Words Matter

Josh Marshall seems to be the leading blogger of the left these days.

Truth be told, I have a hard time reading most lefty-bloggers. I'm not talking the ignorant, stupid ones (I have a hard time reading ignorant stupid conservative blogs, too, and there are plenty of them - including a couple on my blogroll). No, I'm talking about the A-list liberal blogs.

The Daily Kos gets a lot of attention. He's behind the Political State Report, a large group-blog featuring writers from every state, and officially all political outlooks. But at the end of the day, most of his material seems like DNC spin. And occasionally he uncorks a real lulu, as today:

Saddam was, whatever else you can say about him, a bullwark against Islamic fundamentalism. The US is increasingly unable to push back against the rising tide of fundamentalist in that nation. And in the long run, that may prove deadlier than an impotent Saddam.

Atrios Eschaton? He loses a lot of points for the name. The blog is occasionally interesting, but takes things like the LA Times polls at uncritical face value; when a conservative blogger parrots Fox News, the left taunts and ridicules. I think the irony is self-evident.

Marshall seems to be the Tiffany name among lefty-blogs lately. I've read Marshall a few times (he's a good writer) and heard him on the Hewitt show (he's a good writer).

But three things bug me. Two of the aren't Marshall's fault - well, not entirely. He uses three names - it's "Joshua Micah Marshall" - which strikes me as groaningly pretentious, but is also none of my business. He seems to seed his writing with generous dollops of urban wonk lifestyle droppings - which bothers me a lot than middle-aged single-dad musician lifestyle droppings.

But Marshall writes like a wonk - which is fine, because he is a policy wonk, and does it for a living, the lucky sod. But it also shows something of the perspective from which he writes. Like this piece.

Words matter. Often, that's just a conceit of people in the word business. But it's also true.

A few moments ago I was in a cab heading toward the DC train station. On the radio, the president was commenting on the recent troubles in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism.

He said something to this effect: We're in a war on terrorism. When the civilized world expands democracy it's a challenge to the terrorists' totalitarian vision. And so they strike back with increasing terror. They're hoping the civilized world will flinch. But we're not going to flinch, and so forth.

I understand what the president's saying. I recognize a general truth in it.

But the generality, vagueness and abstraction is the problem. They are becoming the engines of policy incoherence and the cover for domestic bad-actors who want to get this country into fights few Americans signed up for.

Leave aside that the war in Iraq exposes what must be the biggest perception gap in American history (the vast majority of Americans approved, and continue to approve, of the war that "few Americans signed up for").

Are generality, vagueness and abstraction "the problem?"

No, not in and of themselves. One of the keys to communicating is knowing ones' audience. Bush's audience, the American people, are not only not policy wonks - I'd argue most Americans are cordially irritated by policy wonkery - but really don't care about the details of how government implements the policies that they heard about on their seven-second soundbites. It's anathema to the way a wonk operates. The man and woman in the street just wants government to work. The wonk wants to know the details.

A good communicator - and a good leader - knows this, and figures out how to express the goal to the people, in terms that everyone from custom combiners to policy analysts can twig to. Ronald Reagan spoke in generalities, certainly - and policy wonks excoriated him for it. But the people aren't wonks - and the goals, or as Marshall would put it, "vague, abstract generalities," resonated with the voters. In contrast, Al Gore and Bill Clinton, being people in love with the inner machinery of government, spoke in specific, concrete terms about their goals for government; it can be argued that neither was (or would have been) anything like the leader Reagan was - but wonks (like Marshall) loved them both for exactly that reason.

Most importantly, Reagan accomplished a lot - his "vague, abstract generalities" eventually became reality, through tax cuts, the demolition of the Berlin Wall, wholesale decommissioning of nuclear weapons, a peace dividend, and a boom that only unravelled during the last years of the Clinton Administration.

Bush's administration is still a work in progress. The stakes are immensely high. And while the people generally have little background in policy, they have immense background in results. Expressing a "vague, abstract, general" vision that never substantiates itself will eventually destroy the administration.

