I wrote a piece on the word “racism” a few years ago. The first line was, “Am I a racist? No. I am not.”[1] Quite a flourish, I thought, for an essay that was going to propose a more modest and therefore more useful use of the epithet, “racist.”
One thing you might ask of an epithet is that it is supportable by publicly available evidence. People who call President Obama an alien on the grounds that he was not born in this country need to find some way to refuse to accept the evidence that he was. It doesn’t seem too much, to me, to ask of a word that it mean something.
But sometimes that is asking too much. Southern advocates for the equal rights of black Americans were called “Niggerlovers.” It is not a word that appeals much to evidence. For all the specific meaning it carries, it might just as well have been a belch. It is an epithet that translates to “I hate you” or possibly the more constrained “I hate what you are doing.” It does not extend to an actual meaning like “I am quite sure that the policies you are pursuing will leave the country worse off and here is why I think that.”
There is a story I attach to Julian Bond’s first experiences in the Georgia State Legislature. The way the story goes, Rep. Bond was the first black State Representative in Georgia and he wondered whether he would continue to be treated as a pariah when his vote made the difference between a bill passing or failing. He was not. When he carried the passage of a bill in his hand, he was treated the way the bearer of any other irreplaceable resource was treated. He was actively courted.
And that is where I would like this inquiry to turn next. When you call someone a name—I am thinking here especially of names that have no empirically verifiable content—there is the risk that the person will accept the characterization and use it as part of his own guidance mechanism. You don’t want that. What is the effect of calling someone a “racist,” for instance, or a “sexist” or, more generally, a “hater?”
We tend to think of those as names for deviations; if not deviations from the norm, at least deviations from the goals we would like to see pursued. In some cases, they could be justified as “true”—evidence for them can be cited—but that is a very thin justification for two obvious reasons. The first is that not everything that is true is a useful part of this situation. The second is that not everything that is true is helpful. I think this kid’s question is a good one. Besides, I think she is cute.
The notion of deviance amplification needs to be explored very briefly here so that I can 
use it to draw the threads of this argument together. There is an approach to sociology called “symbolic interactionism.” I got deeply into it in grad school and have profited from it ever since. Here is a line I would like to share from the abstract of a paper presented at the American Society of Criminology. It comes from a paper, the short title of which (the part before the colon) is “Labelling the Labelers,” by Jeffrey Ward. The question is, “What happens to the individual after being labeled?” [2]
We can assume, I think, that the Georgia state legislators who approached Julian Bond to sway his vote, did not begin by calling him repulsive names. At the very least, they would have identified him as “a colleague,” and, given the extra padding that language often takes on in legislatures, “my esteemed colleague.” They might even have identified him as “someone who often votes against measures like this but who, we are sure, shares our concern…”
This is a social practice so obvious and in such wide use that it almost seems like a waste of electrons to spend this much time on it. But if labeling runs the risk of amplifying the deviance (“deviance” again, from the standpoint of the person doing the labeling) why do it? Why not use labels that have the effect of diminishing rather than amplifying the deviance.
By “diminish,” I do not mean “deny.” In the imaginary interaction with Rep. Bond, I had 
the legislators begin by recognizing that he often voted in a particular way, but they did that for two reasons. The first is that it left them free to argue that he and they had the same goal. Those other votes had to do, according to this strategy, with disagreements about means to achieve that goal, which of course “we all share.” The second is that it frees them to grant that those other votes might have been appropriate, but “this situation is different from those.”
Those are two very good and very common strategies for getting something done. They either avoid labeling entirely or they devise a label that emphasizes the common goals. These strategies work really well. It makes you wonder what important purpose is served by vilifying our political opponents.
Imagine, for instance, that there is one way and only one to pursue racial equality or the legitimate interests of women or to reduce the systematic disparagement of the elderly. One way. If you accept those goals but define them differently or pursue them differently, then you are a bad guy and deserve to be called a bad guy. But if there is more than one way, then people who agree about the goals and disagree only about the means, have every reason to find common ground. They have every reason, in other words, to treat potential colleagues the way Julian Bond was treated when he was the tie-breaking vote.
This is a deviance-reducing response. You still get to call it “deviance” in your mind because they don’t agree with you in every way and you happen to be a picky person, but your response reduces, it minimizes, that “deviance” in the service of a common agenda.
Leftists who call their opponents Fascists and Rightists who call their opponents Communists are engaging in deviance amplifying behavior. If these are people you are not going to be working with anyway [3] you can probably call them all the names you like. Every liberal wants to take away your freedom; every conservative is a “hater” of various racial, ethnic, gender, or age groups.
But the best time to cut a deal with potential colleagues is before you have consigned them to outer darkness, not after. After they have been excommunicated, there is not much reason for them to be willing to talk to you. So, obviously, a deviance minimizing approach is more likely to lead to civil discourse and to broad cooperation than a deviance amplifying approach.
I am not saying that “making nice” (West Side Story) is always the right thing to do. I am the guy who called our president “a pathological liar” and who spent some part of that essay justifying every part of that charge. I am not worried about amplifying President Trump’s deviance.
