The Mouth Is But a Hole Between the Cheeks — On Two Flavors of Bullshit
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started and stopped this piece.
I’ve changed my mind about the specific points. I’ve questioned the necessity of making each point. Over the past six months, the polls have ebbed and flowed, yet one thing has persisted: discomfort and indecision in the face of uncertainty. Here I am starting from scratch, again.
This is my problem. This is, I suspect, also Hillary Clinton’s problem.
However, unlike Clinton, I’m sitting in my small house, my dog asleep at my feet, far from the public eye. The difficulties I have articulating myself authentically and convincingly do not imperil the country.
It takes one to know one
Last spring, I sat down to write about the prevalence of bullshit in the 2016 presidential campaigns. I had planned to use the analytic framework set forth in Harry Frankfurt’s best-selling philosophical treatise “On Bullshit” to draw comparisons between the way Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump present themselves publicly. But with each news cycle the emphasis of my analysis shifted. I picked it up, wrote three-quarters of a draft, then put it down again. Rinse, repeat.
Imagine my despair — my relief! — when I discovered last month that not one, but at least four commentators had already written Frankfurt-inspired analyses of the presidential campaigns: Fareed Zakaria (“The unbearable stench of Trump’s B.S.” August 4, 2016), Eldar Sarajlic (“Donald Trump’s reign of bullsh*t: He’s not lying to us, he’s just completely full of it,” March 27, 2016), Jeet Heer (“Donald Trump Is Not a Liar,” December 1, 2015), and even Frankfurt himself (“Donald Trump Is BS, Says Expert in BS,” May 12, 2016).
All of these predictably conclude that Trump’s the quintessential bullshitter, someone who routinely makes statements without concern for the truth. Trump lies, too, when he says things that he knows to be false, but his most salient quality as a public figure, arguably the primary source of his populist appeal, resides in those unmediated, reckless pronouncements he makes off-the-cuff.
While Zakaria, Sarajlic, Heer, and Frankfurt all condemn Trump’s bullshit, none of them address the issue at hand, and from my point of view the real danger in this election: Trump’s bullshit actually works, and nobody has yet found an antidote. Trump’s bullshit entertains, enthuses, and motivates. His growing base clearly prefers his unbridled audacity to what they see as phony honesty and décor in the rest of the candidates.
So why is this a problem?
Are there not more voters who disdain Trump’s antics than those who love them? Perhaps. But those who would naturally support a candidate like Clinton, especially when Trump’s the only alternative, also take issue with phony honesty and décor. Trump offers one flavor of bullshit, Clinton another. This leaves a bad taste in our mouths.
With Sanders out of the contest and the general election underway, Clinton should carefully consider the relative merits of calculated truth-telling and blatant bullshit. She can call Trump a liar. She can call him a bullshitter. She can highlight his contradictory claims, his logical fallacies, and his many personal and professional faults. None of this will stick.
Trump’s bullshit offers little of substance and frequently misleads people, but it also never aspires to the pretenses of political truth. This makes it difficult, if not silly, to hold it to serious standards of political commentary.
Clinton carefully calculates her positions, usually in consultation with people who think as she does. Her statements may be well-informed, but given the manner in which she makes them, framed by her reticence around questions that make her uncomfortable, her motivations remain in question. For many, those motivations are more important than the truth-value of her statements.
The essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for the truth
At one point in his essay, while dissecting the meaning of “bull session,” Frankfurt suggests that some instances of bullshit amount to an informal trying-on of claims, just as one might try on hats in front of a mirror. Those participating in a bull session implicitly assent to the informality and carelessness of the discourse:
“People are generally reluctant to speak altogether openly about these topics if they expect that they might be taken too seriously. What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say.”
During a bull session, people aren’t judged for the veracity or propriety of their statements. Is that not a fair description of the average Trump rally — at least within its meticulously policed confines? The freedom to “don” aberrant thoughts and attitudes without repercussions holds powerful appeal to Trump supporters. Judging or even monitoring that freedom provokes violence and derision.
Meanwhile, Trump makes the media and his political opponents look like fools for taking him seriously. In 1997, he told a CNN interviewer, “I think I’m almost too honest to be a politician.” By honesty, he means his will to say whatever comes to mind as he speaks, regardless of whether it’s true, appropriate, or even consistent with what he has said previously. To filter or muzzle any of his passing thoughts would be to kowtow to what he incorrectly labels “political correctness.” Most of our journalists do us the grave disservice of taking this discursive habit at face value, trying to triangulate some fundamental political agenda that they can subject to critique. In so doing, they look out of touch with the dangerous game Trump’s playing.
Trump’s life in public discourse is a constant bullshit session
Four years of that bullshit session on a national scale would be a dark chapter in American history.
