The problem with ‘whataboutism’

Recently, there has been quite a bit of discussion in the mainstream media about the phenomenon of “whataboutism.” According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, whataboutism is “a rhetorical device that involves accusing others of offenses as a way of deflecting attention from one’s own deeds.”

Whataboutism is the practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by charging one’s accusers with hypocrisy without directly refuting their argument. Since the practice of whataboutism is an attempt to discredit an opponent’s position without disproving their argument, it suffers from the tu quoque logical fallacy (Latin for “you also”). In this fallacy, the error in reasoning lies in trying to excuse a moral offense by appealing to the deficient character of the accuser, which is generally irrelevant to the soundness of the argument.

These days, the practice of whataboutism is being used most often by Republican politicians and pundits when they are confronted with their role in promoting the big election lie that resulted in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol and their failure to condemn right-wing extremist groups.

Yet many Americans fail to realize that this practice is not new and can be traced back to a Communist technique from the late 1970s whereby any criticism of the Soviet Union was countered by reference to some Western shortcomings. In its earlier version, any critique of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union brought by American diplomats during the Cold War was immediately countered with arguments such as: what about how you treat African Americans in your own country?

A decade or so later, Chinese government troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators trying to block the military’s advance into Beijing’s center square, killing and wounding many civilians in what would be named the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The massacre at Tiananmen, which was condemned by Western democracies, yielded the following comment from the Chinese government: “Bad elements deserved this response because of their

own crimes.”

In my estimation, there are at least three moral problems with the practice of whataboutism. First, is the issue that those who resort to what-about types of arguments typically rely on false equivalencies to make their case. Thus, we heard many Republican politicians who challenged the certification of the 2020 elections even after the violent insurrection of the Capitol attempt to fall back on claims that several Democrats had also challenged the 2016 presidential election.

Yet the two situations were very different, since in 2016 there were no Democratic senators who contested the results when Congress met to certify them.

Likewise, the attempt by Trump’s impeachment lawyers to equate his months-long campaign to deny the results of the election and incite a violent mob to the statements of Democratic politicians about the summer of 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd is an absurd comparison.

Second, what-about claims are often nothing more than efforts to shirk personal responsibility for one’s own role in helping to bring about a troubling situation. When conservative politicians excused the violent right-wing hate groups who created mayhem on Jan. 6 by arguing that there are many leftwing extremists who advocated violence, or even worse by blaming Antifa for the insurrection of the Capitol, they were in fact seeking to evade their own complicity in promulgating the big lie that led to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. Yet blaming others for engaging in the same misconduct as oneself does not morally absolve one from those actions. Neither does impugning everyone across the country for the tragic events of Jan. 6, as House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to do in one interview.

Finally, there is a danger that the practice of whataboutism can degenerate into a negligent kind of moral relativism, one in which those democratic ideals that have guided in the past no longer hold sway. When civil discourse is aimed at trying to score political points rather than telling the truth, when dialogue between adversaries is reduced to personal insults, the result is a struggle between enemies in which the only goal that matters is to maintain one’s power.

When deflection and blaming others become the norm in politics, we risk losing the moral high ground, those values like justice, equality and truth that can help preserve and strengthen our democracy.