Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

  chapter one

  The Word

  So long as I regard stupidity as a news item, a misfortune that happens only to others, or to me only under an outside influence—I wasn’t myself, I can’t think what happened to me—the subtlety of the phenomenon eludes me.

  —André Glucksmann, La Bêtise, 1986

  Assholes and Anti-assholes

  The idea that asshole could be a proxy for the fraying fabric of public life first struck me in 2005, gust before things got really squirrelly. I was writing about the language of politics and listening to a lot of right-wing talk on radio and TV and I kept noticing how everything seemed to be aimed at depicting liberals as, well, assholes. Not that anyone ever actually says assholes on the air on the programs, bleeped or not.2 But that isn’t the point; it’s rather that asshole seems to encapsulate the animus the shows are both stoking and stroking. It’s a word we reserve for members of our own tribe: the boss who takes credit for your work, the neighbors who get on your case for putting out your garbage the night before, or maybe a well-known politician or celebrity It isn’t a word you’d use of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It signals indignation, with an undercurrent of contempt, an emotion you can only feel towards those you feel both superior to and familiar with. And that feeling in turn legitimates a certain energizing response—combative, derisory, with more than a splash of asshole itself—that’s compelling enough to keep listeners tuned in, which is after all the aim of the exercise. Or if the listeners are of an opposing political viewpoint, as many of them are, they can enjoy a rush of head-clearing rage at the hosts’ assholistic harangues. Assholes are people who allow us to be assholes back at them. They turn us into anti-assholes, a word I think of as being less like antitoxin than antimatter—stuff just like matter but of an opposite charge, which reacts with matter violently

  A huge amount of this programming is aimed at creating exchanges and narratives that generate these feelings by turning reports about remote evils into pretexts for stirring up more intimate antipathies. During the buildup to the Iraq war, more than half the Fox News segments on Iraq focused on the pusillanimity of the French, who were refusing to go along with the invasion, and through them, on the pretentious American Francophile liberals who spoke their language and consumed their wines and cheese. (The Germans, who were no less adamantly opposed to the invasion, got a pass.) Saddam Hussein may have been an oriental despot out of central casting, but he was too alien to be the object of the contempt that only familiarity can breed.

  Not that conservatives always had to manufacture such pretexts.You can’t live in San Francisco and teach at Berkeley, as I do, without being impressed by the myriad forms of assholism that bourgeois liberals nourish: the pretension and superiority, the preciosity, the way laudable commitments to social justice sit cheek by jowl with intrusive paternalism. (Berkeley has always been a place where people believe that consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they please in the privacy of their bedroom so long as they don’t try to smoke afterwards.) The truth is that the dynamic I’m interested in here—the play of asshole and anti-asshole—is fed by the abundant strains of assholism that run through every corner of American life. What struck me in 2005 was the way the play of asshole and anti-asshole was bubbling up into the public sphere, like a sadistic form of performance art or a snarky sitcom.

  That was seven years ago, in what in retrospect seems almost an idyllic age of comity, before public discourse started to go completely off the rails. The most dramatic shift was among the partisans of the right, who discovered after Barack Obama’s election just how gratifying it could be to act like an asshole when you could tell yourself you had a sufficient provocation and were unencumbered by the responsibilities of government. In an emblematic case, the first-term South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson interrupted a presidential speech on the health care bill to call out, “You lie!” The conduct was deemed unbecoming by his own party’s leadership—“ totally disrespectful,” said John McCain—and Wilson initially apologized and said he had let his emotions get the better of him. But radio hosts celebrated his “guts” and “backbone” and said he had no need to apologize for simply articulating what millions of Americans were saying. Supporters flooded Wilson with campaign contributions, and a bit more alarmingly, a South Carolina gun dealer offered a limited edition component for the AR-15 with “You Lie” etched on the stock, as if acting like an asshole provided incontrovertible proof of patriotic zeal.

  This didn’t come out of nowhere. Fifty years ago, the historian and traditionalist conservative Peter Viereck, recalling the humanism of Burke and Adams, wrote that modern conservatism was diffusing a mood of emotional freeze, making people “ashamed of generous social impulses.” And in modern times, the right has always been susceptible to making an exhibition of its hardheartedness, just as the left has had a regrettable penchant for self-congratulatory pietism. But lately the tone of those displays has become more intense and operatic, as witness the striking series of outbursts during the debates among Republican presidential hopefuls in 2011–2012. A debate audience applauded when Brian Williams began a question to Governor Rick Perry by noting that Texas has conducted a record 234. executions during his term as governor, then booed Perry himself when he defended a Texas program providing in-state college tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants. (In his defense, Perry said, “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state. . . by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart”—a remark that so angered right-wing voters that Perry was placed in the situation, surely unprecedented in American politics, of having to apologize for using the “inappropriate” word heart.) In another debate, the audience booed a gay soldier would do about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” A debate audience cheered Herman Cain’s assertion that “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” And at a CNN—Tea Party debate, Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul what should happen to a person who lacks health insurance and falls into a coma. “Are you saying that society should just let him die?” Blitzer asked, at which point several people yelled, “Yeah!” and others cheered. By early 2012, a South Carolina debate audience was moved to boo Paul when he said that other countries didn’t like being bombed any more than we would, adding, “I would say that maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy.” The audience’s reservations about Paul’s proposal may have been soundly rooted in Realpolitik, but even so it was a theologically awkward moment. If you took those effusions at face value, they seemed to confirm the continued relevance of Viereck’s observation that among a slice of modern conservatives, it’s cool to be cruel.

