Fallacy of ‘normal’: Abnormal Trump catches up to Clinton
Hillary Clinton’s negatives are so great that it was once assumed she was the luckiest politician on earth getting to run against Donald Trump, the only person whose negatives were greater. Now, more and more, it looks like no luckier thing could have happened for him than to run against her.
It is this straight-up comparison — the reflexive horror of her overshadowing the seemingly much more rational aversion to him — that’s making liberal commentators crazy. In this view, pairing Clinton’s gray areas and Trump’s darkness is what’s now called a “false equivalency.”
Defying liberal logic and prompting liberal apoplexy, that is precisely where the campaign is being fought, and where Trump’s edge could be won.
This liberal brain hemorrhage seems particularly acute at The
New York Times. Its institutional bias sees Clinton as a safe political professional and Trump as an unpredictable, if not ludicrous, political outlier. And yet the
Times, along with other news organizations, has had to deal with various Clinton issues, including her heath, her email practices as secretary of State and questions about her foundation. Airing these issues alongside and at the same length and in similar language to Trump’s myriad business and temperament controversies, the false equivalency analysis goes, is apples and oranges — hers are procedural lapses, his are structural failings.
The Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, was widely castigated last week for trying to parse this on
the side of news — news is news, whatever the relative merits might be, publish and be damned.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof fired back: “Clearly, Clinton shades the truth — yet there’s no comparison with Trump.” He went on to say, after recounting, and dismissing as hiccups, a long list of Clinton “minefields” reported by the press, “I wonder if journalistic efforts at fairness don’t risk normalizing Trump, without fully acknowledging what an abnormal candidate he is.”
In other words, quite in a mind-set of old-fashioned party orthodoxy — in which an election is a choice but not necessarily a comparison between candidates, no more than sides in a war are chosen by weighing national virtues — Kristof is saying, she’s one of us. She is wholly recognizable, even her flaws — she is normal. He isn’t.
The problem here is that for many people, the comparison — alternatives if not equivalents — has become between the nature of normal, demonstrated by her lapses, and the promise of its opposite, demonstrated by his.
In Britain, this was the effective argument during the Brexit campaign. A vote to have Britain exit the European Union was a vote against the organizational norm that’s created a functioning and prosperous society and in favor of the unknown. And that’s exactly what 52% of Britons promptly, and for the other 48% inexplicably, voted for.
Although the Remain side ran as a stalwart of the norm, it chose not to defend it or certainly to promote it. It merely warned of the ghastly consequences of its loss. Similarly, the Clinton campaign has rather turned the presidential race into a straight up referendum between the norm (and, hence, an acceptance of much of what you are currently dissatisfied with) and something outside it. Indeed, Clinton has no real calling card except being anti-abnormal Trump.
Trump’s calling card is, of course, being Trump, precisely an alternative to the norm.
The liberal incomprehension here has to do with the logical fallacy of comparing the normal to the abnormal.
Although you might not like Clinton, whatever her failings when it comes to transparency, whatever ethical compromises she might have made and however many have compounded over her decades in public life, she has, self-evidently, the skills and experience, not to mention the welldocumented modern world view, to do the job with a reasonable amount of expertise and predictability.
For Nicholas Kristof, any other view or vote is utter absurdity — trying to compare the fundamentally sound with the clearly wackadoo.
And yet, for many, in a straightup comparison, a powerfully visceral one, she is diminished by her technical flaws, and he’s promoted by his outrageous ones. Worth noting, in this campaign there is one visceral candidate and one remote one.
Clinton, at this point in the campaign, with a precarious seven weeks to go still arguing her steadfastness against his deviations — a debate strategy, but not necessarily a hopeful one — is increasingly the contrast loser.
This is astonishing to many liberals, perhaps especially those in the media, who can’t fathom how in a reasonable mind she could seem as worse than he is, or how a politician unlike any before could seem better than one so grounded in politics as usual. It’s just obvious logic, they believe.
The poet Frank O’Hara, trying more than 50 years ago to explain something about the challenges of critics struggling with the inherent confusions in modern poetry, once advised that if someone is chasing you down the street with a knife, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up. I was a track star for Mineola Prep.” You just run.
Trump’s calling card is, of course, being Trump, precisely an alternative to the norm.