Old Fictions, New Fictions – The Dispatch

Last night my wife and I were watching Line of Duty, a British police show. It’s pretty good, but that’s not relevant. One of the bosses had a throwaway line that my wife and I laughed pretty hard at. 

“At least we get to call them ‘prostitutes’ again.”

I originally wrote a few hundred words on the history of replacing “prostitute” with “sex worker,” but it grew to be too much of a distraction. Suffice it to say “prostitute” is a perfectly good word for the profession of, well, prostitution. Calling it sex work may have been intended as a way to legitimize and decriminalize the practice, and it had marginal success. But at the end of the day, it didn’t really destigmatize it. When a young woman—or man—tells their parents, “I’m going to be a sex worker,” the reaction is probably not very different than it would be if they said, “I’m going to be a prostitute.” Because most—I’m tempted to say “all”—decent parents don’t want that life for their kids. One of the eternal tasks of the intellectual is to distinguish between words and things and to understand that changing the word for a thing doesn’t change the thing itself. Francis Bacon called modes of thinking that distort or deviate from reality the “idols of the mind.”

When Confucius was asked what he would do if he was in charge, he said he would “rectify the names.” “A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve,” Confucius said. “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

I’ll spare you a long disquisition name-checking Plato, Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and the other usual suspects. The TLDR: Change the name of bleach to Hawaiian Punch and nothing good will come of it if anyone believes you. 

I was reading the inestimable Nellie Bowles’ newsletter, in which she declared that Donald Trump “was right about tariffs” and that “He won bigly, beautifully, dastardly.” Her primary evidence was what everyone is calling the EU “trade deal” (more on that in a moment):

As tariffs turn out to not be a catastrophe, the Secretary of Commerce, one Howard Lutnick, is buoyant. “Where are the ‘experts’ now?” he posted after the deal was reached, which is this administration’s thinly veiled “Let’s get ready to ruuuummmblllle!” They’re getting more confident. Next, all restaurants will face TrumpTariffs™, exemptions for American cuisine only (burger joints, steak houses, and strip clubs).

Now, I have no objection to calling the EU agreement a political victory for Trump. But Trump was not “right about tariffs.” For starters, the tariffs he originally wanted and announced to massive fanfare on “Liberation Day” didn’t happen. He backed off that, because the “experts” convinced the markets, especially the bond markets, that his plan would be disastrous. And the markets convinced Trump to retreat. An enormous number of people want to airbrush this fact from the record. Instead, they insist that because the economy hasn’t crashed, as many predicted after “Liberation Day,” that Trump has been proven “right about tariffs.” 

If I announce that I am going to drink a giant jug of bleach and then I’m talked out of it by the “experts,” if I then opt to drink instead a shot of bleach and survive, that doesn’t mean I get to say, “I was right all along about bleach-drinking.”

Then there’s the problem that most of these “trade deals” aren’t actually deals. They’re frameworks, verbal agreements, memorandums of understanding, and press releases. As John John Gustavsson explains for The Dispatch, the deal reached with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, isn’t a trade deal. She has no authority to make a trade deal. The framework she agreed to has to work its way through layers upon layers of political and bureaucratic mechanisms. 

First, the European Commission must approve it. That’s the easy part. Then it goes to the Council of the European Union, and that’s where things get interesting—or difficult, rather. The Council is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Senate, in that each member state has one vote regardless of size. For a trade agreement to pass, it typically needs a 55 percent majority—15 out of 27 states, and those 15 states must represent at least 65 percent of the Union’s population.

“But,” he adds, “that is not the only hurdle, nor the biggest.” It then has to get approved—unanimously—by national governments and the European parliament. In short: It’s frick’n complicated. If you want a sense of how slow Europe can be in deciding things it doesn’t want to do, consider that Turkey started its application for EU membership in the 1950s. No one seems to think the Turks will be admitted before the end of the millennium. 

What Trump got was a great headline. 

He got similar headlines on his “deals” that aren’t actual trade deals with the U.K., Japan, and other countries. 

Indeed, the currency of the Trump administration is the headline, the photo op, and the press release. It’s the condo-salesman approach to politics. In his first term, Trump announced a historic pact with North Korea on “denuclearization.” He got the handshake and the headline, but North Korea expanded its arsenal. He routinely said that America enjoyed the “greatest economy in history” prior to the COVID pandemic. It was a good economy, but not the best ever. He said he delivered the “biggest tax cut in history.” It was big—and mostly very good—but not the biggest ever. He proclaimed his replacement of NAFTA was a complete rewriting when it was a modest updating. He wanted Ukraine to say Joe Biden was under investigation for corrupt practices, and he’d do the rest. He made a similar demand of the Department of Justice after he lost the 2020 election, asking it to simply say they were investigating corrupt practices, and he’d do the rest. He’s very good at selling the sizzle as proof that there’s a steak. 

