Michael Kinsley sure is getting cranky in his post-Slate dotage. In his recent column, for example, he writes:
In trying to assess a politician, especially one who is braying about American freedom, justice, democracy and so on, I like to ask myself: Where would this guy or gal have been in the old Soviet Union? In the gulag with the other dissidents fighting for those values, or climbing up through the power elite, as this person is doing in real life?
Contrary to what might be your first impression, the most offensive comment here is not the “braying.” Kinsley never says that all politicians who speak in public about “American freedom, justice, democracy, and so on” bray about it. Nor does he claim that all of them are busy waving the flag merely to cover clawing their way up the ladder of success. True, you don’t have to fall back on deconstruction to get the idea that he doesn’t think much of patriotism in public, and it’s probably only unfair at the margins to suspect that he believes most brayers bray with a Republican accent.
No, what bothered me most was that and so on. American freedom, justice, democracy, and so on? Makes those things sound like a cross between cheap goods and the list of imaginary ailments your hypochondriac aunt is always complaining about.
And there’s the “innuendo” problem, as when Kinsley charges, with no supporting evidence or examples, that Senator Fist “won his seat from an incumbent Democrat by using television commercials full of racial innuendo.” It’s not clear which is worse: defeating an “incumbent Democrat” or using “racial innuendo.”
I think that using the phrase “racial innuendo” is itself an example of racial innuendo. It’s a way of Kinsley calling Frist a racist without having to own up to the charge. I noticed during the Lott mess that this has also become true of “code words.” The phrase “code word(s)” has itself become a code word for calling someone a racist. This has been both caused and accompanied by the exponential expansion of the number of “code words.” As recently as Reagan, there were only a few code words, such as “states rights.” Now the list has expanded to include opposition to racial preferences, skepticism of teachers’ unions, criticizing corrupt politicians when they are black, etc.
