However you measure modern political history, the media's unwritten rule of
politics during this era has been to allow the Republican party to get away
with this bit of legerdemain. Everyone understood that, starting with
the Powell Memo and Nixon's Southern Strategy, the base of the party was going
to be comprised largely of bigots and imbeciles -- Archie Bunker chumps who
listened to Limbaugh and watched Fox News.
Ah, but the thin, outer shell of the party would be a candy-coated carapace of
respectable front men and women who would not embarrass themselves on
"Meet the Press", would know which wine paired with what at Beltway
cocktail parties, and wouldn't run screaming into the night for fear choosing
the wrong Italian meat for their sammich.
And for as long as I can remember, it has been the job of the media to pretend
that the latter was the Republican party...and, despite being
the overwhelming majority within the party -- the mob without which
Republicans would never win another election -- it was also the media's
corollary job to pretend the former did not exist at all, and to mock anyone
who said otherwise as unserious kooks and alarmist crackpots.
That was it. That was the job. Denigrate Democrats as out-of-touch
snobs, laud Republicans as sensible and sober and, when this gigantic hoax
inevitably had a containment breach -- when the crazy got out of the lab
and into the world for all to see -- it was time to double down on the Both
Sides Do It lie to calm the public and reassure them that, however bad things
looked at the moment, Democrats were somehow worse.
My quote searching kung fu has not been sufficient to locate the exact quote,
but I distinctly remember, after Trump won and the MAGA lunacy had kicked the
doors entirely off the lab and were (and are) abroad in the land, hearing one
or more freshly-former Republican ad men or spokescritters -- maybe Michael
Steele, maybe Stuart Steven, maybe Steve Schmidt, but most likely Rick
Wilson --- saying words to the effect that of course they knew
wide swaths of the Republican base were bigots and loons, but that was
irrelevant. Not their department. Their job was to get their guy
elected, period. And to do that they needed to fire the base up enough
to put shoes on, get out of their La-Z-Boys, and get to the polls, all bug-eyed and furious, on election
day. Then shut them back in the basement or attic until next time.
That's how little thought they gave to the toxic waste they were storing in
leaky barrels directly under our democracy. How little thought they gave
to doomsday machine they were building, or to what the consequences would be
if containment failed completely.
And then, one day, Donald Trump showed up, swept right past the respectable
front men and women, the handlers, the ad men, the complicit media and told
they base they didn't have to be ashamed anymore. That it was, in fact,
a great and glorious thing to shout their racism, misogyny, homophobia and
batshit conspiracies from the rooftops.
He shut the containment down.
And that was all it took for the thin, outer shell of Republican
respectability to disintegrate almost overnight. Shown up as the
political equivalent of the "whited sepulchres" of Matthew 23:27 --
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto
whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within
full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”
-- as the real Republican party emerged fully into the
light.
And you'll never guess what? That real, emergent Republican party looks
exactly like the Republican party about which Liberals had been
sounding the alarm for decades, and for which we were dismissed as unserious
kooks and alarmist crackpots. Which is why we all have op-ed columns in all
the major newspaper now, and, when we can get away from our top-rated,
well-funded and heavily promoted podcasts, we try to find time between that
and our book tours to hop on MSNOW where we are tirelessly congratulated for
being right about the Right all along.
Honestly it's too much! You're embarrassing us!
Meanwhile, back in the real world, we come now to the today's object lesson in
containment failure.
Meet Jeremy Carl.
Who is Jeremy Carl?
Great question! This is from one dingy wing of the GOP's policy
abattoir.
Jeremy Carl is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where his
primary focus is on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in
America.
Prior to joining Claremont, Jeremy worked for a decade as a research
fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, serving as a
policy advisor to many national political figures. While at Hoover, U.S.
Secretary of State George Shultz praised his “mastery of subject matter”
and “ability to write comprehensively and with clarity.”
And right now Jeremy Carl is up for an important job in the United States State
Department. But it looks like maybe he won't get that job. And do
you know why? From The Rolling Stone:
Trump Nominee Crumbles When Pressed on White Nationalist Posts
Jeremy Carl is the president's pick for a top State Department position, but
his confirmation prospects aren't looking good.
Donald Trump last summer nominated Jeremy Carl to lead the Bureau of
International Organizations. It’s a top position in the State Department,
acting as the primary nexus between the U.S. government and several
international organizations like the United Nations, and requires Senate
confirmation. Carl served in Trump’s first administration and is now a
fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. He’s also a
prolific poster with a long history of espousing white nationalism,
antisemitism, solidarity with the Jan. 6 rioters, and other extreme
viewpoints.
