Discrimination becomes a lack of discrimination. Rembert Browne put it best: “For over a year, their hatred was a revolving door. They did not discriminate: They hated black people, they hated women, they hated immigrants, they hated Muslims, they hated Jews, they hated gay people, they hated Hispanic people — and if you could be white and any of those things, they hated you, too.”
Irony is unsettling. To wish its end is to vote for sanity. But it would be a mistake to retreat from irony. It is our best defense against an unprincipled, indiscriminate force.
Irony’s lesson is that no statement ever necessarily leads in one sure direction. That lesson should be of some comfort right now. The challenge is to invite irony’s split perspective. Being ironic requires us to press up close against arguments that repel us so that we might see in what other directions they might go.