On the other hand, I live with some people and am related to some others, who think that Trump’s approach is the right way to go. Privately, I call those “misguided hopes.” I assume these people can be talked to if someone on the other side is willing to grant them good motives and to work at showing them that the collateral damage of the movement they are supporting will be unacceptably costly to other things they hold dear. I think I owe them the Julian Bond treatment if there is going to be a time on down the road when we can work together. Besides, they are family and friends, not just fellow citizens.
I don’t think I owe them that behavior. The rule I am devising here is not moral; it is strategic. I think that is the behavior that will best allow me to pursue my own objectives. I like pursuing my own objectives and if you don’t like pursuing yours, you might just think about getting some new ones.
[1] March 28, 2014. I called it “Racism and Sin”
[2] I provide a specific context for this meaning of deviance amplification because it means other things in other settings. It is, according to Wikipedia, “defined by media critics as a cycle of increasing numbers of reports on a category of antisocial behavior or some other ‘undesirable’ event, leading to a moral panic.” That’s not what I am talking about.
[3] Unless, of course, the people whose deviance you are amplifying own “a printing press” (Mark Twain) or a radio station or a twitter account. In that case, you have no idea who you are really talking to. There is a place for dramatizing how evil their behavior is, but that is not the way you want to approach potential colleagues.
(Ellen DeGeneris) and trying to persuade her that his feelings for her are intense. “I’m going to show you how much I love you,” he says as he grasps and breaks his little finger. Martha tries to persuade him not to do it and fails and when he does it, she is horrified. But it was all really clear to him and that is the point I want you to remember.
He says, “I know there is a guy in science class who keeps hitting on you. To show you how much I love you, I am going to kill him so he won’t do that any more.” Her heart races. “Oh,” she says to herself, “He must love me a lot to be willing to do that for me.” The parents, listening through the window are thinking, “Did he just offer to kill someone to demonstrate the intensity of his love for our daughter?” Was he joking? He didn’t sound like he was joking.”
dependent populations as opposed to the speeches the Trump/Pence campaign made. The Democrats said that coal is dirty, that getting it out of the ground is environmentally hazardous, and that we need to move to sustainable forms of energy. The Republicans said that coal is wonderful and that people who make their living mining coal are wonderful as are the women who wait hopefully for them to return safely from the mine. We will, the Republicans said, find a way to return coal jobs to the prestige they used to have and to honor the brave men who risk their lives to bring that energy to us.”
department players, and thought the my President had done something wrong and had entertained feelings of disdain, that would be worth doing. Costly, probably, but worthwhile. You can spare some disdain for members of your own team without doing much harm.
That means that the Democratic opposition is wasting its time playing defense by using policy. Policy isn’t relevant yet. You beat a political machine by bringing publicity to their operations, by prosecuting them to the full extent of the law, by protecting crucial resources who are vulnerable to threats and threatening people who are vulnerable to bribes. We (Democrats) have to work harder and more consistently and with more discipline than they do and since we represent the majority of the voters so far as political outcomes is concerned, we will “win” in this limited way if we do that.
This is, as I see it, the Democratic problem. Let’s take income as one example. “Income” is two problems. There is how to have enough of it spread broadly enough to sustain a consumer spending economy. There there is the distribution of revenue, which looks at who has a lot and who has only a little.
This was a whole new thing for me. I was completely smitten and was rooting around for occasions that would allow me to say something that I very much wanted to say. This wasn’t being fastened upon me, as in grade school, or a matter of mutual disinterest, as with my second wife. No, this was me looking for an occasion and seizing on Valentine’s Day as an excuse. That changed my attitude toward it entirely. {The picture is from the right era, at least. In it, we are celebrating Bette’s alma mater, (North Dakota State) which is represented by the same colors as my alma mater (the University of Oregon.)
“hugs and kisses.” First, it ought to mean “kisses and hugs” because the X is the symbol that is supposed to refer to osculation. Still, we make do with the language as we find it.
Kobo Abe’s 1964 novel The Woman in the Dunes is the first treatment of this theme I know about. The protagonist , Niki Junpei, is an entomologist who is trapped in a sand pit because the locals won’t let him leave. All day every day he must shovel back the ever-advancing sand dunes. A young woman lives in the cave as well and they both work at this task. Eventually, working at this endless task along with the young woman comes to seem an appropriate way to spend his life.
begins with the same weather forecast and the same music and the same pointless jokes on the radio—and turning it into a ritual of good deeds. He changes the flat tire on a car, peforms the Heimlich maneuver on a man choking to death in a local restaurant, catches a kid falling out of a tree, rescues a homeless man from starving and freezing to death. And…he honestly courts a woman he loves, knowing that she will continue to reject him and that he will continue to deserve rejection.
narcissism.” But the case I presented is not like that. This guy—the father, employer, mayor—IS a narcissist. It is what he is like ; he overestimates his abilities and has an excessive need for admiration and affirmation. [3] And that means that he will be a narcissistic father, a narcissistic employer, and a narcissistic mayor. He brings his condition, in other words, to the statuses he occupies and as he plays out the roles those statuses demand, characteristic traits of NPD show up at home and at the workplace and at city hall.
