Going Nucular Read online

  The passing of the Progressives’ notion of interest took disinterestedness over the side along with it. It was just about the time that the meaning of interest was becoming blurred that American language critics began to lament the tendency to use disinterested to mean “uninterested.” In fact, that usage had been around for centuries, but it suddenly seemed a harbinger of the disappearance of the old, “noble” use of the word to mean, roughly, “impartial.” As it happens, the “impartial” sense still accounts for the majority of uses of disinterested in the press. But it isn’t a word that comes up much when we try to define political virtue. There’s no position that’s free from what William Dean Howells called “the sordid competition of interests,” now that interest itself has been given so broad a charter.

  Yet there’s one feature of the progressives’ notion of interest that has survived. We still think of special interests as groups that have obtained a back-door influence on law or policy, whether it’s purchased by campaign contributions or bartered for political support. Whether the word is applied to women’s groups or tobacco companies, the implication is that they wouldn’t be able to put their views across in a direct popular appeal.

  What’s notable is how many influences that definition exempts—corporations that take out advertisements or create foundations to promote their political opinions, people who buy newspapers or television networks to disseminate their views, millionaires who use their own money to finance their political ambitions or a recall election. Those aren’t special interests, but merely “powerful interests who control things,” as Schwarzenegger put it. Hiram Johnson would have found nothing to fault in that language, either.

  Me Too, Too

  “No more me-tooism,” wrote John Hood in National Review recently, as President Bush was announcing his prescription drug program. That’s the familiar charge when politicians from either side seem to be sacrificing ideological commitment to expediency. “I’m getting to the point where I think it’s better to lose with someone like [Howard Dean],” one Democrat was quoted as saying, “than to have all this me-tooism.”

  “Me too” began its life as a verb. Just after the 1940 election, Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt’s adviser, wrote in his diary that the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie had “overlooked the best chance that he had by being content merely to ‘me too’ the president . . . instead of striking out for himself in a bold and positive way.”

  The noun me-tooism followed in 1949. The postwar period was fond of using -ism to coin jaunty names for new trends and doctrines, with items like me-firstism, eggheadism, against-ism, mom-ism , big-shotism, nice-nellieism, and go-it-aloneism. It was a way of mocking the more portentously philosophical isms that were in vogue in the first half of the century, the fashion that Westbrook Pegler ridiculed in 1951 as “galloping ismatism.”

  The New York Times Week in Review, July 13, 2003

  But despite its form, me-tooism was really the ismatist’s reproach to the apostasies of Republican centrists. Campaigning against Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 primaries, Senator Robert A. Taft warned that a “me too” strategy would alienate the Republican Party’s conservative base while making few inroads in the mugwump vote—a voter he defined as “an intellectual sitting on a fence with his mug on one side and his wump on another.”

  Eisenhower’s me-tooism was both substantive and symbolic. It isn’t easy to say which of the isms he espoused was more exasperating to conservatives—the welfare statism of the New Deal programs he supported, or the middle-of-the-roadism that he took for a motto, endorsing conservatism in economic matters and liberalism in “human affairs.”

  That strategy effectively undercut the liberal rhetoric of his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, but over the coming decades the Republicans remained a minority party, rent by charges of me-tooism and extremism. Eisenhower never forgave Barry Goldwater for describing his administration as a “dime-store New Deal.” But Goldwater’s resolutely un-me-too campaign of 1964 got nowhere with its slogan, “A choice, not an echo,” and it wasn’t until Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 that the Republicans successfully reinvented themselves in what Ickes would have called a “bold and positive” way.

  Charges of me-tooism didn’t surface again until the 1990s, when another popular president faced with a large opposition majority adopted a strategy of “triangulation” between the left and right. President Clinton’s middle-of-the-roadism riled not just his party’s own left, but conservatives who saw it as a sign of devious pusillanimity. “Clinton has become the first prominent ‘me-too’ Democrat,” the conservative columnist Tony Snow wrote in 1994, “someone who accepts the fundamental rightness of his opponents’ cause but doesn’t have the stomach to go where the principles lead.”

  But when it became clear that the confrontational rhetoric of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” was alienating many voters, Republicans found themselves having to do some me-tooing of their own. The new look made its debut at the party’s 1996 convention, and was in full display in George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign. Democrats had their turn to become indignant when Bush’s nomination acceptance speech appropriated some of Clinton’s own phraseology, like “Medicare reflects our values as a society.”

  Since then Bush and the Republicans have proved adroit at neutralizing the Democrats’ traditional rhetorical advantages on issues like education and the environment. Thanks to the wordsmith Frank Luntz, the Republicans have stopped talking about rolling back regulations in favor of appeals to “balanced, common-sense solutions.”

  And “inclusiveness” has never been so inclusive. At one time or another the White House has applied the word to Republican efforts to increase recruiting among women and minorities, the Homeland Security Department, Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, the Coalition of the Willing, post-Hussein Iraq, and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania (an “inclusive man,” Bush called him, after his remarks equating homosexuality with incest and bigamy).

