arguments against the backdrop of Reagan, so Best and Marcus frame their proposal for “surface reading” as a response to the Bush administration’s obvious deceit, incompetence and reliance on culture war. Bush’s failures and bad faith were so plain, Best and Marcus argue, that they obviate the need for literary studies to develop and deploy sophisticated methods of reading between the lines: “Eight years of the Bush regime may have hammered home the point that not all situations require the subtle ingenuity associated with symptomatic reading.” We might pause to wonder what Orwell would make of the tentative tenacity implied by “may have hammered home the point,” but in this uneasy combination of hedging and insistence we can discern the tensions inherent in their rhetorical purpose, which requires both an inclusive breadth and a focused urgency. Best and Marcus make their argument in the introduction to a special issue of Representations that, like Mitchell’s issue of Critical Inquiry, presents viewpoints drawn from a range of current methodologies in literary studies. This inclusiveness allows them to define “The Way We Read Now” as an attempt to overcome the hegemony of demystification.
If one agrees that methods of critical unveiling or skeptical examination were obviated by the overtness of Bush’s abuses of power, then this must be doubly true of the current administration. In a period when the euphemisms of polite society have been scrapped by many politicians in favor of raunchy hate speech and overt racism, misogyny and transphobia, served up alongside a sneering public disdain for democracy and the rule of law, many of us may be led to question the pertinence of Orwell’s cautions against the depoliticized propriety of professional jargon. In Trump’s mouth, dog whistles become foghorns, eagerly advertising all the dehumanizing hate concealed by the jargon that Orwell deplores. It is tempting to believe that in an increasingly divided country, the agendas of both sides are finally exposed, apparent to all, even self-evident—making interpretation superfluous. But because the antagonism of subcultures that we often call “tribalism” encourages self-referential “information bubbles,” it also encourages the proliferation of bad faith arguments that permit or excuse structures of enjoyment predicated on aggressivity.
As I write this, examples of this disavowal and bad faith arise daily, along with spontaneous examples of tactical response. President Trump recently opined that Representative Elijah Cummings’ district was such “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” that “no human being would want to live there.”21 This came two weeks after the President told four members of Congress, all of whom are women of color, they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”22 The reaction to all this prompted acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to appear on the next episode of Fox News Sunday, apparently with the express agenda of denying the demonstrable pattern of racism in Trump’s insults.23 Mulvaney at first appears comfortable in his appearance on a network guided for so long by the president’s friend Roger Ailes, a network that maintained its deep and extensive ties to the administration, including a regular exchange of personnel, even after Ailes was forced out by multiple allegations of sexual assault. Under questioning by Chris Wallace, Mulvaney quickly deploys a “both sides” defense: “When the president attacks AOC plus three, when he attacks the squad last week, he gets accused of being a racist. When Nancy Pelosi does it a few days later, the left and many members of the media […] come to Nancy’s defense, how it couldn’t possibly be racist, that she was simply attacking their ideas.” Mulvaney goes on to contend, against all apparent evidence, that the president’s attacks are comparable to those of Speaker Pelosi, that he is also attacking the ideas and records of these public figures, in ways that do not implicate their race: “Look, I was in congress for six years. If I had poverty in my district like they have in Baltimore […] and I spent all of my time in Washington, D.C., chasing down this Mueller investigation, this bizarre impeachment crusade, I’d get fired.” In what has become a favorite strategy of Trump defenders, Mulvaney ignores the president’s actual message and implicitly substitutes a more substantive and judicious message in its place.
But he also goes beyond this inventive free indirect speech, to conjure a set of putatively factual premises, upon which to base his conclusions. Mulvaney substitutes a stereotype of black urban poverty for the actual data from Cummings’ district, while substituting a stereotype of white suburban affluence for the data that describes his own former district. Of course, neither substitution comports with the facts. Upon seeing this segment, NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen corrected the record, tweeting that “the poverty rate in Mulvaney’s old district (14.9%) isn’t much lower than it is in Cummings’ district (16.6%). Both are above the national poverty rate of 12.3%. By Mulvaney’s standard, Republican Reps. Jeff Duncan and Tom Rice of SC should be thrown out of office.”24 Relying on the false certainty afforded by familiar racist stereotypes to establish the credibility of his claim, Mulvaney is able to argue that Cummings’s district is worthy of the president’s verbal abuse because it is poor, not because of the race of its residents or their representative. This is a perfect example of how racist attacks do not so much rely on ignorance as they do on a false knowledge supplied by aestheticized fantasies, of the same kind that undergird more complex conspiracy theories. Simple ignorance would be an improvement for Mulvaney, as not knowing would at least allow room for learning, whereas his false certainty about fictional premises leaves no space for the inquiry that leads to knowledge.
Referring to his pretextual concern with the district’s poverty, Mulvaney concludes that “I think the president is right to raise that, and it has absolutely zero to do with race.” This denial is itself a racist erasure of the historical relevance of white supremacist public policy to the accumulation of wealth, and many activists or academics could refute the point by citing history or social science. This is a valid approach, but Wallace shows that it is unnecessary if one’s aim is simply to demonstrate Mulvaney’s bad faith. Almost before Mulvaney finishes his denial of the relevance of race, Wallace launches into a demonstration of a pattern of usage in Trump’s attacks, one clearly marking their racist tone. “You say it has zero to do with race,” Wallace repeats, but “there is a clear pattern here, Mick.” He focuses on a key word associated with racist and Nazi smears against people of color, religious minorities, socialists and leftists, as well as the queer community, among others: infestation. Trump said of Representative John Lewis, “he should spend time in his crime infested district.” About “the squad” of four Representatives who are women of color, Trump tweeted “they should go back to the crime infested countries from which they come.” And about Representative Cummings, Trump tweeted that “his district was rat and rodent infested.” After rehearsing this list, Wallace again emphatically pronounces the word “infested,” to observe that “it sounds like vermin, it sounds subhuman, and these are all six members of Congress who are people of color.”
Mulvaney, whose small round metal-framed glasses suddenly seem in discomfiting harmony with the historical resonances of the accusation, rears back on his stool as if to slow a galloping horse, delivering a dismissive charge with which every literary scholar is likely familiar: “I think you’re spending way too much time reading between the lines.” Wallace, demonstrating a wit I have not generally been led to expect on Fox News, shoots back: “I’m not reading between the lines. I’m reading the lines.”
In sum, Wallace simply cites the public pronouncements of the president and observes a pattern of usage consonant with one of the most historically familiar racist tropes. His claim could not be more transparent or inarguable, but because Mulvaney does not want to explicitly acknowledge and support the clearly racist attacks, he accuses Wallace of suspiciously “reading into” the language, unveiling supposedly secret meanings that are merely the product of an overly sophisticated intellectualism. But while it clearly cannot be said that Wallace was “reading into” Trump’s words, he was also doing something more than merely reading his lines. To highlight what he calls “a clear pattern,” he had to first note and select for repeated word choices, and then conclude about the significance of that repetition, by placing it in a pertinent social and historical context of usage. He attentively and faithfully reorganized Trump’s utterances to emphasize their terminological consistency. And while Mulvaney could not be expected to admit what, after all,
