Whataboutism

I often see people in debates online accuse other people of playing “Whataboutism.”

Here’s a standard definition:

Whataboutism is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counteraccusation instead of a defense against the original accusation.

That raises two issues.

First, is whataboutism ever a reasonable way to argue?

Second, what’s a good way to respond when someone uses the “whataboutism” strategy to deflect?

My answer to the first question is yes. It is sometimes a reasonable way to argue.

I’ll answer the second question by referring to a discussion I was in on Facebook today.

I had said good things on FB about Senator Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic Senator from Maryland. I thought he did a good job down in El Salvador, in a 3-minute video (here’s the 24-minute version), of making the case for the return of one of his constituents, Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration admits was mistakenly taken to a prison in El Salvador. Van Hollen made only one error: he stated that Abrego Garcia is innocent even though he doesn’t know that. The key is not that he’s innocent. The key is that he was never given a hearing. The only way to find out is to give him a hearing back in the United States at which he can have a lawyer present.

Probably because of FB’s algorithm, up popped a threaded discussion initiated by a lawyer friend named Matt Gilliland. Matt said that Trump is defying the Supreme Court of the United States, which told him, in a 9-0 decision, to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.

A friend of Matt’s named Will stated:

Wow, a president defying the SC – why I haven’t seen that since … JOE BIDEN on student loans bragging about it.

Matt replied:

So I think that Biden’s student loan shenanigans were often outside of his limits, but Biden didn’t actually defy the Supreme Court. When he got shut down because the method he used was ruled invalid, he tried a different legal method. That’s not defying the Supreme Court — it’s following their decisions. Can you point to an example where he actually defied their decision?

The conversation went back and forth.

Will was engaging in whataboutism. Was that an invalid way to argue? I don’t think so. Matt’s response was that Biden hadn’t defied the Supreme Court. (By the way, in an appearance in, I think Los Angeles, Biden came awfully close to bragging that he had.)

The problem is that in raising the issue of Biden, Will manages to avoid discussing whether what Trump did was illegitimate.

So I asked the obvious question. I wrote to Will:

And when Biden did that, you were against it, right?

Will didn’t answer.

I think my question of Will was a good way to go. Once he admitted that he was against Biden defying the Supreme Court (he thought Biden was; I, like Matt, thought he didn’t, but I also thought Biden came perilously close) then we could get to the issue of whether Trump’s actions constituted defiance of the Supreme Court. We never got there because, at least so far, Will hasn’t replied.

But the way I responded is a legitimate way to respond to whataboutism, whether or not whataboutism is justified, but especially if whataboutism is justified.

One final question about Trump and Biden. The Supreme Court has seconded a lower court decision requiring Trump to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Why, after the Supreme Court found Biden’s forgiving of student loans unconstitutional, did it not require him to undo that forgiveness? Biden wouldn’t have even had to get people to send checks that had been sent to them. All he would have had to is tell them that their loans were not forgiven.