  Bush is hardly an Eisenhower Republican, of course. He’s not about to style himself a “progressive moderate,” much less warn against the dangers of the military-industrial complex. But even if his me-tooism is largely symbolic—and highly selective, at that—it has left the Democrats in a rhetorical bind. Unlike the 1950s, this is a period of sharp partisan divisions over most important issues, and yet the Democrats are struggling to find language that makes their differences with the Administration clear. The phrases that signaled many of the great themes of liberalism—“inclusiveness,” “community,” “corporate responsibility”—have become bland, universally sanctioned values that no longer connote the political program that brought them to the ball.

  Granted, this is partly due to a propensity for overcomplexity that has always plagued the Democrats—as Joe Klein has observed, lousy bumper stickers are a chronic Democratic woe. But the Democrats are also the victims of a shift in the linguistic center of gravity. Now, as in the past, frequent complaints of me-tooism are a sign that the language of the last generation of isms is losing its hold on the political imagination.

  For the first time in history, in fact, the ‘me-too’ label is as likely to be applied to one side as to the other. That doesn’t signal a rush to the center, but it does mark the waning of another cycle of isms, as people weary of grand doctrines that offer themselves as the motor forces of history, and history takes one of its ideological breathers.

  It’s inevitable that conservatism will suffer the same decline as liberalism—an oppositional label can’t flourish for long when its contrary is ailing. (Nowadays, it’s the right that is most responsible for keeping the liberal label alive.) President Bush’s use of “compassionate conservatism” was an implicit acknowledgment of the uneasiness that many voters have about the unqualified noun. And Luntz’s advice to Republicans to refrain from describing opponents as liberals suggests his awareness of the public’s increasing impatienc
e with purely ideological wrangling.

  In fact, the forces that severed liberal rhetoric from its underlying ideology cut both ways. As Democrats have begun to realize, traditional conservative themes like fiscal discipline, wealth creation, and individual freedom are up for grabs. Both sides will be trying to stake out a new political vocabulary, as they contest the meanings of words like security, opportunity, responsibility, and fairness. Those may seem like vague terms, but then so did conservatism and liberalism when the modern opposition between the two was taking shape in the early years of Roosevelt’s presidency. As late as 1936, Herbert Hoover was accusing Roosevelt of a kind of me-tooism avant la lettre for hijacking the true meaning of liberal.

  Charges of me-tooism are inevitable in periods of terminological realignment. New political vocabularies always sound nebulous until debate gives them partisan shape and color. But as no one knows better than we San Franciscans, the distinctive features of the landscape sooner or later emerge out of the fog.

  Slippery Slopes

  I read in recent months that Democrats were complaining that the Administration’s prescription-drug bill would put the nation on the slippery slope toward Medicare privatization, that the dismantling of West Bank outposts puts Israel on a slippery slope leading to its destruction, and that the ownership of a women’s NBA team by a Connecticut casino sets the sport on a slippery slope towards control by gamblers.

  And the metaphor was predictably ubiquitous in condemnations of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Texas sodomy law—Jerry Falwell said the ruling could set the nation down a slippery slope in which courts might approve bestiality, prostitution, and the use of narcotics, in an echo of a controversial remark by Senator Rick Santorum several weeks previously.

  To judge from the news stories, the entire nation is coming to resemble San Francisco after a heavy rainfall. In the press, the phrase “slippery slope” is more than seven times as common as it was twenty years ago. It’s a convenient way of warning of the dire effects of some course of action without actually having to criticize the action itself, which is what makes it a favorite ploy of hypocrites: “Not that there’s anything wrong with A, mind you,

  Fresh Air Commentary, July 1, 2003

  but A will lead to B and then C, and before you know it we’ll be up to our armpits in Z.”

  The argument goes by various names. The phrase “slippery slope” dates from the mid-nineteenth century, around the same time that people started to talk about “letting the camel’s nose into the tent.” That’s an allusion to a fable about a camel who asks if he can put his nose into a workman’s tent to keep it from the cold, and winds up inserting first his shoulders, then his legs, and so on, until he disposseses the inhabitant. Actually, I haven’t been able to find any Arab source for the fable, and it may very well be a Victorian invention. There’s a version of the tale in an 1860 poem by Lydia Howard Sigourney, which concludes:

  Oh, youthful hearts, to gladness born,

  Treat not this Arab lore with scorn.

  To evil habit’s earliest wile

  Lend neither ear, nor glance, nor smile,

  Choke the dark fountain ere it flows,

  Nor even admit the Camel’s Nose.

  Then there’s the domino effect, an analogy that Dwight Eisenhower used in 1954 to justify U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Or people talk about the thin end of the wedge, the snowball effect, the doomsday scenario, or opening the floodgates. Philosophers have sometimes tried to distinguish the various arguments on logical grounds, but usage always blurs the lines between them—one way or another, it always comes down to “God knows where will it all end.”

  The rhetoric textbooks usually describe the “slippery slope” as a logical fallacy, but that depends on how it’s used. When you say that A puts us on a slippery slope to B, you might mean only that A will create political momentum for B, or that A would make B cheaper or easier to implement. The UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh gives the example of installing video cameras at every intersection. That may make it easier to deter street crime, but it also provides the government with the means to perform more sinister forms of surveillance.

