Debate is Futile

The Meaninglessness of America’s Political Vocabulary

[BILL] MAHER: But listen, as long as… as long as the conservatives are putting this word “treason” into play, our friend—
[KELLYANNE] CONWAY: I’m not. I didn’t say that word.
MAHER: [overlaps] —Anne Coulter wrote a book called Treason. I mean, really, they throw that term around a lot. Rush Limbaugh—
CONWAY: Her book is a best seller though. Give her her dues. I don’t think you are treacherous.
MAHER: [overlaps] Well, that must make it true.
CONWAY: No. I don’t think you’re treacherous, but—
MAHER: But isn’t—but if you’re going to throw this word “treason” around, let me suggest a few things that, to me, are more treasonous. Like when Karl Rove outed a CIA operative… [applause] to settle a political score. That’s not more treasonous than a comedian making a joke?
CONWAY: I don’t think what you said was treasonous.
MAHER: I understand. What if—
[ASA] HUTCHINSON: [overlaps] We’ll give you more latitude. We’ll give you more latitude, and you raised important points that troop levels, the retention levels, the military, our recruitment capability, important issues that we need to debate. But whenever you look at what we’re doing to support our troops, that’s a legitimate issue for congress to debate—the body armor, the troop levels that are there. But the fact is, I think that whenever you’re talking about treason… you didn’t come close to it, and that’s not an issue today.
MAHER: But what about Karl Rove? I know I didn’t. I’m asking about him. I’m asking about people who voted when the NRA said, you know what? We don’t want our gun check lists to be subject to terrorists. In other words, if you’re on a terrorist watch list, you can still buy a gun in this country. That is not a vote brought by the NRA? That’s not treason?
CONWAY: No.
MAHER: No?
CONWAY: No.
[applause]
CONWAY: But I don’t think you’re treasonous. I think no one uses the First Amendment quite the way you do. In other words, you have benefited from the First Amendment because your intelligence allows you to be funny, it allows you to take potshots at the administration if you want. It allows you to—
MAHER: [overlaps] You’re concentrating on me. We know I’m not the traitor.
CONWAY: [overlaps] Well, you said—
MAHER: We’re asking about Karl Rove. We’re asking about people… [applause] How about this one…
CONWAY: We were talking about you. That’s how this started—
MAHER: [overlaps] Christy Todd Whitman wrote that chemical industry lobbyists thwarted her reasonable safety rules to protect our chemical plants, because they got contributions from chemical companies. Because Dupont gave a politician money, and they voted against safeguarding our chemical plants. That’s not treason?
CONWAY: Well, the fact that she put it in her book doesn’t mean it’s true.
MAHER: It is true. And you know it’s true.
[Chris] ROCK: I think this expensive gas is treasonous. [cheers] [applause] It’s killing me.

There is a fundamental fiction embraced by all sides in contemporary American political and cultural discourse. This is illustrated in the above televised dialogue, though of course many of the key elements of the fiction are identifiable in other media, e.g. internet blogs, press briefings, op-ed columns, and the massive business of publishing books on politics and current affairs (and of course our three rhetoricians above each have their own books in the current affairs section of your local bookstore). The fundamental fiction is that our discourse takes the form of a “debate” carried out in this diverse media environment, led by television talk shows. The multitude of talk shows on CNN, FOXNews, MSNBC and their derivatives lead the charge and are joined by popular programs (and programs more honest about their goal: entertainment) such as “Real Time” and Comedy Central’s “Daily Show.”
We must understand “debate” as in some sense being a cooperative truth-seeking activity, where opposing parties air different views and try to come to a consensus; more on this later. Everyone is familiar with the format of these “debates”—there is a host, and usually more than one guest (if there is just one, it is almost certain, at least on the shows that purport to be about news, that the guest will, either through emphatic agreement or through pathetic ineptitude, make the host look good), hailing from different places on what is taken in the MSM to be the ideological spectrum in this country .
Evaluation of the truthfulness of a proposition depends upon acknowledgement of an agreed upon objective criterion, a fact or set of facts, and rules of inductive and deductive reasoning. Thus both sides can look to a fact and the rational weight of the fact forces the same judgment in opposing parties. Such an agreement is not always pragmatically possible, due to a poverty of known facts with respect to the number of opinions possible to advance, and debate can be quite a bit more sophisticated than this simple account would have, but in a debate, the aim is to arrive at truth—the search for reasonable criteria, acknowledged and acknowledgeable facts, must motivate all parties if a “debate” is to be a debate. That this account applies to contemporary American political discourse is the fiction in some sense enacted by all parties at the table, the moderator, the participants, and the audience .
The brief dialogue sampled at the beginning of this piece is evidence of the general problems of our discourse. First, I chose to start with the prominence of the word “treason.”

treason, n.: the abandonment and betrayal of one’s country, one’s homeland, and the title of one of Ann Coulter’s bestsellers, in which she accuses all liberals of this crime.

The word is important because it illustrates cogently what many of the terms in the dialogue function as: emotional cues. Words like treason become rallying points, where sides can be formed and lines drawn. The problem is that using words in this way completely undermines the meanings of the words. “Freedom” is another example of a word made vacuous in our dialogue. It is not that these words don’t refer to anything in the world, but that within the discourse we are examining, they don’t pick out concrete ideas, objects, and actions. Rather, they function in the way flags function during times of conflict: they make it easy for people to pick sides, and become emotionally invested in their sides. “Treason” and “freedom” do have meanings, debatable meanings, but they are so commonly used in ways that are meaningless, but functional, that their use in an actual debate becomes extremely dangerous. If everyone starts accusing people of treason, actual instances of treason can be brushed off if they threaten prejudiced argumentative stances. Throughout the excerpt, Maher struggles in vain to use “treason” to actually pick out treasons against the United States, but it doesn’t matter, because “treason” is only functioning as a flag, an emotional cue which does not have impact on Conway when attached to Karl Rove, or the effects of lobbying by the NRA or the chemical industry. Whether Maher’s examples are actually examples of treason is not even important; no reference can now be fixed by what was once, and should be, an important and dangerous word.
The general case, then: many of the terms which are of utmost importance to a political dialogue are debased to the point that they only function as place-holders and rallying points for people already prejudiced to use a term in a certain way. Thus, the dialogue that is carried out in our media rarely meets up with reality, with facts. It doesn’t need to. It is not that there isn’t serious intellectual work being done, but that this work is completely marginalized by the profitable media formats. The language used in our debates is frictionless; none of the terms catch reality. It is thus impossible for our national dialogue to be a debate in the sense that I described earlier. When two opposing sides come together to talk, unless they are both of the utmost intellectual integrity (and intellectual integrity is one of the most marginal integrities in politics), they use the same terms, but there is no fixed meaning to those terms. Thus, it is impossible for the representatives of the “Right” and the “Left” on these talk shows (and blog threads, etc.) to pick out facts, criteria, for deciding issues between them. No consensus is possible, because agreement on reality is impossible.
Perhaps it is a general condition of democracy for its very language to escape from under it. For democracy to function, for a pluralistic society to be sustained, each generation must be committed to bringing many of the conflicts within the society to consensus. The debasement of our political vocabulary makes the movement towards consensus (the consensus of the polity—that of decision makers is another matter) a near impossibility. Perhaps this was always so, but we must hope this is not the case.

-Pat Kirts