The Politics of Superlatives
When your political opponent is devious and highly competent, the language you use to fight them has to be bold and bolder to defeat them.
The best political system is one where the decisions made by those with the most power are almost never felt in the normal course of the average citizen’s daily routine.
Political efficacy is more than just a feeling that one’s voice is heard in policy debates; it is a feeling that the system is not a barrier to an individual’s goals and aspirations.
The problem, with high political efficacy, though, is that it renders politics—at least on a federal level—practically individual to most citizens, except during election time.
And this is a problem for party politics, which is invested in selling itself as an invaluable ally to its base in the fight against a government constructed to, in every way, harry and harass and generally worsen the quality of life for citizens.
When politics is functional in a limited republican government that devolves power to state and local levels, it is almost invisible. When politics is dysfunctional, however, it is highly visible. There are miscarriages of justice and incidences of unfairness everywhere: the effects are concrete and can be denounced. Politicians can tap into a heightened sense of existential fear: that their audience’s livelihoods will be eradicated by outright maliciousness or haphazard governmental mismanagement. This rhetoric—used to particular effect by populists—lends potency to their words because it taps into natural law and the survival instinct. “Vote for me or watch your life destroyed by an administration whose policies hurt your bottom line,” motivates the base because it paints electoral results in clear terms: vote for change in a candidate who will personally work to your benefit, or vote for the status quo: an administration that will coolly shrug its shoulder in indifference to the deleterious effects its policy have on working Americans. Not to vote for change becomes synonymous with personal suicide.
But while populist politicians can speak to clear failures of policy and clear dysfunction within the organs of power, they can only speak of solutions in vague aspirational terms: they can speak broadly of change and of increased prosperity and social harmony. But they cannot tout specific policies that have proven records of creating change for the better.
Prior to the election of the current president, a populist politician had never successfully run for and won a public office. Major parties have policy positions they can fall back on: cutting defense spending has long been code on the left for ending foreign entanglements and the violence and atrocities they tend to engender; cutting taxes has long been code on the right for freeing business owners from the government yoke, leading to greater prosperity.
But populism has no evidentiary record of success. It has also painted itself into the corner by using hyperbole that represents its opponents as sneaky, underhanded and highly competent. Effectively dismantling a vast and evil conspiracy is a Herculean task and requires language reflective of this.
Hence the superlatives. A populist policy cannot be adequate, it must be great: the greatest in the history of the country. It cannot simply stop a decline in prosperity; it must reverse it and result in unprecedented levels of wealth creation. Harmony between the citizenry must be at levels never seen before.
The problem, of course, is that “good” in political terms is not an unqualified absolute. Representative government is about channeling interest: a people group whose geographical proximity leads to certain shared interests (though it does not ensure that everyone agrees on everything) appoints someone who will argue their case on a wider stage.
Congress is constructed so that different interest groups are balanced against each other: on its own, one does not have enough power to set policy. But by appealing to commonalities and convincing others of the merit in their position, they may win over a plurality or majority of other interest groups who rally together towards a common end.
“Good,” clearly, is not one thing to all people.
But the dualistic morality of populism, wherein one group vies against an evil “other” whose primary motivation is destructive of everything the former holds dear, doesn’t admit this kind of nuance. And this contributes to the inability of populists to govern: this dualistic morality is reflexive and must immediately paint anyone who critiques—however mildly—the efficacy of populist policy as part of that destructive “other” bent on its downfall. By assigning a malicious intent to criticism, arguments on the merits are not only sidestepped but anything said against populism is invalidated.
This lack of pushback helps create a feedback loop that only leads to the use of more and more superlatives: if one’s initial policies bring unprecedented good, how much greater must the benefits of subsequent action be? This language becomes substituted for the proof that cannot be provided by policies, which have a much more mixed record of success as they effect different interest groups in different ways: some for the better and some for the worse.
Virtue, according to Aristotle, is a conscious act of choosing an action likely to bring about a positive end: it is a right action chosen at the right time, directed towards the right object and for the right motive. It brings about an end in the right way and usually involves a course of action that is an intermediary between an act excessive in virtue and one defective in virtue.
This definition is politically significant because it requires an appraisal of available options. Representative government is obliged to enter into this calculus any time one interest group attempts to win others over to its side. Aristotle’s definition of virtue does not reject objective values, but it does recognize that the physical universe is not perfect and that absolute values manifest themselves in different ways. Again, this is something with which representatives must grapple when making arguments about the merits of their viewpoints and their proposed policy solutions.
Populism and its superlative culture—which projects one definition of good onto many disparate actors—ignores this and stubbornly and illogically insists that its proscription is the only path to prosperity. When reality reveals the falsehood in this sentiment, it can do nothing but double down on the intensity of its language and the emotionally-driven rhetoric that won it power in the first place.