Political
Why Bush and Krauthammer hate politics
February 13, 2007 18 comments
George W. Bush despises politics. That, at least, is one interpretation of the curious fact that, whenever he wants to dismiss criticism or ideas, he labels them “political”. Thus did he speak on CNN:
I guess my reaction to all the noise about, you know, [funny deep voice] ‘He wants to go to war’ [end of funny deep voice] is, uh, first of all I don’t understand the tactics, and I guess it would say it’s political.
Er… well, yes, it is political, in that it’s about the nation’s citizens discussing what to do about international affairs. That’s what people do in politics. For Mr Bush, however, “political” seems to be synonymous with something like “playing politics”. Anything that’s “political” must be cynical Machiavellian manoeuvring. Bush’s semantic extremism, in which he cannot allow the word “political” itself to have any good or even neutral sense, bespeaks a more deep-seated contempt for debate of any kind.
Of course, this is also but the latest and most lurid flowering of the long-standing tradition whereby conservatives identify themselves as occupying a non-political default position. It is only ever the other side that is being political. Happily, we can see this in action in a recent column by Charles Krauthammer, which for a moment I thought was going to be a ringing denunciation of Unspeak in American politics. After all, he laments:
What is striking is how much of the debate in Washington about Iraq has to do not with the war but with the words. Who owns them, who deploys them, who uses them as a bludgeon.
Yes, that is striking, isn’t it? What about that old “surge vs escalation” catfight?
Words. Consider “surge.” It carries an air of energy, aggression and even hope. That, in fact, is a fairly good reflection of Petraeus’s view of it — not just more troops but a change in the rules of engagement, with more latitude to fight, less political interference by the Iraqi government and a much tougher attitude toward foreign, especially Iranian, agents in Iraq.
The opposition prefers “escalation,” as featured, for example, in the anti-surge commercial that aired in certain markets during the Super Bowl. The main reason for using escalation, of course, is that it is a Vietnam word. And the more Vietnam words you can use in discussing Iraq, the more you’ve won the debate without having to make an argument.
So “escalation” is a deliberately loaded word, as Krauthammer rightly notes; but what about “surge”? Duh, surge is fine! Because it’s “a fairly good reflection” of reality! It’s only the “opposition” who is being political with language! NBC’s decision to call the situation in Iraq a “civil war” was, according to Krauthammer, “a statement far more political than analytical” – the word “political” here, soaked with spittle, is used exactly à la Bush. (It’s an illuminating dichotomy that Krauthammer implies: of course, analysis and politics are fundamentally opposed.) “Political” is the word for the craven behaviour of liberal news networks. It is a shame that Mr Krauthammer is ignorant of the fact that “surge” did not in fact appear in Bush’s State of the Union speech, which instead announced “reinforcements“, but we can be pretty sure that if he had bothered to look it up, he would have approved, too, of the latter word’s manly directitude.
What is “political”, therefore, is the action of the enemy. There is, though, at least one context in which Mr Bush himself uses the word “political” in a sense that is not negative. That is as part of his favourite economic metaphor, “political capital” – like the “political capital” that he “earned” by winning the election in 2004: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” But don’t you dare question how he spends it – that would be political, not at all the sort of behaviour that is decorous in a great democracy.
Good point, well made.
Also look out for the use of the word ‘political’ in industrial disputes.
Action taken by trade union organisers, worker’s rights activists and strike sympathisers are often political in this nefarious sense. Pundits often discuss the role of possible political motives in somber tones.
Political motives are bad because while workers are possibly allowed to complain about wages and conditions, they are out of order if they turn their minds to anything else, and taking action over wages itself might just be a ruse for something political, like who knows what?
Management and government, on the other hand, deal with industrial disputes in an entirely non-political fashion and are greatly saddened to see unions, by contrast, playing politics all the time.
Hmmm… the point is pretty clear, but I apologise for how badly written the above comment is. I blame society.
Enter Schmitt.
I am frequently fascinated by politicians (=”those who involve themselves professionally in political activities” and therefore whose actions while engaged in their profession are unavoidably political?) contrasting their own obviously neutral, logical, pragmatic actions with those of their devious, deceitful opponents, when the very action of drawing such a distinction is a “political” gambit.
Look also for the deprecatory “ideological” and perhaps shortly, “democratic”.
BTW didn’t George’s people decide to change “surge” to “reinforcements” (with all of its last-minute-John-Wayne-cavalry-to-the-rescue connotations), or “augmentation”?
Mark Cooper: “By referring to the 21,500 additional troops Bush will send to Iraq as “reinforcements” there’s a direct suggestion that our soldiers already in Iraq are pinned down and need immediate support. Oppose the ‘reinforcements’ and you are endangering our troops already on the ground.”
I did put in a link to my post about reinforcements at the time, but the Mark Cooper point that WIIIAI cites is a punchier expression of it. Thanks!
