Monday, June 14, 2021

A Nuanced Analysis

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume Philip Bump doesn’t remember Watergate.  I can’t easily find bio info on him, and I’m not going to search diligently.  Assumption is good enough for this. 

Anyway, Bump writes that he expected Trump to be exposed, and basically that eventually everyone would see the emperor was not only naked, but nuts, too.  That this didn’t happen he cannot seem to attribute to human nature or how all the blind men see the elephant, or even because of Paul Simon's wisdom that "a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."  Eh, probably too young for that, too.  No, this awakening did not occur, he writes, because of “nuance.”

Nuance is Trump’s ally. Not in the sense that Trump is particularly adept at introducing it but in the sense that he’s adept at exploiting it. We can pretty easily predict a Trumpian response to this issue: The fake news media got it wrong again (because the headlines or stories didn’t match eventual revelations)! Even if a document emerged showing Trump’s signature underneath an order to, say, investigate the personal lives of his enemies, there would be some rationalization or redirection offered that neutered the issue for his base, like that the paper wasn’t the right color or his signature looked like a forgery. (Remember that Trump briefly floated the idea that the voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape wasn’t his.)
“Nuance” is carrying a heavy burden in this analysis.  It wasn’t “nuance” that got Trump through the last four years.  It wasn’t even a willing suspension of disbelief.  It was the willingness to accept Trump against anyone else.  It was the decades long GOP effort to erect a false god, an idol, as the only true way to ensure “conservatism,” which is defined here less as an ideology and more as “not liberal.”  Where “liberal” is “bad,” and that’s all that matters.

Basically, nuance is not what Bump thinks it is, because Bump presumes there is a truth, pure and sterling and diamond bright, to which every knee will bend and every judgment yield.  Except it doesn’t work like that; it has never worked like that.  And to expect it to work like that is, well:  hopelessly naive.  Trump didn’t survive, or escape, on nuance.  The truth is probably more depressing than that:  Trump survived because of the willingness of enough people to accept him, no matter what.  It wasn’t that his excuses were good, or even sufficient; it was that he had more Teflon than Reagan.  Teflon enough people granted to him to allow him to win the electoral college; once, anyway.

Most people cobble together their understanding of the world from twigs and chewing gum.  As for the “media” demanding “perfection:” FoxNews was, during the Obama years, upheld by practicing journalists as a valid journalistic enterprise worthy of the highest regard granted to those allowed entry to the White House press room.  This would be the same people Jen Psaki has to regularly dress down in public in the same press room, the same way she handled "journalists" from state agencies from China and Russia.  Not to mention, apart from FoxNews, the NYT and Whitewater; or WMD; or the “nuance” that held the media back while Trump was in office, but since January 6th has allowed them to explicitly state that many of Trump’s lies are actually….lies.

Get off your high horse, bub.  And recognize this is not a nation of journalism professors. 

Comparisons to Watergate or, more broadly, to the sort of aggressive overreach that would shock the conscience of even the most hardened observer seem at this point to be premature.

“Comparisons to Watergate” are easily made by people who don’t remember Watergate that well.  The criminality of Nixon was, indeed, bad.  But the perception of that criminality was never universal.  I knew people who went to their grave believing Nixon was railroaded by, among others, the “Democrats.”  I know we imagine we were bipartisan on the issue of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation; but we weren’t.  As for “nuance,” Watergate was such a tangled mess of allegations and claims and suggestions and witnesses, it’s hard to imagine if you weren’t there.  Any recap of Watergate must include the huge cast of characters (it wasn't all just the break-in or the unexpurgated tapes), from minor players who got lost in the story (the burglars) to minor players who became major media figures (G. Gordon Liddy) and minor players who became minor media figures (who remembers now?) to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and on up to the Oval Office and beyond (Mitchell was no longer AG by then, but in it up to his eyeballs).  The whole was so convoluted and complicated and full of stories and incidents it was hard to figure out just what it was Nixon had done, or was alleged to have done.  His most famous defense, after all, was “I am not a crook.” And frankly, that worked.  Most of the country was not happy when Ford pardoned Nixon (it stuck Ford as the only POTUS never to be elected to the office of even VP), but much of the country was never quite sure what evil Nixon actually did.  I even remember reports from overseas correspondents wondering why we were running such a successful foreign policy President out of office.

And besides, the hearings into Watergate were bipartisan (but still partisan) and it was the GOP Senators who went to Nixon and convinced him he was about to be impeached, and would probably be convicted.  
Today the GOP looks more like this: I wonder if this is the "nuance" Bump was writing about. It's certainly the way Trump handled controversies, with the gleeful cooperation of most of the GOP in DC.  Like this: So much nuance!  I'm not sure the country could have taken much more nuance!

Bottom line:  there is no shining revelation that is going to put us all on the road to Damascus together and make us all hear the voice and know for once and all we have been wrong, but now we will do it right!  After all, in John's gospel Jesus (!) tells God to "Honor your name," and God answers.  Some bystanders, John says, heard thunder; some say an angel spoke.  It's not clear any of them heard what Jesus (and John) did.

So it goes.
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