Which brings me back to tariffs. He hasn’t been proven “right” about tariffs. He keeps saying they’re paid by exporters (foreign countries or manufacturers) when it’s simply a fact that they’re paid by importers. He claims they’re not taxes; they are taxes. A flurry of headlines doesn’t change the underlying reality. They do change political reality, for a time. But the facts remain facts. 

What I find remarkable—hence my penchant for remarking upon it—is how postmodern Trump is. What I mean by that is postmodernism is shot through with a confusion of words and things and a sometimes-invincible conviction that feelings determine authentic truth. Romanticism and postmodernism share a conviction that truth is subjective and therefore obtainable on a retail, personal basis. There is no better example of the convergence of the romantic and the postmodern than Trump’s famous claim that his net worth depends on how he feels about himself. Screw those external, objective measurements—I’m worth what I feel. 

Indeed, just today, in a classic example of Critical Trump Theory at work, Donald Trump ordered the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the numbers in the agency’s latest jobs report, and therefore the BLS had to be biased against him.  

Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and that crowd treat language less as a medium for accessing reality and more as the structure of reality. “Discourse” for Foucault produces reality. People aren’t insane or criminal so much as society imposes these labels on people. For Derrida, “there is nothing outside the text (“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”)” means—or has been interpreted to mean—that reality is simply what we say it is. “Truth” is just the dominant “narrative.”

The narrative is that Trump was proven right on tariffs, but the reality is that tariffs do real things in the real world. The doomsaying might have been overblown (America is less reliant on trade than many people on the left and right think), but the tradeoffs are real, and widget importers don’t care about your narrative—they have to make payroll. It may take time for the real-world consequences of Trump’s protectionism to play out, but they will, and I don’t believe for a moment he’ll be proven right. 

Students and fans of postmodernism undoubtedly hate the idea that Trump is postmodern, because they like to use postmodernism as a gnosis, a professional language, a shibboleth that signifies they’re members of an elite club. Postmodern jargon is not the lingua franca of what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs,” but it is a distinct dialect of it. All of the fashionable concepts of the campus left (which, alas, is not restricted to campuses) are the products of people who think “discourse” produces reality. If you peel back the layers on “Defund the police,” you’ll find it’s an understanding of reality shaped by words rather than facts. You have to peel back all the stuff about social construction of power, systems of oppression, and all that junk, but eventually you’ll get to the claim that criminals aren’t criminals, they’re simply people society identifies as criminals. Don’t call them “juvenile delinquents” or “young offenders.” Call them “justice-involved youth.” That way the problem isn’t what the individual people did or do—and how we should deal with them—but the system of oppression, the “carceral state,” etc. 

More to the point, the people who say “defund the police” are just as likely as anyone else to call the cops when someone is breaking into their house. But until then, they get to identify as the kinds of people who say “defund the police.” If Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York, he might follow through on his luxury beliefs and disband all sorts of police units that protect other people, but you can be sure his protective detail will remain well-funded. The whole point of luxuries, after all, is that other people don’t benefit from them. That’s why they call them luxuries, not commodities or staples. 

Regardless, the fact is that once you realize that postmodern word games aren’t nearly so clever as their players want you to believe, you’ll find that everyone plays these games, which is why all of those philosophers from Confucius onward have been talking about the problem with linguistic distortions of reality. I mean, Bacon was lamenting the “idols of the mind” long before Stanley Fish and Michel Foucault were born. 

If you think of the headline game as just an extension of word games and narrative fights, everything makes a lot more sense. The “Inflation Reduction Act” did as little for inflation as the “Patriot Act” did for patriotism, but the labels do what the labellers intended. “Climate justice” is about industrial policy, pork, and wealth redistribution for specific groups and “stakeholders.” But it sounds like something new and important. “Reproductive justice” is the “Inflation Reduction Act” of reproduction, as it is mostly a euphemism for abortion rights. The fights over Israel are a contest of narrative competition far, far more than they are a fight over the facts. 

And it’s not just in politics either. When I stay at hotels with my dogs, I’m often told dogs can stay for free, I just have to pay a “non-refundable deposit,” which is just another way of saying “fee” not “free.” 

One of the best examples is the “reality show.” Most reality shows are staged, scripted, and directed to seem like reality. Indeed, the mere fact that contestants or participants are on camera in the first place means they won’t be behaving like normal people. An actual reality show would involve long stretches of people sleeping, eating, watching TV, and going to the bathroom.

It’s become a cliché that Trump brought the logic of reality TV to politics, but that doesn’t mean the cliché is entirely wrong. What it misses is that the logic of the reality show was always present in politics—he just took it to another level. The irony is that one of the things people love about him is his claim to be a force of rectification. He claims credit for killing wokeness (some truth there), but also for restoring the ability to say “Merry Christmas” again. Again, there’s something to his claims of tearing down the old fictions, but he’s not restoring truth, rectifying names, or re-centering objective reality. He simply replacing—or trying to replace—the old fictions of the left with new fictions of the right. It’s still just a fight for reality-defying narratives and vindicating headlines that don’t reflect reality.