Smarm is often directed downward at anyone who lacks more traditional elite credentials, particularly younger and/or lesser known writers who are using the Internet as a means to gain an audience. To the smarmy, “Internet” is a four-letter word. It is a pejorative, meant to dismiss what the speaker sees as a second-class medium and the second-class people who use it.

What disturbs the smarmy about the Internet is its openness, its leveling effect, its capacity to give a platform to outsiders. Smarm contains a recognition that the digital age has forced entrenched elites to be more subtle. Empty a can of tear gas in a peaceful protestor’s face, or call a brown-skinned supporter of your opponent a “macaca,” and it will end up on YouTube. The old methods of control are more difficult to deploy. Smarm is the insiders’ reactionary response: it is the counterrevolutionary attempt to belittle the Internet and everything and everyone associated with it, frequently under the category of “snark.” Denby, more than anyone, lays this bare. He proclaims that “[s]nark is the expression of the alienated, of the ambitious, of the dispossessed.” Having defined snark on those terms, Denby then sides with the smarmy incumbents against the snarky insurgents.

Scocca recognizes the centrality of the Internet to smarm, with its political and socioeconomic implications, though this recognition is somewhat obscured by the sheer torrent of his examples and arguments.

Nothing is stopping anyone—any nobody—from going on a blog or on Twitter and expressing their opinion of you, no matter who you think you are. New media and social media have an immense and cruel leveling power, for people accustomed to old systems of status and prestige.

Scocca’s other political or politicized examples are also telling: Alex Pareene’s criticism of JPMorganChase and Maria Bartiromo’s response, the mainstream media’s backlash against Edward Snowden, and Denby concern-trolling Spike Lee before anyone knew what “concern-trolling” was. In each of these instances, a young insurgent attempted to challenge the entrenched incumbents, and a defender of the incumbents—of the status quo, of the establishment—dismisses the challenge by invoking hierarchy, authority, and conversely, the outsiders’ lack thereof, as well as their naiveté. (Interestingly, George Lakoff has described respect for hierarchy and authority as the central animating principle of American conservatives, the “frame” or paradigm that orients their worldview.)

Another of Scocca’s political examples is perhaps his most astute: the smarm of technocratic, post-partisan centrism, in which the self-styled rational and practical are “unable to accept opposition,” refusing to engage with their opponents, who are dismissed as “ideologues” and “interest groups.” Yet these terms are euphemisms that are worth translating and unpacking. To a smarmy centrist, “ideologues” are those ruled by emotion rather than intelligence, and “interest groups” is a convenient catch-all for any group one wishes to ignore, such as low-wage workers, women, gays, or people of color. (You can hear this same dog-whistle anytime someone decries “identity politics.”) We see this Centrist Smarm whenever an elite tells those ideologues and interest groups that they are irrational and do not understand how the world works, in lieu of actually countering their arguments.

Against this backdrop, we now can make some additional claims about what smarm is.

– Smarm is a superior claim to the truth based on status, stature, authority, or credentials.

– Smarm attacks the tone of outsiders’ speech, their relative lack of traditional qualifications or experience, or the new media they use.

– Smarm is an attempt to evade any engagement with arguments an elite does not wish to face. Disdain replaces discourse.

– To the smarmy, dissent is “negativity.” Criticism is “snark.” Arguments are “partisan” or “ideological” and lack “civility.” Youth is an automatic disqualification. Credentials from the Internet are dismissed or overlooked. Any mention of inequality is “class warfare.” Any mention is civil liberties or due process or human rights “makes America weaker” or “makes our streets less safe.” These smarmy responses imply that the other speaker is naïve, illegitimate, or doesn’t understand how the world really works.

– Smarm is power, as Scocca notes. But the power usually comes first: the possessor of power uses smarm to stay in power.

– Smarm says: “Trust us; we know best.”

– Smarm may take many forms: concern-trolling, ad hominem attacks, lectures regarding tone and civility, pretending to take umbrage, pulling rank, or flashing a superior credential.

The outsiders are excluded or diminished as a result, and this determination of who may legitimately participate in a public conversation inherently carries a political bias, a tilt in the machine that allows for rigged outcomes.

Smarm and Literary Criticism

Yet Scocca’s definition of smarm goes too far, encompassing a distinct though perhaps related issue: that a relentless positivity has become one of the dominant social mores of the literary Internet. This of course was the subject of its own online debate in 2012, after Slate’s Jacob Silverman denounced what he called the “epidemic of niceness in online book culture.” Should this fall under the same heading as the insider/outsider dynamic that defines the examples of smarm discussed above?

