Decents, Deplorables, and the Conditional Mood

 

For my next trick, I’d like to indulge in a linguistic conceit of sorts. I’d like to use the current political nightmare to speculate about a matter of grammar, of all things, that has long intrigued me:

Namely, why do so many languages codify the conditional mood — also known as the conditional tense — in their grammar? Why do we use ‘should,’ ‘could,’ and especially ‘would,’ in so much of our speech?

Why do we hedge our conversations this way? Why is it more acceptable to say “I would like a cup of coffee” than “Give me a cup of coffee.” Why is one deferential and the other pushy? Why has history passed down this polite form to multiple language groups, in such a similar way? Why is it bad form to use “I want” in a non-confrontational situation? And why does the MAGA crowd insist on such bad form?

I have a speculative answer to these questions, but first let me cavalierly divide the world into two groups of people: Decents and Deplorables.

Goods and Bads would serve just as well, but it’s quite trendy to have adjectives performing as nouns these days. Plus, I like the Hillary reference.

So Decents and Deplorables it is — two words that are highly descriptive in the context of this blog, to the point where I don’t even need to define them. My readers know exactly who — and what — I’m talking about.

The world has always been loosely split between Decents and Deplorables. The Decents have mostly outnumbered the Deplorables, but the Deplorables have ways of making up the difference, generally through corruption, subterfuge, and violence. This is nothing new. And given what we’re now going through, we no longer need to pretend that mankind has put its worst tendencies behind it.

It’s not clear how Deplorables get to be deplorable — both nature and nurture are involved — but it’s clear they’ve always been there, running with the many conquerors throughout history, always on the lookout for rape, pillage, plunder, and insider trading. From the Huns to the Vandals, from the Gestapo to the KGB, from the Wagner Group to the Proud Boys, the Deplorables do get their moments in the sun, which they use to spread their darkness far and wide.

It gets even darker if you buy into the idea, as I do, that history is largely written by the winners. Think about all the atrocities this country has papered over in a mere 250 years — Black enslavement, indigenous genocides, Japanese internment camps, My Lai-type massacres — yet we’ve always thought of ourselves as the Decents. The line between decent and deplorable is fuzzier than we think.

And always has been. Our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors’ were apes who had somehow been shaken from their trees. We were forced to live on the ground, where we were no match for the lions, leopards, and assorted predatory types who were stronger, faster, and had sharper teeth.

To compensate, we were forced by evolution to grow and develop our brains, clearly an incomplete process when you consider Trump voters. But we were able to leverage that additional brainpower in novel ways.

We learned how to cooperate with other humans, so we could hunt in teams, a real breakthrough at the time. Going one-on-one with a lion is, even now, a losing strategy, but going ten-on-one improves the odds dramatically. Especially when you add in weapons, the original disruptive technology. Lions don’t do weapons.

So between the weapons and the cooperation, the oddsmakers started moving away from the lions. There was, however, a definite downside to the weapons thing. Because once we could throw rocks and swing clubs, it was but a short step from killing animals to killing humans.

This was long before the ‘Love thy Neighbor’ meme caught on — mostly with the Decents — back when you were more likely to bash your neighbor’s head in. If your neighbor had something you wanted, like a horse or a daughter, head-bashing was thought a legitimate recourse.

The Decents, not surprisingly, grew to question this behavior. They wanted to cooperate. They wanted to band together, to get a leg up on the lions and leopards. This led, over a hundred-thousand-or-so years, to the development of agriculture and the division of labor, which led to social contracts, laws, education, and bigger, deadlier weapons. We now call this civilization.

The Deplorables, on the other hand, wanted everything to be about them, and they were happy to bash any unlucky heads that got in their way. If cooperation could get them closer to their goals, they might play along with the Decents, but they can’t be trusted with the common good.

The dirty secret here is that Decents and Deplorables need each other. Sometimes the Decents need defending, which comes far more naturally to Deplorables. Deplorables, on the other hand, need the Decents to keep food in their mouths, gas in their tanks, and their grandmothers on Medicare, which they could never make happen on their own.

So for the most part, we coexist, in some times more easily than others. But encounters between the two groups have always been fraught. To this day, whenever we meet a stranger, we can’t automatically tell a Decent from a Deplorable. Decents can do deplorable things. Deplorables are capable of occasional decency. You never know when a Trumpy might return your lost dog.

Which is, finally, where the conditional mood comes in.

When we say “I would like,” instead of “I want” or “Give me,” we soften the tone and lower the temperature. We change the “mood” of the room, so a peaceful exchange can now take place. It’s part of a code we humans developed, over eons, to deal with inter-personal tension. It's also part of the origin story of manners.

Because it’s manners — those simple ritual politenesses of daily life — that sand down the rough edges of human transaction. And it’s manners that separate the Decents from the Deplorables. Always have, always will.

There is little doubt that the Deplorables are running the show at the moment — something history tells us never ends well — and their manners, or lack of them, are a leading indicator of their deplorability.

This is particularly evident in the coarseness of their language, in the open aggression of sentences that begin “We want this…” or “We demand this…” as opposed to “We would like to discuss this…”

They are not subtle. Listen to how they avoid the conditional mood. Listen to the sneering belligerence of a Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Karoline Leavitt, Tom Homan and the other Deplorables — not to mention the stream-of-consciousness verbal diarrhea of Trump himself.

And watch how the bullying tone they take shuts down all negotiation, and threatens to shut down all commerce. Their intractability — their my-way-or-the-highway attitude — is all head-bashing, no cooperating. They serve nothing but anarchy.