The Firmness Factor
The Senate hearings on
campaign-finance irregularities, conducted since July by Sen. Fred Thompson's
Governmental Affairs Committee, have eased finally into insentience. As with so
many political efforts, the committee's most lasting achievement is likely to
be linguistic. Much as the one tangible consequence of Jimmy Carter's famous
"malaise" speech, in 1979, was that it taught millions of Americans a new
French word (which Carter in his speech in fact never uttered; the word was
picked up from pre-speech "spinning" by Carter's political adviser, Patrick
Caddell), so too a consequence of the Thompson committee hearings has been to
give wide currency to the term soft money , in the sense of "money that
can be collected for use in political campaigns but which enjoys an existence
outside the rules, the oversight, and the control of the Federal Election
Commission." Specifically, soft money can be contributed in unlimited
amounts so long as it is ostensibly spent on vague "party-building activities"
rather than on behalf of, or at the direction of, particular candidates.
At one
point in late October, as the committee hearings neared their end, Sen. Carl
Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, sought to emphasize that it was not only the
Democrats who relied heavily on soft money. "The soft-money cake was eaten by
both parties," Levin said. "This is what Congress permits, folks. Heck, we not
only permit it, we thrive on it." A week later, as if to underscore Levin's
point, or at least to carry the culinary metaphor a little further along, the
New York Times headlined a story about a Republican fund-raising dinner
with "Menu at G.O.P. Feast: Soft Money for Appetizer and Dessert."
There is no deep mystery about the proximate origins of the
term "soft money." In its current sense, it came into use almost as soon as the
present contours of campaign law were established, in the late 1970s.
Beginning
in the 17 th century, hard money and soft money came to
refer to metallic money and paper money, respectively. Because hard money was
tied intrinsically to the value of precious metals, the term was soon applied
more generally to currencies of enduring and robust value, currencies that were
under tight control and backed with ample amounts of metal. Hard
currencies aren't pegged to metals any longer, but in casual political and
macroeconomic parlance, soft-money
people are those who take an
optimistic and permissive attitude toward control of the money supply, and
hard-money
people are those who take a grouchy and restrictive
one.
It is the "control" rather than the "value"
aspect of the modern hard money-soft money dichotomy that makes the terminology
applicable to campaign contributions. The immediate linguistic conduit through
which it arrived was probably the language of Wall Street, in which soft
money may refer to payments made in the form of noncash goods and services.
(In 1983, a Washington Post story described an operative for Walter
Mondale's nascent presidential campaign overseeing a vast pro-Mondale mailing,
one that wouldn't count toward the campaign's spending limits because it was
"educational" material technically being sent out by a labor union. "Ah, the
sound of soft money," the operative said.) In business terms, hard money
may refer not just to real money--i.e., hard cash --but also to real
money obtained on hard terms.
All this
is straightforward enough. But let's not lose sight of a larger phenomenon. It
is said that the human tongue naturally distinguishes among four types of
tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Similarly, the human mind is always
ready to divide the world roughly into two conceptual categories. Oliver
Wendell Holmes thought that all people could be classified according to whether
they were psychologically "internal" or "external." The late Isaiah Berlin, in
a famous assessment, classified people according to whether they were hedgehogs
(those who know one big thing) or foxes (people who know many little things).
As I have noted elsewhere, other "two-kinds-of-people" categories
might include dogs vs. cats, savers vs. tossers, deciduous vs. evergreen,
standard vs. automatic. Somehow, though, the qualities soft and
hard never made it onto this original list--a significant omission,
given the prominence they are coming to enjoy in the public arena of
language.
The softness and hardness at issue here are
not, of course, the words having literally to do with the physical properties
of the same name, but rather the higher, metaphorical qualities associated with
the words: that is, hard in the sense of "stern," "uncompromising,"
"grim," "tough," "realistic," "verifiable," or "physically palpable"; and
soft in the sense of "moderate," "subjective," "subject to emotion,"
"simple," "idealistic," "weak," or "physically immaterial." In religious terms,
hard can often be thought of as Calvinist, soft as Unitarian.
Taking these attributes together, we thus have hard-liners and
soft-liners , hard-core pornography and soft-core
pornography , hard sell and soft sell , hard numbers and
soft numbers , hard drugs and soft drugs , hard
liquor and soft drinks , hard sciences and soft
sciences , hardhearted and softhearted , hard rock and
soft rock .
Keep an
eye out or an ear cocked today for the hard-soft distinction, and you
probably will encounter examples within just a few minutes (not counting the
ubiquitous hardwares and softwares , hardballs and
softballs ). On the BBC World Service's main morning news program a few
days ago, a news reader, in a story about a Kurdish influx into Europe, spoke
of Italy as having a soft immigration policy, meaning that illegal
aliens are given expulsion orders but not actually subjected to any further
action. (The Misty Isles, the mythical homeland of Queen Aleta in Prince
Valiant , once made a practice of slaughtering shipwreck survivors the
moment they washed up on beaches. This would be a hard immigration
policy.) Labor disputes in professional sports have centered on whether teams,
and therefore players, would be subject to a hard salary cap or a
soft salary cap , "hard" and "soft" in this instance meaning,
essentially, "enforceable" and "unenforceable." The hard-soft distinction crops
up in the jargon of globe-twirlers. Hard power , as foreign-policy
analysts use the term, is power that comes out of the barrel of a gun--pure
military might. Soft power is power that comes in the form of economic
influence or (most softly of all) moral standing.
Hard and soft figure in the context of
preferments extended to racial and ethnic minorities. According to a recent
article in the journal Public Interest , soft affirmative action
emphasizes efforts to improve educational and job-training opportunities to
improve minority representation in the classroom and the workplace. Hard
affirmative action emphasizes explicit quotas for jobs, promotions, and
college admissions. In Quebec, soft separatists are those who simply
seek ever more cultural and political autonomy for the Francophone province,
whereas hard separatists demand outright sovereignty. Political theory
distinguishes between a hard state (a state with a relentlessly
efficient, perhaps authoritarian, central government and a high regard for
Darwinian market dynamics) and a soft state (which features messy
pluralism and aggravating domestic politics in an environment of at least
intermittent concern for the general welfare).
Such hard-soft terminology
is, one could argue, ideally suited to a postideological age in which other
kinds of distinctions--liberal vs. conservative, right vs. wrong, nature vs.
nurture--seem increasingly tiresome or obsolete. For the most part, hard
and soft carry no troubling value judgments. They merely express an
attitude--a stance, a pattern of behavior or of thought--and their meaning in
almost any context is intuitively clear. The hard truth, I would argue, is that
this way of seeing the world is itself distressingly soft.
