Good Ideas. Clunky Read.

by tristero

From an op-ed by William E. Forbath in The New York Times:

you can’t have a republican government, and certainly not a constitutional democracy, amid gross material inequality.

Of course. But what’s with the tone-deaf writing style, which hides certainty in a dependent clause? And how about that flaccid-sounding “amid,”thoroughly crushed by all the Big Idea phrases on either side?

Professor Forbath urges a clearly articulated, history-based liberal alternative to the rightwing “laissez-faire” mis-readings of the Constitution. A great idea. And sure, “crackpot originalism” efficiently mincemeats Scalia, but alas, the essay is not very well organized. Who, for example, are the “revivalists” at the top of graf 8? I don’t see…oh, yes, now I get it, there they are, mentioned in the middle of a long, tortuous sentence that ends with an awkwardly-used colon: seven paragraphs and several long digressions earlier.

Our problem is not ideas – we got ’em. Our problem is not moral justice, either, or the facts – they’re on our side. Our problem is, as always, rhetoric. We are still very bad at writing crisp, compelling explanations of our ideas.

Let’s take that quote above, and do a 2 minute rewrite:

In the face of gross material inequality, a democratic republic simply can’t exist.

Not great, I agree, but I think it reads a little better. Overall, the sentence is filled with sibilants, “t’s” and plosives – tough sounds. “In the face of” posits a confrontation and focuses the homonyn potential of “gross”so that it better implies personal revulsion (the sight of a “gross face”) at the enormous (“gross”) size of the inequality. A”democratic republic” conflates the distinction between a “republican government” and a “constitutional democracy” – important, but not terribly useful in this context. The strongly trochaic “simply”not only reinforces the proposition in the verb clause that follows but adds a second, vital, hidden assertion to it: the harm gross inequality causes is very easy to grasp. Finally,”can’t exist”explicitly warns that gross material inequality is an existential threat to America.

I’m sure that you folks – many of you far more talented writers than I am –  can do much, much better. William Forbath does have a great idea. Rather than wasting our time criticizing crackpot originalism – which confers upon it a status it doesn’t deserve – liberals need to better articulate independent alternatives. However, the way he expressed himself was not terribly articulate. It really is the rhetoric, people.