One of my most leaned-on cliches is “reasonable minds may differ.” I think saying this is a good habit, a reminder of the thing that makes living in a society with more than one political party and more than one religion and more than one official viewpoint possible, which is pluralism or Enlightenment values or classical liberalism or call it what you like. We all think our opinions are the correct ones, or else they wouldn’t be our opinions, but we engage with other perspectives and don’t freak out about the idea that somewhere, somebody may be communicating something we disagree with. Or, at least, that is how it is supposed to work.
The system breaks down somewhat when people insist on the use of language that wins the argument for them. Imagine how confusing it would be if, instead of the Washington Commanders, the football team in the capital had changed its name to the Washington Team That Won the Game. Of course, you can say “The Team That Won the Game lost,” but you now sound pretty unreasonable.
I thought of this dynamic when I read a paragraph in the New York Times about how New York and several other blue states are dropping COVID-19 restrictions: “Democrats used their ‘trust the science’ mantra in the pandemic’s early days to project competence and skewer Republicans who were flouting public health guidance, but even the White House now acknowledges the growing gap between public opinion and the advice of the president’s public health advisers.”
It’s nice to see it admitted that it’s just a mantra. “Science” is just a word for knowledge, so when you define the open-ended use of what public health professionals call “non-pharmaceutical interventions” as “the science,” you can make people who oppose them sound unreasonable, anti-knowledge. In Australia, the mantra for the restrictions was “the commonsense restrictions,” so if you were against them, well.…
You can publish articles in the Atlantic calling Georgia’s more lax policy an “experiment in human sacrifice.” Georgia has seen fewer deaths per capita than New Jersey, New York, or Massachusetts to date. But you can ignore that. You are “The Science.” You are “The Team That Won the Game.”
The trouble with this strategy, however, is that people will notice you deploying it, and they’ll get wise. They’ll start asking, “Who scored more points?,” instead of asking, “Who won?” You can’t wordplay away reality. As the New York Times reports: “Seven in 10 respondents to a recent poll by Monmouth University agreed that ‘it’s time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.’” Seventy percent is a lot. Only about 33% of the country “identifies with the GOP,” per the Pew Research Center’s polling. So, more than twice as many people are done with COVID-19 as are Republicans.
Cue yet more slippery word games. The New York Times, for instance, finds Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey “struck by” research findings that “voters shared frustrations over public health measures.” Reasonable minds may differ over whether a model like Florida’s, with very minimal interruptions to civil liberties and a moderate death rate, is preferable to the Australian model, which combined maximal unfreedom with a low death rate. But the New Jersey model combining high COVID-19 mortality with high unfreedom is not something one should be “struck” at in terms of why people hate it. That is, unless reason has been hidden behind language that purposefully makes differing, and even understanding one another, harder.