There is a meaningful difference between foreswearing negativity oneself and belittling or criticizing negativity in others. The line is not a crisp one, however. Scocca led off his piece by pointing to a quote from Isaac Fitzgerald, the new book editor at BuzzFeed, who declared that the site will refrain from negative book reviews.

“Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

He will follow what he calls the “Bambi Rule” (though he acknowledges the quote in fact comes from Thumper): “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”

The line from Thumper shows the ambiguity on this question of criticism. Scocca correctly points out that the rule is a forced recitation, “admonishing” and “scolding.” The “don’t” is the key word here. This is not an appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s an order from an authority figure.

Yet it does not follow that all calls for niceness are alike. If I choose to refrain from negative criticism of other writers, that is my business, even if I announce it to everyone; such an announcement would sound smug but falls short of smarmy. If I argue that too much negativity in book criticism is harmful to writers in general, especially when books and writing face dwindling audiences and a daunting future, it is a debatable point, one that inches toward the (again, admittedly fuzzy) line between maintaining a vibrant literary community and squelching discourse and dissent.

I suspect that this latter point is what Fitzgerald meant. Most tellingly, he ascribed negativity to older media outlets rather than newer ones. He seems to be thinking of someone like Dwight Macdonald, or perhaps more recently, James Wood or Leon Wieseltier. He opposes the authoritative, credentialed excoriation of a book, and he supports the “online books community,” which he sees as “a positive place” of “respect” and empathy for others’ hard work. In other words, Fitzgerald is not an entrenched elite engaging in smarm as a way to silence outsiders. He is not rejecting snark; he is, if anything, rejecting smarm. And he is attempting to establish the online literary community as a haven from any kind of rejection or dismissal, whether smarmy or “scathing.”

Scocca may not like the positivity of online book culture, but that does not necessarily make it smarm—at least not yet. BuzzFeed’s popularity may be soaring, but it is not an elite institution. Nor is Gawker. That may change someday—and soon—given how quickly today’s digital Davids become tomorrow’s Goliaths. Google and Amazon were considered scrappy upstarts only a decade ago; Facebook is still shy of its tenth birthday. Yet these companies are already among the most influential and powerful in the world. The lesson is that the relative stature of a speaker matters. Ten or even five years from now Fitzgerald’s Bambi Rule or Thumper Doctrine may start to sound a bit more ominous: the “don’t” may seem more authoritative if BuzzFeed grows into a behemoth of the media establishment, or if Fitzgerald were to dismiss criticisms of him or of BuzzFeed based on the relative lack of stature of the other speaker. Such disdain would constitute smarm.

Statures of Smarm: Eggers, Gladwell – and Franzen

The question of stature and authority applies equally to individuals and not just institutions and their visible leaders—and this leads us back to Scocca’s consideration of Eggers and Gladwell, which naturally became the headline of this debate.

If relative stature and defense of authority are key elements in identifying smarm, then Eggers’s email to the Advocate would seem to qualify—but only on one very specific point, albeit a point that recurs throughout Eggers’s self-styled “rant.” Twice he argues that only artists of a certain stature have the privilege to criticize other artists. When he dismisses the “tiny voices of tiny people,” it can be construed as ignoring naysayers—or as distancing himself from any criticism. Taken together, it constitutes a rather extreme view.

 Yet Eggers’s comments are in the context of discussing the perpetual bête noire of the indie music fan: the sellout. It was a question about “selling out” that stirred Eggers’s ire, and after running through his own history as an indie rock fan (souring on R.E.M. after they achieved mainstream success), he answers—correctly, I believe—that being a sellout is more about fashion than anything else. To the obsessive, it is fashionable to love the undiscovered; upon discovery, the love wanes or sours, and the obsessive moves on.

Still, Eggers did himself no favors with his inattention to the power/stature dynamic in play: he was just becoming a famous author and publisher, and he was ranting at college students who were a bit too irreverent and colloquial with their questions. Perhaps Harvard was part of the problem, along with Eggers’s relative youth at the time (he was 30): the Advocate editors viewed him as a young writer they could engage with informally, and Eggers, still uncertain in his newfound fame, may have viewed the Advocate—of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, Norman Mailer, among many, many others—as the higher-stature participant in the conversation. For example, he felt compelled to note that out of a hundred reviews of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he only had one negative one. In this light, his rant seems more like defensiveness and insecurity than smarm. A far better measure of Eggers’s views would be to ask these same questions of him today, now that he is undoubtedly one of the more prominent figures in American writing, whether you like him or not. Does he still believe that only successful artists may criticize art? That art should be enjoyed—consumed—but not criticized? Would he be as strident in arguing his position now as he was back in 2000?