Carl sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, which
is weighing whether to confirm him to the key diplomatic position the
president wants him to hold. Senators pressed Carl on his social media
posts. It did not go well.
Here’s one exchange between Carl and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.), for
example:
Murphy: “Tell me how you define white identity and what you think has
been erased about white identity
Carl: “Certain types of, umm, Anglo, uhh, derived culture that comes from
our history…”
Murphy: “Like what?”
Carl: “Umm, let me think about this. Uhhh, you know, senator, I would say
if you were to look at the book by one of your Senate colleagues Born
Fighting about the sort of Scotch-Irish military culture and certain, you
know, pride that went with that, that would be one example. Obviously, you
could have sub-elements of that culture. You could have Italians, you
could have Irish…”
Murphy: “But you’re now retreating to ethnic identity. You don’t speak
about ethnic identity. You speak about white identity. So tell me the
values that stitch together white identity, that make it different than
Black identity.”
Carl: “I would say the white church is very different than the Black
church in terms of its tone and style, on average. Food ways could often
be different. Music could be different.”
Murphy: “And those are being erased?”
Carl: “Well, if you look at the Super Bowl halftime show, which was not
in English…”
Murphy: “Our ability to access white churches or white food or white
music is being erased?”
Carl then said that mass immigration has “Balkanized” what he described
as “common American culture,” that this weakens America and that he won’t
apologize for his comments on the issue...
It goes on and on like this, proving that Jeremy Carl is a ball-less poltroon.
Because if he we are real man -- a real MAGA man -- he would've
gone so much further. Shit, even a half-bright skirt like Bondi showed
way more gonadal firepower than this sorry excuse for a male.
If he was any kind man he would've told the committee to go fuck themselves. Shown them the master race doesn't back down and names will be taken!
He would've told the committee that his white supremacist / Christian
nationalist beliefs were entirely in keeping with those of
Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and JD Vance.
He would've told the committee that +77 million patriots had put Donald Trump
and his white supremacist ideology back in office so he could cleanse the
nation of the scum and degenerates who are standing in the way of our national
greatness and Trump's thousand-year Reich.
He would've told the committee that, if they knew what was good for them -- if
they didn't want ICE or worse coming for them and their kids... if they didn't
want the DOJ, the FBI and the IRS up their collective asses, and raining
indictment down on them -- the committee had fucking well better shut up, bend
the knee and do as the Dear Leader commands.
But no, Jeremy Carl didn't do that.
So much for MAGA solidarity. So much for 'WWG1WGA'.
Scandalous! Shameful! And don'tcha just bet this limp dick, soy-boy had a big,
fat Soros check burning a hole in his pocket the entire time he was rolling
over for this so-called committee.
It's language lesson time once again, and the subject today is versatile words
-- words that have lots of different meanings packed into one little packet of
consonants and vowels.
If this sounds familiar, I'm doing up a print version of our Professional Left
podcast from yesterday for those of you who do not partake, or who want
something copy/paste-able suitable for passing along to friends, impromptu
Valentine's Day card, TL:DR protest chants, etc.
As an example of what I mean by "versatile words" let's take the most
versatile word in the English language. This is not the one I'm going to
be focusing on, but it's a good example, and I think you all know what that
word is:
And, just for fun, here's an example from The Wire of writers and actors
having an absolute ball pushing that word's versatility to the limit:
Inevitably, there are also words which describe words that are versatile.
They're referred to as polyfunctional or polysemous words -- words which are
versatile enough to be used in a variety of ways.
As you heard, the word "fuck" is widely recognized as the all-time English
language champ. It can be used as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb,
intensifier, or interjection. It can convey a whole spectrum of emotions and
meanings. Even opposite meanings -- from anger to surprise to joy
to disgust.
This is what makes it both a polyfunctional and polysemous word.
Polyfunctional means a single word can function as multiple parts of
speech. And polysemous means a word that has multiple related
meanings. For example, “head” can refer to a body part, a leader, to be
on top of something.
And the specific polyfunctional words and phrases we’re going to talk about
today are ones you likely hear a dozen times a day. If you read or watch
the news, you probably hear them two dozen times a day. You probably use
them yourself. I know I do. And yet, as often as we hear and read
and use those words, in the context in which we hear, read, and say them, we
have no clear, concise, agreed-upon understanding of what they mean.
Isn’t that odd?
If we were sitting back to back, and you were describing to me an object, like
a cup or a checkerboard or a carburetor – or something quantifiable like a
dozen eggs or a size 13 shoe – I would have a pretty good idea what you
meant. Without a lot of adjectives I probably couldn’t visualize the
exact shape and size and color of whatever it was that you were naming, but
since we start off broadly agreeing with the basics of what those things are,
I would be able to understand you and you would be able to understand
me.
