Bullshit Politics

Unserious politics for a serious age

The bullshitter…does not reject the authority of truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

—Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”

I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, which is to say in the sunlit plateau of Clinton-era America. (It was sunny for us in the mainstream of the West then, at least; for others, there and elsewhere, it was grim, or at least tumultuous.) For those of my cohort and a little before and a little later, reality really intruded with September 11, 2001. For some, the sort of people who mouth the cliche that “hard times make strong men”, I suppose the end of the end of history came as a stimulus; for a great many others, it came as tragedy compounded by hypocrisy.

For my particular reference group, however, the coming of the age of wars meant something different. Life didn’t actually change all that much. There was no homefront mobilization, and very little sacrifice beyond taking off our shoes at the airport. Great things were afoot, but somewhere … over there. Still, something had changed, some set of expectations and assumptions had vanished or transformed. The legendary post-9/11 Onion coverage hit exactly the right note with its headline “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again”.

The world is much more serious now. One rarely hears the drumbeat of optimism about how war, occasionally narrowly defined, is a thing of the past. The news from Ukraine suggests that great-power war looks less like Tom Clancy, or even Tim O’Brien, and more like “In Flanders Fields” with drones. The news from Sudan and Tigray is no less grim. And for every new breakthrough in medical science, like the advent of malaria and even melanoma vaccines, there is a reminder that vaccine resistance—denialism—is soaring.

Despite this turn, U.S. (and, I think, U.K.) politics have become ever more unserious. Let me be more specific. There has always been an element of hucksterism in democracy, and there have always been instances (or worse) of corruption and injustice. What I specifically mean is the rise of bullshit as a driving mode of engagement with the public sphere. Serious times, it turns out, do not make serious men.

The news that the U.S. House of Representatives has launched an impeachment probe into President Biden is one instance of this bullshit. It’s not my goal here to persuade you that there’s no merit to these claims, although I’m deeply skeptical. Nor am I even highlighting that the progress of these steps toward an inevitable impeachment seems obviously timed to detract from a conviction in one of the Trump trials; that, I could always chalk up to the sharp elbows of political calculation.

Rather, I’m asserting that the presence or absence of merit is immaterial to the advance of the probe itself—that the bulk of representatives making these claims are doing so in a deeply cynical way that has no regard for deliberation. The way you know this is true is that if a representative find the evidence against President Biden compelling then they should have voted to impeach President Trump a dozen times over.

Impeachment was once grave. They never even impeached Nixon! Even the Clinton impeachment was viewed as a somber step, and the underlying cause—that someone charged with faithfully executing the laws wasn’t—was arguably one that sensible people could agree with. (The mishandling of the charges, and turning it into a lurid sex scandal, turned people off and delivered a win to the Clintonistas. The problem of weirdoes wrecking Republican playbooks is not one that began with the Too Online staffers of the DeSantis campaign.)

Impeachment has since been debased. The failure of the Trump impeachments, particularly the second one, makes it increasingly unlikely that removal will ever be possible, making impeachment proceedings more of a ritual denunciation. (And is it even possible that Biden would be removed now? Indeed, would Senate Republicans calculate that removing even a guilty as hell Biden would be in their interests?) Impeachment, then, is now bullshit.

I think you can sustain the case that a lot of our political discussions are similarly constituted. And the examples can be easily multiplied at the federal, state, and local levels. Even internationally: much of Russia’s public diplomacy and influence campaigns, for instance, is bullshit at industrial scale. (Moscow is not alone in this, although I do tend to think that Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore had it right about the United States being hypocritical rather than two-faced.)

Not all that is controversial—or harmful—is bullshit, to be sure. I would never accuse the John Birch Society, for instance, of that sin. And at times—like the depths of the Covid crisis—bullshit might be dissipated, at least temporarily. (The Trump administration was no stranger to bullshit as governing strategy but it also delivered Operation Warp Speed.) But bullshit has a peculiar appeal, an evolutionarily adaptive quality, in times of firm partisan division, when voters vote as much or more against as for. Why make persuasive arguments, which can be disputed or even disproven, when there’s few people to be persuaded and more fundraising opportunities to create? The incentives at the mass level are no less hopeful; watching online political discourse is certainly an exercise in wading through bullshit.

What is dismaying, then, is that the incentives do not point to an easy way out. People will sometimes say that “the fever will break” and serious people will return to politics, but this is to misunderstand the problem. Most people in public life either adapt to the times or are chosen by the circumstances of the times. The essence of bullshittery, of course, is that it produces a disregard for truth, and such casual habits of disdaining evidence help both the pseudosophisticated cynic and the zealot to disregard disconfirming facts.

The incentives for disregarding truth—for treating governance as performance rather than policy—will not go away just because they produce bad results, or at least not just because they produce a few bad results in places far away. Nor is it easy to be confident that a reckoning with serious problems will lead to sobriety rather than fanatical excesses. The First World War didn’t teach Germany to be more realistic or the United States to be more responsible; that is why we call it the First.