That brings me to Donald Trump. And for those of you who are wondering why it took me so long, the answer is that I am trying to distinguish between the effects of narcissistic behavior, on the one hand, and the causes or the signs of it on the other
with narcissism? It seems to me that we can find three there at least.
I need to find a way to get off this horse before I disappear over the far horizon and I have an idea. There is hardly a more innocuous movie that The Wedding Date, starring Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney. Messing takes Mulroney to the wedding of her sister, pretending that he is her fiancé when in fact he is a professional escort. Messing is concerned that the proceedings will go well, but they start going badly as soon as she and her “wedding date “ arrive.
And Stephen Colbert blusters, “If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it.” Season 3, Episode 2
articles called “analysis.” These are “news stories.” In a long life of reading the New York Times, I have never seen anything like it.
often enough, there is simply no way for the media to deal with them while staying within the boundaries of “professional journalism” as previously defined. I think they have decided that the pallid responses to which they have limited themselves have made them tools of some of the worst elements of American politics and they have decided that if that is what “professional” means, it is time to give it up. (This is Sean Spicer, by the way, President Trump’s Press Secretary. For fans of The West Wing, he is standing where C. J. Craig used to stand.)
communicate the truth in plain language. “He knows it isn’t true and he keeps on saying it is true. If that isn’t lying, what is?” And these bald confrontational questions wind up in the headlines, not buried in the text. And not countered by someone representing “the other side.
and Pharisees accuse Jesus of blasphemy, interpreting his statement as something he, himself, was doing. It would have been easy for Jesus to have said that God had obviously forgiven this man, so it was not something Jesus was doing, but only something Jesus recognized. Then they could argue about whether God had done that or not, citing various interpretations against each other.
requires that you forego association with violators of the law. Jesus did not dispute that the other people at the party were sinners and he did not dispute that he would become ceremonially impure by association with them. He said, as I hear it, “They may be impure, but they are also spiritually sick. It is my mission to heal as many as I can. Why would God send me to people—like you—who are not sick and who, therefore, have no need of my special gift?”
Let’s begin with Jesus as a chooser of what issues are going to be salient. Etymologically, and issue is “salient” when it jumps out at you. [5] Each of the events I have chosen as examples brings some new aspect of Judaism front and center. In the case of the paralytic, the question of God’s forgiveness is raised. At the party, the question of holiness as separation from the needy is raised. In the “cornfield,” the question of the applicability of the Law to Jesus and his mission is raised.
Jesus picked this fight, it seems to me, in order to establish that he dare not subordinate his mission to the ordinary constraints of Judaism. That’s why he didn’t stop with the rabbinic justification of his disciples’ actions, but went on to make a claim about himself.
I have taught in public schools and universities nearly all my life, so I can tell you that comparing anyone to Adolf Hitler is taken as a serious insult. If you say to a politician who is five feet and nine inches tall that he is as tall as Hitler, he will take it as a mortal insult. He will say, incredulously, “Are you comparing me to Hitler?” If I say that Hitler was a marvelously gifted tactician, deploying a largely unwilling bureaucracy with great skill, I will be accused of “justifying Hitler.”
Noting these similarities is not a charge against Trump. You can go down the two speeches and just substitute a German expression for an English one and just doing that is scary.[2] It is true, however, that Trump sees many more similarities than I do between the time of his assuming power and the time of Hitler’s assuming power. And because Trump sees these similarities, he chooses words that highlight them. Any good speaker would do that. Abraham Lincoln did the same thing; he was a superb speaker as a result.
achievement to the appropriate agencies, funding them adequately, and then holding them accountable for their work. That’s not how you build a movement. A movement needs a leader. The leader needs to focus the movement on himself and to give indications that he, personally, is bound to the success of the movement.
United States of our time (by contrast with the Germany of Hitler’s time) there are many social and political institutions, including a robust federal system, in place. They can’t simply be set aside. They will have to be bargained with.
OK, how are we going to have such ceremonies if people say that the ceremony is about the person who is being honored? We will not have them. If the ceremony is about the person rather than the office, then the ceremonies that are supposed to celebrate our unity as Americans and the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another, will have no power at all. Everything is politics—the pursuit of power. Nothing is government—things like providing for a common defense and protecting domestic tranquility.
Trump will be the 45th President of the United States. But winning an election does not mean a man can show contempt for millions of Americans and then expect those very people to celebrate him.
It takes her a little longer to get to the “but;” still, when she gets there, she wiggles the same way Rep. Castro did. I respect the office. Good. I respect the peaceful transfer of power. Good. But the man who will take the office is a jerk and the man to whom power is transferred is offensive…and therefore we cannot participate in this celebration of peaceful democracy in America.
I think that President Trump’s actions, proposed and executed, should be opposed by everything we have. He is going to want to cozy up to Russia with predictable consequences for Germany and France. Make him pay. He is going to want to gut the health protections President Obama put in place and that the Supreme Court declared to be constitutional. Make him pay. He is going to continue to engage in business practices that are wholly out of line with the office of the President. Make him pay. He is responsible for his actions and when he does wrong, he should pay the consequences.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 