Communicating across political divisions is hard enough if everyone involved genuinely wants to be understood, but plenty of people don’t. Obfuscators are delighted to find words that carry double meanings. Slimy political con artists may want to imply—not clarify, just imply—two different messages for two different audiences they covet, retain plausible deniability about their past promises, gloss over their ignorance on certain topics, or just be superficially funny by keeping listeners mildly confused (today’s cancerous online trolls are delighted any time they can pull off that very low-bar victory).
Ten currently-relevant examples of political double-meanings spring to mind.
“There is no love lost between them” is typical of phrases that have been used for centuries, not just in benighted recent decades, to mean one thing but also to mean the exact opposite. This suggests the actions or situations being described remain hopelessly vague in the mind of the listener, perhaps even in the mind of the speaker. No matter how many people you hear getting away with using such a phrase, and no matter how strong an etymological case you can make for one meaning or the other having been the original, you probably ought to drop such phrases permanently from your writing and speech to avoid confusion.
(Come to think of it: tragically, we’ve reached the point at which “drop” may itself have to be dropped, at least in discussions about media, since people lately are just as likely to say a new movie, music, or political plan has been “dropped” to mean it has been announced as to say it has been “dropped” meaning withdrawn from the schedule—a hopeless muddle. Add to such tangles the abandonment of grammar in the colloquial use of phrases such as “I could care less” when the ignorant or careless speaker plainly means to show apathy by boasting “I couldn’t care less.” It’s a miracle people manage to talk to each other at all. As the brilliant writing analyst and editor William Zinsser put it, assume when you are writing that anything that can be misunderstood will be. He should have added that if you are actually trying to be misunderstood, you probably suck.)
“The left” could nowadays mean anything from a gay-friendly moderate Democrat proud of his corporate endorsements to an Islamism-boosting Marxist subversive, so the intellectually honest person should eschew tribal-political labels in favor of explicit descriptions of preferred policies, something most people—very much including politicians—are afraid to give, lest they be held to account later. Tribal affiliations, whether ethnic, geographic, or political, don’t really tell you all that much about where a given individual stands. Crispin Sartwell wrote last month about the similar vexing ambiguity in people’s use of the term “liberal.”
(One stand-in for “the left” lately is the Democratic Socialists of America subset of the Democratic Party, who sound radical in part because they talk about wanting to abolish prisons. In a sane world, enterprising libertarian politicians would try to out-radical the DSA by explicitly vowing to abolish everything government does, not just prisons and one or two controversial programs. Watch the Democrats and Republicans alike get flummoxed if that cut-to-the-chase tactic is ever routinely deployed. Call their faux-radical bluffs!)
“Manchester liberalism” will now get a boost from its influence on the thinking of Britain’s new prime minister, Thatcher-bashing Andy Burnham. That phrase nowadays means something very 20th-century and welfare-state-oriented, but I can’t help thinking that (much like “liberalism” itself) it gets much of its allure and resonance from the far more impressive 19th-century accomplishments of “Manchester School” economic thinking, which—despite politicians’ and some academics’ love of squaring the circle—had almost the opposite policy agenda, the Manchester School having been resolutely laissez-faire capitalist, not a bunch of central-planning control-freak nerds.
(We might need to get in the habit of saying “classical Manchester” and “modern Manchester,” much the way some of us in recent decades tried to say “classical liberalism” to mean 19-century-style laissez-faire and “modern liberalism” to mean idiotic present-day tax-hiking, regulating, and government big-spending schemes. I’ll leave it to more spiritually-inclined observers to explain what it means that Burnham as well as the U.S.’s five perhaps-most-likely 2028 presidential contenders are all “Catholic”—Newsom, AOC, Vance, Rubio, and Cruz—and at a time, too, when the Pope is American.)
