Metaphor Country

More on Sotomayor: Battling Buzzwords

The Sotomayor fight is evolving along predictable lines - at least where language is concerned.

As predicted (here, too), the Republicans are moving away from "empathy" as in "Empathy: Bad" and toward "feelings" - judges shouldn't make decisions based on their "feelings."  Probably a bit more effective.  It's hard to be against empathy but easier to be against feelings, at least when you're playing out the (questionable) notion that judges ought to be robots executing an abstract, impersonal program called "the law."  David Brooks is pretty good at undermining that idea today, at least until he comes out where he has to, in favor of restraint...

Meanwhile, Sotomayor supporters are casting about for their own counter-buzzwords.  At the moment the winner seems to be "modesty," as in "judicial modesty."  Neat enough - it echoes Chief Justice Roberts, suggests its own kind of restraint ("she's not an ideologue") and suggests that it's the Right that's driven by ideology.  And it calls a bluff - if the Right wants restraint, here it is.  Checkmate.

Which is fine, as far as it goes.  I would have been happier if the Sotomayor camp had put aside buzzwords altogether and trumped the Republicans by opening up a real discussion.  "Let's forget about catchphrases - aren't you too smart to be manipulated by all that? - and instead, let's talk about the record.  And let's talk about how an appellate judge really makes decisions..."

That, to me, is a win.  Because what that acknowledges - and the GOP won't - is that the age of the buzzword is over.  There's too much information available, and too many ways of getting at it, and too many opportunities for real conversation, in real time or something like it, for an argument to succeed or fail on a turn of phrase.  That's the old broadcast model at work.  And we're in a post-broadcast world.  Substance wins, style doesn't, and manipulation fails because - like everything else these days - it's completely transparent.  You can't be an effective puppet-master when everybody can see the strings.

So don't play the GOP's word games.  We're beyond framing.  Roll out the big truck full of facts, and show the people what's really going on and what you really mean.  That's what gets you respect, and support, and takes you where you need to go.

Maddow on Sotomayor Drives Me Underground

I've been falling away from Rachel Maddow since the election - at the end of the day, I don't like the brain-dead left any better than I like the brain-dead right.  Last night's piece on Sotomayor finished it for me - no going back.  Her coverage ("Oh, my God, she's not really a leftist!") was so uninformed, off-target and ideologically driven that I fled all the way to Democratic Underground, where I never, never, never go.

And that's where, among the ranting, I found this:

i saw her report and what she did was cherry pick decisions to make Sotomayor sound like a conservative without even reviewing what the cases were, or even a detail about them (for example, were they good cases?)

if you bring a bad case in favor of civil rights and you lose, does that mean the judge is against civil rights? this is the key information that Rachel, quite irresponsibly, left out.

Ah, yes - judicial reality.  Context.  Facts.  But they won't do what I want them to.

Time to move on...

"Empathetic Activism"

Interesting, in the immediate wake of the Sotomayor announcement, to see the Republicans shifting their game a little on the question of empathy.  As noted here and elsewhere, attacking empathy didn't seem like the world's best idea.  In the past few days, at least some of the opposition gang has put a variation in play - all of a sudden, what they're opposed to isn't empathy, it's "empathetic activism."  That is, it's not the pure quality of empathy that's the problem, it's the "activist" stance that they've been against for years.  Empathy isn't the main show anymore - it's a modifier describing a kind of activism, which is the real demon.

Ed Gillespie seems to have been the first to come out against "empathetic activism," though it's quickly become a standard talking point.  I wonder how well it'll do - not as a means of trashing the nomination (that's not going to happen), but as a new set of GOP fighting words.  My take is that people still like empathy, and in a few days or weeks "empathetic" will fade into the background.  Republicans will be opposing activism, same as ever.

The term "empathetic activism" seems to have a longer history in education circles, where, not surprisingly, it's seen as a good thing - a key component of developmental progress beyond "mere" multiculturalism.  Here's a 2008 presentation that includes a citation from 2000, and it's cited in the abstract here as one of the "six characteristics of universal citizenship" - also in an educational context.

Seems like a clever GOP researcher - possibly armed with Google - has been busy.  Nice try, using captured progressive ammunition.  It'll be fun to see if it works.  I vote no. 

