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Totally DisingenuousYou disagree with the Republicans? So do the Republicans.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

(Editor's note: Check out Slate's new, improved "Book Club." Click here to read all about it.)

Understandably eager to win back the White House now and worry about doctrinal niceties later, the Republicans may have gotten carried away. They have maneuvered themselves into a situation where their leaders—including their presidential candidate—are required to be disingenuous on almost every topic.

On social issues, Republican leaders pretend to be hard-core conservatives, when most are actually far more cosmopolitan than they let on. Meanwhile, on domestic policy issues, they endorse new spending and regulations like drunken liberals, while their inner conservative surely writhes in agony. Only on foreign and military policy does their public posture—an incoherent mix of pugnaciousness and isolationism—accurately reflect their actual beliefs, which are sincerely confused.

George W. Bush met with gay Republicans in April and declared that he was "a better person" as a result. I doubt it. The specific person Bush wished to be thought better than is the one who had previously refused to meet this group because that would be "divisive." Actually, I don't doubt at all that Bush is a better person than this fatuous bigot. What I doubt is that anything has changed. He was always a better person at heart, just pretending to be a fatuous bigot. One danger of disingenuous posturing is a tendency to overshoot the mark.

Bush is a yuppie, for all his Texas twangery. He also, on all public evidence, has inherited his father's WASP values, under which a general obligation to treat people decently is very important but particular ideological passions are vulgar and boring. Who can believe that such a person would have any sincere objection to simply meeting a group of equally nice, well-brought-up Republicans because they are gay? But he fabricated an objection and then had to fabricate a small moral awakening to get out of it.

Years ago Hendrik Hertzberg, now of The New Yorker, coined a term for politicians who pretend to extreme social-conservative views they don't really share. He called them "closet tolerants." Ronald Reagan, after a lifetime in Hollywood, almost surely had no moral objection to homosexuality. But he pretended to share the views of the religious right.

Abortion is an even better example. Raise your hand if you think that George W. Bush—or George H.W. Bush or Trent Lott or whatsisname the speaker of the House—actually believes that abortion is the murder of an innocent child. But they feel they must pretend to believe it. Then they must try to explain why the murder of innocent children should not be a "litmus test" for admission to their party's "big tent." It cannot be done. As with gay rights, a double pretense—abortion is murder, but that's OK—gets them pretty close to where their sincere beliefs might bring them anyway. But the round trip must be tiring for those with any capacity for reflection.

Listening to Republicans wax enthusiastic about new regulations on HMOs or a prescription drug subsidy program for seniors, you might suppose that the Republican-controlled Congress would be pushing for things like this even if the Democratic Party didn't exist. Who believes that? The Republicans tend to clothe their ideological nakedness with a lot of talk about privatization, using market forces, or simply doing it smaller. They also claim to be doing it better, and they may be right in some cases. But this doesn't explain why they're doing it at all, or relieve the near-certain suspicion that in their hearts they'd rather not.

Well, so what? Hypocritical posturing greases the wheels of change. If you favor HMO regulation, isn't insincere support better than sincere opposition? Intellectual dishonesty is a pretty recherché complaint. Maybe factual honesty is enough to ask from politicians. Forget the fancier stuff. Or, to put it another way, maybe John Mitchell ("Watch what we do, not what we say") had a better philosophy than George Bush the Elder ("Read my lips").

And yes, of course, disingenuousness is not a Republican monopoly. The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, is disingenuous in his new role as a fire-breathing us-against-them populist. (Either that or he was disingenuous during his entire previous political career as a self-described "raging moderate.") Politicians of all stripes reposition themselves within their slice of the political spectrum as the demands of national vs. local office, or primaries vs. general elections, dictate.

Spin—the native language of politics—is inherently disingenuous: It is based on the premise that words are moves in a game of strategy. Every politician says he is "saddened" by some stupid action or remark by his opponent, when he is actually delighted. And they all love the word "frankly." With this easy-to-use device, not available in stores, you can repackage an unobjectionable or toadying remark as an act of verbal courage. These rhetorical tricks are so ingrained in political culture that you can't even call them lies. But even when spin is the truth, it is insincere.

Usually, though, what's going on is the minimizing or exaggeration of a pol's devotion to a few small issues. Even in the Age of Spin, it's pretty special to watch a party basing an entire presidential campaign on the systematic betrayal of its true beliefs in both directions simultaneously. And the strain seems to be showing.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.
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Reader Comments from The Fray:


"More money for billionaires" generally doesn't sell well, so they need to rope in irrational voters, like bigots.

--Viewpoint

(To reply, click here.)


I take exception to your belief that Trent Lott is a closet tolerant, especially on the subjects of tolerance of gays and abortion. Maybe I am such a blinded, bigoted Northern liberal that I can't help but take Trent at his word when he proclaims that homosexuality is the equivalent of alcoholism and kleptomania. It seems to me that the force of his political persona derives from his deep-seated beliefs. George H.W. Bush we knew was no good-ol' boy just because he ate pork rinds and Dukakis never liked that tank, but Trent surely thinks that loose women who terminate pregnancies are murderers. I'm just surprised he never came out for juicing them up in the electric chair.

--John Campanelli

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The tendency toward disingenuous embrace of the positions of right or left is as pronounced among Democrats; it's just that it bothers Kinsley less. For example, surely Kinsley doesn't really think that only Joe Lieberman in his heart of hearts thinks that school vouchers are a good idea to help transform a public education system that has been brain dead for 40 years or more in most central urban districts. But the teachers' unions are not only a "core constituency" for Democrats, they are also one of the best organized political groups in the nation, able to defeat unsuitable Democrats in primaries and sending hordes of their apparatchiks as delegates to Democratic National Conventions. Sure, Republicans have to kow tow to their conservative core constituencies on such matters as gay rights. But, as a strong supporter of gay rights since before the Stonewall uprising, I'm not at all sure that the right of a few thousands gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces is more important than the right of millions of minority children to a decent education. Of course, the nation can have both; but it comes with ill grace to knock Republicans' cant one the one issue without even recognizing that Democratic cant on the other has totally paralyzed public policy on inner-city education for decades.

--Publius

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When politicians say they're saddened
by what opponents do it means they're maddened,
and when you see them staring blankly
before they say the magic words: "Well, frankly,"
you know they really have been gladdened
by actions which they'd make up if they hadn't
occurred, as necessary as God
according to Voltaire, and as slipshod,
and maybe as subliminal,
and frankly, sad to say, not criminal.

--Gershon Hepner

(To reply, click here.)


[Notes from the Fray Editor: A poem. In the Readme Fray. An on-topic poem, inspired by the column. We think that might be a first.

Consider also an interesting post from Glen Davidson. Then try to guess which sentence in it Yanni didn't like (clue: it contains the phrase "multiply heterodox post-modern take on reality") and tell us what you think Manichean goggles are.]

(9/13)

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