  It’s misleading to judge any group by its most demonstrative adherents. Wilson was plainly out of line even by the standards of his caucus, and the audiences at primary season debates—candidates’ supporters provided with tickets by the campaigns and urged by the producers to be demonstrative—were clearly more vociferous than the typical adherent of the Tea Party right, the conservative movement, or the Republican Party in general. Still, the groundswell of support for the outbursts suggests that these attitudes are widespread. And yet these people are neither demented extremists nor political neophytes: they’re people who were mad at Gore, mad at Clinton, mad at Carter. This isn’t a new constituency in American politics, just an old one steamed over. So what has gotten into them? People point to race as a motivation, and there’s clearly something to that: it’s sobering how many of the online comments about Obama and the Democrats at conservative sites manage to work in references to affirmative action, watermelons, Chicago thugs, and Kenya. But few deserve the labels of “terrorists” or “crazies” that critics on the left have thrown at them, and notwithstanding the occasional demonstrator holding a sign that depicts Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose, the majority weren’t driven to their participation by virulent racist attitudes. Indeed, you have the sense that a fair amount of their race talk is just the colla
teral effect of a free-floating outrage that will seize opportunistically on any inimical attribute that comes to hand. When it comes to the crunch, there isn’t that much difference in tone between their vilifications of the Muslim Kenyan socialist America-hating Barack Hussein Obama for being so exceedingly Other and their vilifications of Bill Clinton for being so exceedingly anything but, as web comments indicate:Wanna talk about the country’s “First Black President”? Hell, he was a hick-ass bubba long before he went black: worthless, shiftless, non-productive, lazy, no account, philandering piece of poor white trash.

  That intensified tone of vituperation isn’t the direct result of a shift to more hardline political attitudes. Not that there hasn’t been one, but it itself is largely the outgrowth of a change in political style. Michael Tomasky has argued that the character of the new right was shaped more by rhetoric than by ideas:Usually a political movement is driven by its ideas. Then it chooses the rhetoric it thinks best advances the ideas. I’ve long thought that sometime in the 1990s, this normal process reversed itself on the American right, and rhetoric began driving, and even elbowing out, ideas. Once this wall is breached, compromise on any important issue becomes impossible, and responsible policymaking nearly so.

  There’s no question rhetoric has become one of the principal drivers of the politics of the right. But the word itself may be misleading. These days it usually has a narrow sense; say “rhetoric,” and what comes to mind is the use of emotionally charged words (“traditional values,” “reproductive freedom”) and tendentious metaphors and comparisons (“death taxes,” the economy as a family budget)—words that call up pictures in people’s heads and dispose them to think in a certain way. But rhetoric is also a matter of making connections, of arranging the conversation so that the listeners feel a sense of community with the speaker and with each other. And the “conservative rhetoric factory,” as Tomasky calls it, promulgates not just a vocabulary but a tone, an ethos, a way of presenting oneself in relation to the other side. What makes Rush Limbaugh so adept a rhetorician isn’t so much the words he uses or the comparisons he makes as the attitude he conveys and the sympathetic chords he strikes with and between his listeners. The asshole/anti-asshole business isn’t the only maneuver that works this end, but it is central to the way a lot of people construe their political identity—to what it actually means to be a “conservative” or a “liberal.” The web is full of ads for T-shirts that say “I’m everything the liberals hate” or “I’m every conservative’s worst nightmare,” and in fact that’s how a lot of partisans think of themselves, as in the business of infuriating the assholes on the other side.

  That dynamic explains the oddly insouciant hardheartedness of those debate outbursts. I say “oddly” because these people aren’t constitutionally cruel or sadistic. In the New York Review of Books, Charles Simic described the 2011 Republican debates as “celebrations of meanness and inhumanity” But in fact the animus here is only incidentally directed at the actual victims of the controversial policies—the executed convicts, the gay soldiers, the hapless uninsured, or the child of undocumented immigrants who was brought into the country at five and wants to go to college to become a veterinarian. True, those people are dehumanized, which is always a prerequisite for a tactical unfeelingness. (What could be more dehumanizing than the noun illegals, a term that reduces people to their infractions?) As Rick Perry observed to his detriment, it’s only by suppressing your reflexive compassion that you can oppose providing college tuition for that undocumented teenager, which is otherwise as close to a moral and economic no-brainer as any issue in American political life.

