Nobody Likes a Narc
A short post about Matt Yglesias's license plate crusade
I have some more substantively important things that I should be writing about, but I wanted to briefly touch on a minor Twitter fracas that I found exemplary of our moment’s tendency to elevate everything to a principle even when what’s really at issue is just personality. The subject: cars that don’t have proper and visible license plates, and freelance pundit Matt Yglesias’s vendetta against same.
Yglesias has written before about the importance of enforcing traffic rules in a reliable fashion, which in practice means an increasingly automated fashion. You need to enforce the rules about speeding and running red lights to make cities safe for pedestrians; the alternative is not blissfully self-regulating anarchy but a less-functional city and more traffic deaths. If you don’t want lots of police stopping lots of cars (which you don’t, for a lot of reasons), but you do want people to expect to get caught and modify their behavior accordingly, then you need some kind of automated enforcement.
The problem is that automated enforcement only works if the cameras can see your license plate. The proliferation of these cameras means there’s now a powerful incentive for motorists to either display fake or invalid temporary tags or to obscure their legitimate plates, so the cameras can’t do their job. So, earlier this week Yglesias decided to involve himself in non-automated enforcement, and start reporting cars that had either invalid or obscured plates:
This led to widespread mockery by people to Yglesias’s left [UPDATE: and right; picked the wrong tweet to illustrate the former, that’s for sure], which he found strangely perplexing:
Subsequent debate shifted in a policy direction—are traffic laws bad because they have a regressive impact?—which is something Yglesias was very happy to debate indeed:
I’m sure this was a lot of fun for all concerned, but from where I sit, none of this is actually about policy, or equity, or right and wrong. Yglesias was just being a narc. And nobody likes a narc.
People break rules all the time. They jaywalk. They speed. They litter. They don’t wear their mask properly. They smoke in the bathroom. They take phone calls in the quiet car. They leave their shopping carts in parking spaces. They use illegal drugs. They lie and cheat and steal. Matt Yglesias himself engaged in welfare fraud. Sometimes these infractions seriously impinge on the experiences of other people and sometimes they impinge less. Sometimes we think the rules themselves are stupid. Sometimes we think the rules are sensible in general but that there should be exceptions. And sometimes we know we’re just being selfish for breaking the rules, and hoping to get away with it.
But we never like the people who take it upon themselves to enforce those rules. The guy who shushes you in the quiet car? The woman who tells you to put your shopping cart in the shed with the others? The person sitting next to you at the theater who asks you to wear your mask over your nose? We don’t like those people. Even if we know we’re in the wrong, we don’t like those people. Even if we aren’t the ones being called out, and even if we think the rule is important—unless the person being called out is being an egregious asshole right then, we probably feel for that person more than we do for the person taking it upon themselves to enforce the rules.
And of course that goes treble for anybody who reports anything to the authorities. We don’t like the RA who breaks up the party, but we really hate the RA who rats out the people throwing the illegal kegger to the administration. Who wouldn’t? Nobody likes a narc.
That’s what Yglesias was doing: He was being a narc. He was being a narc for a principle that he believed in, and he’s being attacked for believing in that principle. But that disagreement is not what this is really about. What it’s about is that nobody likes a narc. And I’m sure on some level Yglesias knows that. I’m sure he understood that even if reporting those cars was helping enforce important pro-social rules, he didn’t need to advertise that he was doing so for that neighborhood-watch-like activity to have its desired pro-social effect. The tip line is anonymous for a reason. I’d bet he even understood that he was unlikely to be applauded for advertising what he was doing. He wasn’t in it for applause; he was in it for engagement. In other words: he was trolling, and the troll was successful. He got a whole bunch of people to attack him for the principle of enforcing traffic laws—which is kind of a ridiculous thing to oppose in principle—when the reality is they just saw him bragging about being a narc. And nobody likes a narc.
Ironically, since the people attacking Yglesias are mostly coming from the online left, much of the hatred of the online left amounts to little more than this kind of anti-narc sentiment, a natural revulsion at people who spend their time looking for people to report to the administration for traducing some rule or other. I could spend my time here mocking people for the hypocrisy in caring more about, say, calling out racism than about calling out reckless driving—or, more substantively, get into the weeds on the principle at issue and point out the ways in which an equity “framing” can wind up driving outcomes that make society more inequitable, which is where Yglesias would like to take the conversation.
But I’m not going to do that because I felt the same feelings that Yglesias’s critics felt, even though I’m more inclined to agree with him on the underlying principle, and because, as Frederick de Boer memorably and correctly pointed out, being a narc isn’t actually a particularly left-wing phenomenon. Nor is it a phenomenon of the extremes against the center—Yglesias is an exemplary centrist of a liberal-tarian persuasion, and he’s not only formed his own one-man traffic-related neighborhood watch, but he’s bragging about it. In our era, people from every political disposition are eager to call people out, harass them, and sometimes even try to get them arrested for a panoply of infractions that are constantly changing. They all claim to be enforcing rules that matter, and I think most of them are sincere. But, stepping back from the purported principles involved, what’s really happening is that everyone is becoming a narc.
Which is why, increasingly, nobody likes anybody.
I missed this tempest in a teapot because I'm not on Twitter, but I had independently come to the conclusion recently the spate of fake paper license plates and license plate obscuring plastic is a grievous social ill, and there should be vigorous enforcement to crush it. Go narcs, go!
There’s a difference between ratting out someone talking in the quiet car and ratting out someone who is actively trying to defeat public safety measures.