And yet here we are, with our media filled with polyfunctional words that we
hear every day -- words that we might use every day -- but that no one can
define with any precision.
The polyfunctional words and phrases we're going to talk about today are
at the political end of the spectrum of what George Carlin called "soft
language" -- euphemisms, jargon, and politically safe terms -- that he
believed concealed reality, diluted meaning, and softened the truth. In his
1990 HBO special, he argued that such language takes the life out of
communication, replacing direct, honest words with evasive phrases.
Specifically, we’re going to discuss terms like "America", "The American
People", "the voters" and "the public".
So, what the hell is “America”?
Well, as Bad Bunny reminded us during the most-viewed halftime show in
history, the most basic, factual definition of "America" is a landmass in the
Western Hemisphere comprising the continents of North America and South
America. In strict geographic terms, “America” refers to the combined
continental landmass stretching from the Arctic in the north to the southern
tip of South America.
But we want to be a little more specific, don't we? So what does the "United States of
America" mean?
Again, the most basic definition of the United States of America is a federal
sovereign nation in North America composed of 50 states, a federal district
(Washington, D.C.), and several territories. It is a constitutional
republic with a federal system of government, and its authority is defined by
the U.S. Constitution.
Sure. Great. But what does it mean to be an American! A
United States American!
Once again, at the most basic, factual level, to be an American means to be a
citizen or national of the United States of America. Legally, that
status can be obtained by Birth in the United States, Birth to U.S. citizen
parent(s) under certain conditions, or Naturalization through the legal
immigration process.
And now we move from bare facts to interpretation. Where, if we were
sitting back-to-back and you asked me to describe a hammer, my description
would roughly match yours. You might have been thinking of a ball-peen
hammer and I might describe a dead-blow hammer, but we'd understand each
other.
On the other hand, if I'm back-to-back with a stranger and they ask me to
describe "the voters" or "the public" or "the American people" and what makes
"the American people" a "people"... our answers might diverge so wildly that
you'd never know we were from the same culture and spoke the same
language.
For example, if you grew up with Schoolhouse Rock, you may remember
''The Great American Melting Pot''. And if you do, you might describe
what "America" means this way
If you're Ralph Waldo Emerson writing in 1837, you would describe “the
American people” as a cultural project: self-reliant, intellectually
independent, not merely an extension of Europe. More aspirational than
descriptive. He was passionate about the cause of abolition and about
the need for Americans to break from the past.
This was Emerson in 1862 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C.:
America is another word for Opportunity. Our whole history
appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence on behalf of the human
race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the
peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people.
Which, when you think about it, is broadly in-line with Schoolhouse Rock.
And if you were Emerson addressing the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard
University five years later in, July, 1867 (just two years after the end of the Civil War) you would be describing the spirit of the American people in
hopeful terms, while exhorting American intellectuals to stop being so
dithering and weak.
Difficulties exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no more
complain of the obstructions that make success hard, than of the iron walls of
the gun which hinder the shot from scattering...
Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad enough. In England, ’tis
the game-laws which exasperate the farmers to carry the Reform Bill. ’Tis what
we call plantation manners which drove peaceable, forgiving New England to
emancipation without phrase. In the Rebellion, who were our best allies?
Always the enemy. The community of scholars do not know their own power, and
dishearten each other by tolerating political baseness in their members. …
Gentlemen, I draw new hope from the atmosphere we breathe to-day, from the
healthy sentiment of the American people, and from the avowed aims and
tendencies of the educated class.
Oliver Wendell Holmes called that speech America’s “intellectual Declaration
of Independence.”
But then consider Frederick Douglass’ keynote address at the July 5,
1852 Independence Day celebration where he asked, “What to the Slave is the
Fourth of July?” And his answer to "Who are the American people?" was very
different.
I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not
included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only
reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this
day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice,
liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by
you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has
brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You
may rejoice, I must mourn.
Sojourner Truth had this to say on the subject in her 1850 “Narrative”:
O the 'fantastic tricks' which the American people are 'playing before
high Heaven!' O their profane use of the sacred name of Liberty! O their
impious appeal to the God of the oppressed, for his divine benediction while
they are making merchandise of his image! Do they not blush? Nay, they glory
in their shame!
Once a year they take special pains to exhibit themselves to
the world in all their republican deformity and Christian barbarity, insanely
supposing that they thus excite the envy, admiration and applause of mankind.
