The Logic of Political Smears
with John McWhorter
Kamala Harris is a communist. Donald Trump is a fascist. How seriously are we meant to take these sorts of charges? In one sense, this is just name-calling, and it’s probably been a part of politics since the advent of politics itself. As one viewer notes in his question from my Q&A session with John McWhorter, nineteenth-century American presidential politics was rife with insults, smears, and slurs. Our present-day politics are no different, and there’s no reason to think they should be.
But insults like those listed below also serve an insidious discursive function. They’re ad hominem attacks designed to shift the audience’s attention from the substantive claims, deeds, and policies of a politician to that politician’s imputed character. We’re meant to infer from those insults that the problem with the target is not what they do but what they are. The insult “Donald Trump is a fascist” implies that fascism is essential to his political identity. Therefore everything he does is, ipso facto, fascist, even the things he does that don’t square with fascist political ideology at all. Those are just distractions meant to throw us off the trail, or so the logic of ad hominem inference goes.
It would be one thing if those who promote and amplify insults like that were sincere but mistaken in their beliefs. All too often, though, their actions belie their words. As I point out below, if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris really did believe that Trump was a fascist, then why do they, when push comes to shove, treat him like an ordinary politician? If Joe Biden really believed he was handing power over to a fascist regime, his willingness to sit with him for a White House photo-op would constitute a profound betrayal of his beliefs and the country’s interests.
In other words, we know Biden and other Democrats tried using the f-word as a political tactic. It didn’t work, and they dropped the act. But plenty of ordinary voters, having bought into the smear, now do believe he’s a fascist, and they’ll view everything he does through that lens. An effective smear becomes a doctrine of faith. And one must have a lot of faith to believe that a wishy-washy functionary like Kamala Harris has the degree of political commitment demanded of a hardcore communist or that as unpredictable a figure as Donald Trump could abide any ideological restrictions at all.
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GLENN LOURY: This is [a question from] Peter Bradshaw.
What do the two of you think of the use of labels and slurs? I can think of these recent examples: “fascist,” “Hitler,” and “commie.”
To which I add, parenthetically, “apartheid,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing.”
Here are some historical examples. “Pimp” (applied to President Pierce in 1855), “Drunkard” (regarding President Grant in 1868), and “moral leper” (regarding Grover Cleveland in 1884). What are the effects of labels and slurs? Does the use of labels and slurs suggest anything about the user?
I find that to be an interesting question. Maybe I should defer to the linguist. I'll just observe, I'm not surprised that there are historical examples, because the temptation to call one's opponent a bad name, unacceptable, outside of the realm of legitimate political activity can be very powerful. Communist? A Marxist? Anybody who's in favor of the New Deal in [1936] is a Marxist? Anybody who is left-of-center on national healthcare and wants Medicare for All now is a communist? This kind of idea. Likewise, “fascist” and “Nazi.”
I can see the temptation. These are not descriptive. They are emotive uses of words. It's politics after all. You're trying to get people to get off their couch and go and vote one way or another. You're trying to get their juices flowing.
On the other hand, to the extent that they are clearly false claims about people— “I'm left-of-center, socialist, therefore I'm a Marxist, I'm a communist, I'm someone who wants Russia to prevail in the Cold War?" That discredits the person who uses the slur. It undermines their credibility. And likewise, calling someone a fascist. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris spent a lot of time talking about MAGA as a fascist movement until he won the election. And Biden invited him to sit down at the White House and have a peaceful transition of power.
You don't do that to Hitler. Hitler is not entitled to a decent, peaceful transition of power. He's entitled to be assassinated. How can I take you seriously next time when you go to such vituperation and exaggeration and hyperbole and then revert to norm when the voters don't confirm what you say?
That's a comment.
JOHN MCWHORTER: I didn't know Franklin Pierce was a pimp. I thought he was a drinker.
Those things are not inconsistent with one another.
Okay, anyway. Using slurs in that way is something that human beings do, because it's natural to seek to find some sort of coherence or system or broader explanation for all of the chaos that's buzzing around us. You're trying to make sense of things. And if You call somebody a commie because they like the New Deal or because they think Obamacare was a good thing, obviously that's a vast distortion of what the term originally meant. It's a way of saying, “All of this can be explained if you just realize that ultimately these people are, etc.” They are this thing. All sorts of other things about them are gonna fall out from that thing. It's a way of trying to make an explanation. There's that.
