As always, I confess up front to my own considerable left wing bias, but I also confess that I'm becoming less interested in policy and issues and more interested in the carnival of pitchmen and rubes that tuck us in at night so that we'll vote the way one party or another wants us to vote, until Death sneaks in and removes us from their grip.
As far as I can tell, controlling the narrative is what everyone is paid to do. Facts emerge, every day, and a fact is either good for a party or bad. Sometimes facts pop up that are very bad for someone. We saw more bad facts, I'd say, in the last year than we've ever seen before. And the mountain of bad facts required a mammoth crazy quilt of narrative control to earn all the votes cast for our two wonderful candidates. It could be argued that Donald Trump is better at narrative control than any living person-- his ability to generate ad hominem attacks is like Mozart's gift for melody, and if I suspend my concern for truth and morality, and my love for the English language, I find myself admitting that Trump impresses me to a degree that Mrs. Clinton never could. It's a shame that no-one has ever used the Trump level of narrative control in the service of the human race.
When facts arrive that make you look bad, or imply that a party or politician is corrupt, dishonest, or incompetent, it's necessary to blunt and tarnish them. There are many ways to do this. Spin has more colors than the rainbow, and it typically uses highly effective logical fallacies. The ad hominem attack, where you discredit the bearer of facts and only by insinuation the facts themselves, is perhaps the most popular. I believe humans love this fallacy for several reasons; it's fun, it's effective, and it's a leadpipe cinch for even the lazy and uninformed because nearly every living person has some flaw or closet skeleton.
And if you are good enough at it, as Trump undeniably is-- it is the very core of his dealings with the world, usable in every situation where a human disagrees with you or mentions something about you that you'd prefer to keep quiet-- if you can achieve a Bruce Lee level of expertise in the unapologetic savaging of others, you won't have to work very hard to defend yourself because people that love your crassness will never really look at you. It's what you might call Howard Stern syndrome-- Americans with no sense of humor guess (wrongly) that ugly mockery is in itself comical, and eagerly give their love and money to a man who can deliver it in the manner of a batting cage ball machine.
But mainstream pundits have to do narrative control with more finesse and less crassness. This can be observed in any article where Obama's dubious legacy is the theme. Even the choice of this theme appears to be narrative control, for just as "Hillary Clinton" was the one-size-fits-all answer to every Trump criticism, the narrative of "arrogant blowhard comes to Washington" must be blunted beyond usefulness by the "even more arrogant phony finally leaves Washington."
Thus, we have a column in the Post where Obama is blamed for Washington gridlock. Obama was so arrogant that he accepted no opposition, we are told. The implication we are asked to swallow is that Republicans forced to deal with such a man had no choice but to dig their heels in and mire the United States in heroic gridlock. That is some bold and sassy spin, but it's resolutely mainstream in that party.
I found other examples of spin in National Review. You may recall the recent ethics flap, where a group of Republicans attempted (over the objections of Paul Ryan, who's been doing this for a while and is no fool) to gut the Ethics Office, but hoped no one would notice. This story might have seemed unspinnable, but NR is always up for a challenge that might scare away the more craven among us. I read a column there that essentially said, "Come on, this isn't really that bad." On an issue that is arguably more heinous and disturbing, but also more complex (the Russian hacks) NR is on less shaky ground. On top of the "Russia may not have done this" argument that is just as popular with some on the real left as it is with our President-Elect, we get the "Come on, this isn't really that bad" defense but at much more length and with many extra tracks and alternate takes, like a box set for an artist who really only had one hit. Sometimes we get the "hacks are actually a good thing because they expose various bad faith acts and corruption on the part of Democrats." It's a fascinating narrative control masterpiece, revealing as it does that Democrats are so awful that they shouldn't have a right to privacy, and that we should all be happy to side with a once and future evil enemy abroad as long as their target is American liberals.
The spin from the other side I saw this morning was that there's a cognitive dissonance afoot when hypothetical intelligence breaches arouse ire while actual breaches are to be admired and joked about, provided the victim is the Democratic Party. Of course the counter spin to that is easy, and I can just do it for them. Democrats aren't real Americans, so when bad things happen to them it's good for the country.
Controlling the narrative in the case of Jeff Sessions is another tug of war. Sessions, we're told, is a racist, and therefore shouldn't be attorney general. Years ago this argument denied him federal district court judgeship, and it's not clear to me that it's going to fly this time around, but let me shine some light on an argument suggested by a recent column written by three of Sessions's former colleagues. In refuting the bold Sessions assertion of civil rights credentials, they don't attack him so much as question his narrative control argument. So far, so good. Here's where it gets interesting, though. I think this racism-smoking gun method of discrediting people is wearing out its welcome. Not because it has no validity for me, but because it's lost all practical effectiveness in Trump's America. The race card doesn't have the same purchasing power it once did, and though this is a bad thing, there is a silver lining for those who can see it. Whether we realize it or not, we are in the midst of a discussion about what America is, and what it means. Jeff Sessions has called the NAACP and the ACLU "un-American," and for me this is more disturbing than evidence that he's a cracker. This gets to the core of what being American is to mean for us. If an organization designed to help America live up to some of the Declaration of Independence rhetoric that had an asterisk attached for many years, and another organization whose mission is keeping our legal system American rather than despotic are both to be seen as un-American, then a white guy who required a few years to train himself to stop calling African-American adults "boy" is not our biggest problem today.
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