  Or sometimes the slippery slope is invoked in the course of making an argument about the impossibility of drawing clear moral distinctions—if you can’t draw the line between A and B, then how can you accept one and reject the other? That’s an argument you often hear from abortion critics—where does a fetus end and a child begin? It’s an instance of what Greek philosophers called the fallacy of the heap, or the Sorites Fallacy. If you start with a heap of sand and take one grain away, you’re still left with a heap, but if you keep repeating the process you wind up saying that a single grain of sand is a heap all by itself. The mistake is in assuming that if a distinction isn’t clear-cut it can’t be drawn at all—a form of argument you could use to discredit the distinctions between young and old, slow and fast, or bitter and sweet, if you were of a mind to, until all of experience was reduced to a featureless muddle.

  The Supreme Court justices love to torment advocates with slippery slope examples to get them to clarify their positions, with the result that the Court transcripts often have the air of absurdist theater. But the technique is more disconcerting when it moves from the hypothetical to assertions of fact, the way it did in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the case overturning the Texas sodomy statute. According to Scalia, once you start throwing out laws that reflect the moral choices of the majority, you undermine the basis for state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity. (That reads as if Scalia intended to warn supporters of anti-masturbation statutes that the Texas sodomy decision puts these laws on shaky grounds. And so it does, provided, of course, that the act is consensual.)

  I have the feeling that Scalia had a good time drawing up that list, but it isn’t likely he really buys the logic. It’s hard to imagine him voting to overturn a state anti-bestiality statute on the grounds that the Texas sodomy decision leaves him no alternative.

  But the real problem with slippery-slope arguments isn’t their logic, but the rhetorical games people play with them—they’re a way of turning every decision into an unprecedented step into the void. In theory, you could use Scalia’s logic to run the metaphor uphill; you could just as easily say that refusing to overturn the Texas statute would open the way to laws restricting nose rings, public dancing, or other things that voters might find morally unacceptable. But people rarely mention the slippery slope to argue for a change in law or policy—it’s chiefly an argument for maintaining the status quo. The English legal scholar Glanville Williams once called the slippery slope “the trump card of the traditionalist, because no proposal for reform is immune to [it].”

  That comes from the metaphor itself, with its image of stepping off the edge of a slope. But law and policy decisions are rarely that dramatic—it’s more like carving our way along a hill-side, making small adjustments as we go. Or to switch metaphors, we all agree that we want to keep the camel’s nose inside the tent and leave his nether parts out in the desert—the question always comes down to where we want to put the hump.

  If It’s Orwellian, It’s Probably Not

  On George Orwell’s centenary—he was born on June 25, 1903—the most telling sign of his influence is the words he left us with: not just thought police, doublethink, and unperson, but also Orwellian itself, the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer. In the press and on the Internet, it’s more common than Kafkaesque, Hemingwayesque, and Dickensian put together. It even noses out the rival political reproach Machiavellian , which had a 500-year head start.

  Eponyms are always the narrowest sort of tribute, though. Orwellian doesn’t have anything to do with Orwell as a socialist thinker, or for that matter, as a human being. People are always talking about Orwell’s decency, but “Orwellian decency” would be an odd phrase indeed. And Orwelli
an commemorates Orwell the writer only for three of his best known works: the novels Animal Farm and 1984 and the essay “Politics and the English Language.” The adjective reduces Orwell’s palette to a single shade of noir. It brings to mind only sordid regimes of surveillance and thought control and the distortions of language that make them possible.

  Orwell’s views on language will probably outlive his political ideas. At least they seem to require no updating or apology, whereas his partisans feel the need to justify the continuing relevance of his politics. Yet Orwell was scarcely the first writer to protest against political euphemism. More than 150 years earlier, Edmund Burke sounded a very Orwellian note in his attacks on the apologists for the French Revolution who tried to extenuate the September Massacres of 1792: “The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies and circumlocutions for massacre and murder. Things are never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess; sometimes too continued an exercise of a revolutionary power.”

  The New York Times Week in Review, June 22, 2003

  But it was Orwell who popularized the modern picture of language as the active accomplice of power, whether by concealing its abuses or, as with Newspeak, by making dissent literally unthinkable. In “Politics and the English Language,” he wrote that “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” and spoke of “words that fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”

  That was an appealing notion to an age that had learned to be suspicious of ideologies, and critics on all sides have found it useful to cite “Politics and the English Language” in condemning the equivocations of their opponents. Critics on the left hear Orwellian resonances in phrases like “weapons of mass protection,” or in names like the Patriot Act or the Homeland Security Department’s Operation Liberty Shield, which authorizes indefinite detention of asylum-seekers from certain nations. Critics on the right hear them in phrases like “reproductive health services,” “Office of Equality Assurance,” and “English Plus,” for bilingual education. And just about everyone discerned an Orwellian note in the name of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness project, which was aimed at mining a vast centralized database of personal information for patterns that might reveal terrorist activities. (The name was finally changed to the Terrorist Information Awareness program, in an effort to reassure Americans who have nothing to hide.)