Gladwell was an odd target for Scocca to choose in some ways, but Gladwell’s reply to Scocca invited more criticism than Scocca had directed at him in the first place. Scocca knocked Gladwell for his optimism, which was simply too easy of a critique, given that Gladwell predominantly writes his books for a business audience for whom a sunny outlook is virtually required. (If Scocca has a problem with all positivity, that’s a different story—one explored most recently by Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided—but it does not follow that all reflexive positivity is inherently smarm.) Yet Gladwell’s response veers in some odd directions. After he more or less grasps the gist of Scocca’s argument—that “appeals to civility have become the newest weapon in the arsenal of the privileged”—he tries to defend Eggers and looks rather clumsy doing it. One sentence will suffice: “When Eggers says, ‘Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one,’ he does not mean you can’t criticize a book or a movie unless you’ve made one.”

Eggers’s words are in plain English, and yet Gladwell says that they should mean basically the opposite of what Eggers actually wrote. Indeed, as mentioned above, Eggers inveighed against such criticism twice in his email. And in the other instance, he was even more explicit: “the only book reviews that should be trusted are by those who have themselves written books. And the more successful and honored the writer, the less likely that writer is to demolish another writer.” Eggers’s point was quite clear and was not taken out of context by Scocca.

Then Gladwell moves without explanation from snark to satire and argues that the comedy of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert supports the status quo rather than undermines it: “What defines our era, after all, is not really the insistence of those in authority that we all behave properly and politely. It is defined, instead, by the institutionalization of satire.” As astute as Gladwell’s writing typically is, here he could hardly be more wrong.

The problem with smarm is not limited to an insistence on politeness; it extends to a dismissal of less-credentialed speakers from the marketplace of ideas. It is personified most completely by Dick Cheney’s unctuous lectures on how we mere mortals cannot possibly understand the importance of torture or Guantanamo to national security—or, relatedly, Robert Novak’s infamous Washington Post op-ed in which he disdainfully rejected Joseph Wilson’s questions about the basis for the invasion of Iraq while outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA operative. Or the claims of Sarah Palin or George Allen or Paul Ryan that they represent the “real America” of rural areas and small towns, with its disgusting implication that urban or non-white speakers have less legitimacy to speak on public issues. Smarm is an elite’s attack on an outsider’s qualifications to speak on a subject—with the implied or express corollaries that such talking out of turn is improper and uncivil, and that the elites should be trusted without any questions. Few things define and damn our era more.

Gladwell is not a practitioner of smarm himself, though. Despite his optimistic tone, most of his work is contrarian, designed to challenge at least some conventional wisdoms—sometimes rather substantially. For example, one of the sections of his most recent book, David and Goliath, cuts sharply against the “aggressive policing” that Scocca correctly identifies as part of the agenda of Centrist Smarm. In one part, Gladwell warmly highlights an effort in Brooklyn to help the families of young criminal offenders, including the door-to-door provision of Thanksgiving turkeys; in the next part, Gladwell describes the flaws of California’s three-strikes sentencing program. He is far from a smarmy lackey for the status quo. But his strange attack on satire serves to highlight the need for a more clear view of smarm, its definition, and its consequences. In particular, if satire has become more prevalent, it may be because of the increased need to identify and to puncture smarm—indeed, this would seem to be the very mission of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It’s what Jon Stewart refers to when he mocks and rails against what he calls “Bullshit Mountain.”

One final example of smarm that was not identified by Scocca may be useful here. The online debate earlier this year over writers’ use of social media has many of the hallmarks of what we can now recognize as smarm: authorities with greater stature (primarily Jonathan Franzen) declaring that a certain new medium (Twitter) and the content of certain speech on it (short social media posts, particularly about oneself) is “irresponsible,” whereas the proper scope of discourse should be limited to “particularly serious readers and writers.” Those “serious” people are “my people,” Franzen said, “[a]nd we do not like to talk about ourselves.” Franzen’s tone was that of a scolding parent, much like Thumper’s. He was making sure to let all of us know what is proper and improper, what is serious and what is not serious, and surprise surprise, what is proper and serious is for all of us to be quiet. Perhaps predictably, literary Twitter responded with a veritable snarknado, Franzen’s stature be damned. There may be some hope for us yet.