Getting away with it

A curious column on the Wall Street Journal’s op ed page towards the end of January put its headline in the imperative mood. “Lay Down Your Weaponization,” commanded the Journal on behalf of its columnist Andy Kessler. He was citing numerous examples from both left and right on the political spectrum of writers accusing somebody else — it’s always somebody else — of “weaponizing” something which is not usually thought of as a weapon: the law, the border, the climate, information, even children. “By using the word ‘weaponizing’,” wrote Mr Kessler, “writers are strengthening, exaggerating, magnifying, embellishing and, what the heck, weaponizing the word.”

All very true, of course, except for the part about “strengthening.” On the contrary, the overuse of the word, or of any word, weakens rather than strengthens it. The more things there are supposedly being “weaponized” the less persuasive the case for any particular instance of alleged “weaponization” — as Mr Kessler’s column itself demonstrates. I think he might do well to reflect on the possibility that such weakening results from a deliberate strategy, hatched in the media hive, to rob certain instances of actual weaponization of their rhetorical sting — including the weaponization of the media themselves against dissenters from the progressive orthodoxy.

But perhaps you think that sounds like a “conspiracy theory”? It wasn’t so long ago that the identification of a conspiracy theory behind some some bit of polemical writing or speaking was enough to banish it to the “fringes” of our political spectrum. But that, too, became an overused expression — right around the time of “Crossfire Hurricane,” an actual and not a theoretical conspiracy to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump. Similarly, as Michael Barone points out in the Washington Examiner, right at the beginning of the Covid-19 panic, “The dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis as a ‘conspiracy theory’ was, in fact, the result of a conspiracy.”

Both these conspiracies, by FBI and Justice Department officials and Dr Fauci and friends, respectively, are still denied by their perpetrators, presumably relying on people’s memory of those false-by-definition “conspiracy theories” of old. It just goes to show what good cover the charge of conspiracy theory is for real conspiracies — but also how both conspiracy theories and real conspiracies have become a part of everyday life for consumers of the media.

The formerly hyperbolical and crank-dominated “fringes,” in other words, are now occupying more and more of the center ground which once shunned them. Surely, you would think, all men and women of good will must agree in deploring what New Criterion visiting critic Victor Davis Hanson calls “The Hysterical Style in American Politics” — by which he means, among other things, the weaponization (if you’ll pardon the expression) of the 2008 financial crisis by the Obama administration.

Wait a minute! Remind me. Which side is it again who is being hysterical? Let’s call the whole thing off! I think maybe Associate Professor Faris would settle for that — just as long as he still gets to call President Trump a threat to democracy. Have you heard about that, by the way? President Trump being a threat to democracy I mean. My guess is that you have. Everybody has. We have indeed heard little else from Mr Trump’s opponents as to why they oppose him. And yet nobody, or almost nobody, seems to be complaining about that trope’s overuse or hysterical character. One who is is that honest leftie Matt Taibbi, who writes that

“Protecting democracy” in the Trump context will be remembered as having served the same purpose as Saddam’s mythical WMDs, the shots fired in the Gulf of Tonkin, or Gaddafi’s fictional Viagra-enhanced army. Those were carefully crafted political lies, used to rally the public behind illegal campaigns of preemption. Voters, by voting, “protect democracy.” A politician who claims to be doing the job for us is up to something. The group in the current White House is trying to steal for themselves a word that belongs to you. Don’t let them.

He, for one, understands that continually making the charge of threatening democracy against somebody else is a pretty good cover for you if you’re threatening democracy yourself — say, by trying to keep Mr Trump off the ballot in the next election.

As I have noticed in this space several times — beginning with “Lexicographic lies” in The New Criterion of October, 2012 — the word “lie” has of late completely changed its meaning. Now it can and usually does mean no more than an honest mistake, or even just “something I disagree with.” Back in the days of “Bush lied; people died” the semantic change left the word’s emotional punch intact for anyone unscrupulous enough to use (or misuse) it.

That could not survive the extreme overuse of the newly redefined word by the “fact checkers” of The Washington Post who purported to catalogue 30,000-plus “lies” supposedly uttered by President Trump. As a result, both the charge of lying and, under that cover, lies themselves have proliferated to the point where everybody assumes that lying politicians are the new norm — which, of course, is good news for the liars, whoever they may be.

