The Associated Press Stylebook Is A Metaphor For Today’s Political Division – Wirepoints Quickpoint

“Think Different.” – Steve Jobs

By: Mark Glennon

I’ll have you know that I hold the exalted title of Executive Editor here at Wirepoints. (Never mind that it is self-bestowed.)

You may have noticed that we don’t have much consistency on matters of style and grammar in our writing, which I suppose I should fix. So I asked a journalism prof who follows us which style guide is most commonly used in his field and he said the Associated Press Stylebook. I ordered up several copies despite my disdain for the A.P. for other reasons.

But my reaction on getting the stylebook was instinctive and immediate: It’s over 600 pages! That’s far too long, making it oppressively autocratic. It’s over twice as big as it was in 1980.

I submit that most people would react intuitively just as I did, but that others would be fine with it. There’s an innate difference among us. Maybe it’s congenital.

I further submit that having that instinct or not is driving much of what now politically divides us so starkly, both here in Illinois across America. Forty-six percent of Americans think a civil war is likely.

I am not talking just about violations of constitutional rights, particularly freedom of expression, That’s a more important topic, though how strongly one feels about those things is certainly a function of the predisposition I am talking about.

Instead, this is about something else that intrinsically bothers some of us but not others –about conformity and following orders. And it’s personal. It’s what’s behind the Karen meme. It’s resentment against expectations of submission and obedience. It’s anger about claims that “science says” this or that on matters that should be contested.

It’s about knowing what Winston Churchill knew, which is that “if you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.” It’s about having an inherent intuition about what a Roman historian, Tacitus, wrote centuries ago, which is that “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”

It’s about hostility to centralized power, which is driving populism as we define that today.

It’s not just about mandates for masks and vaccinations, though they are important. But it is about why the backlash against vax mandates is growing even among the vaccinated. The word “mandate” itself is repulsive to many of us, regardless of what we think about masks, vaccines or anything else.

But part of America has no such instinctive aversion to compliance with endless rules. That’s the modern left. Gone from today’s left are yesterday’s hippies, whose trademark was nonconformity. Classical liberals within the left are also mostly extinct. What remains may be sheepish about following rules, but they are vicious when it comes to enforcing their rules.

For many of us, today’s political continuum therefore looks something like this:

The center and the right are lumped together because the modern left comprises no more than a third of America. They hold all the power in Illinois and Washington now. They’ve become The Man. But polls say their policies on the most contentious issues have the support of no more than a third of the nation, and only a third now thinks the country is heading in the right direction. So it is also, I sense, with the primal instinct I’ve been referring to.

They do, however, include most of the national press. Hence the popularity of the A.P’s guide.

So screw it. We’re not going to sweat about whether our style and grammar conform to all the rules, especially not the A.P.’s rules. Their stylebook, by the way, is also filled with the rules of political correctness, but that’s a different matter. For the important rules on things like accuracy and quotes, I will stick with my 1982 copy of the New York Times style guide, which is almost two-thirds smaller than the A.P.’s today.

Apple under Steve Jobs told us what they were about by thumbing their nose at grammar when their motto was “Think different.” We won’t go that far, but we like how they made their point.