Strategic Ambiguity

 I was listening to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast's coverage of the RNC the other week, and they made an interesting point that the issue of Ukraine was strangely absent from the convention. If someone were teleported to our world without any knowledge of our geopolitical context, they might even come away from the RNC without knowing that this conflict exists. To be sure, a few hardline isolationists (Tucker, for one, obviously couldn't resist) went off-teleprompter to deliver some pro-Putin talking points. But, for the most part, people simply tried not to mention the subject. Israel, by contrast, was foregrounded repeatedly on almost every night. 

The podcast hosts speculated that this was due to the fact that "Israel unites the Republican Party, whereas Ukraine divides it"—and so, the platform speakers had decided to emphasize the former and simply not to mention the latter. The hosts also observed that the exact inverse situation prevails among the Democrats. Ukraine unites the party; whereas Israel divides it. Thus, they prognosticated, at the DNC in August, we will probably be hearing a great deal about Ukraine but almost nothing about Israel. 

I think this observation somewhat overstates the degree of ideological uniformity in both parties. On the Democratic side, after all, there are a few progressives who are tepid at best in their support of Ukraine. There remains a large contingent of left-wing anti-interventionists in the Democratic rank-and-file; and these will often find common ground in practice with conservative isolationists, even if they reach their stances through completely different philosophical pathways. As for the Republicans, Trump has brought into the fold a large and growing number of Neo-Nazis and antisemites, who have their own pseudo-reasons to oppose Israel. 

But broadly it remains true that a greater proportion of the Republican coalition can line up behind support of Israel, and a greater proportion of the Democratic coalition still backs Ukraine. And, for this reason, it is in each party's interest to constantly mention one of the two conflicts and paper over the other's existence. 

I could hardly wish for a better illustration of Walter Lippmann's theory of coalition-building in Public Opinion. He mentions in one chapter of the book, "The Transfer of Interest," that politicians—when they are presenting a party platform—will often resort to vague formulations. For those unversed in the arts of political communication, these more nebulous verbal formulae may simply look at first like bad writing. "Why couldn't they just say what they mean?", they may wonder. But, as Lippmann explains, these thickets of opaque verbiage serve a strategic purpose: they occlude the parts of the platform on which there is actually significant disagreement within the coalition. 

By way of example, Lippmann goes point-by-point through the acceptance speech of the Republican presidential nominee in 1916, Charles Evans Hughes. He notes a number of vague formulations in Hughes's speech, whenever they touch on certain sore spots and ongoing points of contention within the Republican Party. He cites phrases such as "correct principles," which the partisans of mutually exclusive policy positions could all happily adopt, since each believes his own principles are indeed the "correct" ones. 

Likewise, on the subject of the then-raging conflict in Europe: Hughes said, "I stand for the unflinching maintenance of all American rights on land and sea." It's the perfect sort of question-begging formulation for a political coalition. Everyone together—those who favored U.S. intervention in the European war and those who opposed it—could agree in the abstract that the country's "rights" ought to be maintained. The real dispute—over just what rights the country had, and how far they extended—could then be safely tabled for the moment, for each side of the argument could rest content that their view of the matter had been contained already within the one formulation "rights." 

This is one rhetorical strategy, then, for maintaining a political coalition: the tautology (say something that is good by definition—like "correct principles" or "rights"—and everyone will come away feeling represented; for does not every side to every conflict believe that its opinion is the "good" one?); but it is not the only such strategy available. Charles Evans Hughes tries out others as well. He also succeeds in a different but closely-related strategy: that of offering a sop to each side. He says, for instance, that the United States must adopt toward Mexico a policy of "firmness" tempered with "friendship." Lippmann points out: The "firmness" was for the hawks; the "friendship" for the doves. 

Norman Mailer, in his classic New Journalism account of the 1968 Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Miami and Chicago, respectively, notes a number of examples of similar political behavior. Nixon in Miami, he observes, is especially adept at it: offering "law and order" to one side, but simultaneously reframing it as a "justice" issue and a matter of protecting "the first civil right," which is "to be free of domestic violence." It's "[a] feint to the Right; a feint to the Left," as Mailer observes. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats in Chicago, in Mailer's telling, were in complete unison in pledging fealty to the goal of "Peace in Vietnam." The most hard-bitten anti-Communist hawk and the most pink fellow-traveling dove could all get on board with that formulation. It was the "correct principles" and "all rights on land and sea" of its time. Everyone could believe that their approach would be the one to deliver Peace. And indeed, even Nixon would be content with that formulation. It transcended not only the division inside one of the two major parties, but the party system itself. Nixon too was all for "peace," he declared—it just needed to be "peace with honor." 

Such vagueness does not reflect a paucity of thought or an incapacity to think clearly. Indeed, political rhetoric can be quite precise indeed when members of the coalition all agree on something. It is only when the coalition is internally divided on an issue that politicians will resort to the devices of tautologies and sops. 

On the subject of Ukraine—if forced to address it—Republicans today will often use tautologies. Trump promises that he will "end the war." And who doesn't want that? It's the "Peace in Vietnam" of our time. The GOP hawks can come away thinking Trump means he will continue the defense of Ukraine until they can cast out Putin's forces. The isolationists and the pro-Putin brigade can content themselves that he really means (and this is much closer to the truth) that he will pressure Ukraine to make concessions to Putin's war aims, so that the latter can effectively declare victory. 

