The Chotiner Question
By 
Matt Tait recently noted that the dynamics of Twiter incentivized trolling: “after a while, people with no shame realized they could be the main character on purpose, continuously seeking the thrill or profit of the attention it gave them.” Maybe the same is true with talking to Chotiner. For contrarians, is there such a thing as negative publicity?
The thing is, at this point Chotiner’s reputation should precede him. Mearsheimer, in his interview, seems keenly aware of the risks of talking to Isaac. And I don’t recall any of these characters crowing that they did well in their interviews with Chotiner.
So why do it? Maybe they believe that speaking with Chotiner is not an intellectual challenge. In The Ideas Industry I talked about how superstars evolve to the point when they tune out editors, critics, and rivals as beneath them. Most of these contrarians are conservatives/reactionaries who have found sustainable niches in the academy. In their minds, they have survived for decades in a hostile intellectual climate (decades is a key word in that sentence; the truth is that many of the names on that list are approaching emeritus status and might have lost their intellectual fastball). After dealing with unrelenting hostility from an army of Ph.D.s maybe they look at Chotiner as not worthy of worry.
Maybe the explanation is simpler: age and intellectual vanity lead many people to do and say dumb things. I wish I had a definitive answer but, in the end, it’s hard to have the confidence of a contrarian.
I think the explanation is even simpler than that–these people aren’t actually intelligent at all and they are supremely arrogant. And why not? It’s not as if Mearsheimer or Alan Dershowitz or whoever have anything to lose really. They are firmly in their element and even if Dersh whines about Larry David telling him to fuck off, he’s still getting paid by the right people.