The conspiracy theory that Mr Faris regards as an example of “GOP hysteria” is one of his own invention involving what he characterizes as a diabolically clever plot by Joe Biden personally, along with his Democratic henchmen, to orchestrate the multiple felony prosecutions currently pending against Mr Trump. “Let’s set aside for the moment,” he writes, “the fact that when Republicans aren’t crediting him with a devious and meticulously planned legal persecution of Donald Trump, they are saying that he is a doddering old fool, beset by dementia, whose presidency is operated by some unnamed regent.”

Yes, by all means, let’s set that aside, even though on its own it might provide him with another and perhaps countervailing example of “GOP hysteria.” But what if it is the “unnamed regent” rather than Mr Biden himself who is organizing the “legal persecutions” of Mr Trump? Or what if the Democratic and media groupthink on the subject of the former president is such that no central organizer is required? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that there has long been a sort of bidding war between and among Democratic lawyers and media folk to see whose hatred of Mr Trump burns the brightest and who is therefore most forward in pronouncing him guilty of any crime that one of their number may find him- or herself in a position to charge him with.

“The most tendentious objection to Trump’s various prosecutions,” writes Mr Faris, “is that they make America a ‘banana republic’.” You will gather from this that he doesn’t believe in the “banana republic” thesis himself. In fact, he thinks that “most people who use this term” — i.e. “banana republic” — “haven’t the slightest clue what it means or refers to.” I must admit he has a bit of a point there. Nobody, including Mr Faris himself apparently, can know what it means anymore. Why, there are places in the world with bananas growing like blackberries along the roadside where they don’t do what they’re doing in Poland right now. And there’s not a banana tree to be found within a thousand miles of Poland.

But the newly elected government of Donald Tusk, head of the Civic Platform party, is vigorously prosecuting leaders of the previous government, of the Law and Justice party, and that would seem to fit the description by Mr Faris of a “banana republic” as one that is “characterized by politically motivated prosecutions of current or former officeholders.” In Poland, however, you’d have to say the more obvious comparison is with the even more previous government of the Communist party. It was a Pole, after all, Ryszard Legutko, whose Demon in Democracy (2016) pointed us towards the growing similarities between old-fashioned communism and the new, post-Soviet version of “liberal democracy.”

“Communist,” along with “banana republic” must presumably be added to the list of weaponized political epithets — including, of course, “weaponized” — all of which may be supposed to have lost, or to be in the process of losing, their force through overuse and which are thus ready for the rhetorical mothball fleet or knacker’s yard. This will, of course, give considerable satisfaction to communists and the leaders of banana republics everywhere who might otherwise have their feelings hurt by such harsh and judgmental language.

When it comes to the quasi-legal but avowedly political matter of impeachment, The Wall Street Journal has that matter, too, well in hand — at least if the would-be victim of the proceeding is a Democratic officeholder. “Don’t Impeach Alejandro Mayorkas,” wrote Michael Chertoff, Homeland Secretary under President George W. Bush, for the Journal around the same time as Mr Kessler’s column on “weaponization” mentioned above. “House Republicans are misusing the process to target an official who has done nothing wrong,” he wrote. Two days later the Journal’s editorial board weighed in with “Impeaching Mayorkas Achieves Nothing,” averring in addition that “a policy dispute doesn’t qualify as a high crime and misdemeanor.”

The claim is arguable. I don’t know that so comprehensive a failure to enforce the law, as it pertains to immigration, that he is sworn to uphold is quite accurately described as “a policy dispute.” Nor do I think that announcing, under oath, that the border is secure when it quite obviously is nothing of the kind can fairly be described as doing “nothing wrong.” At the very least it has to constitute contempt of Congress. But then I’m not a lawyer. The point is that these and other journalistic wishes to turn down the rhetorical heat in our highly polarized public square — or claims, like Andy Kessler’s, that the fuel burning under our red-hot indignation is running low — always seem to be made in the interest of Democratic officeholders and never, ever that of the much-roasted and toasted Donald Trump.