Alex, your good point re the use in industrial disputes illuminates the idea that those who are “political” can also be those who merely want something, or are otherwise dissatisfied with the status quo. (And so I suppose that links back to the fact that this asymmetric use of “political” is mainly exploited by conservatives.) Graham is right to notice that “ideological” often works in the same way.
No doubt sw’s stage direction gnomically or teasingly promises an interesting observation about the relation between a) Bush’s deprecatory use of the word “political” to describe only his enemies; and b) Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the concept of “the political”, or politics itself, as predicated on a distinction between friends and enemies; and I sure look forward to hearing that observation.
Graham is right to notice that “ideological” often works in the same way.
Absolutely. Especially in the 30-second TV news debates over the Private Finance Initiative. There, PFI proponents literally hold the ring using only Unspeak – arguing that opponents or critics are ‘ideological’, while they favour ‘what works’.
And there is never quite enough time in the day to examine if PFI actually ‘works’ in the sense intended, or what these famous ideological objections actually are. We are also informed that recipients of services do not care where they come from (official praise for apathy is more common than you might think) even if opinion polls and local protests indicate that they do.
But by then, you have an image of some quasi-Marxists whose devotion to the God That Failed (copyright) makes them want to deny kidney transplants to Middle England out of spite.
Calling one’s opponents ‘political’ casts oneself as being above politics, but what are we to suppose of the opponents’ motives for being political? Why, in short, are people drawn to being political?
I find that the trope often implies not that the opponents are self-interested or Machiavellian but that they are, as Steve said at the top of his initial post, ‘playing politics’. We might think further about the implications.
As the trope is typically played, the people who play politics are wankers—or worse, intellectuals—who persist in playing games of eloquence and debate because they fail to see the gravity of the situation. The accuser adopts the posture of a man of action and sound judgment. He has appraised the situation and is prepared to act decisively. The opponents love to debate and mind the punctilios of procedure and whatnot. They don’t get it. Because they are lost in the game they don’t see that the proper course of action is self-evident. But this is no game, the trope implies, and this is no time for debate. And what is debate in this scenario? Little more than an extravagant sport for a dissipated class of fops and overgrown children who enjoy tying the hands of decision-makers because they love to preen and strut on the rhetorical and procedural stage.
The ‘politics’ trope is fundamentally anti-debate, anti-reflection, and anti-parliamentarian.
‘Rhetoric’ is another word in the politics/ideology cluster.
My highly crafted pitch is common sense; yours is just rhetoric.
Say what?
I think Mr Bush let his stance be known loud and clear with his words in the following where he says, “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just as long as I’m the dictator.” With the Patriot Act and many other laws, this aspiration has been shown to be much more than simply a frivolous joke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNo0_klKzis
I admit to being new here, Steven, both to you and your very interesting looking site. I hope you won’t mind the inclusion of some lines from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited regarding the use of propaganda.
“Today’s dictators rely on repitition, suppression and rationalization- the repitition of catchwords they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or State.
The propagandist’s statements are made without qualification. Everything is either diabolically black or celestially white….(“Axis of evil” anyone?)
Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, or shouted down.
The effects of propaganda cannot be neutralised except by a thorough training in analysing its techniques and seeing thru its sophistries.
Hitler viewed the masses of man as utterly contemptible and incapable of abstract thought. They are determined by feelings and unconscious drives which the succesful propagandist must learn to manipulate. In the words of Hitler himself, “All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bear necessities and expressed in a few stereotyped formulas constantly repeated”. (War on Terror anyone?)
Steve, could you help me out? Am I right in thinking that your response to my blomment is dripping with sarcasm?
Zizek regularly points out that “interesting” is a synonym for “boring”. And, at the end, I’m left wondering whether you really do “look forward to hearing” what I might say. Feel free to ban me from unspeak.net if I bore you!
Of course, I knew you’d get the Schmitt reference, but I don’t think that there is something necessarily incompatible between words and concepts. And do you think that because Bush et al only apply “political” to their enemies, they cannot be alluding to Schmitt’s conceptualisation of “the political”? Because I think they are.
When they use “political” to describe their critics, they are specifically saying that those who criticise them are doing so only on the basis of distinctions between friend and enemy (hence “political”), thus unspeaking any analysis that might have gone into the criticism. Rather than taking a particular issue or policy and analysing its benefits, costs, drawbacks, etc., these critics are deciding to forego such an analysis and simply reject the proposal outright because they only perceive things along the lines of friendship and enmity and can therefore only act in a hostile, unthinking way; and instead of recognising that these issues or policies are being proposed by honest, rational men who believe in the constructive give-and-take of democratic debate, these “political” responses are made by critics simply because they cannot shake off their divisive, irrational and knee-jerk partisanship. Thus, Bush and Krauthammer can draw a distinction between “analytical” and “political”.
By the way, I have no dispute with anything that you wrote in your blog: the assertion that only the other side is being “political” is ironic (if you read “political” along the lines of Schmitt) or hypocritical (if you read “political” as “cynical Machiavellian manoeuvring”). And I do think that Bush, Rove, et al bring a particularly uncompromising sense of enmity to politics, so their regular accusation is – well, projection.