The nations are looking at the dreadful spectacle with disgust and amazement.
However sunken and degraded they may be, they are too elevated, too virtuous,
too humane to be guilty of such conduct. Their voice is heard,
saying--'Americans! we hear your boasts of liberty, your shouts of
independence, your declarations of hostility to every form of tyranny, your
assertions that all men are created free and equal, and endowed by their
Creator with an inalienable right to liberty, the merry peal of your bells,
and the deafening roar of your artillery; but, mingling with all these, and
rising above them all, we also hear the clanking of chains! the shrieks and
wailings of millions of your own countrymen, whom you wickedly hold in a state
of slavery as much more frightful than the oppression which your fathers
resisted unto blood, as the tortures of the Inquisition surpass the stings of
an insect!
We see your banner floating proudly in the breeze from every
flag-staff and mast-head in the land; but its blood-red stripes are
emblematical of your own slave-driving cruelty, as you apply the lash to the
flesh of your guiltless victim, even the flesh of a wife and mother, shrieking
for the restoration of the babe of her bosom, sold to the remorseless slave
speculator! We catch the gleam of your illuminated hills, everywhere blazing
with bonfires; we mark your gay processions; we note the number of your
orators; we listen to the recital of your revolutionary achievements; we see
you kneeling at the shrine of Freedom, as her best, her truest, her sincerest
worshippers!
Professing to believe in the natural equality of the human race--yet dooming a
sixth portion of your immense population to beastly servitude, and ranking
them among your goods and chattels! Professing to believe in the existence of
a God--yet trading in his image, and selling those in the shambles for whose
redemption the Son of God laid down his life! Professing to be Christians--yet
withholding the Bible, the means of religious instruction, even the knowledge
of the alphabet, from a benighted multitude, under terrible penalties!
Boasting of your democracy--yet determining the rights of men by the texture
of their hair and the color of their skin! Assuming to be 'the land of the
free and the home of the brave,--yet keeping in chains more slaves than any
other nation, not excepting slave-cursed Brazil! Vaunting of your
freedom of speech and of the press--your matchless Constitution and your
glorious Union--yet denouncing as traitors, and treating as outlaws, those who
have the courage and fidelity to plead for immediate, untrammelled, universal
emancipation!
Monsters that ye are! how can ye expect to escape the scorn of
the world, and the wrath of Heaven?
Emancipate your slaves, if you would
redeem your tarnished character--if you would obtain forgiveness here, and
salvation hereafter! Until you do so, "there will be a stain upon your
national escutcheon, which all the waters of the Atlantic cannot wash out!"
James Baldwin wrote about how "the American people" were not defined
by a shared myth, but by a shared history, about which we are often in denial. And you have to go no further than Trump ordering the National Park Service to
tear down plaques and cancel videos and displays that don’t agree with the
MAGA whitewashed version of American history to see how true this
is.
How the National Park Service Is Deleting American History
Philadelphia sued the Trump administration after it directed the Park Service to rip out a memorial to slavery. Elsewhere, materials about climate change and labor history were being removed.
At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the Trump administration took down an exhibit on the contradiction between President George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people and the Declaration of Independence’s promise of liberty.
At Muir Woods National Monument in California, the administration dismantled a plaque about how the tallest trees on the planet could help store carbon dioxide and slow the Earth’s dangerous warming.
And at Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, Trump officials ordered the National Park Service to stop showing films about the women and immigrants who once toiled in the city’s textile mills.
Across the country, Park Service workers have started taking down plaques, films and other materials in connection with a directive from President Trump to remove or rewrite content that may “disparage Americans” or promote “corrosive ideology.”
In theory at least, and no matter what Nazi Stephen Miller believes, America is not supposed to be about blood and soil but a
nation born of an idea. Ironically, one of the best
quotes on this subject is from the man Republicans still sanctify. This is Ronald
Reagan, from his last speech as president:
Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think
it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which
I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote to
me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a
Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot
become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the
Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.
And because we are a nation born out of an idea, since the day we were founded
there has been a running battle over who gets to claim to speak for America,
and for all those other adjacent polyfunctional words and phrases
like "The American People", "the voters", "the public", “the people” and
“the country”
This is the grand prize in politics and in the media. The brass
ring. And the fight over who gets to speak for America has been going on
as long as we've been a country.
So, here's a fun question: Were the "Confederate States" still part of "the
American public" while they were in rebellion?
And the answer to that depends entirely on who you ask. Who you ask and what you
mean by “the American public”, which was exactly why the question mattered so
much during the Civil War and still matters today.
