The Ultimate "Bullshit Job"

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

25 October 20

 

here are several ways to describe the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Jane Chong, writing in The Atlantic, called the hearings a “pointless farce,” not least because they did not shine a spotlight on the potential role of the Court—and Barrett—in deciding the Presidential election. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick called them “empty theater.” Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, repeatedly used the term “gaslighting” to characterize the hearings. My colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin has written that Barrett’s many evasions—even on the question of whether a President should commit to a peaceful transition of power—are a measure of her political extremism, and her ability to get away with them is “a measure of how thoroughly President Trump has moved the margins of our political culture.”

All of these observations are accurate. Four days of hearings contained not a single substantive exchange. When the nominee was questioned by Democratic senators, she obfuscated. When it was a Republican’s turn, Barrett joined the senator in performing a pointedly empty ritual, whether it was Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, asking the judge who does the laundry in her house (she evaded the question) or Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, using his time to make a twenty-three-minute speech about Democrats, abortion, and democracy before segueing to ask Barrett whether she plays any musical instruments (a bit of piano) and how her family has managed distance learning for seven children. (It was challenging, but the Barrett family succeeded, of course.)

To an outside observer—someone who was not aware of America’s current polarized predicament—the hearings would have seemed as inscrutable as a politburo meeting: all code and no content, culminating in a vote whose results are preordained. But why does one of the most consequential political decisions of a decade take such a bizarre and hollow form? One answer is “the rule of ‘because we can,’ ” as Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said on the final day of the hearings: Senate Republicans have the votes to do whatever they want, so they do.

With the game fixed from the start, Republicans could have used the time to lay out an agenda. They didn’t have to obfuscate; they could have boasted instead. They could have indulged their fantasies and envisioned the details of a near future in which an ultraconservative Court further dismantles voting rights, repeals the Affordable Care Act, places a federal ban on abortion, abolishes marriage equality, and systematically reverses civil-rights progress. Their reticence wasn’t a matter of decorum—shame has no purchase on senators who refused to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination during his last year in office but took up Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Barrett. The reason Senate Republicans and their candidate said virtually nothing of substance during her confirmation hearings is that they think the hearings amount to virtually nothing.

The Republican Party is the Party opposed to government as such. It is the Party whose ethos is summed up in President Reagan’s famous quip from a news conference in 1986: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” What gave this joke its frisson was that, at the moment he made it, Reagan was pledging help from the government—in this case, aid to struggling farmers. (According to the PBS documentary “The Farm Crisis,” “Reagan’s farm programs cost more than the combined farm expenditures of every President from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter.”) In the Trump era, Reagan’s phrase has become a full-fledged ideology, and government inaction is weaponized. (Americans will not see a second pandemic-relief bill before the election because, in large part, Republican lawmakers oppose what they call a “blue-state bailout.”)

Hannah Arendt defined ideology as a single premise taken to its logical extreme and then used to explain the past and determine the future. For the Republican Party, the Reaganite idea that government is a necessary evil has turned into the idea that government is evil, period. Arendt believed that the two-party system was well protected against this kind of ideological thinking, because real political power is always within reach for either party. (Multiparty systems were more vulnerable, she thought.) She did not foresee our present system, where one political party is still awed by the responsibilities and norms of governing while the other is bent on destruction.

We have gone from the strange spectacle of Reagan, the leader of the free world, stating that his government’s actions are fundamentally suspect, to the even stranger spectacle of Trump, who openly dislikes his job, avoids doing it, and refuses to accept its responsibilities. Yet he desperately desires to keep his job and so, it seems, do most Republican elected officials. These are people who continually attack “government,” in which they work, and “Washington,” where they live, but they will apparently do most anything to keep their places in both. Imagine having to wage a long and gruelling campaign in order to land a job you believe is deserving only of scorn; imagine then spending the bulk of your working hours asking people for money so you can keep this job.

