Pundits are aflutter over a Wisconsin Democrat's plagiarism of other candidates' platforms for her jobs plan. What would politics look like without plagiarism? Nothing. Politics is plagiarism. And it will continue to be plagiarism until we demand something different of our politicians, and ourselves.
Political plagiarism is a perennial story. It's as old as Cicero. But it's been exposed frequently enough of late that even the New Yorker feels the need to explain "Why Politicians Plagiarize So Often." Rand Paul does it in speeches and books. A Montana U.S. Senate candidate did it in his Army War College thesis
Kaczynski's work, while valuable, isn't that trailblazing. Everybody in politics plagiarizes. It can't be stopped.
Do not mistake this for a defense of plagiarism on the basis that you can't do politics without it. That, too, is not an original argument, but a cynical example of the sort of "This Town," "cult of the savvy" wisdom that passes for political commentary in most media circles.
I do agree that all plagiarism isn't all bad per se. The kneejerk moral reaction against intellectual borrowings is a property-rights hangup that very smart people have pushed back against in recent years. Nobody's argued against blanket plagiarism condemnations as eloquently as Jonathan Lethem in his 2007 Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence"—which was itself cleverly cobbled together from dozens of other pieces on the subject (a conceit that Lethem admits, in an index to his index of sources, had been done before he did it). From Nabokov to Dylan to blues to his own essay, Lethem argues that out of material so familiar, we make new meanings.
It's hard to quibble with Lethem's thesis that literature—and music, and politics, and culture in general—"has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time." Of course, the journalistic profession treats itself differently, and rightly so; its constructed identity as a credible intermediary for "real" information demands that it hold copiers and cribbers accountable. Fareed Zakaria, Benny Johnson
But the infinite regress of borrowings and appropriations that make up political culture seems more deeply offensive, precisely because we've grown to accept it. I'm grateful that Kaczynski chronicles new cases as dutifully as he does, but there's something Pollyannaish, even smarmily cynical, about assuming each successive case of plagiarism will surprise us. What's really surprising is how generally unsurprised we are when politicians are caught plagiarizing. "That's politics, after all!" (Note that even the plagiarizing journalists I cited above are all known primarily as political journalists.)
My colleague Tom Scocca, in his meditation on smarm
What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick flow of opaque smarm.
Here is Obama in 2012, wrapping up a presidential debate performance against Mitt Romney:
"I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world's ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk-takers being rewarded. But I also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and everybody should play by the same rules, because that's how our economy is grown. That's how we built the world's greatest middle class."
The lone identifiable point of ideological distinction between the president and his opponent, in that passage, is the word "but." Everything else is a generic cross-partisan recitation of the indisputable: Free enterprise ... prosperity ... self-reliance ... initiative ... a fair shot ... the world's greatest middle class.
The scary thing is not that this is true. It's that we all recognize it as true and choose our sides anyway, as if there's any true difference between them. In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell acknowledged how political rhetoric turns speaker and listener alike into recursive machines, producing a "reduced state of consciousness" that, "if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity." Two years later, he published 1984.
One may object that the examples above are of mere political rhetoric and not actual policy, and there are substantive policy differences between our warring factions. Certainly, the incessant recyclings don't stop me from voting whenever I'm able. But I do so with an awareness that those policies are bound by the rhetoric, so much so that a Democratic or Republican platform only makes the news today when its language changes from convention to convention. Put another way: The earth-shattering news happens when a political strategy appears not to be entirely plagiarized for once.
This self-limiting cycle is at work in Burke's case: She (or her campaign staff) took existing jobs plans from previous Democratic candidates' platforms and recycled them. Her political opponents, who themselves barely exist outside talking points and think-tank policy papers, feign outrage at her borrowings. Her political defenders say the ideas are what's important, and borrowing good ideas is how the thing is done. But how good can such ossified ideas really be? Logically, they boil down to ideology: She's a Democrat, and she wants things that Democrats always want.
Plagiarism in politics fails the Lethem test precisely because it doesn't open us up to new vistas of policy or even of moral rhetoric: It distills politics down to an ever-shrinking discourse of formless, meaningless platitudes, like recycling one's own urine until the nutrients have been wrung out. It makes a mockery of a democratic system. It traps the citizenry in a hall of mirrors and permits us to choose only whichever glassy reflection of the status quo we think shines best.
So what other politics is possible? I think the example of Obama, the result of 2008's "hope and change," is evidence that one can never escape the cycle of borrowing and appropriating to make an appeal to the American electorate. "Something different, something honest" is a tried-and-true brand, too—perhaps the most dangerous one, because it invites a kind of earnest credulousness in voters (see also: Rand Paul), an inability to appraise recycled bullshit at its true value.
What's possible at a minimum is a willingness to acknowledge the central role of cribbing in our political culture. A commitment to trace every tired idea through its many incarnations back to its fountainhead, to its underlying ideology. "This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases," Orwell writes, "can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain."
If we exercised that kind of critical faculty, what would we find in our politics? Nothing but ideology. And it's hard to challenge ideology: "free enterprise... prosperity..." ad infinitum. Even Orwell's appeal for critical thought has been stolen by the politicians, hammered into their recycled messages, so that they can easily challenge the other guy as "straight out of 1984."
That sort of talk is itself straight out of 1984. We have always been at war with tyranny, with terror. We have always stood for free enterprise, for prosperity. And we always will, until we start to ask what in the hell that really means, and answer bravely that it means nothing at all.
I want to say that another kind of politics is possible, but a kind so radical that it would wreck our collective complacency and restructure our entire culture. It wouldn't be plagiarism-free, but it would be self-aware, post-ideological. It would be great. But I doubt we're ready for it.
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