Legally and constitutionally, the Union’s position was "Yes". Lincoln's
administration insisted that the Confederate states had never actually left
the United States. Secession was treated as illegal; the states were “in
rebellion,” not foreign countries. Under that logic, white Southerners were
still U.S. citizens, the states still existed, and the rebellion was an
internal insurrection. This is why Lincoln could claim to act on behalf of the
American people as a whole and why Reconstruction was framed as “restoration,”
not conquest.
But in rhetoric and practice, the Confederacy was often excluded from “the
American public” as a moral and political community. Union rhetoric regularly
contrasted “loyal Americans” with “rebels” or “traitors,” effectively
redefining the American people as those who accepted the Union and its
authority. The phrase “the American people” narrowed in wartime to mean the
loyal public, not everyone living within U.S. borders.
And from the Confederate perspective, the answer was "No". The
Confederacy claimed to be a separate people altogether, with its own public,
sovereignty, and national will. Confederate leaders explicitly rejected
membership in the American public and framed the war as one nation fighting
another -- even while demanding international recognition on that basis.
Also, Confederate leaders very explicitly portrayed themselves as the
true heirs of the American founders. It claimed to be the truer, purer
America -- a successor state that preserved what it said the Union had
abandoned.
They were the “real” Americans.
Jumping ahead a century to1969, with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War growing, in his televised
“Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam” this is how Nixon began to wind
down his speech. And, of course, I apologize profusely for quoting both
Reagan and Nixon, but it couldn’t be helped.
Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the
world. And the Wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for
the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American
people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free
world leadership.
Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in
the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes
for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of
totalitarianism.
And so tonight--to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans--I
ask for your support.
And there it is. Not just mentioning the American people, but calling on
the “great silent majority” to back him. And Nixon would use that phrase again
and again, contrasting his invisible “silent majority” with the anti-war
protesters who, he insisted, were just an unruly minority. And this has
been the Republican playbook ever since. The Decent People versus the
Indecent. The Stoic and Silent versus the Loud and Dirty.
You will remember George Dubya announcing: 'You Are Either With Us, Or With
the Terrorists'. That was Iraq War cheerleaders versus us Murrica-hating,
terrorist loving Left, which was the running theme in every right-wing
publication and every Hate Radio broadcast and every night on Fox News for
years.
Now it’s MAGA Patriots versus the Baby Killing Commie Democratic
Left.
Because it always comes down to legitimacy. Whose vision has been endorsed
by the people? Whose policies have been ratified by the nation?
This is why Gingrich and his Republican henchmen were so fanatically
single-minded about impeaching Bill Clinton.
This is why the Republican party – led by Conservative Hate Radio – were so
fanatically single minded about sabotaging Barack Obama’s policies and
delegitimizing him personally as a Kenyan Commie Usurper.
And this why Trump and his Republican henchmen have been so fanatically single
minded about discrediting the 2020 election results. It’s why Trump and
his henchmen can’t go five minutes without vomiting out some garbage about the
radical looney communist left. It's why Trump Orthodoxy-Enforcer, Laura
Loomer, went on a long shrieking rant on Twitter, accusing Republican Senator
Tim Scott of secretly siding with Democrats and trying to destroy the
Republican party because he said Trump's incredibly racist post should be
taken down. It’s why she ended the post with "Fuck you! [Tim Scott]" and
"Resign, Traitor!"
So, let’s get back to the question of who are “the American people” and who speaks
on their behalf?
This was from John Kennedy. Not John Kennedy, the 35th president of the
United States, but garbage John Kennedy, Republican senator from Louisiana:
My Democratic friends just can't accept the fact that the American
people chose Donald Trump to be president - it's called democracy. My advice
to them, and I say this gently: Fill out a 'Hurt Feelings Report' and let's
move on.
This was Lindsay Graham, May 20, 2017:
The American
people chose Donald Trump.
This was David Bossie on Meet the Press, December 3, 2017:
It's been litigated and the American people chose Donald Trump to be
their president."
On February 17, 2017 (and a million times since), Trump called the “FAKE NEWS media” the "enemy
of the American people.”
Now, consider how that same mysterious aggregation of humans – “the
American people” – are referenced by respected historian and all-around good
egg, Heather Cox Richardson.
Her January 13, 2026 politics chat video is entitled "The American People
Refuse to Obey in Advance."
In conversation with Chelsea Clinton she said: “The
American people are the source of our power.”
And this was Dr. Richardson on September 18, 2025: "It's
extremely difficult to bear down on 341 million people all protesting in
different ways." And "If you stop thinking
about the country as us versus them and start thinking about it as the
American people versus an autocrat, the lens changes a lot, doesn't it?"