“The right” is lately getting tarred with a very broad brush by precisely the sorts of academics who pretend to be the guardians of terminological precision and ideological nuance. If you’re an intellectually dishonest academic like historian Nancy MacLean, you can get book contracts and book awards by pretending you can’t tell the difference between racist Jim Crow laws and something as anodyne as public choice economics (the attempt to predict government action by applying the same analytical principles one would use looking at actors making decisions in the market, particularly the assumption that people and organizations are often selfish). Last year, the unwarranted raves and awards flowed for another disingenuous attempt to smear market thinkers as veiled racists, this time by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, whose book Hayek’s Bastards tried to trace a direct line of logical reasoning from (econ Nobelist) Friedrich Hayek’s insights about the failure of government central planning to the neo-Nazi authoritarian tendencies within the current so-called New Right.
(Imagine the real damage that would ensue if every right-leaning historian were as sloppy with terminology and causation as Slobodian and decided, say, to start claiming that every twentieth-century effort to combat fascism was synonymous with the craziest elements of the current Antifa movement.)
“Libertarian,” needless to say, gets used in ways that are sometimes technically precise but at other times, given how tiny the movement is, are easily battered and deformed by larger prevailing political winds, whether from right or left. It appears the national Libertarian Party now has a vice chair in the form of punkish-looking Amanda Griffiths who says, perhaps jokingly, that she doesn’t believe in property rights or having children, only in a vague agenda of outreach to autonomous communities or something like that, I think.
(And you wonder why the short-lived rightward rebellion within the Libertarian Party that was the Mises Caucus happened. If it were up to me, of course, people wouldn’t deviate from strict libertarianism in either a rightward or leftward direction, but leftward deviations, no matter how bizarre and frequent, never seem to elicit the anger and outrage from the mainstream-media-friendly and academy-schmoozing libertarian establishment that the tiniest rightward deviations do, so the right-leaning members get frustrated. It’s a downward co-dependent spiral.)
“Capitalism,” of course, tends to mean all the good things that happen within markets when market advocates use the term and to mean mainly the bad things, regardless of what caused them, when leftists are talking about that same economic system. But Rainer Zitelmann’s recent book The New Space Capitalism makes the case that the boom in space commerce at the hands of rocket-building and rocket-launching entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk illustrates the broader principle that even small and imperfect doses of capitalism tend to yield immense practical benefits—despite the condescending pretense by leftists that all this free-market stuff only works “in theory.”
(The real danger in the current era of Musk-style capitalism, I think, isn’t so much that his profits somehow steal bread from the mouths of the poor nor even that his ties to government will transmute him from a late-career Wernher von Braun visionary into an early-career Wernher von Braun fascist but simply that people will be lulled into thinking that only a handful of “great men” are cut out for market activity in general and that the rest of us should sit back, accept that our fates are largely shaped by regulations and cronyism, and see if the big shots distribute some crumbs, a sad outcome more Nietzsche than Rand.)
“Daylight Saving Time” debates would be confusing enough if people were merely having idiotic spats over whether to keep switching clocks forward and back each year (obviously, we shouldn’t, and the House of Representatives now agrees with me but may not be seconded by Senate or President). However, there are three debates and terms squished together in some of these conversations, I’ve realized to my horror. After all, the phrase “Daylight Saving Time” might refer to the whole system of clock-switching, might refer to the chunk of the year during which the clocks are moved ahead relative to where they would have been without the switch, and might sometimes refer very specifically to the nominal time as given during that chunk of the year. To my astonishment, since it’s all just a matter of labeling and thus none of these debates should exist, each of these meanings has its own set of partisans, convinced that deviating from their lingo or clock practice or time of year will bring death and other, less-severe biorhythm disruptions. Cartoonist Ted Rall, an ass, claims: “Studies show that many Americans will die, literally, as a result of going to permanent daylight savings time. It should be permanent standard time. Leave it to Congress to take a half-bad situation and make it fully bad.” Tom Cotton and Michael Brendan Doherty seem to agree. But it’s arbitrary, people! Just pick a time-convention and stick with it. Let those clocks keep ticking without interruption.
