Chris Cillizza is a Washington Post writer who runs a political blog called “The Fix.” At his site, Cillizza and his co-authors are obsessed with “process stories”—stories that focus chiefly, if not solely, on who’s up and who’s down, rather than who’s wrong or who’s right. As Paul Krugman once put it, if Republicans were to start saying that chocolate is actually vanilla, the media would only dispute the point to the extent they’d write that “some Democrats claim that it's brown.”
And Cillizza is the guy who would dutifully relay that claim, no more, no less. He wouldn’t question anyone’s veracity. Instead, the only thing he’d ask is whether or not this chocolate-is-vanilla delusion is “good politics”—in other words, is the issue at hand, no matter how wrong, stupid, or repugnant, helping the politicians who are promoting it (almost always Republicans) to achieve their political goals?
Cillizza loves this concept and invokes it often. In fact, he’s termed something “good politics” or “smart politics” in no fewer than 10 different posts in 2015 alone. His analysis is almost always pitifully jejune, though. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would pay to read Cillizza’s catalog of gems this year (online subscriptions to the Post start at $99 a year):
- It was "smart politics" when John Boehner pushed through a budget deal as he was resigning, so that Paul Ryan could play "bad cop."
- It’s "good politics" for House conservatives to oppose their leaders.
- It was "smart politics" when Carly Fiorina mau-maued CNN into including her in their debate.
- It's "good politics" for Republican presidential hopefuls to go after Hillary Clinton.
- Donald Trump's loudmouthed bluntness can, of course, be "good politics."
- Attacking the media is "good politics" for national Republicans.
- When faced with crises like the Baltimore riots, it's "good politics" for politicians to show empathy.
- It's also "good politics" for Republicans to pretend that the media does Hillary Clinton's bidding.
- It's "smart politics" when Republicans avoid discussing abortion in favor of talking about the economy.
You don’t say.
But this kind of stuff is great fun for the Beltway set, because it allows Cillizza and his gang to act as though they are nothing more than disinterested referees of some great political game, merely tallying points while passing no judgments as to how they are scored. And as long as it’s meaningless fluff like “empathy is good,” then it’s easy to do no more than roll your eyes and ignore it.
If this were the sum of the complaint, there’d be no point in lodging it. But Cillizza’s pretense to amoral scorekeeping went from groan-worthy to outright revolting earlier this week, when he declared in the headline of a new piece:
You might not like Republicans calling for a ban on refugees. But it’s smart politics.
“Think what you will” of Republican xenophobia and hate-mongering toward Syrian refugees (especially the Muslims among them), but it “sure looks like a political winner,” says Cillizza. He expresses no qualms about what Republicans are doing; he just cites a raft of polling in an attempt to prove his argument.
But his correctness is utterly beside the point. When bigotry promotes suffering and death, labeling it “smart politics” offers cover to those bigots. They can point to scribes like Cillizza and say, “See—we are smart to foment hatred.” It also offers encouragement, by reassuring these merchants of intolerance that they will emerge on top.
Cillizza does not care. He’s just doing his job, you see, and isn’t it valuable to point out the winners and losers in our politics?
If this were truly the case, though, then Cillizza should have no problem writing a companion piece, explaining why it was “smart politics” for U.S. politicians to bar Jewish refugees fleeing from Hitler during World War II. After all, the polls then were quite similar to what we see now, as was the rhetoric.
I suspect, though, that the thought of penning such a post would make even Cillizza queasy. And why? Because to say such a thing now would be morally repugnant, and to have said such a thing at the time would have made one complicit in the slaughter of the Jews.
The moral stakes are unchanged today: If you wouldn’t call anti-refugee hostility in the Holocaust era “smart politics,” then you must also not say the same thing of hostility toward Syrian refugees. Chris Cillizza refuses to understand this, and it’s to his everlasting shame that he does not.