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The role of the nerd in mass culture occasionally pops up as a topic of national debate (see for instance the perennial question of whether nerds are cool now). Now Charles C.W. Cooke of The National Review has issued a critique of nerds in the political sphere — and in so doing he’s placed himself in the middle of one of nerd culture’s biggest arguments.

Mr. Cooke argues that the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and a variety of journalists and commentators are using the mantle of nerd-dom to push liberal ideology. He writes:

“One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics.”

Mr. Cooke accuses liberal nerds of using science when it suits them to prop up their political agendas. He offers this “translation” of a statement by Mr. Tyson: “All of my political and moral judgments are original, unlike those of the rubes who subscribe to ideologies, philosophies, and religious frameworks. My worldview is driven only by the data.”

But Mr. Cooke also argues that the leftists on his list aren’t really true nerds:

“The pose is, of course, little more than a ruse — our professional ‘nerds’ being, like Mrs. Doubtfire, stereotypical facsimiles of the real thing. They have the patois but not the passion; the clothes but not the style; the posture but not the imprimatur. Theirs is the nerd-dom of ‘Star Wars,’ not ‘Star Trek’; of ‘Mario Kart’ and not ‘World of Warcraft’; of the latest ‘X-Men’ movie rather than the comics themselves. A sketch from the TV show ‘Portlandia,’ mocked up as a public-service announcement, makes this point brutally. After a gorgeous young woman explains at a bar that she doesn’t think her job as a model is ‘her thing’ and instead identifies as ‘a nerd’ who is ‘into video games and comic books and stuff,’ a dorky-looking man gets up and confesses that he is, in fact, a ‘real’ nerd — someone who wears glasses ‘to see,’ who is ‘shy,’ and who ‘isn’t wearing a nerd costume for Halloween’ but is dressed how he lives.”

In a response at Salon, Andrew Leonard takes issue with Mr. Cooke’s notion that the nerds he cites aren’t truly nerdy: “I’m not sure it’s all that smart to attack the likes of Dawkins or Krugman (or even Bill Nye, a mechanical engineer who worked for Boeing) as lacking scientific training. But Cooke’s real problem is that the ‘real’ nerds — the ones that aren’t on MSNBC, also, by and large, share the political beliefs he scorns.”

Actual scientists and engineers, he writes, generally subscribe to the liberal views Mr. Cooke accuses his faux-nerds of pushing:

“Acknowledging that nerds — you know, the guys and gals who invented the microchip and the PC and the smartphone — actually do have a grasp of scientific fact, which leads them to take seriously the problem of historically unprecedented carbon dioxide emissions and the idiocy of rewriting school science textbooks to include dogma about creationism and intelligent design, is a disastrous dead end for conservatives.”

By arguing that some liberals are merely posing as nerds, Mr. Cooke may have opened himself up to other criticisms, too. At The Mary Sue, Victoria McNally argues that his complaint is “literally a Fake Geek Girl argument.” She’s referring to a claim that’s been circulating among nerds for years — Heben Nigatu of BuzzFeed boils it down to “the accusation that women are pretending to be nerdy for male attention.” Many have called this accusation sexist; others have argued that it also reveals a wrongheaded obsession with geek authenticity and that this obsession may be harmful to geek culture.

Of Mr. Cooke’s entry in the Fake Geek canon, Ms. McNally writes:

“By condemning people who do identify as nerds without subscribing to a very particular and arbitrary type of social criteria that’s rooted in what’s considered more difficult to obtain or master (I won’t ask whether he himself plays ‘World of Warcraft,’ his go to example of the nerdiest video game despite its status as a global phenomenon, because that’s too much like what he’s implying with this article) Cooke is literally doing the same thing he is accusing Melissa Harris-Perry and Rachel Maddow of doing: acting like some people are better than others because of what they know.”

Mr. Cooke doesn’t appear to care primarily about nerd-dom — his argument is, at bottom, about politics. But in bringing the idea of the “real” nerd into it, he’s backed his way into a longstanding intra-nerd debate, one that has politics of its own. Alyssa Rosenberg addresses these politics in a 2012 ThinkProgress post on the Fake Geek Girl debate:

“At the root this conversation isn’t really about the inclusion of women, or certain kinds of women, in geekdom. It’s about a slow and uneven shift in which some geeks and some kinds of geekdom have accumulated an enormous amount of social capital. And that shift has revealed that we don’t always know how to spend it wisely, magnanimously, or in ways that don’t repeat the ugly marginalization of geeks that came before.”

Making the geek community more welcoming can only benefit it, she writes: “If geeks want to consolidate our cultural power, the best thing we can possibly do is be as magnanimous and as forward-thinking as possible.” And she calls on geeks to use their powers for good:

“Want to see your expertise count? Use it like you’re teaching padawans, rather than looking to knock off as many points as possible on someone’s Kobyashi Maru exam. Stop acting like everyone else has something to prove and recognize you have something to offer.”

Ms. Rosenberg also cites an essay by Rachel Edidin, who issues a similar call:

“Insularity and identity-policing will consume geek culture faster and more thoroughly than any legion of imaginary interlopers. For decades, we’ve prided ourselves on being forward-thinkers, early adopters, willing to challenge cultural norms and think and work outside the boxes imposed on us. Imagine how far we could go if we could then stop replacing them with boxes of our own design.”

An open and unified nerd community, she implies, is a strong one. Of course, every nerd knows that nothing unites like a common enemy — the pop-culture treasure trove TV Tropes has a long catalog of warring nations (and species) banding together to fight off invaders. Mr. Cooke just gave the nerd community something to fight against; if life imitates nerd culture, he may have increased their power.