So it seems pretty clear to her whose side she thinks the American people are
on.
But even if you stop thinking of that thing charging at you as a rabid beast and
start thinking about it as a lightning bug, that doesn't mean the "lightning
bug" isn't actually 200 pounds of rabid fangs and muscle that’s very dangerous and
that’s going to make you very, very unhappy unless you are very
careful.
However, I really want to dial in on this one. It's from The
Bucknellian, which is the weekly student newspaper of Pennsylvania’s Bucknell
University, November 14, 2024:
When the American people chose Donald Trump as president-elect on Nov.
5, it came as a major shock to much of the country.
Believe me, I am not picking on this student newspaper. More power to them
and may they go on to do great things. I bring it up because it sums up
our language lesson for today so concisely. Because how can it be
that "the American People chose Donald Trump"...
and yet that choice comes as a major shock to "much of the
country"?
How can "much of the country" not be part of "the American people"?
And on the subject of “the American people”, this is from a single press
release from Mike Johnson, this week, February 11, 2026:
What Democrats are doing in this process is they're putting hurdles in
the way of the goal, and it hurts the American people...
Remember, they forced upon us the longest shutdown in US history last fall, 43
days, and did real harm to the economy and to the American people for no
reason...
It's all politics, and we're asking them to put that aside and do what's right
for the American people...
The Democrats want to stop that, and if their policies were enacted, we would
just have open borders. We'd have open unimpeded immigration and that is not
what the American people voted for and we're doing the right thing.
And this is from a single press release from Mike Johnson, one day earlier,
February 10, 2026:
The American people have good reason to feel this optimism...
We promised the American people we would do it; we got it done...
You're watching the economic growth numbers that are off the charts... We
think that's going to happen all the way through the year. And so do the
voters. So do the American people.
The idea that "the American people" are overflowing with optimism and are super excited about the way the economy is going is, of course, so much piffle. From The Guardian, January 21, 2026:
An assessment by the Century Foundation’s new democracy indexing
project found that the US had recorded a staggering 28% “collapse” in
democratic health over the past year – from 79/100 in 2024 to 57/100 in 2025,
the kind of sudden decline more typically associated with a coup or other
major shock.
Nate Schenkkan, the report’s lead author and a former research director at
Freedom House, hoped to help Americans distinguish between the “push-pull” of
partisan politics and the “authoritarian behavior” of the current
administration.
“When a major change happens in a political system, it’s very unevenly
distributed,” Schenkkan said. “Certain people will feel it first. Certain
communities will feel it harder and faster. And it is really important to
recognize that just because it hasn’t come to you doesn’t mean that it
won’t.”...
Last year, millions joined No Kings rallies to denounce a president they say
has wielded power like a monarch.
At the ballot box, Democrats won a series of victories in the 2025 off-year
elections, and are well positioned to retake the House – and possibly the
Senate – in the 2026 midterms. Trump, meanwhile, remains unpopular nationally
– a vulnerability for his party heading into this year’s elections. A CNN poll
found that a majority of Americans believe Trump’s policies have worsened
economic conditions in the country, and 58% call his first year a
failure.
From ABC News, January 13, 2026:
Trump boasts of
'economic boom' as voters remain concerned about high prices. Trump
claimed inflation was "defeated" despite it holding steady at 2.7%.
Then there’s this from The Hill, February 6, 2026:
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) claimed Sunday that the “public has
turned against” President Trump, whose polling numbers have recently slumped
following multiple controversies.
“The public has turned against him. In every election we’ve had since his
election, the voters have swung wildly against him. And as you know, he said
at that prayer breakfast, his ego cannot stand another loss,” Schiff told ABC
News’s Jonathan Karl on “This Week.”
Ok, there's a lot going on here. Second part first. To "turn on" someone means a sudden and usually unexpected switch from being an
ally, friend, or supporter to being hostile, treacherous, or antagonistic. It
represents a shift from loyalty to betrayal or direct attack. So,
was "the public" supportive of Trump until now?
Now the first part. Who, exactly, is "the public"? Is it the same
as “the American people”? As “the voters”? As “the country”?
The technical definition of “the public” is "of or concerning the people
as a whole" from the Latin "publicus", meaning “pertaining to the people,
state, or community.”
Which isn’t helpful at all is it?
Throughout all of recorded history, the desire to know the future, to predict
the outcomes of battles and harvests, has been nearly universal. It's
why the Greeks trekked to the Oracle of Delphi to consult the Pythia, a
priestess of Apollo, for prophecies about the future.
