‘Scary’ Monsters

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

 

One of the words I would abolish from our political lexicon is “scary.” It is an insipid, empty adjective with its roots in “one weird trick”–style digital gimmickry, beloved of such master click-baiters as the editors over at Vox. A recent example comes from our friends (“If a man’s character is to be abused, there’s nobody like a relation to do the business”) over at The Bulwark, which carried a headline reading: “The Scary Spectacle of Trump’s Last Month in Office.”

 

(The piece, by Brian Karem, opens: “Some may think of these as ‘the last days of Pompeii.’ If that reference strikes you as too erudite to be fitting, you might prefer to think of the month ahead as ‘the last days of chaos in a blender.’” To borrow from Margaret Thatcher: If you have to tell people you’re erudite. . . . And The Last Days of Pompeii was inescapable as a miniseries on ABC — as allusions go, not exactly Finnegans Wake.)

 

“Scary” used in this way is irritating for a half a dozen reasons. One of them is that it is a base-stealing stratagem, a way of suggesting, usually in a headline, that the following matter is shocking or revelatory. And what follows almost always is something that is neither shocking nor revelatory. In the Bulwark piece, the “scary” headline is undercut by the copy itself: “The final days of the Donald Trump administration are upon us, and they look much like every other day at the White House for the last four years.” To which some might reply: “Oh, but every other day at the White House for the last four years has been scary, too!”

 

In which case, grow the . . . heck . . . up.

 

Scary is a weak and dishonest means of gaining influence, with the writer ordering readers to feel a certain way about a subject rather than causing them to feel that way, which takes a little bit of effort and skill. If you were to read a straightforward account of the crimes of Jack the Ripper, nobody would need to tell you that you should be shocked and disgusted by them. Margaret Thatcher did not need to tell anybody that she was a lady, or that she was powerful — the facts of the case were enough.

 

But the facts of the case are not always with you. A particularly dopey CNN headline over a particularly dopey Chris Cillizza piece reads: “The Republican convention just proved this scary fact about the GOP.” The “scary fact” is that the most prominent voices and faces of the Republican Party in 2020 exhibited a cultish devotion to the president, and that they were willing to subordinate “what the party believes in” to the project of seeing him reelected. “Scary” means “causing fright or alarm.” Because this is not 1972, it is not even surprising, much less frightful, to discover that Republican bosses do not believe in much. Slavish and, indeed, idolatrous devotion to presidents has been a fact of American political life for a long time now, from John Kennedy to those Hollywood dolts singing literal hymns of praise to Barack Obama a few years back. Cillizza repeats several bits of over-the-top praise of Trump at the 2020 convention from the likes of Kimberly Guilfoyle and Charlie Kirk. And Guilfoyle and Kirk are very much representative of current Republican leadership.

 

That isn’t scary — the word you’re looking for here is embarrassing.

 

New York magazine, in a rare display of wit, offered a spin on the formulation: “On Guns, Liberals Are Flirting with the Politics of Fear. That’s Scary.”

 

Scary also contributes to another regrettable aspect of our political journalism: Putting the writer at the center. All of that performative “empathy” (they mean sympathy) in our journalism and our politics is a way of saying: “Look at me! Because what is interesting here is not how these poor people are suffering from famine or drought or plague or the aftermath of an earthquake but how I feel about it — and how I feel about it reflects very well on me, indeed!” Scary is a minor-league version of that: “All these socialists in the Democratic Party are scary! Really scary! Really, really scary! See, I feel exactly the same way you rubes do, which means you can trust me — and, now, a word from our sponsors!”

 

Leaning on scary causes much of our political journalism to read as though it were written and edited by eleven-year-olds (the wrong kind of eleven-year-old — you know the type) but it also obscures the actual considerations before us by fortifying the good-guys/bad-guys, white-hats/black-hats approach to politics. Intelligent and responsible political debate recognizes that very little of what’s at controversy in our public life has to do with unadulterated good and evil, or absolutes of any kind, but instead involves balancing competing goods, tradeoffs, and prioritizing among legitimate interests. Take, for example, the recent debate over a new round of COVID-relief checks. It can be simultaneously true that (1) this measure will have the unhappy effect of reinforcing and legitimizing the “waiting for my check” model of government; and (2) that it is necessary or prudent in the current situation. Each of those must be taken into consideration and weighed against the other. That is what functional political debate mostly does. Declaring those with views and priorities different from your own scary — or extreme or whatever other moralistic adjective is in vogue at the moment — isn’t a way to advance that debate, but a way to avoid having the debate at all, and to prevent its being had by others. And it is necessary for us to have the real debate: Even where there are genuine moral fundamentals at stake — as in the matter of abortion — we still are faced with competing goods, and a democratic conversation that cannot acknowledge that and make provision for it eventually will produce a democracy that is ineffective and unstable.

 

Democracy is much more the result of conversations than the result of votes. It is for this reason that in modern totalitarian regimes, under which the people neither have access to the ballot box nor to the ammunition box, rulers who will never face election and who face scant prospect of revolution nonetheless find it necessary to suppress and distort public discourse. If people are permitted to speak freely, then they will start to figure things out — and that is indeed scary, if you are a tyrant. The emerging totalitarian tendency in the United States is in much the same way focused on suppressing, perverting, and controlling language. For modern political journalism, the pursuit of public influence and the pursuit of commercial success are conjoined by sheer quantifiable reach — commodity eyeballs — which is why such nonsense as scary so frequently disfigures otherwise erudite outlets.