How does Schmitt’s concept of the “political” apply to Bush’s use of the words “political capital”? I don’t think it does. And that in itself may be significant. When it comes to capital and the free market, there’s no room for distinctions between friend and enemy: everybody wins and you’re only limited to spending what you’ve earned!
I like Jeff Strabone’s reading: it’s interesting, however, that people like Krauthammer should be endorsing the eggheaded “analytical” approach over the “political”. There is another concept of the “political”, as something macho and rough, a real man’s game. Is it not possible that these neo-cons consider themselves intellectuals, just as men like Feith and Kristol fashion themselves as thinkers and analysts? In this case, the trope of the “political” is being deployed pejoratively to defend the intellectual from the neanderthal male thuggery of the “political” and to protect the elegance of parliamentarian moves (with all due respect to the Democrats, the Republicans kick Democratic ass on this front). It’s strange, isn’t it? And it’s yet another reason why Bush’s macho charade is so irksome: he’s far more of a “wimp” than his father ever was, and completely subservient to the eggheads and parliamentarians who are pulling the strings in Washington.
SW, I am willing to admit my ignorance. I was fascinated and even charmed by brevity of the post, “Enter Schmitt” and, like Steven, I looked forward to the unfolding of that discussion. But unlike Steven I had no idea who Shmitt was and looked forward to learning about him and his ideas. Sadly there was no elucidation; so for those (who may be in the majority) who didn’t know as much as you and Steven, here is an extract from Wikipedia. It turns out the Schmitt reference is very apropos to this discussion.
By the way, look out also for “populist” as another deprecatory term, used in the Australian Parliament today to describe those who would listen to the will of the people, as opposed to those who would be strong and decisive and, like good parents, give the children what they need, not what they want. Things are heating up in the run-up to the Federal Election later in the year!
I think what’s happening here is that they are trying to narrow the specter of acceptable public discourse by adding another taboo. They just haven’t come up with a suitable unspeak catchphrase for this new taboo yet.
Think of the “class-war-rhetoric”. This is a well established taboo: can’t do class-war-rhetoric; no place for class-war-rhetoric in our public discourse.
Now there’s going to be a new one for “the noise about, you know, ‘He wants to go to war'”. Catchphrase is the work in progress, “unpatriotic” didn’t stick; I think it’s gotta be something from the actual vocabulary of those who make “the noise”. War-is-the-last-resort-rhetoric? Stop-the-war-rhetoric?
Thanks, sw! Of course my comment was intended as a lure, or bait, or nudge, to provoke you into saying what you hinted at but for some reason refused to actually say in your first comment. I’m glad it worked, because now we can have a conversation. I cannot have been bored by your coy first comment because it did not say anything, but it did indicate that you might have something interesting in mind. (I must say that, much though I admire some passages of Zizek, I do not personally use “interesting” as a synonym for “boring”. What would I then use as a synonym for “interesting”? “Shatteringly tedious”?)
I’m not sure Bush really is alluding to Schmitt deliberately, but that doesn’t dilute the splendid force of the ironies you subsequently tease out.
Quite so. As you then point out, the really ringing irony is that Bush affects to despise this idea of the “political”, and yet notoriously his own idea of political speech is to divide the world absolutely into a Manichean zone of friends and enemies. “You’re either with us or you’re against us”, no?
In other words, we seem to agree that Bush and his chums are themselves the Schmittians par excellence – at least on the misreading of Schmitt (which seems also to inform the Wikipedia passage Graham quotes) that supposes Schmitt was arguing normatively, that politics should be thus, rather than, at least in my opinion, describing with something close to satirical anger the lamentable state of affairs that actually obtained.
Oh yes, they do! And how clever (qv) of them to choose as their frontman or puppet a man who is so good at seeming to be the opposite of an intellectual, who manfully despises intellectuals while cutting brush at his (palatial) “ranch”.
Meanwhile, Graham rightly adduces the related irony of using populist as an insult – isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about?
Andrew – welcome! And thanks for the very apt Huxley quote, which might have gone well in the introduction had I been reminded of it back then.
I look forward to the next good presentation I hear, after which I will tell the presenter, “That was shatteringly tedious – in the Zizekian sense, of course.”
I quite agree with you about Schmitt; and yes, there is some satirical anger there, but I also occasionally hear a tone of tired resignation, and in those moments, can appreciate echoes of a spleenless, less jittery, and altogether less amusing Schopenhauer. I certainly agree that Schmitt is not promoting this concept of the political as what ought to be.
Yes, it is an unfortunate truth that most people are less amusing than Schopenhauer.
One more Huxley quote from the seminal afore-mentioned work which I wish most of our “intellectuals” had the guts to remember when accepting supposed truths from the authorities regarding versions of events that push certain and obvious agendas is
“Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies.”