Let me preface this post with a disclaimer: I’m probably as embarrassed as you are—in fact, more embarrassed, I’m sure—that I’ve devoted as much thought to this tempest in a teacup as I have. But having poured this much thought into this little tea, I feel that I should share, lest my cup spilleth over. So here goes.

I’m finding the pushback—at this blog, on Twitter, and across Facebook—about my exchange with Chelsea Clinton super interesting. One of the leitmotifs of the pushback is that it’s somehow unfair of me to engage Clinton about Arendt. Now that it was an act of almost spectral comedy, if not lunacy, to so engage, I’ll freely admit. Which is mostly why I posted the whole exchange. But unfair? That tells me something about my critics. A lot of things, in fact.

But before I tell you about those things, let me say this: I didn’t actually seek out this exchange. I retweeted what Clinton wrote with a comment, a snide comment, as I admitted. I didn’t direct my comment at her, issuing a challenge and expecting a response. I was as surprised as anyone that she would see it, much less respond to it. But having gotten her response, I had a choice: ignore her or respond to her. I opted to respond, but as I said earlier, I deliberated about the proper mode of response. And decided I should respond the way I would to anyone else who gets something wrong. Which is what I did (politely, you’ll see; once she engaged, I tried to keep things on the up and up). I thought democratic manners required nothing less. And it was not I but she who kept the conversation going, returning to it again and again, long after I had assumed it was over.

But here’s what I’m thinking about the pushback.

First, had this exchange occurred with a Republican, or with one of the sons or daughters of a famous Republican, say Eric or Ivanka Trump, I have no doubt that I’d be hearing nothing but lusty cheers and congratulations, particularly from Democratic Party partisans. I mean these are folks who manage to muster a fresh cackle at every prodigy of stupidity the right manages to produce on any given day. But Chelsea Clinton is part of the team, so, well, the obvious. And that’s fine; I don’t begrudge people their partisanship. But I do ask that they cop to it and not pretend that I’ve somehow transgressed a norm they’d never acknowledge if the other party were on the receiving end of it.

Second, there’s a related element that’s worth noting. And that has to do with the politics of intelligence/education, social class, and partisanship. The Democratic Party and its supporters like to think of themselves as the party of the smarties. Obama, Clinton, Clinton, Clinton: all so smart, all so well educated, all so well spoken. That’s why they’re entitled to rule, their supporters think. (Believe me, I’ve had these conversations many times.) And that’s not just about politics; it’s also about social class, or at least the culture and style and markers of a particular kind of social class. Unlike the Trumps and other vulgarians of the right, these are people who know how to carry on a conversation at a cocktail party or on Charlie Rose. (Is that show still on, by the way?) Indeed, a well educated liberal person on Twitter—a professor of political science, in fact—made a point of noting to me that none of the Trump kids had read Hannah Arendt. That Clinton didn’t seem to get Arendt didn’t matter. It was enough that she had read Arendt. Or knew to show that she had read Arendt.

I’ll confess, I find that kind of thing distasteful. (Arendt has a great line in Eichmann about how the well-heeled educated German classes of the postwar era didn’t really have a problem with the fact that the workaday Jews of Germany—little Hans Cohn from around the corner was how, I think, she put it—had been murdered during the Holocaust; it was that Einstein had been sent packing. That was the real crime: the loss of all that wondrous cultural capital.)

My objection is not just academic or aesthetic or cultural; it’s also political. I don’t believe in technocracy. I don’t think I (or people like me) am qualified to lead the country or to have a Clinton-like position in this country because I went to good schools or read a lot of books. There’s a limited place for expertise in a democracy, but it’s limited. I know I’m in the minority here on this, but I get no comfort from the fact that Barack Obama reads great literature (that was a Facebook post a while back) or that Chelsea Clinton knows how to name drop Arendt. For me, that doesn’t reflect the legitimate needs for some limited expertise. Nor does it reflect the requirements of good leadership, and it sure as shit is not about democracy. It’s about social class, social standing, and social signaling.