  But for just that reason, those victims themselves aren’t satisfying objects of contempt. You may be indignant about the law-breaking aliens who are flooding across our borders, but you aren’t apt to think of them as assholes or lie awake fuming about them in the middle of the night, the way you do about an insufferable co-worker or cousin. True hatred and contempt are more intimate emotions than that. The real targets of the aggression here are the liberal bleeding hearts who favor amnesty for illegal aliens, the same people who support the radical homosexual agenda, the government takeover of health care, and gay marriage. The more outrageous and callous the position you take on those issues, the greater the pleasure in imagining the conniptions it will give to the other side, and the greater the sense of camaraderie you create with your fellows. It’s the political equivalent of smut, as Freud explained the notion, like the men in a tavern who make salacious jokes when the barmaid enters the room in order to enjoy her discomfort at their displaced aggression.3 Think of Ann Coulter saying that the 9/11 widows enjoyed their husbands’ deaths. The remark was flamboyantly cruel and tasteless, but it wasn’t personal; Coulter couldn’t care less about those women one way or another. But it came off as sufficiently monstrous to rouse liberals to steaming indignation—“Heartless!” said Hillary Clinton, as if on cue—and by the by to get Coulter invited to The Today Show to repeat the remark for the delectation of viewers, outraging some to the delight of some others.

  People talking about the polarization of American political life often speak of “demonization” of the other side—a recondite theological term before it suddenly became popular in the mid-1980s. But demonization is too broad a notion to be very helpful.You can demonize anyone from the Jews to the oil companies to Tiger Woods to PC users, but the color and intensity of the animus is different in each case. What’s going on here is much more specific. It’s assholization: the more of an asshole you can make your adversaries seem, the more of an asshole you can permit yourself to appear, so as to bond with your fellows with provocative gestures of insensitivity, real or, very often, fantasized, as various web comments reveal:Next time you’re in line waiting behind that welfare moocher, don’t forget to yell out “You’re Welcome” as they walk away from the register with all that crap you just bought for them. Trust me, the look they will give you is worth it. If your lucky, they’ll smart off at you which will be your invitation to further humiliate their sorry ass.Yea, I know, I’m being insensitive. Cry me a freakin river.

  Saturday I was parked in a shopping center. When I returned to my car I had difficulty getting into my driver’s door because the a—hole next to me had parked waaay too close. I tried very hard not to scratch their car door getting in, but then I noticed their Obama bumper stickers. Oh, well. Accidents happen.

  I was driving south on the Meadowbrook on LI. This guy was stuck in the left lane with his hood up. I was slowing down to help him and then I saw a big Bush/Cheney 2004 sticker. I sped up and left. I don’t feel particularly bad about it. He would have gotten fat and lazy if I helped him.

  This is a fairly pointed maneuver, which by no means covers every variety of political stupidity, belligerence, or malice. You aren’t necessarily an asshole for asserting that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. Nor for that matter are you an asshole for holding that Bush and Cheney were responsible for 9/11 or that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a cabal of greedy scientists. But you might be an asshole if you asserted those things not because you believe them but because they’re the sort of thing that pisses off people on the other side.

  It’s assholism if people take some pleasure in justifying it with the proposition, “It’s impolite (cruel, unfair), yeah, but the asshole has it coming.” Joe Wilson’s defenders didn’t deny that his outburst was intemperate, but rather stressed the provocation; he was “Rude but Right,” as National Review headed the story. And not even the most devoted fans of O’Reilly or Limbaugh would deny that they traffic in contention or suggest that they’re basically sweet and easygoing guys; they’ll say that it’s no more than those liberal assholes deserve. Anyway, they say, the other side does the same thing. They’re right about that, too. Conservatives may have had more success with belligerent broadcast formats, but liberals haven’t eschewed opportunities for playing the anti-asshole to the assholes on the right. Michael Moore has built a whole car
eer around the maneuver, and the hosts on MSNBC have been known to go there, too. (I think of Chris Matthews interviewing Michele Bachmann remotely at her campaign headquarters after her congressional election victory in 2010. “Are you hypnotized?” he asked her, after she kept ducking a question about Republican plans, while Keith Olbermann sniggered in the background.) And if you were looking for examples of flamboyant assholism among political demonstrators, you’d be hard put to beat the antics of some of the anti-war protestors in San Francisco back in February of 2003, who took the marching cry of “no business as usual” as justification for blocking traffic and leaving commuters stuck in their cars for hours, not to mention the “Pukers for Peace” who vomited on the steps of the Federal Building to demonstrate that they were sick of war. (“There’s nothing like this in Phoenix,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported one Arizona tourist as saying.) There were similar gestures at some of the Occupy venues in 2011 and 2012, mostly from Black Bloc “anarchists” like the ones who smashed windows and slashed tires along Valencia Street in my own San Francisco Mission neighborhood on the eve of May 1, 2012, having redirected their rage at the I percent toward the “bougies” whose cars and coffeehouses were more conveniently at hand. The rhetorical strategy was almost identical to that of the right. If the Tea Party made everything about the asshole liberals, the anarchists made everything about the asshole yuppies. It comes to pretty much the same thing. The difference, over and above the violence of the latter, is that the anarchists are a marginal if troubling element in the Occupy movement, whereas the assholism of the right is far more extensive and coherent at every level—not because conservatives are bigger assholes than liberals, but because they’re much better organized about it.