Words matter, indeed. But that phrase cuts both ways. Marshall continues:

We've heard critiques of this phrase, the 'war on terror,' ever since 9/11. But only now, I think, are we seeing the full effects of its mystification. We're at war with al Qaida and any and all radical Islamist groups who threaten mass casualty terrorism against America or her vital interests abroad. We are at war, even if it's a war fought by non-conventional means against non-conventional, non-state entities. That's who we're at war with: a loose-knit network of radical Islamist groups who practice mass-casualty terrorism against us.

Radical Islamist revisionism is a primary foreign policy challenge for the US and probably will remain so for a very long time. That understanding should (and already has) decisively shape our policies toward the various states in the Middle East. But we're not at war with it any more than we were or could be 'at war' with right-wing or left-wing extremism in the second half of the 20th century.

If words truly matter, then I'd like Mr. Marshall to suggest a better word to convey to an audience of non-wonks exactly what we're doing in a mortal struggle with people that want to achieve their ends through killing their opponents (or enough of them to terrorize the rest)? People whose ideal, in their own words, is a version of theology applied through totalitarian means, and who operate in groups that are "Fascist" by any rational definition of the term?

Because if, indeed, Marshall's complaint is with "vague, abstract, general" language, isn't it his job to be specific and concrete?

Just as vague and abstract language makes for bad prose, it is also the handmaiden of bad policy and the abettor of buck-passing.

All this talk about civilization, totalitarianism, fascism and terror is just preventing us from looking at what's happening and recognizing what our own interests are.

While Marshall is right in the sense that it can happen, I don't think that's the case here. I think the Administration has recognized our interests, and is acting in what it sees is their best interest. Remember - it's not the Administration's job to necessarily get complete consensus as to what our interests are - but I think you'll find broad electoral agreement they include:

• Removing WMDs from the terrorists' catalog of options (and whether Iraq "would have" had WMDs in five to ten years or not, it's a safe bet they won't now)
• Preventing Islamofascism's threat to the entire Western (as in "free world") economy,
• trying to head off the next 9/11, and to choke off the supply of funds and weapons that are making the streets of Israel run red, and hopefully prevent that from being imported to the US

Did the Administration express a case toward these goals in terms that were "vague, abstract and general?" Arguably - and the argument is coming from people whose language itself, like that of Marshall, isn't any more specific.

They also make it possible for some people to convince themselves that it's not a screw-up that we've turned Iraq into a terrorist magnet. After all we're at war with 'the terrorists' and it makes sense that 'the terrorists' would attack us anyway, if only in a new venue. And we always knew it would be a long fight, a long twilight struggle, and yada, yada, yada and the rest of it. Same with the mumbo-jumbo about totalitarianism.

Marshall says this as if all is a given. Among his audience, no doubt, it is...

Look at the difference thus far between Afghanistan and Iraq. In the first place, we drained the swamp. In the second, we've made the swamp.

It's really that simple.

Only if you either claim clairvoyance or look at the world through a lens that is every bit as rosy (to your worldview) as Marshall would no doubt claim his opponents do.

Marshall continues:

Bear in mind that the author of these words is a fairly convinced Wilsonian, a strong supporter of our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, someone who's convinced that our values cannot be divorced from our national security interests, a believer in the power for good of American military might, and someone who thinks progressives who recoil at this administration's excesses should avoid the safe-harbor of foreign policy Realism (creeping Scowcroftism).

And I can respect the views of the Democrats who realize that in an imperfect world we may have to enforce peace and security through imperfect means - while adding that the actions Marshall lists, Kosovo and Bosnia, were all about values, and concerned "National Security Interests" only in a "vague, abstract and general" way.

But the White House is being run by men and women who've already made a lot of really stupid mistakes that are going to cost a lot of American lives, money and credibility. And now they're trying to hide from accountability in their own idiot abstractions.

Leave aside that the jury is still very much out about how things are going in Iraq. Marshall believes his sources, I'll believe mine.

The real point? Sometimes an "idiot abstraction" is exactly what is needed.

Marshall's ideological forebears wailed and fumphered about Reagan's "Evil Empire" incantation, and the "vague, abstract, general" nature of so much of his policy. The only way they'd have been right is if the implementation of the policy had also been vague, abstract and general. It wasn't.

The Administration's challenge isn't necessarily to be as specific about its goals as a policy wonk wants it to be. It's to implement the "vague, abstract, general" goals successfully.

Posted by Mitch at August 26, 2003 08:21 AM