It's why the Romans revered the sacred chickens and routinely consulted them
on matters of the utmost importance. They believe the ‘sacred chickens’
could confer power on those who heeded the predictions about the future that
were gleaned from the way the chickens were eating.
How seriously did they take the sacred chickens?
During the First Punic War, Publius Claudius Pulcher turned to them for
approval of his plan to launch a surprise attack on the Carthaginian fleet..
When the chicken watcher told Pulcher that they were not eating, which
was a bad omen, he replied, ‘Since they do not want to eat, let them drink!’
and had them thrown into the sea . In the naval battle which ensued
nearly the entire Roman fleet was annihilated, and humiliated Pulcher returned
to Rome where he was tried on the charge of impiety.
You do not screw with the sacred chickens. Which seems hilarious and weird to us modern folk, until you consider how many billions Very Serious People spend on our own version of the sacred chickens
Focus groups. Research polling. White paper factories. Apocalyptic cults. Associate Professors of the Practice of International Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. And, of course, the punditocracy, which excels at
making ambiguous yet declarative statements.
But in our country the state of the future isn’t usually determined by naval
battles or the death of kings or predicted by comets and strange weather. In our country, the fate of the future
very much depends on the next election. In other words, which way will “the
American people” will jump this time? which is why polling companies and focus
groups and pundits do a land-office business.
It’s also why groupthink and conventional wisdom doom the pundit
class to being mostly wrong most of the time. Because they’re not really
paid to predict the future. They’re almost always paid to tell their
readers, subscribers, patrons, or publishers what they want to hear. So they spin fairy tales about the wisdom and righteousness of “the American
people” and make sure that their version of the American people either
includes their readers, subscribers, patrons or publishers or flatters them.
But since we here at The Professional Left are all about clarity, for
clarity’s sake, let’s turn to one of the books on every poli sci major’s
shelf: Richard Hostadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
published way, way back in the before time of 1964.
Hofstadter makes it clear that talk about “the American people” is usually
doing political work, not descriptive work. In paranoid rhetoric, the people
are glorified as a single, innocent mass – they are pure and unified, and
always being betrayed and sold out. And anyone who disagrees is probably part
of a shadowy conspiracy against them.
Hofstadter’s language – “heated exaggeration,” “suspiciousness,”
“conspiratorial fantasy” – captures how this rhetoric feeds on fear while
pretending to channel popular will. The speaker isn’t listening to the people;
they ventriloquize them. Invoking “the American people” becomes a way to shut
down argument, short-circuit complexity, and turn political disagreement into
a loyalty test.
In his 1948 book, “The American Political Tradition and the Men Who
Made It” Hofstadter is even more blunt. He argues that American politics,
for all its supposed passion, has long been trapped inside a narrow
ideological cage, bound by an “unusually firm and widespread consensus” around
property, capitalism, and individualism.
That consensus defines who counts as “the people” before anyone ever opens
their mouth. So when politicians invoke “the American people,” they’re rarely
expanding democracy. Instead, they’re guarding the fences around
it. However apocalyptic the rhetoric gets, the assumptions
underlying it rarely change; the “range of vision” is tightly policed by
gender, race, class, sexuality, wealth, all the usuals.
Taken altogether, Hofstadter’s work suggests that “the American people” is one
of the most effective lies in American political language: a phrase that
claims universality while doing exclusion, that promises popular power while
consolidating authority, and that turns a messy democracy into a moral fairy
tale with villains conveniently pre-labeled as un-American.
And that lie fits hand-in-glove with another of the most effective lies in
American political language:
The “Both Sides Do It” lie.
In our politics right now there are actual fascists trying to
eradicate American democracy and replace it with a white Christian nationalist
autocracy. Those are the Republicans. All of them.
And yet they are “American people” and “voters” and members of “the public” every
bit as much as the patriots who are actively opposing the fascists in every
way they can think of. That coalition is 95% the Democrats, plus a few
independents and now-former Republicans who have seen the light and joined the
good guys.
And those two groups – the fascists and American democracy's allies – are also “American
people” and “voters” and members of “the public” every bit as much as the
vast, dull, uninformed wad in the middle who are determined to stay in the
middle no matter what. They don’t know what’s going on, and don’t
want to know what's going on. All they know is that The Extremes on Both Sides
are yelling at each other, and that Extremes are Bad, and that every day the
legacy media reassures them that they – the sensible centrists and
independents – are more virtuous and morally superior because they won’t lower
themselves to taking sides in this loud, confusing pie fight between two
extremes who are both somehow equally wrong.