Clinton’s life in public discourse is the precise opposite. Clinton appears to be in a state of endless deliberation. Her mechanical nodding and rigid smiles belie game theoretical analyses of the next best move. Every response is calculated before it leaves her mouth. It’s a wonder plastic chess pieces don’t gush out when she opens it.
Unlike Trump, Clinton commits to knowing the facts and speaking about them seriously. She knows what a position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership looks like — hell, she knows what several TPP positions look like. Unlike Gary Johnson, she knows Aleppo’s a major city in Syria and other arcane details of foreign affairs. That by itself subjects her to a much more stringent set of standards that, indeed, play to her strengths, but it doesn’t necessarily give her an advantage in contests where her opponents needn’t meet them as well.
Clinton’s manner of presentation, while serious and dignified, often creates problems for her campaigns. Awkward gestures, visible discomfort, and an unwillingness to provide immediate answers to certain questions pertinent to her candidacy — the substance of her exorbitantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street, for instance — all create an appearance of inauthenticity that throws her motives into question. Calling the inevitable skepticism that arises an “artful smear” is disingenuous.
Even perfect knockoffs are fake
At one point in his essay, Frankfurt introduces the analogy of a counterfeit. A counterfeit may in all respects be identical to the original, but it is nevertheless a fake:
“For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made.”
This phoniness or inauthenticity of origin represents another flavor of bullshit, one in certain respects more offending than Trump’s in that it entails an attempt to conceal or misrepresent the truth. If someone sells you a knockoff, you have good reason to suspect that person knew or at least should have known that it was a knockoff. It may be in all respects identical to the real thing, but it’s nevertheless a fake, and you own it because the person who sold it intentionally deceived you.
Jon Stewart described the problem of the Clinton façade aptly to David Axelrod, during a live taping of “The Axe Files” May 9 at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Here he characterized Clinton as “a very bright woman without the courage of her convictions.” That isn’t to say that Clinton possesses no principled convictions, only that she is not publicly comfortable with them, always guarding and articulating them within a calculus of political pragmatism.
Clinton’s stated positions need not be inferior to the real thing, as Frankfurt points out, but if they primarily represent calculations of political expediency, rather than principled beliefs, if Clinton has merely “evolved” to accommodate the latest polling on the issues, as many suggest, then she is in fact guilty of peddling counterfeits. Her inauthenticity — her bullshit — stems from her frequent failure to persuade us that her political statements are heartfelt convictions.
Are Clinton’s positions actually influenced more by polls and political alliances than by her own convictions? “I’m not even sure what [Clinton’s convictions] are,” Stewart maintained, comparing her public persona to Magic Johnson attempting and failing in 1998 to launch a talk show called “The Magic Hour”: “It seemed like he was wearing an outfit designed by someone else for someone else to be someone else.” That comparison didn’t quite work, but Stewart kept trying to hone the point, taking a final stab with a gaming metaphor: “You have a Mac and you want to play a Microsoft game on it, and there’s that weird lag. That’s Hillary Clinton.”
With Trump, there’s no weird lag. Small hands, potential sociopathy, but no weird lag.
No more weird lag
To save us from a reign of Trump in November, Clinton needs to accept and address her own brand of bullshit. Choreographed interactions and soundbite responses to a narcissist who’s monopolized the country’s attention for the past year simply won’t work.
Clinton needs to uninstall her PR-programmed personality emulation software and embrace her native operating system, with all its unfixed bugs and missing features.
Clinton could learn a thing or two from Sanders’ astounding success during the Democratic primaries. There’s a reason he consistently polled so well against Trump. Sanders lays all his cards on the table. Nobody suspects his political positions are counterfeits. That authenticity’s his greatest strength.
Clinton could also learn from an unusually candid moment of her own during the primaries, when she acknowledged one of her shortcomings during the Univision Democratic presidential debate in early March. Asked by Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post why voters consistently question her trustworthiness, Clinton responded, “Look, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. I am not a natural politician, in case you haven’t noticed, like my husband or President Obama.”
But here’s the thing: Clinton was telling us something we didn’t necessarily know, something we may need to be reminded of from time to time. Her virtualized political personality’s plainly obvious to anyone paying attention, but her ability to acknowledge it publicly was a genuine revelation. Admissions like this are far more effective than tone-deaf attempts at personal warmth and humor designed by PR firms: inviting discussion of the student debt crisis with emoticons on Twitter, for example.
No amount of money can buy authenticity. Nor can you emulate the ideal candidate without effacing your passion, intuition, and personality. You are who you are, and if you try to be something else, people will see that you’re a counterfeit.
What’s behind that weird lag? We’ll never know unless Clinton shows us.
