Sprachspiel
How Trump turned America into a "Choose Your Own Adventure Game" and Lost
Welcome to The Experiment, the weekly newsletter where I’m finally going to tell you about my big secret book project. Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth is coming out June 8, 2021 from Penguin Random House. My partners in this particular crime are my friends Bryan Burrough, whose New York Times best sellers include Big Rich, Public Enemies, and Barbarians at the Gate, and Chris Tomlinson, the Houston Chronicle’s business columnist and a best-selling author in his own right with Tomlinson Hill.
That the book is done is good news on a couple of fronts, the biggest of which is that I get my evenings, vacations, and weekends back with my family. Also, Forget the Alamo has so much great stuff in it that a lot of great stories ended up on the cutting room floor, and I get to repurpose them periodically here in The Experiment. Last month I examined the widespread belief that Mexico lost the Battle of the Alamo. Next week, we will learn the real story behind one of San Antonio’s cherished myths.
Until then, there is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
This week in The Experiment, I take a look at Thursday’s choose-your-own adventure town halls. Democratic pollster Stefan Hankin makes the case for a real conservative party in “End the GOP.” Veteran journalist Wayne Slater tells us about the time he invited the lawyer for the Chicago 7 to his fraternity house in “Bill Kunstler — a Good Man.” And Robin Whetstone tries to resurrect her journalism career by sneaking onto a band’s bus in “Faith No More.”
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to, including Ryan Holiday’s quadrennial letter to his father, a television show I overlooked for far too long, and new music from The Budos Band.
And as always, if you like what you’re reading, there’s no better way to support The Experiment than by sharing it on your networks or forwarding it to your friends. If you know an undiscovered writer out there who needs a platform, please suggest them. Already, three national publications have picked up essays originally published in The Experiment. And if you’re new here, sign up to get our free Saturday emails so you don’t miss out, because it’ll be more fun with you along for the ride.
But first, have you ever heard of Ludwig Wittgenstein?
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a logic philosopher. His mentor Betrand Russell called Wittgenstein “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating,” which, OK, settle down, Bertrand. Among Wittgenstein’s contributions to the world is a concept that in retrospect seems more discovered than created. Ben Franklin did not invent electricity; he discovered it, as well as a new way to find one’s key in the rain. And Ludwig Wittgenstein did not create the concept of Sprachspiel, or the language game. He observed it and wrote down the rules.
In his excellent book, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, my friend Kevin Ashton explains Sprachspiel this way:
In a group, words are heard in a context that includes emotion, power, and existing relationships with other group members. We are all social chameleons, adjusting our skin to blend in with, or sometimes stand out from, whatever crowd we happen to be in.
Here’s an example of a Sprachspiel Ashton cites: “How are you?” How you answer that depends entirely on context. If your boss asks you, you smile and say, “Great!” Because of the power dynamic and professional setting, your boss isn’t actually asking after your well-being, though this is less true during the pandemic. He or she is expressing good intentions and trying to establish a rapport to begin a common enterprise of getting you to do your TPS reports. Now if your doctor asks you the same question, you still say, “Great!” because you don’t want to hear a lecture about your weight. And if a Texan asks you the same question, it comes out, “Howdy,” which is a contraction of “How do you do,” but you still say, “Great!” because most people find talking with Texans so disorienting.
“Organizations,” writes Ashton, “are made of rituals—millions of small, moments-long transactions between individuals within groups.”
Until this week, an organization called the United States of America has been operating under one set of communication rules set by the ALL CAPS Drunk Uncle in Chief. He made the guardrails disappear by ignoring them. Norms, such as not saying nice things about Nazis and generally agreed-upon standards of capitalization and punctuation, no longer held. He turned our television screens into fun house mirrors, leaving us to wonder if this new discourse made us look fat. He set the rules to this game, the gaseous orange sun who made us all react to his gravitational pull and radioactive ultraviolet rays.
Then Captain Twitter Pants was exposed as more or less broke, we were trapped in a room with him for an hour and an excruciating half, and then he got the COVID, setting in motion a chain of events that was more like the restaurant scene in Mrs. Doubtfire than a responsible way to pick a president. After backing out of the debate because the President was infected with a deadly coronavirus, Joe Biden snagged his own town hall on ABC. Thinking he’d outmaneuvered Biden, Trump scheduled a competing town hall on NBC to humiliate his Democratic opponent by getting bigger ratings.
“He looks at this the same way he looks at attendance at his rallies,” one of the President’s men told The Daily Beast. “He obviously wants to blow Biden out of the water.”
To quote another famous head of state, “Awesome. Wow.”
But something had changed, hadn’t it? This time, Trump’s attempt at domination didn’t feel like getting a swirly from a bully. It just pissed us off at NBC. Maybe it was because The New York Times revealed that Trump was essentially broke and paid less in taxes than I paid for my last suit. Maybe it was because his imitation of an abusive stepfather in his debate with Biden had traumatized the country. Or maybe by getting COVID he had lost his aura of invincibility.
By counter-programming Biden’s town hall with his own, Trump had unwittingly scheduled a choose your own adventure for democracy. After 2016, when his empty podium got more live airtime than any of his primary opponents got, and after almost four years of enduring his abuse, we had an option. We didn’t have to watch The Walking Dead and have nightmares. We could watch Sunday night football and, if the Seahawks were playing, have nightmares.
He didn’t do much to adjust to the new rules, raising his voice to regular people who asked him questions, engaging his own brand of aggressive nonsense (on COVID-19, he said, “Excess mortality! Excess mortality, we’re a winner.”), and refused to condemn an anti-Semitic conspiracy because its adherents supported him.