The Democrats, meanwhile, tend to use the strategy of sops to both sides, when forced to discuss Israel. Both Harris and Biden will emphasize that U.S. support for Israel's "self-defense" is "ironclad," but also that the country's military must "do more to address the suffering of Palestinian civilians" in Gaza. To some extent, this rhetorical strategy borders on tautology too: We must support Israel's war to the extent that it is justified, but not to the extent that it isn't. We must support its "self-defense," but not anything it does that exceeds the bounds of legitimate self-defense. 

There's something for everyone in such a statement, for who could oppose justified or legitimate things? What the rhetoric doesn't tell us is exactly what means Israel is entitled to deploy in its war against Hamas—and that is deliberate. For if the politicians were to get any more specific, they would have to confront the part of their coalition that wants to halt transfers of military supplies to Israel. 

And indeed, as Lippmann recognizes, sometimes the different elements within a political coalition are so completely polarized on an issue that no verbal formula, no matter how vague or tautological, will suffice to bring them together. Probably we have reached this point already within each party, on the issues of Ukraine and Israel respectively. The Republican Party includes people whose entire political identity is based on being more hawkish than the Democrats on Russian aggression. It also—now, thanks to Trump, Carlson, et al.—includes people whose entire political identity is based around admiring Putin and seeking to align U.S. foreign policy with his strategic objectives. This is the sort of categorical divergence that is almost impossible to heal with any verbal sop or tautological abstraction. 

The same goes for the Democrats, alas. The party includes people who believe that the country must support every action the Israeli military takes in its war against Hamas, no matter how abhorrent, or how blatantly at odds with international law, or how many innocent civilians perish along the way. It also includes a large bloc of people who believe that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state that does not deserve to exist. There is no way to bring those two viewpoints together. Ambiguous political speech, no matter how carefully worded, cannot bridge this divide. Vague formulae can do a lot, but they cannot work miracles. They cannot accomplish the logically impossible. 

And so, each party simply stops mentioning the issue that divides it. As Lippmann observes, "what cannot be compromised must be obliterated[;] when there is a question on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend it does not exist." This is clearly the rhetorical strategy that both major parties have adopted now as a last resort, when it comes to foreign policy. This is what the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast hosts were picking up on, in watching the RNC. The Republicans have simply decided to pretend the war in Ukraine does not exist. And there is a good chance likewise, as they noted, that speakers at the DNC in August will make the same choice vis-a-vis Israel: "Gaza? Never heard of it." 

As a friend of mine was pointing out to me, an inability to understand that political coalitions always have to be vague or silent on key points like this accounts for so many of our futile scholarly debates. Experts in constitutional law, for instance, are forever arguing over what the true "original public meaning" of a constitutional passage might have been. But, as my friend observed, the passage in question may have been left deliberately vague for a reason. The framers may have been unable to settle on a shared meaning, even at the time they wrote it, because they actually disagreed with each other. 

The fourteenth amendment, for instance, has proven notoriously difficult to interpret over the years. "Due process"—does that just mean a state legislature must pass a law to achieve a certain effect? Or does it protect people's substantive rights as well, and therefore empowers the courts to strike down state laws that violate certain fundamental rights? "Privileges and immunities of United States citizens"—which ones? What privileges inhere in being a United States citizen, as opposed to being a citizen of one's state? "Liberty"—what does that include? My "liberty" to open a slaughterhouse in violation of local zoning ordinances? Or my "liberty" to speak whatever language in the home with my children that I choose?

Many thousands of constitutional law students have wished for decades that the framers of this amendment had been a little more specific. If they had only expressed themselves more clearly, then perhaps we wouldn't be in this exegetical mess. The amendment therefore comes across as the product of poor drafting. 

But suppose the amendment was in fact worded exactly the way it needed to be in order to get ratified by the states. Perhaps it was exactly as precise as it could get away with—and no more so—while still having a large enough coalition of interests be willing to sign on to endorse it. Any greater specificity about the nature and scope of the rights it protects would have alienated too many people for it to pass. Whereas, as it stands, everyone could get behind "liberty" and "due process" in the abstract. They were the "correct principles" and "all rights on land and sea" of their time. 

And so, perhaps, the solution to the great mystery of the "original public meaning," my friend says, is that there is none. Perhaps "none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain," as the poet James Thomson wrote, "Because there is no light beyond the curtain." All the "oracles are dumb or cheat," as the poet says—that is, they either practice the silence strategy (pretend the disagreement in the coalition does not exist; i.e. the "dumb" strategy); or they utter something so vague and platitudinous that no member of the party could disagree with it (the tautology or sop strategy; i.e. the "cheat" strategy)—"Because they have no secret to express." There is no true singular meaning behind these formulae that can be teased out. The formulae were specifically designed to accommodate multiple truths, and multiple viewpoints. 

The same is doubtless true of the history of Christian doctrine too. The Church Fathers could not have arrived at such an opaque formula as the Trinity had they been trying to speak clearly. Even the dogma's defenders have been forced through the ages to describe it as a "mystery." But, the formulation worked splendidly as a product of coalition-building. The early church was riven, after all, with disputes over whether Christ was god or man; father or son; one with the Father or separate therefrom. The Trinity got around this argument by answering—in effect: "All of the above." It had something for everyone. It was the "firmness tempered with friendship" of its time.

And so, we need not waste our time any more looking for the one "true" meaning behind political speech. Rather, we should learn to read it critically. We should look to see what disagreements it disguises—what multiple and incompatible truths it serves to cover up. Maybe then we can "learn to look instead of gawking," in political life—and "we wouldn't always end up on our arse," to quote Bertolt Brecht (Tabori trans.).