By Greg Weiner
Monday, January 06, 2020
As 2019 drew to a close, Chief Justice John Roberts
issued his annual report on the federal judiciary, which opened with a paean to
civics education, the pedagogical function of judicial opinions, and the
importance of an independent judiciary in the face of mob rule. This is not
ordinarily the stuff of manic headlines. But then, we live in the Age of Trump,
when every event must be traced to the person of the president.
The report “seemed to be addressed, at least in part, to
the president himself,” Adam Liptak of the New York Times explained.
“The nominal focus of the report was the importance of civics education, but
even a casual reader could detect a timely subtext, one concerned with the
foundational importance of the rule of law.” CNN helpfully connected dots, too:
“Although the report does not specifically cite Donald Trump’s past attacks on
the judiciary, [Roberts’s] statement is a clear attempt to bolster federal judges
across the country and shore up the reputation of the judicial branch as the
other branches of government have dissolved into a bitter morass.”
Is it possible the chief justice of the United States was
bolstering his branch of government because that is what branches of government
should do? Of course, Roberts might have been sending coded signals to the
American public by means of journalistic interpreters. But the far likelier
explanation is that the cigar was just a cigar. What is striking about the
dustup around the report is the failure to contemplate the latter scenario.
These days, it is always about Donald Trump — and that is exactly the problem.
The insistence on interpreting every event through a
presidential lens illustrates why Trump has become so polarizing: For Democrats
and Republicans alike, he symbolizes too much. In the terms of classical
rhetoric, he is the ultimate synecdoche.
Synecdoche, a device by which a part of something stands
for the whole or the whole of something stands for a part, is often used to
simplify. In political campaigns, it solves a problem of prediction: Voters
rarely know what will actually arise during a candidate’s term in office.
Synecdoches provide them with identifiable stances from which a candidate’s probable
reaction to future circumstances can be inferred.
A presidential candidate’s position on gun issues, for
example, is relevant to barely a fraction of a president’s actual work. But to
voters on either side, it symbolizes a range of cultural and political views.
Similarly, abortion policy is not a daily concern in any White House. But for
Democratic and Republican voters alike, a candidate’s stance on the issue
represents a broader set of beliefs. That is why Trump has rhetorically
prioritized both issues.
Yet the most important synecdoche in American politics
today is not one of Trump’s beliefs but rather Trump himself. Candidates at all
levels of government — from city councils to state legislatures — orient their
campaigns either for or against him, regardless of whether the offices they
seek bear any relationship to the presidency. The reason is that one’s attitude
toward Trump is shorthand for one’s attitudes toward everything else.
This is the key to understanding the polarizing dimension
of the Trump presidency. It is not simply that people feel strongly for and
against Trump, although they do. Nor is it just that his outsize personality
inflates those perspectives. It is that his supporters and his opponents fear
the totality of their worldviews is at risk in every battle concerning him.
A politics of synecdoche tends in that direction. It
heightens the stakes of the symbols under dispute because they are parts
representing a much larger whole. A legislature left to itself could almost
certainly compromise on discrete issues such as guns or abortion. But when
these issues represent broader worldviews, compromise is more perilous.
Positions harden and gravitate toward extremes.
Often, the symbols are inconsequential. In presidential
politics, for example, a candidate’s stance on the death penalty should be
irrelevant. The overwhelming majority of capital offenses are matters of state
law and have no bearing on the presidency. But when the death penalty signals
whether one prioritizes law and order or civil rights, compromise raises
questions about a more universal array of controversies that is — precisely
because it is universal — much less amenable to legislative bargaining. In this
sense, synecdoche is a likelier explanation than malice or intransigence for
the failure of compromise on hot-button issues. Too much is on the line in each
single controversy because each one symbolizes so much.
But if the synecdoche becomes not merely a politician’s
positions but rather a politician himself, the result polarizes the electorate
and its representatives more completely. That is especially true when the
politician in question is the president, because the office has long had such a
swollen importance in American politics. And it is difficult to recall a
president who has symbolized more to his supporters and opponents than Donald
Trump has.
This applies as much to opponents who label themselves
“the resistance” as to supporters who wear Trump’s signature red caps. For each
side, those symbols denote not just discrete issues but rather a total
perspective on culture and politics. Disagreements mutate from matters of what
people believe to matters of who they are.
For Trump’s supporters, the president represents
everything from rebellion against “political correctness” — itself a synecdoche
for a range of issues including elite condescension, identity politics, and
race — to concerns about moral, economic, and cultural alienation. For his
critics, “resistance” signifies a slate of positions on immigration — a
synecdoche for compassion — as well as capitalism, civility, and other issues.
Synecdoche of such an acutely personalized sort
encourages a politics of winners and losers rather than give and take. If
everything — one’s entire disposition toward social and political concerns — is
at stake in every controversy surrounding Trump, the battle will be fought to
the end rather than bargained away.
Both parties’ intractable positions on impeachment
illustrate the point. For Republicans, following the evidence on impeachment
wherever it leads risks not just Trump’s occupancy of the Oval Office but also
everything else he represents. For Democrats, considering the possibility that
impeachment and removal is justified but imprudent hazards accession to an
entire cultural and political outlook they oppose. One result is that each
side’s concern becomes “owning” the other rather than resolving disagreements.
Symbolic politics can be useful. Synecdoche can simplify
complex issues and help voters predict how an aspiring leader will react to
unforeseeable eventualities. But when the president is himself the symbol,
polarization will inevitably intensify. That is among the lamentable
consequences of the cult of personality surrounding the modern White House
generally and its current occupant in particular. One long-term solution is to
shrink the presidency. The more immediate answer may be for voters and pundits
to disenthrall themselves from support of or opposition to Donald Trump. Though
that is difficult to do in no small part because Trump insists on making
everything about himself, the rest of us are not required to play along. We
shouldn’t, because not everything is about him. Want a healthier
politics? Start there.
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