So when you hear anyone – even the good guys, even us – using
polyfunctional words and phrases or using “soft language” to sand the rough
edges off our politics, or to distribute blame so widely that ultimately no
one is responsible for anything, ask yourself, what is this person trying to
do?
Are they trying to provoke a possible and hopeful future where
enough of the American people really do wake up to the threat at our doorstep,
and really do care enough to vote against it?
Or are they desperately lying to their base, trying to convince them
they are still as one with “the American people” while Trump’s poll
numbers continue to plummet?
Speaking of which, according to The Economist this week, Trump’s approval
rating has dropped to 38 percent! That being the case, this headline should come as no surprise. From The New York Times:
Gallup Will No Longer Track Presidential Approval Ratings
The monthly poll has been used to measure presidential performance for almost nine decades.
After nearly 90 years, the Gallup Organization will no longer track presidential approval ratings, which served as a steady way to measure Americans’ views of their elected leaders.
Fuck those sacred chickens! Throw 'em in the water!
"Senator McCarthy's reckless and unfounded attempt to impugn my loyalty is just one more example of his typical tactic of attempting to tie up to Communism anyone who disagrees with him."-- Edward R. Murrow
The fact that it's a Guest Essay in the New York Times.
The fact that they're casting themselves as the wise and far-seeing "we" here, and apparently
everyone else is the "you" that got it all wrong.
The fact that about halfway through they haul out the hoariest and (surprise!) most New
York Times-pleasing of all media lies to elevate themselves above Both Sides:
Each of the major parties has pulled away from the libertarian elements of
their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans
and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant
gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible
for the period they hold it.
The fact that it's the fucking Libertarians.
And the fact that it just ain't so.
Meet Anthony L. Fisher:
When I worked for Reason magazine during Trump's rise to power in 2016, I
was explicitly forbidden by the editor in chief from writing about Trump's
racism, or the violence and racism at his rallies. It was a "sideshow," I
was told.
Then there is this from
The Daily Beast, which was cited further down the BlueSky thread:
A leading critic of “cancel culture” is being accused of canceling one of
its own—for speaking out too loudly and too often against President Donald
Trump.
Throughout the Trump era, Reason magazine, a digital and print
publication published by the nonprofit libertarian Reason Foundation, has
routinely sounded the alarm about the perceived threat posed by “cancel
culture,” the modern phenomenon in which people are publicly and
professionally ostracized for heterodox beliefs or remarks. The magazine
has lambasted other outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The
Intercept for firing or pushing out key staffers whose views or actions
were determined to have conflicted with their respective editorial
missions.
And yet, a long-time Reason columnist and policy analyst alleges that the
libertarian magazine dropped her over her vehemently anti-Trump views.
“After 15 years, the curtains came down for me at Reason today. My views,
I was told, had become too out-of-step with those of the organization,”
Shikha Dalmia announced Tuesday evening in a Facebook post.
“Reason has some amazing writers who do great work on a whole host [of]
issues that I will continue to read and share. And it has been an honor
and pleasure to work with them,” she added. “However, I had a staunch and
uncompromising anti-Trump voice calling out his authoritarian tendencies
unambiguously. That this made many libertarians uncomfortable raises all
kinds of interesting questions about the state of the liberty
movement.”
From The Cato Institute (yes, it makes me feel dirty just writing that, but onward):
What’s Donald Trump Doing at the Libertarian Party Convention?
The Libertarian Party presidential nominating convention is coming up this weekend, with Donald Trump as a featured speaker. This is apparently the first time in US history that a political party has had another party’s nominee at its own nominating convention. And what a choice!
The Libertarian Party was founded to “challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual” and to specifically run candidates for office on a platform of personal liberty, economic liberty, and a peaceful foreign policy.
Needless to say, that’s not Donald Trump’s platform, nor does it describe his actions as president...
To be clear, I do appreciate various Johnny-Come-Latelies (even the
Johnny-Galt-Come-Latelies) finally arriving where Liberals have already been for
decades
I appreciate it even though, when they finally got to the party, it was already far, far too late. And I appreciate it even though these same people mocked and dismissed those of us who were right all along as alarmist crackpots right up until they had their long overdue moments of clarity.
What I do not appreciate -- what I might even call vexing (if you'll pardon the salty language because I know how important "tone" is in determining whether someone is right or wrong) -- is that
every new arriviste to where the Left has been all along carries with them the
same overweening, self-aggrandizing, and very thirsty, psychological disorder, best summarized here by the character of Bert
Cooper on Mad Men
*(H/T @airbagmoments.bsky.social on Blue Sky for the heads up)