Peggy Noonan Curses Linguistic Fog, Then Sails Into It

There were many extraordinarily bad things in Peggy Noonan's latest - the most obvious being her funeral oration for the golden goose of free-market capitalism.  For a good general takedown, see Scott Rosenberg's commentary.

What struck me was something a little different, namely this: she attacks the Obama administration for obscurantist language, then serves up the following...

The second great fear [after the death of the aforementioned goose] is that the balance between those who pay taxes and those who need benefits will be left, after the great flurry, all out of whack. When this balance is deeply disturbed or distorted, when the number of those who need to take truly overwhelms those who need to make, a tipping point occurs. People become disheartened. Generations become resigned. Tiredness steps in. We will miss irrational exuberance.

Ah, excuse me, Peggy, but isn't that your own brand of linguistic fog?  First of all, there's the odd passive tone.  Apparently because of some external oppression - the arrival of socialistic, Obama-speaking technocrats - "[the] balance is... disturbed... People become disheartened. Generations become resigned.  Tiredness steps in."  There has been a great disturbance in the Force.  Attention must be paid.

If I'm not mistaken, the balance was disturbed and the people became disheartened because of irrational exuberance.  It's not being taken away arbitrarily - it's what got us here.  Basically, she's telling us that the passengers on the Titanic miss recklessness and bad shiphandling.

But apart from the Ayn-Randian melodrama, there's also this insidious bit: "...when the number of those who need to take truly overwhelms those who need to make..."  Once again, a tap on the shoulder... Miss Noonan?  A large number of those who need to take used to be those who need to make.  That's true in my case... and in my father's case... and in millions of other cases.  See, it's not that there's a permanent underclass desperately scrabbling at the wallets of the overachievers.  It's that the people who swallowed the party line and tried to be overachievers are now below the line.  Disheartened.  Resigned.  Tired.  All thanks to that terrific irrational exuberance, again.

Of course, the problem is that Noonan thinks there is a scrabbling underclass - and that it's undermining the moral fiber of good hardworking people in her "Old America."  The truth is there aren't two classes - instead, there's a steady flow between them.  At the moment the flow is mostly downward.  Yesterday's have is today's have-not.

But to admit that suggests that something's wrong in the system, and that the irrationally exuberant free market may not be the answer, and that "old America" is a bit like Willoughby.  A nice image.  Shame it doesn't exist anymore.  Shame it never did.  But you can get there if you try.

Empathy and Other Evils

Good work, Republican Party - it takes effort and talent to turn empathy into an evil, especially in times like these.

Good commentary last night on Slate by Dahlia Lithwick, who writes...

When did the simple act of recognizing that you are not the only one in the room become confused with lawlessness, activism, and social engineering? For a group so vociferously devoted to textualism and plain meaning, conservative critics have an awfully elastic definition of the word empathy. It expands to cover any sort of judicial malfeasance they can imagine. Empathy—the quality of caring what others may feel—signals intellectual weakness, judicial immodesty, favoritism, bias, and grandiosity...

Professor Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine Law School has a thoughtful piece in America: The National Catholic Weekly in which he suggests, reflecting on the prophet Micah, that "one can be empathetic toward all sides of a dispute." Empathy means being impartial toward all litigants without being blind to the consequences of your decisions. You can send up such concerns as gooey judicial sentimentalism, unmoored from any fixed legal principle. Or you can admit that judging requires acts of judgment beyond the mechanical application of law to facts and that it's best for judges to know when the mechanical act of deciding cases gives way to ideology and personal preference. Empathy isn't sloppy sentiment. It's not ideology. It's just a check against the smug certainty that everyone else is sloppy and sentimental while you yourself are a flawless constitutional microcomputer.

...and by The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, who had this to say...

Almost immediately, "empathy" became a terribly scary word to conservatives, who said it was "code" for "judicial activism." (The irony is, phrases like "judicial activism" and "strict constructionist" are themselves code words for the right.)

My take is simpler.  Just on a basic level of how to connect - or fail to do so - you're not going to come out against empathy and win.

But it'll be fun to watch them try.

 

 

Reptilian Blues

Obviously I'm not doing justice to anything concerning the election.  Still way too busy over here.