(Keep in mind, too, that the planet’s divided into 24 time zones—indeed, that’s oversimplifying matters, since for instance there are parts of India that are, I swear, 10-and-a-half hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the U.S. for petty historical reasons tied to the region’s Partition into India and Pakistan—so the last thing we need is constant redoing of the math that determines which phone calls, flights, or scheduled surgeries happen when. Despite Cotton and others seemingly being in love with the idea that “noon” is whenever the sun is overhead for you, we might even be best off if the whole planet were just a single time zone and no more math were necessary for international coordination, aside from keeping track of the International Date Line. In the meantime, don’t try and tell me it’s more traumatic and heart attack-inducing to experience gradual adjustment to six a.m. sunrises than to suddenly lose an hour of sleep each year or realize with great chagrin that you’re an hour late for your flight connection. If you don’t like the way the numbers on the clock gradually change relative to sunrise, try the old-fashioned method of posting “Summer Hours” in your workplace or whatever other hyper-local adjustments you need to make without forcing the entire population to lurch with you into a different aspect of space-time twice a year. No matter how many cows, crops, or customers you have to shuffle around, you can handle it on your own time, so to speak.)
“Hunter” would’ve appreciated the absurd distance between humanity’s rationalist aspirations and earthly squabbling implicit in the recurring fight over Daylight Saving Time, and by that I mean gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, an indirect influence on this very website and the subject of a current exhibit of cartoons by Ralph Steadman and others from Loathing and related works at George Berges Gallery in downtown Manhattan. They even have Thompson’s cigarette holder and typewriter on display. No guns, alas.
(Oddly enough, the same gallery had an exhibit not long ago by one of the other prominent Hunters of our era, Hunter Biden. He isn’t half-bad at painting, but I felt at least a little bit paranoid inquiring about his gallery show at the time, since I imagine half the art world to be a big money-laundering scheme, and who knows what sorts of things that guy might be funneling through Ukraine when he’s not explaining how kinky he thinks Ted Cruz is or nearly getting into a fistfight with young right-winger Nick Fuentes on a recent podcast, later issuing a challenge for either of the Trump sons to fight him. Thompson, for his part, toured college campuses in the late-1980s debating right-winger G. Gordon Liddy and lobbing the occasional ice bucket in anger, so manic outbursts are nothing new in right-left politics.)
“Dan McCarthy,” I was pleased to see, was listed among the panelists for the Hunter S. Thompson events and displays occurring downtown here over the past few days, but I eventually realized the Dan McCarthy in question was not my fellow political writer and onetime concert buddy but rather a Canadian vibraphonist lecturing about the gonzo streak in music or something along those lines.
(I didn’t follow up the visit to the Thompson exhibit with acid-drenched, Joycean wanderings through the Village as perhaps I should have, nor have I ever met the vibraphonist McCarthy, but during a brief post-art stop at nearby Shade Bar, I did meet singer-writer-actress Greer Sinclair, who with her beatnik-era-via-David-Lynch vibe is a reminder that one more sometimes-appealing, sometimes-dangerous form of ambiguity in this world, on-screen or off, is noir. Beware ominous hints and weighty implications, in any era.)
“Brain dead” is a more ambiguous diagnosis than we used to assume, apparently, leading the usually-cautious libertarian commentator Robby Soave to make an explicitly reluctant foray into conspiracy theory a few days ago by floating the (Spillane-worthy) idea that Mitch McConnell might be in that very state even now, with his handlers perhaps avoiding saying so until after his likely reelection to the Senate in a few months, a way to hold the seat without, among other things, giving controversial libertarian Republican Thomas Massie a chance to run for the seat at a time when his profile is high.
(With new photos suggesting McConnell is mostly-alive, Soave and others have presumably backed off that theory, but you can’t blame them for wondering at a time when McConnell’s wife has supposedly met with representatives from China, 40 FBI agents are rumored to have been dispatched to investigate Lindsey Graham’s neighborhood just in case there was anything fishy about his recent death, and a dead body turned up at the home owned by Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s husband at roughly the same time. In politics, almost anything is possible, no extra verbiage needed.)
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey