Undecided Voters and Bored Students
they think everything is too flowery. they need more policy specifics. sorry, they weren't listening to the last six things you said
People are talking about “undecided voters.” Mostly this is because it’s an election year, and the stakes are what they always are in election years1. It’s also because the corporate media have been doing their usual annoying thing, where they find some people — often conservative Trump supporters who are gaming the system or just people who want to be on TV — to opine about their reactions to big moments like the recent Harris-Trump debate. These undecided voters’ reactions are, often as not, mystifying. They were mystifying in 2020. They have always been mystifying.
They have always been mystifying, unless you read them cynically: not as “someone’s real opinions” but as “a verbal Muzak that plays over whatever actual thinking, if any, is going on.” It sounds good to say “I need more policy specifics” rather than “I remember five vague scary things that the TV told me about Kamala and I don’t know if any of them is true but then when Trump was president that was bad too but then there was that thing my cousin said about Hillary Clinton eating a baby but was she a Democrat or a Republican I can’t remember,” which is the level of national politics news lots of people are working with, because they have jobs and lives and no real hometown paper anymore and — perhaps this above all — sharp, painful memories of school. You can’t really know national party politics news — that’s a distinct subfield of “politics,” which we all practice, willy-nilly, and imperfectly, as we all participate in ethics and live within a metaphysics, also willy-nilly and imperfectly2 — you can’t really know national party politics news unless you kind of like doing homework. And you really can’t know anything about policy, which is the thing that you pay attention to national party politics news and vote in elections for, unless you like doing homework.
I think about undecided voters and their res dicta a lot, because I teach freshman English, and so I have to listen to what my students say. This is a better experience for me than you might expect from the way some teachers talk (but then, I may be, probably am, unusually lucky). I find a lot of joy in talking about readings with students, especially here in the very first weeks of many of their college careers, when they are especially scrupulous about actually doing their homework. (I have also attached some small stakes to every reading assignment. If you say the words “policing students” to me about this I will roll my eyes at you till gravity looses its hold upon my body. I’m done.) My experience is that many young adults hunger to be talked to like they’re in possession of minds and souls and that they appreciate it when you do so.
But as a teacher, of course I have to think about the things people say to cover up for not having anything to say, because I am a regular recipient of these sorts of phrases. I invite them. I invite them by giving students stuff to read and then asking them to talk about it. Also, I was a student! I remember the stuff I said in these situations! Hell, one of these days I should probably write a taxonomy. There’s the “Raise My Hand First and Give a Broad, Obvious Summary So That the Professor Feels I’ve ‘Contributed’ And Then Shut Up For 74 Minutes” move, for example. Or the “OK But What About a Line Of Critique That the Essay Has Already Anticipated and Fundamentally Refuted? What About That?” move. Or there’s the ol’ “Fulminate About the Single Buzzword That I Recognize From Skimming the First Page.” Or the “I Just Fundamentally Reject Abstract Speculation About Anything, And I Define ‘Abstract Speculation’ As Anything I Don’t Feel Like Reading.”
At the first-year level we don’t get those as much, at least not right away — those are more often upper-level or even grad-student moves, some of them. Here, where I am, students are blunter and, though they’re all afflicted by the fear of sounding stupid that so often inhibits us from discussing the really interesting stuff, they’re still figuring out what sounds stupid at the college level. So they say things like: “The author is too flowery,” “The author doesn’t get to the point,” “The author is repetitive,” and all of these can be true of various pieces of writing, but the problem is: the first comment is about, say, Ernest Hemingway, the second comment will be about an analytic philosopher who states the argument in words of one syllable on the first page, and the third comment will be about an Oulipo story where the single constraint is that you never use the same letter twice. And early in my teaching career I was confused by this. I think the most confused I ever got was when I gave some students Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and they talked about how evasive and double-talky it was — this essay that both preaches and practices bluntness and directness. How do you teach people so insensitive to language that they think anything and everything is flowery bullshit how to write at all?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was facing a critical juncture in my career here. I had to decide whether or not to take this sort of thing at face value or not.