In any event, a lot of the pushback from certain quarters seems to have more to do with that, with the anxiety around the role of intelligence and social signaling in the Democratic Party and liberal social circles, than it does with the ethics (or aesthetics) of engaging with Chelsea Clinton on Twitter about Arendt. To that extent, I not only think my criticism of Clinton is fair game—after all, if you think a source of liberalism’s cultural and political legitimacy is that liberals know something, it seems only fair to point out when they’re full of shit—but I also now have come to think that, despite the fact that I mostly posted about the exchange because I found it hilariously strange and amusing, it may serve a useful if limited political purpose.

Which brings me to a third point. The celebrity dimension. Some folks on Facebook and elsewhere don’t like that. I get it. Were I reading these posts, I might also think to myself, eh, big deal, he’s talking to Chelsea Clinton, why he’s going on about it? How is that helping The Cause? He should be spending his time on something else.

I guess all I’ll say in my defense is: give me a fucking break. I spend most of my time on social media getting into the minutiae of the politics of the healthcare bill, rounding up folks to make phone calls to their senators, making historical comparisons between Trump and other presidents, writing about whatever books I’m reading, reporting on what I’ve found in a Clarence Thomas opinion or some obscure text in political economy, and for about 18 months there, posting on Hannah Arendt.

For the most part, I avoid virtually every single sectarian intra-left internet spat. I don’t drone on about Chapo or the Jacobins and their haters or whatever bit of leftbook celebrity esoterica is currently preoccupying people on social media. I don’t get caught up in whatever atrocity of the day has the Twitterati chattering. Nor do I chastise other folks who do get caught up in that. I just try to stay focused on the things that matter to me and leave others to their thing.

So I think I’ve earned my right to a moment’s levity, and a slightly self-mocking post about my one-time engagement with a player like Clinton. To me, as I said, it’s funny. You may disagree; that’s fine. But I think we can both agree that the republic will survive these 24 hours of my indulgence. And while I do appreciate all the well-intentioned people who feel duty-bound to tell me that I would be better served spending my time on other things, I do wonder how they square that position with the fact that they’re spending all this time enjoining me not to spend all this time on this thing.

And for those who are simply annoyed that people around you are talking about this when you just couldn’t give a shit, I feel your pain. All I can say is: welcome to my world. That’s just the way it sometimes goes on the internet.

Fourth, the gender dimension. In the initial draft of my blog post, I had a long discussion about mansplaining and why I didn’t think that was what was at play here. After reading it over, I thought, oh, don’t go there. You can’t win this argument, not on the internet; you’ll only generate more accusations of mansplaining. Leave it out, leave it alone. So I did. And I will.

Fifth and final, the power dimension. I get the strong feeling that some people still think Chelsea Clinton is a little kid in the White House, getting her every pre-teen face and every teenage gesture subjected to nasty scrutiny from the right. People, Chelsea Clinton is nearing 40 years old. She’s a high-powered player in New York financial, cultural, and educational circles. She’s the leader of a major global foundation. And she’s increasingly a major player in national political circles. She has elected to be in the public eye. Those more than one million followers of hers on Twitter didn’t just happen. She’s created that audience, that following. I’m not going to play little ole’ me here, but I am in fact a professor at Brooklyn College; I don’t just play one on TV. The idea that I’m somehow this big powerful person who’s victimizing a hapless Chelsea Clinton is, well, a little silly.

I was going to close this post with a line from Smith—where he talks about how odd it is that people lower down on the totem pole always identify with the misery of their social superiors, seeing in abjection of elites some kind of universal state of disrepair or perhaps even their own misery—but I figured, nah, why elevate this like that? Instead, I’ll close with a plea that we all of us grow up and stop pretending that Chelsea Clinton is some poor little lamb who has lost her way and who needs protection from the likes of me. She’s already got Jordan Horowitz playing wing man for her; I think she’ll survive my tweets.