But a quick thought, following up on this... in the past few weeks, we've gotten a good look at exactly what's wrong with the whole reptilian thing.  As in - the McCain campaign tries to appeal to fear by painting Obama as an exotic.  Then something really scary comes along - say, for example, the collapse (or near collapse) of the financial system.  Under those circumstances, Obama looks safe (Presidential) and McCain takes the honors as scary, out of control guy.  So what does he do?  Try to gin up the fear again by leaning on the whole Ayers/terrorist dynamic...

Which proves what, exactly?  Well, to me, the lessons are...

• Fear is genuine, not something you can manufacture.  Calculated attempts to gin up fear (exotic, Ayers) look tinny next to the real thing (meltdown).

• Fear is dynamic, not something you can control.  Things change and your well-planned fear campaign winds up behind the curve.  The audience gets a vote - it's not just what you tell them, it's what they tell you.

• Deliberate attempts to appeal to fear bring out everybody's worst - the campaigner and the audience, too.

• THERE ARE NO MAGIC BEANS!

I can't make that last point often enough.  There's no single thing that you can do in a communications campaign that automatically spells victory.  "The reptilian always wins."  No.  The reptilian always plays a part.  "What we really need is a new message."  "What we really need is a brand solution."  No.  No.  Those are nice things to have but the reason people - especially businesspeople - like them is they're shortcuts.  "If we had the reptilian/the message/the brand then we wouldn't have to do the work."  But you've got to do the work.  You've got to go out and meet people and get to know them and work with them in a complex dynamic environment and build relationships and build trust. 

In other words, reality always wins.

Nice try, reptile guy.

(This) Morning in America

This morning in America it occurred to me that I"m really living out the Republican vision after all. 

More here.

If McCain Has an Advantage, Here's Why

Putting aside all the details of policy and political management (yes, I know I'm reversing myself here, but bear with me)... and taking a broad view of communications... it occurs to me that if the McCain campaign has an advantage, it's this: McCain, however much he talks about change, stands for stability.  And simplicity.  As in, "You don't really need to change anything.  You don't need to make painful choices.  You don't need to accept that things are seriously wrong.  America can go on being America - same as it ever was."  Or put another way, "I'll change Washington but not your life."

I don't favor simple, but simple usually beats complicated.  The risk to Obama is that he comes across as complex and his worldview looks like it means pain for the end user.  As in, "Things are difficult in intricate ways and we need to look at them carefully, and think hard about them, and give up things we like and change who we are in the world."

Want to bet on complexity/pain against the can-do spirit?  I'm not sure I do.  Bad news from my partisan perspective.  We need the surgery but we're going to pick the hair tonic instead.

Then there's Palin.  The other day I was trying to take down Clotaire Rapeille and his archetypes.  Today I'll reverse that, too.  McCain and Palin together look like the wise old man and the young woman.  It's classic Jung food.  Think that isn't going to resonate?

The wise old man goes walking with Sophia and they get together and tell you it's all going to be all right.

The alternative is Scary Exotic Guy.

I'd hate to think The Reptilian Always Wins.

But maybe it does.

You're On Your Own

If I had any doubts going in, he got me with this.

You might recall that a couple of days ago I mentioned this.

And back in March on my Alzheimer's blog, I wrote this.  The paragraph in question, about three quarters of the way down, reads:

Add to this another issue -- the society's fetish for individualism -- and you've got the makings of a perfect storm.  Hey, Alzheimer's caregiver -- you're on your own.  Figure out the disease and pull together a whole patchwork of underfunded volunteer organizations and hey, what great initiative you're showing.  We're all cheering for you.  Shame about your lost productivity.  And Alzheimer's patient -- speaking of productivity, well, it was nice you had all those productive years but since you're not productive anymore, you're not really in the center of our awareness.  We're busy marketing to youth (and beyond that dividing the society up into separate, mutually hostile groups so we can market to all of them) and looking after the needs of our shareholders.  We feel for you, but what have you done for us lately?

I don't usually quote myself and I'm not doing it here to get all egomaniacal on your ass.  I'm doing it to point out that Obama's onto something big and critical.  There are millions of cuts on this story in the naked city.  Mine is just one of them.

By the way, the columns turned out to be a non-issue, didn't they?

Note to self: don't be a pundit.  Don't follow the pundit herd.

The real issue are elsewhere.

The Perspective from Street Level

Am more than ready to be persuaded/bowled over by Obama.

Grappling at the moment in my own way with the collapse of the Great Society and the many reasons the whole free market thing doesn't work.