A Case Against "Double Down"
Even the most causal news listener or watcher has certainly noticed the term "double down," which has become increasingly ubiquitous in political journalism. I suspect that if we did a content analysis of the most influential and mainstream news sources, the term has been used every week since Trump announced his bid for the presidency in 2015. Just a quick Internet search for news on Trump produces headlines that include the following: "Trump doubles down on immigration stance"; "President Trump doubled down on call to end due process"; "Trump doubles down on heightening border security"; "As Trump Doubles Down on Coal . . . ."; "Merkel Hits Back After Trump Doubles Down on False German Crime Figures"; "Trade row: Trump doubles down on Trudeau . . . "; and I could go on, but I think the point is clear. Using the term "double down" is not only at this point an empty-calorie cliché, but also both registers and endorses the dumbing down of popular political conscience. If, of course, there ever was such a thing (I think there was, but that's another post).
What I mean by "the dumbing down of political conscience" is the way in which a person is induced to forget the material conditions that make the use of force possible at all (by politics I usually mean, in the end, an expression of power primarily by the use of force). In so forgetting, the bases of one's political views are semantic relations between words instead of references to a lived or shared reality (perhaps I should term this, "dumbing up"). I do not mean some objective reality, since what this means is always contested and at some remove the product of sentences. But we do have things like facts and truth that we depend on that are not relative (my position on this is the psychoanalytic notion of "symbolic efficiency," or a certain reading of Rorty if you like, but that too is a tangent).
The example that always comes to mind for me are numerous studies, inspired by the Great Recession, that show most U.S. citizens (or those polled, anyway) have overly rosy views of wealth inequity. Occupy Wall Street mounted an impressive campaign to disabuse folks of the idea that they are going to be rich one day, but the rallying cry for the 99% has disappeared from the popular speaker and screen. The brief blip of popular class consciousness has been replaced by cheers and jeers over the tantrum-cum-policy du jour bad news buffet, eliding the economic contradictions exposed during the recession.
Much ink has been bled and screen time spent on documenting the human cost "zero tolerance" for immigrants and refugees on the Mexican border; still, it is alarming how quickly the president's resolve to enforce his gambling habit becomes the lead story with the use of one idiotic term. Everyone knows the story on the border is about how folks seeking asylum are treated, but deploying "doubling down" in the same story is a kind of rhetorical misdirection that makes Trump (and Miller's) obstinance the most important focal point. Such attention, positive or negative, fuels the cycle of messianic megalomania.
The sudden ascent of "double down" in the news cycle, usually applied to so-called conservative positions or political spectacles, is not a coincidence: the increased use of the term in the news reflects the way in which governance, and the campaigns associated with it, are now assumed to be a form of risk taking--a game familiar to most of the voting public as reality television. It has also come to connote stubborn or reckless decision making of course, so when used by journalists, it's also code for backdoor critique—however unwittingly deployed (hey, careful journalists, your unconscious is leaking).
Of course, "double down" is a mid-century term, originating in U.S. casinos, that refers to doubling one's bet in a game of blackjack after having glanced at one's cards; this means you'll get one more card and that's it. The win could be huge, but the risk is high. At some point in the 2000s the term migrated as a metaphor for taking lofty risks in corporate circles (especially the tech industry), eventually coming to signify for many the impending doom of a dumb decision. Regardless, that the term has traveled into clichéd political metaphor registers the complete return to the glories of finance capital, or basically, risking other people's lives for personal gain (irony there, Right . . . right?). The sweeping deregulation policies and dismantling of agencies of oversight, which will be the policy legacy of this presidency in addition to the manufactured war, has put large numbers of folks in danger.
That at least half of Trump's public rhetoric fetches "double down" as a term for behavior is truly all but determined; this is the first casino presidency, after all. The term "double down" in news journalism is stupid, not only because it mystifies a return to a historical default of 80s-style deregulation in its own terms, but also because this jargon connotes a compulsive character in respect to its own addictive consonance: duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh. Every time I read the term or hear a reporter speak it, I imagine drool dribbling out the corner of a mouth framed by chapped lips. Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.
In his cranky critique of Heidegger titled, The Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor Adorno unleashes a jeremiad against the linguistic innovations of German existentialism as a form of fetishism, where poetic neologisms and homey concepts (such as "authenticity") valorize the relations between words and concepts, obscuring their origin in objective struggles, material constraints, and institutional domination. This debate is not really my jam, but I do appreciate Adorno's argument that ideology is perpetuated in language use and that rhetorical habits create safe spaces for instrumental reason and ultimately hateful ideologies. I'm suggesting that "double-down" is something like a popular equivalent, almost like a jingoistic endorsement of the very thing that it is supposed to critique. The continued use of "double down" as a description of political decision making creates asylum for the kind of unregulated finance capital that blew-up and burst the economic bubble in the first place; it's use reduces political decision making to one deranged individual, displacing our collective responsibility to recognize that Trump is a production of the system, not a perversion of it.
Decisions that affect thousands of people, if not millions, should not be described as a gamble or risk. Politics is not a game show despite folks now "play" it that way; "doubling down" is just another way of reporting a "daily double" that may "pay off big for the Republicans." The odds are always with the house. Reporting policy decisions and enforcement and the rhetoric that defends them as "doubling down" makes statecraft the new mystification, often unwittingly obscuring the material impacts of policy decisions in the jargon of luck and presidential volition. In a truer reality these are fiendishly calculated decisions made in full knowledge of the card to be drawn next: insofar as the MVP is the Hierophant, it will be the inverted card of Death.
"Double down" is "collateral damage" by other screens.