Also, there's the fact that terms’ meanings tend to change over time, and that change often is a matter of generalization. For example, the term fascist. All these articles trying to explain, “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” in terms of what the term meant in 1932? It's beginning to be used in a more general way. And I'm not sure we can get the horse back into the barn. We're talking about a general, vague sense of the authoritarian, as opposed to what Mussolini's regime actually was like. But we're trying to make sense of things. And yes those things are going to happen.
Or Ulysses S. Grant. How did you feel about his politics? How did you feel about the way he was waging war? One way to dismiss him was just to say he's a drunk. So whatever he's doing, he's not doing it as well as he could or he's doing it wrong or he did it by accident. He's a drunk. You're trying to explain. That's what people do. And so that's why slurs get used in that way.
It's a kind of mess that I think we just have to tolerate, because it's part of being a person, and people have emotions and people seek to make sense out of the chaos. Or they should try to make sense out of the chaos instead of just saying things like “apartheid.” That's what I would say.
Names, slurs, insults, labels...call them what you will. They're all schematic shorthand, boxes into which we dump the world. The more we can reduce complexity to a label, the simpler life becomes.
We get to think less and react more. It saves us time and energy. A large umbrella of a category phrase that we can drape, carelessly, atop 'whatever', the more we can, Beatle-like, turn off our minds, relax, and float downstream. We surrender to the void. (It helps if we can drop acid at the same time, but it's not necessary)
A very human thing to do, no doubt. We're all guilty.
But doing it is not reason; it is not argument. It proves nothing save the hollow weakness and terminal laziness of the label-thrower. 'Trump is a fascist!' UnHuh, and what is that? The syllogistic answer, inevitably, after much sputtering & hand-waving is...'Trump! A fascist is Trump! And he's, you know, unlikable, and orange-haired, and egotistic, and bombastic, and he does mean tweets, and he's gonna put everyone in Concentration Camps, and Secret Police, grabbing women's body parts, and the Disappeared, and Censorship....and did I say the magic words, Racism, Sexism, Misogyny, Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity, Colonialist, Capitalist, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad?!'
'My mom says some fascists are like that.'
In total, wrapped up with a bow, and given some really cool illustrations (as in 'Alexander and his Terrible, Horrible, No Good', this Void Surrendering process can be moderately entertaining, but it leads exactly nowhere, and accomplishes nothing. Well, except for the fact, that it seduces others into the same Non-Thought Kneejerk Zombie Dance of Outrage.
Thus the insane, but entirely & predictably 'joyous' reaction of the terminally Woke to the cold-blooded slaughter of Brian Thompson... as given voice most recently by Ethics Professor Yolanda Wilson, "So, while I’m not rejoicing about the UHC CEO being shot dead in the street, I’m not sad about it, either. People deserve better than the US health insurance industry, and chickens come home to roost."
She's a professor, with a Phd, who teaches Ethics, for God's sake.... she's a middle-aged adult, presumably with a family, raised in the lap of First World luxury, working at a prestigious university, who has drunk so much of the KoolAid, and swallowed so much of the True Believer Progressive dogma that she has become utterly incapable of even understanding, let alone empathizing with the tragic, homicidal destruction of a man's life, and his family's lives in a pool of blood on a city street. No tears here; not even a coldly pro-forma 'Gosh that's too bad'. Yolanda gives us only a sneer and the inhumane assertion: 'he had it coming'. Taylor Lorenz, minor journalistic celebrity, tells Piers Morgan she was 'celebratory' ('joyful' she says was the wrong word) when she heard the news.
No God... no heaven, no hell, and everything becomes not just permissible, but embraced if and when IT serves our purpose and feeds our appetites. No need to think; no need to question, rather we reduce the entirety of the world, the universe which is a human life to a label, a cipher, a cruelly malicious caricature of 'evil' -- 'Healthcare Insurance CEO' -- and throw it and him, bloody and despised into yesterday's trash.
These people should be ashamed, but that would require self-awareness...and that requires thought & humility. They have none of that. But they do have hate, and a handful of labels, and they see the world only as Victim & Fascist Victimizer. No one should be surprised that in this horrific sleep of reason we have birthed monsters.