The movie The Thing features a monster that can flawlessly mimic human beings. It can replace anyone, and there is no way to tell the monstrous mimic from the real person… until the mimic suddenly attacks you and tears you to pieces.
Killing a mimic is obviously justified self-defense… but there is no way to be sure who is a mimic. Is it justified to kill a person who might be a mimic? In a world infested with such creatures, would it be justifiable to kill a stranger, just in case? Even if not, it is certainly justifiable to treat any stranger with intense suspicion. If there is no way to tell for sure who is a mimic, then trusting anyone you don’t know is human is obvious folly.
This seems to be a metaphor for where American politics is heading.
I doubt that Trump is really a racist. I doubt that many of the people chanting “send her back” at his rally, or praising his “you can’t leave fast enough” tweet are really racists either.
But the language they are using is such that an impartial observer can’t tell if they are racists or not. Does it sound racist? Yes, it does. Do bona fide racists love it? Yes, they do. Is it really?
…
Bullies are insincere. Bullies do not actually mean the things they say. Their word are weapons, and they choose their words to hurt, not to communicate their actual beliefs or opinions. When a bully speaks, you don’t learn what he actually thinks about anything. You learn only who he wants to hurt, and what words he thinks will be hurtful.
Bully language in politics is nothing new, but I feel like over the last three years it has become ubiquitous. This week, the week of July 14, 2019, feels like it might be a tipping point. I feel like we’re coming up on a place now where both left and right will soon speak only in bully.
This is hyperbole, of course. Obviously not everyone will speak bully, but if the loudest and most influential voices in our politics, the voices that define the scope and direction of political movements, the voices that the rest of us are obliged to rally around–if these voices are bullies, then political rhetoric and political affiliation will lose all correlation with political belief.
We see this now. What does MAGA mean? To most people who wear the hat, it means generic American patriotism, not much different from waving a flag. But if the people who wear the heat embrace the bully language of xenophobia and racism, then how is an outsider to know what it means? If some who wear the hat are racists, and all who wear it are tolerant of racist rhetoric, then who can know which are the racists and which are not?
If some of a group are mimics, and there is no sure way to tell human from mimic, then all of them must be regarded as mimics.
I’ve noted recent attempts by liberal writers to shift the meaning of the word “pro-life,” from meaning “opposed to abortion and euthanasia” to meaning “cradle-to-grave utopian socialist who (maybe, weakly) opposes abortion.” As this redefinition takes hold, we see a similar phenomenon to the MAGA slogan. When someone claims to be “pro-life” today… what does that mean? Does that mean that they politically opposed to abortion? Or does it mean they are a utopian socialist who is de facto pro-abortion because of their willingness to pull the lever for Democrats? With both sorts running around calling themselves “pro-life,” who can tell?
I can say the exact same thing about immigration to two different people, and one of them will infer that I am an open-borders globalist while the other infers that I am a xenophobic isolationist. I cannot reliably predict how my political statements will be perceived, and I am often completely surprised by what people assume I must believe based upon some web of associations to which I am not privy.
There are many other examples.
I feel like, in 100 ways both obvious and subtle, we are losing the language necessary to articulate our political beliefs. I feel like we are approaching a point where it will be possible to ask someone 20 questions about their politics and not come away with a clear idea of what it is they actually believe (if they even know themselves).
A lot of people think Trump’s bully rhetoric is “genius.” I think it’s terribly dangerous. Not because it incites his followers to violence. No. Rather, it is dangerous because it prevents anyone from knowing what he or his supporters really think about anything. We know who he regards as his enemies, but beyond that what Trump “really means” is left very much to the listener’s imagination.
As that sort of uninformative rhetoric becomes ubiquitous on all sides, I fear that we are losing the ability to tell what anyone really thinks about anything. If all political speech becomes just bullying and virtue signaling, how can I tell who really has an evil ideology that I should fear, and who is just “talking tough”? And even if I can tell the difference, should I assume that others can? Or should I anticipate that others will fear me because they associate me with a “tough talker”?
I fear that at the end of this process of rhetorical deconstruction is a society in which the inability to communicate drives people who really ought to be able to get along into bitterly hostile factions, factions based not on actual irreconcilable differences, but rather on unresolvable suspicion, because people can’t tell who’s really bad and who’s not.
If we want to avoid needless strife, then we need to be honest in our speech. We need to say what we really mean, not what we imagine will “work” or “win.” If we don’t say what we really mean, we undermine language itself, and there will be consequences for that.
But what if other side is not honest?
That should make no difference to us at all.