I’m going to try to avoid all but a brief recap of everything that has already been said about Wolf’s gig at the White House Correspondents Dinner a couple weekend’s ago. You can watch it here. On the Right, everyone is foaming at the mouth because Wolf used foul language and hurled direct attacks at conservative foot soldiers as well as their boss, the President. They’re also trying to make the story about a joke Wolf made over Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup, even though the joke was really about Sanders lying. The media fell over themselves trying to make it clear they never want to make anyone angry, so they didn’t want to take a stance. And the Left laughed at the delicious hypocrisy of a Right led by a foul-mouthed insulter-in-chief playing the victim card all of a sudden. Some on the Left have also shifted the conversation away from hypocrisy and toward speaking truth to power.
There. You’re all caught up with the main points.
I agree a bit with everyone. Wolf was a little more foul-mouthed than the event typically allows and her jokes a great deal more risqué. In particular, a joke about the “pussy hats” that were knitted for the Women’s March last year, her own anatomy, and yarn was pretty graphic, although there was a joke about Mitch McConnell having his neck circumcised that was pretty funny. There were also more direct insults than particularly clever jokes. And of course, the Right playing sensitive snowflake caused an army of archival footage editors to comb the internet (it couldn’t have taken very long) for examples of Trump and his lieutenants engaging in exactly the behavior they’re now demonizing a comedian for. In fact, last week the New York Times printed a full two page spread with every insult Trump has posted on Twitter over the last two years. Ten years ago, I might have agreed with Conservatives that Wolf went too far and should have toned it down, but in Trump’s America? I’d argue that if the standard is the one set by the President of the United States, she was very much in bounds. It’s difficult to take seriously people who demand more decorum from their comedians than from their president.
I think this also requires us to ask, what constitutes an insult? President Trump has said some truly heinous things about almost every demographic group in America, but none of his supporters see any of these things as particularly offensive. They see it as straight talk. Telling it like it is. Just exercising his first amendment rights. And if anyone is offended, they just need to grow a thicker skin and stop being offended so much. Yet, the victim hysteria over Wolf’s routine suggests their feelings aren’t universal. There is no generally agreed upon definition of what constitutes an insult beyond this: tough language about someone you don’t like is okay, but tough language about someone you like or identify with is unacceptable.
Typically, the WHCD is more of a good-natured, but occasionally biting, comedic roast of Washington. In fact, Stephen Colbert’s relatively (by current standards) tame roast of then President George W. Bush in 2006 caused a small uproar for being on or over the line of acceptable decorum for the event. Wolf blew past that line by putting the message first and the comedy second. Despite her opening statement that she wasn’t out to make a point, she clearly had a message to deliver.
What this event perfectly highlights is the ongoing prismatic nature of every major news story that breaks today. Wolf laid bare a lot of Trump supporters’ cognitive dissonance. They claim to like these hard truths and straight talk, but when fed a twenty-minute dose of Trump-style hard truth from Wolf, they recoiled and whined about the media elite. Trump supporters claim that wasn’t “straight talk.” It was the disdain and disrespect that the Left shows for “real” America. But I would point them then to just about every speech Trump delivers, where he regularly and bluntly calls everyone he doesn’t like dumb, ugly, deceitful traitors out to get him and his supporters. Hardly a paragon of virtue and respect. And that’s disappointing too, because there are absolutely times when Right-wing claims of Leftist disdain and snobbery regarding the Right, especially the Right rural poor, have merit. Leftist policy solutions for national problems also tend to favor (either implicitly or explicitly) cities and metropolitan areas on issues like poverty when white rural poor areas need just as much help.
But that’s not what the WHCD and Wolf’s performance were about. Wolf confronted the Right with some hard truths about the behavior of their leader. And it went completely over their heads. The hypocrisy is entirely lost on them. Trump’s supporters see their president speaking hard truths, but the hard truths are about the other guys. Wolf’s hard truths, using Trump’s actual behavior, can’t possibly strike a chord because it feeds into Trump’s victimhood narrative. Through his voluminous tweets associating himself with his base (a billionaire for the masses) and then constantly proclaiming his own victim status, he already has them primed to receive and react to Wolf a certain way. The irony is that those crowds revel in Trump bashing liberals as whiny snowflakes who can’t take a joke, but that same crowd screams twice as loud when someone tells a joke at their expense. I think that’s perhaps the most fascinating aspect of what Wolf accomplished here. She has drawn in sharp relief the fact that the country can’t agree on what a universal insult is. If Wolf calls Sarah Huckabee Sanders a liar, it’s insulting, and suddenly the Right is full of feminists claiming calling her a liar is somehow sexist. But when Trump regularly calls his “haters” liars, he’s just defending himself. “I think he’s been very clear that, when attacked he’s going to hit back,” Sanders said last year. Apparently, Trump is the only one allowed to do that.
The enduring legacy of Wolf’s routine will be the reaction it provoked. At first, I thought that was its biggest problem. Clearly our nation is dysfunctional in a lot of ways, but perhaps our greatest flaw is we no longer occupy the same fact ecosphere. We live in different worlds, where words like “liar” don’t mean the same thing to everyone, where events, speeches, and facts carry multiple meanings coded by our political affiliation and reinforced by media propaganda machines designed to encode doctrine among their adherents. Given that state of affairs, how could her routine possibly do anything but inflame tensions?
But upon further reflection, and after seeing the mealy-mouthed response from most of the mainstream media that tacitly rebuked Wolf, I think her routine was a tipping point. I think the next evolution in this political cultural divergence is to try to reconnect a shared language. And I propose that the Left surrender its coded language to adopt that of Trump’s supporters. When people Google snowflakes and safe spaces, I want results to pop up with why Sanders is playing a victim, why Trump’s supporters are being sensitive little snowflakes, and why the President needs the WHCD to be a safe space for him before he’ll attend. Trump twisted the term fake news (a very real problem that has only gotten worse on social media sites) and turned it into a farcical version of its original meaning. In a tweet earlier this week he confirmed what has long been suspected, that “fake news” to him is merely news that is negative, regardless of truth. In doing so, he killed meaningful progress on rooting out lies on social media and gave himself a propaganda piece used to devalue the actual news media who are out there trying to spread the truth. It’s one of the more perverse examples of how Trump and his supporters have mutated and degraded language to serve their own partisan needs. To be fair, the Left has done this as well. Not to nearly the same extent, but there is a lot of coded language on the Left that we could do without as well.
In an era where language has diverged along partisan fault lines, where left and right can’t talk to each other or understand each other, where leaders need only to utter a series of buzz words to pacify or rile up their bases, I believe the only way to fix our civic discourse is to repurpose that language. Forcing people out of their cognitive dissonance requires confrontation. And in this case, it requires confrontation using their own language. The mainstream media needs to finally step up and recognize the role they play both in perpetuating the deterioration of our national discourse and also the power they have to help fix it. When we’ve gotten to the point where comedians need to deliver thinly veiled excoriations when given the rare chance to confront powerful elites face to face, it should be a wake-up call. And when we’ve gotten to that point because no one else will take on that responsibility, it really shows just how far we’ve fallen as a society. I don’t know if this would really work, but at least we would have a conversation on the same terms, no matter how low the bar has dropped, rather than constantly talking past each other to our relative sides using our own codes and shibboleths. If everyone can be called out on their own terms, they’ll at least understand what they’re being accused of. No offense to Michelle Wolf, but if we’re counting on a comedian to deliver some straight talk to shake us out of this funk and to hold the elite to account, then we’re all in trouble.