Meanwhile, on ABC, Biden was demonstrating his mastery of the rules of the new Sprachspiel: Don’t give the press a hypothetical abstraction to distract them from the real world collapse of democratic norms, the economy, public health, race relations, and American leadership in the world, not to mention the Seahawks defense.
The best example of this is Biden’s refusal to directly answer whether he’ll support adding more seats to the Supreme Court. “I'm not a fan,” he told George Stephanopoulos but refused to elaborate, explaining that he’s holding his fire pending the confirmation process for Judge Amy Coney Barrett because he wants to see “how much they rush this.”
“I'm open to considering what happens from that point on,” Biden said.
The political press thinks the pre-Trump rules apply, that a refusal to answer an invitation to engage in political parlor games constituted lying. Jim VandeHei of Axios buys into this, uncritically relaying statistics from the Trump campaign that “Biden has answered less than half as many questions from the press as Trump — 365 compared with 753.” They think he’s dodging the question to conceal his true intentions, and that a winner either succeeds at evading the question or in forcing him to reveal something.
But Biden’s playing a different game. You win the game by saving democracy, not by engaging brainer-than-thou wordplay, and you do that by making sure people are focused on the fire consuming the house and not on the hypothetical plans to expand the kitchen when you rebuild.
“No matter what answer I gave you, if I say it, that’s the headline tomorrow. It won't be about what’s going on now,” Biden told Stephanopoulos, who pressed him until Biden said he’d give a fuller answer after Barrett’s confirmation. That, and not what Biden actually said about what was happening now, was treated as the news. Journalists aren’t very good at adapting.
You are, though. You’ve picked up on the rules of this Sprachspiel. We’ve all figured out we can ignore Trump, that his words have lost all their power. You have realized that the two lines in the opinion polls, a blue one consistently 8%-10% ahead of the red once since early this year, translate into long lines at the polls. You’re showing up to find hundreds of other people just like you at early voting locations, and instead of anger at an under-resourced democracy or frustration at wasted hours, you’re expressing joy because under these new rules, if there are enough of us, we don’t have to pay attention to him ever again.
This is my oldest son. He voted for the first time in his young life yesterday. The first time I voted was for Michael Dukakis. The first time he gets to vote, he gets to choose his own adventure, saving democracy.
Good job, America. Keep it up.
End the GOP
by Stefan Hankin
Pollster Stefan Hankin, whose previous contributions have included “The Day Data Died” and “Rule by Minority,” argues that the only way forward for our democracy is to end the Republican Party and build a new conservative party.
This is an opportunity for anti-Trump Republicans to create an entirely new party.
Bill Kunstler – a Good Man
by Wayne Slater
My old friend Wayne Slater, the former senior political writer for The Dallas Morning News and co-author of the NYT-best selling Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, was reminded of his college days recently when Netflix released The Trial of the Chicago 7.
Kunstler took the stage and read Yeats. An acoustic group sang something about revolution. In such an orbit, you might believe the world was filled with possibility.
That’s when I suggested that we take Kunstler to my fraternity house.
Red Ticket: Faith No More
by Robin Whetstone
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin tries to resurrect her journalism career by interviewing Faith No More after their concert in Moscow. And because this is Robin, she does this by sneaking onto their tour bus..
I waited for what always happened in movies and what should be happening right now to, in fact, go on and happen. One of them would say, “Just let her ride to the hotel.” Or one of the passengers would recognize me and stand up and say “Wait! I know her! Really, she’s cool,” and then someone would start a slow-clap.
RIP
This Tennessee mayor
This lady who was interned during WWII
This bishop
How we’re getting through it
Sending pizza to people waiting to vote
Learning about the First Nation’s wool dogs
What I’m reading
HBR: “Research: Why Breathing Is So Effective at Reducing Stress”
Ryan Holiday: “Dear Dad, Please Don’t Vote For Donald Trump This Time”
Megan Thee Stallion: “Why I Speak Up for Black Women”
NYT: “A Columnist Makes Sense of Wall Street Like None Other (See Footnote)”
WaPo: “Bringing the chill of the cosmos to a warming planet”
What I’m watching
I haven’t been the most diligent consumer of streaming this week. There is a ton of good programming waiting for my eyeballs, but I’ve been busy. So this week, I’ll admit to you that what started as mindless entertainment to occupy me during my morning workouts has turned out to consistently clever meta media commentary. Community is about adults going to community college, I guess. What it’s really about is watching, loving, consuming, and thinking about television. So no, I haven’t watched any of the great news stuff that’s out there, but I do now understand why so many people adored this television show.
What I’m listening to
Budos Band, the Afrobeat band on the Dap Tone label, are out with a horns-forward album called Long in the Tooth. Brooklyn Vegan gave it a decent write up if you want to know more, but the best thing to do is to just click on this video.
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A new poll shows that Biden and Trump are tied in Texas. Texas is a swing state. Let’s act like it.
Thanks to Noom I am down to my college weight, and haven’t had to cut out any foods. I hit my goal weight before Memorial Day and have stayed within a few pounds either way ever since. This is easy. Noom is an app that uses psychology, calorie counting, and measuring activity to change your behavior and the way you think about food. I’m stronger and healthier than I’ve been in years. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works.
Headspace is a meditation app. I’ve used it for a couple years and am absolutely shocked at how much it’s taught me about managing my inner life. Try it free for a couple weeks. Don’t worry if you’ve never done it before. They talk you through it.
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