In his book “Bullshit Jobs,” from 2018, the late anthropologist David Graeber defined the title category as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” In Graeber’s taxonomy of bullshit jobs, Republican senators would be “box tickers”: people who go through procedures, produce paperwork, and otherwise look important performing tasks that make no difference to any substantive outcome. (As Graeber explained, a job is a bullshit job only if the person performing it feels that it is purposeless, which means that two people can have the same title and the same nominal tasks, but only one of them may be working a bullshit job. For example, one senator may feel that Supreme Court confirmation hearings are an empty ritual with predetermined results, while another considers them a great responsibility.)

Many bullshit jobs, according to Graeber, exist solely to make other people feel important, by giving them underlings and acknowledging their wealth. The Senate offers a twist: its Republican members seem to think that their job is to make one person, Donald Trump, feel maximally important. Some bullshit jobs are links in a bullshit chain—if the entire enterprise disappeared, no one would be the wiser. But a bullshit job can also wedge itself in between or next to meaningful jobs. Imagine a receptionist whose only task is to sit at a desk in the empty front office while other people work. The landline never rings and visitors never arrive, but an office is not an office if it doesn’t have a receptionist.

One of the most interesting insights of “Bullshit Jobs” concerns the soul-deadening effect of meaningless work, especially in the Anglo-Saxon culture, which assigns value to people based on grit and productivity. Graeber suggested that the long-term effects of working a bullshit job are akin to the effects of imprisonment and even solitary confinement, which kills the soul and damages the brain. He might have been overstating the case, but there is no doubt that people who work bullshit jobs—the engineer who provides support for software that no one uses, a maker of presentations that no one ever watches or hears—are full of loathing, for the job, for the people who put them in the job, and for themselves.

Reading the Barrett hearings as a bullshit box-ticking ritual allows them to make a kind of sense. In the pantheon of bullshit jobs, Republican senators might be most fruitfully compared to the financial analyst who plugs figures into a spreadsheet, massaging the numbers to yield predetermined results; these results will be used to make bad loans, which will prop up a rotten financial infrastructure, ruining some people and making others ever richer. In short, the analyst’s job is consequential yet preposterous. Similarly, installing Barrett on the Supreme Court will have far-reaching, real-life consequences, but the process that puts her there is pure bullshit. It is difficult to find a better word to describe the closing statement of the Judiciary Committee chairman, Lindsey Graham, on the third day of the hearings, which began as follows:

I’m going to tell you about where I grew up. I don’t know why—it just seems to be a good way to end this thing. It’s got nothing to do with anything. But I grew up in a small town called Central, South Carolina. First in my family to go to college. My dad owned a bar, a pool room, and a liquor store. And my mom ran the bar, my dad ran the liquor store, and, when I was old enough, I ran the pool room. This is why I think I’m a good senator—it’s good training for this job. But I remember—speaking about country music, we had a piccolo. You know what a piccolo is, Judge? Well, you are too young. A piccolo is something you put money in to listen to the song. And the one song I’ll remember to my dying day—talk about country-music titles—was “My Wife Ran Off with My Best Friend, and I Miss Him.” So this is a wonderful country.

Senator Kennedy, too, killed time like a bored, trollish office drone. “Are you a racist?” he asked Barrett. “Do you support, in all cases, corporations over working people? . . . Are you against clean air, bright water, and environmental justice? . . . Do you support science? . . . Do you support children and prosperity? . . . Do you hate little warm puppies?” He then congratulated himself and the judge: “See, we did that in about two minutes.” In fact, it was about a minute and a half, but then Barrett volunteered that her family has a pet chinchilla and she doesn’t hate chinchillas, either, and this got her and the senator roughly to the two-minute mark.

Republican senators, in other words, asked bullshit questions. Barrett laughed gamely, indulged their bullshit, and gave uniformly bullshit answers, both to bullshit questions and to substantive ones. She gave bullshit answers even when she appeared to be called upon merely to affirm the existence of a statute or a Constitutional norm. Barrett surely doesn’t think that her future position on the Supreme Court is a bullshit job; Senate Republicans don’t think that packing the courts with conservatives is bullshit work, either. But, like the people who are rushing her onto the bench, Barrett does seem to believe that the nomination and confirmation process are bullshit—she shares the Trump Republican Party’s contempt for the norms and processes of the government in which she has risen so far, so fast.