I honestly haven’t checked the paracosm yet to see into just how thick and frothy a lather they’ve worked themselves up over Professor Pamela Karlan’s utterly innocuous mention of the given name of the Grand Nagus’s youngest child in yesterday’s impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, wherein she stated that under the Constitution’s express prohibition against titles of nobility ever being granted in or by the United States (Art. I § 9), the Nagus
… can name his son Barron, but he can’t make him a baron.
Naturally, as expected, and on cue, the high dudgeon began almost immediately. I’m not here to defend the remark or to survey the aforementioned high dudgeon; indeed this is meant to be more anticipatory than revelatory, and there’s plenty of that going on here and elsewhere.
I want to go back to a diary I wrote a little over a year ago, called “On Importance,” which in turn was prompted by a Vox column by Matt Yglesias about something he called the “hack gap,” and “one of the most fundamental asymmetries shaping American politics.” Here’s an excerpt:
I’ve written about it before too in somewhat different terms, not as an “asymmetry” but as a “double standard." What the “hack gap” basically means is that when Republican politicians and conservative media start freaking out about something a Democrat (or some Democrat-adjacent public figure) has done, said, or worn, the media bends over backwards to treat it as if it’s tremendously important, even though it isn’t, and we know it isn’t because we know from past behavior that Republicans and conservatives don’t actually care about it.
The obvious example to which Yglesias points is the Clinton e-mail “scandal,” which got more coverage in 2016 than all actual policy issues combined. Yes, Clinton broke with internal State Department e-mail protocol, but departmental e-mail protocol is (a.) not important enough to give rise to a national scandal (never mind anything approaching a crime); and (b.) not something that Republicans or conservatives actually care about. They simply seized on it as a means of validating their long-standing prejudices, and the so-called “news” media predictably played along. Here’s Yglesias:
The essence of the hack gap is that when Clinton was in the crosshairs, conservative media made a huge show of being sincerely outraged by her misconduct, which forced the topic onto the national media agenda.
Reporters, meanwhile, simply tend not to jump on left-wing talking points. And progressive media is more infused with the values of actual journalism, and pretending to think something unimportant is actually critical is not journalism.
(emphasis added). The concept of importance is what interests me here. We all know, and remember, that Republican politicians and Republican-adjacent media figures throughout the Obama presidency “made a huge show of being sincerely outraged by” all sorts of unimportant, benign, routine, non-controversial things, and that’s the things that were real and not a product of the ever-burgeoning Republican fan-fiction universe. This, more than anything else, is what programmed the base for Trump; the non-stop outrage, the unhinged freakouts about anything and everything, constantly watering the tree of grievance and resentment and paranoia and self-hero-worship until it sprouted one big, odoriferous orange flower.
OK, so, what we’re looking for now is how the non-GOP-adjacent (or, if you prefer, “mainstream”) media treats the GOP-adjacent media’s treatment of Karlan’s remark — and, by extension, indeed more importantly, the remark itself. The test is whether the non-GOP-adjacent media has learned its lesson, and whether the “hack gap” has narrowed or widened in the year since Yglesias pointed it out. Will the non-GOP-adjacent media just let the GOP-adjacent media have its obligatory unhinged freakout over this and just ignore it until it peters out in favor of the next intolerable outrage, or will they give credence to it and treat it as if it’s gigantically, monumentally important, like Obama’s remark that police officers “acted stupidly” in arresting a man for trying to enter his own home?
I think we all know the answer, but let’s watch and find out.