Behind all such editorial deprecations there lies, I believe, an attempt to be — or at least to appear to be — calm, even-handed and moderate in the editors’ approach to the passionate and often rhetorically extreme airing of grievances on both sides that has come to characterize American politics during the Trump era. Another example is provided by the Journal’s Holman Jenkins, Jr., who writes that

Mr. Trump can be expected also to intrude at least some discussion of the country’s problems and Mr. Biden’s handling of them, whereas Mr. Biden plans a campaign of Trump, Trump, Trump, implying any price (even a second Biden term and more Biden policies) is worth paying to keep Mr. Trump out of the White House. This doesn’t mean Mr. Biden isn’t still a decent bet to win. That’s how unpopular and untrusted his opponent is. So, here we are, Democrats, if you like living dangerously; if you like making sport of the election; if you seek a possible cliff-hanger in the Electoral College or even a hung election in the House if enough disgruntled voters opt for a third party. Almost any outcome is likely to be contested; norm violations will be rampant on both sides — Mr. Biden skipping the debates, his prosecutors trying to put Mr. Trump in jail, Mr. Trump using the courtroom as his campaign stump to delegitimize the legal system.

Let’s look a little closer at this claim that “norm violations will be rampant on both sides,” followed by three compelling examples of what those “norm violations” are likely to be. I don’t think “skipping the debates” should really count as a “norm violation.” Surely it can’t be only partisans who wish that the debates had been skipped in 2020 and hope they will be in 2024. Certainly no one expects them to be in the least enlightening or, in the absence of some fatal “gaffe,” to change anybody’s mind about the two most likely candidates. Only the media’s thirst for blood-politics could ever make them happen again.

Trying to put Mr Trump in jail certainly is a norm violation. A massive one. And yet it is implied here that Mr Trump’s calling attention to the fact and using it “to delegitimize the legal system” is also a norm violation. It seems pretty clear to me that the legal system has delegitimized itself by allowing itself to be, ahem, weaponized in this way. Maybe that’s why Mr Jenkins’s colleague, Mr Kessler, wants to decommission the latter term.

I suppose it can be considered some improvement on the rest of the mainstream media’s open advocacy on behalf of Mr Biden that the Journal is thus bending over backwards to cry a plague o’ both your houses, but I don’t see it as winning back a lot of the public trust that Bret Stephens, for one, thinks the media have lost. Mr Stephens, now of The New York Times, left the Journal because it seemed to him too favorable towards the first Trump administration, but is now writing from his new perch at the Times “The Case for Trump … by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose.”

Talk about back-handed compliments! Yet this gesture may be in part a reflection of his regret over the same weaponization of the media that I mentioned to start with — though he doesn’t use that word — including, presumably, his own little platoon of the media army. About this he says that

Even my liberal friends complain that some of the coverage they encounter, especially about culture, tilts so far left that it manages to leave them simultaneously bored and outraged. The plague of ideologically loaded adjectives is another big problem, as is reporting that too often is just opinion writing masked in quotes from experts.

Golly, I wonder whom he can have had in mind here?

After all, however, the undoubtedly best recent example of an overused word or concept’s providing cover for the real thing is the word “genocide.” As I write I can almost hear the word echoing down the George Washington Parkway from the chants of demonstrators eight miles away who are blocking the bridges over the Potomac from Virginia to Washington, D.C. “Genocide” allegedly practiced by the Israelis against the Gazan Palestinians is routinely paired by the demonstrators with their aspirational elimination of the Jewish presence “From the river to the sea” — i.e. the hopeful genocide to be practiced by the Palestinians against the Jews.

Needless to say, it is only the former alleged genocide which is getting a hearing before the International Court of Justice, at the instance of South Africa, that shining example of toleration and human rights. Of course it’s all a part of the left’s boy-who-cried-wolf strategy. Throw around the word “genocide” promiscuously and falsely and often enough and eventually people will be so blasé about it that they will be in no position to recognize a real genocide (like a real weaponization or a real threat to democracy) when it comes along. The pro-Hamas demonstrators obviously believe we have already reached that point. As Matt Taibbi might say, don’t let them get away with it.