For a full year, maybe more, Americans who follow national politics were subjected to the unabating use of a single metaphor: the “blue wave.” Would there be a blue wave? If so, how big? What would the blue wave, if it turned out to be a wave, mean for the Trump administration?
The term, as readers will have gathered, is derived from the more general descriptor wave election, an election in which (leaving aside the more precise definitions of pollsters and political scientists) one party makes overwhelming gains in both House and Senate. Waves apply only to congressional elections, not to presidential elections; in the latter we trade an oceanographical metaphor for a geological one: landslide. The blueness of the wave, of course, referred to the color we’ve consistently applied to Democrats since the blue-and-red map of the 2000 presidential election. In the intervening 18 years we’ve witnessed at least one wave election—in 2010 the GOP gained 63 seats in the House and 6 in the senate—but I don’t remember anybody that year talking about a red wave.
By the end of election night 2018, it seemed that the wave was not a wave. A wavelet, maybe, or a ripple. Democrats had taken the House, for sure, but they had only gained somewhere from 23 to 27 seats. As election returns were posted over the next several days, however, their total reached 35 seats. That’s wave-ish. But how can it be a wave if Republicans gained at least one and probably two seats in the Senate?
I often think, when the chattering class becomes preoccupied with some metaphor or other, of a passage in the greatest of all Victorian novels, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in which the narrator observes of the aging scholar and bachelor Mr. Casaubon that he had doomed himself with a metaphor. “Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”
Maybe no one acted fatally on the strength of the blue wave metaphor, but I fancy that some made poor decisions as a consequence of taking it too seriously. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate of my home state of South Carolina, for instance—James Smith, a longtime member of the state House with an impressive record of military service—defied expectations by not running against Nikki Haley in 2014. I don’t know what made Smith decide to run against Henry McMaster this year, but it must have seemed like a savvy decision at the time. McMaster was not invulnerable, and anyway there was constant talk on CNN and MSNBC of a “blue wave” in 2018, so the chances were good, right? Smith lost by 8 points.
The power of an effective metaphor is that it coerces the mind into perceiving a thing—a problem, a theory, an activity—in a way that may or may not accord with truth or wisdom. The metaphor does not draw a comparison, as the simile does, but equates one thing with another. Often it doesn’t even bother with a predicate—this thing is that thing—but simply describes one thing with language ordinarily appropriate to the other thing. The great Welsh socialist Aneurin Bevan in 1953 dismissed his centrist colleagues in the British House of Commons with the metaphor of a bustling road: “We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.” Unlike the simile, the best metaphors don’t allow for questions or disagreements, which is what makes them so dangerous.
Government programs are often spoken of in metaphorical language, because to do otherwise would be to highlight their inadequacies. The metaphorical name urges, almost forces, the uncommitted and skeptical observer to think of these government schemes more sympathetically. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was a failure by almost any measurement, but it was hard to think ill of a “war” on something as sad and painful as poverty. American liberals have for years spoken of Medicaid as a “safety net,” a metaphor that allows no room for traditional criticisms of massive government-run social welfare programs: You can’t abuse a safety net or become addicted to it.
People in politics are always trying to define their adversaries with unflattering metaphors, but there are few good writers or poets in politics, and mostly these attempts sound stupid. Only this week, after President Trump announced that he would nominate to the federal bench Neomi Rao, heretofore the president’s “regulatory czar” (another metaphor!), the left-wing Center for American Progress issued a predictably hostile statement on the nominee: “Neomi Rao is an anti-regulation zealot who has been the tip of the spear in President Trump’s efforts to gut important protections for millions of Americans.” The metaphor doesn’t work—not so much because Rao isn’t a “zealot” (she is not) but because it’s hard to know how one would “gut” something—a fish or a pheasant—with the tip of a spear. Law professor Jonathan Adler noted that the remark reminded him of Chuck Schumer’s description of Miguel Estrada, the Bush judicial nominee, as “a stealth missile—with a nose cone—coming out of the right wing’s deepest silo.” I’m told that stealth missiles are air-to-surface and so are not launched from silos, deep or otherwise, and I doubt even Schumer knows why he gave Estrada a nose cone.
Some metaphors sound effective but aren’t. Lawmakers and governors who worry about the consequences of runaway deficits and unfunded liabilities like to orate on the dangers of “kicking the can down the road.” The phrase, which I gather is of recent vintage, is supposed to signify putting off painful decisions to a later time. It has a nice iambic rhythm to it: Once again, the legislature has decided to kick the can down the road. The alliterative kick and can evoke an immediate and vaguely unpleasant image. But why does kicking a can signify procrastination? Should we pick the can up instead? What does the can represent—duty? obligation? Maybe American voters can’t get exercised about their government’s $832 billion budget deficit and $21 trillion debt because they’re encouraged to think of these dangers as some nonsensical game of can-kicking.
Sometimes politics feels like studying ancient religions or modernist poetry: The metaphorical and the literal wind themselves around each other and you can’t tell which is which. Politics is a place of fishing expeditions and level playing fields and circular firing squads and steps in the right direction and whistleblowers. And very small waves.
