The curious parallels between Herschel Walker and Jacob Rees-Mogg
The name Herschel Walker might not be familiar to UK readers who aren’t following the intricacies of the US news cycle. He’s one of those big but confusing characters that the game of politics occasionally throws up; much more a spectacle of epic miscalculation than he is a representation of a modern functioning democracy.
Actually, let’s scrub that and start again…
The name Jacob Rees-Mogg might not be familiar to US readers who aren’t following the intricacies of the UK news cycle. He’s one of those big but confusing characters that the game of politics occasionally throws up; much more a spectacle of epic miscalculation than he is a representation of a modern functioning democracy.
On the face of it, the contrast between Walker and Rees-Mogg is as striking as it is incongruous. You could not find two men as different as the former NFL player running back now running for the Georgia Senate seat and the sitting Conservative MP for North East Somerset. Yet this week, the media across our two countries have been struggling to frame the latest behaviour of the two men in a way that doesn’t sound like a collective snort of derision.
In the case of Walker, we’re talking about a candidate who has admitted to having suffered from multiple personalities and has been subject to allegations of domestic violence as well as the recent controversy around revelations that he asked a former girlfriend to get abortions. For much of the campaign, he has been a walking gaffe machine, producing meme-worthy examples of rambling incoherence. His campaign has been floundering, but this is also the hyper-partisan reality of American politics heading into the midterms in less than four weeks, so he did begin to recover ground on his opponent, Raphael Warnock, during September. Sensing the opportunity to overturn the odds, the Republican Party sent some of their bigger hitters down to Georgia to bolster Walker. That’s how senators Rick Scott and Tom Cotton found themselves this week standing behind Walker as the candidate attempted to reboot his campaign. It was the perfect chance to put all the crazy campaign speeches behind him.
So… perhaps not the best time to repeat the Fable of the Randy Bull. It’s not one of Aesop’s finest but worth quoting in full.
“This bull in the field with six cows”, began Walker. “And three of them are pregnant, so you know he got something going on. But all he care about, he kept his nose against the fence, looking at three other cows that didn’t belong to him. Now all he had to do was eat grass. But no, no, no. He thought something was better somewhere else. So he decided, I want to get over there. So one day he measured that fence up and he said I think I can jump this. So that day came where he got back, and as he got back, he dove over that fence and his belly got cut up on the bottom. But as he made it over to the other side, he shook it off and got so excited about it. And he ran to the top of that hill, but when he got up there he realised they were bulls too. So what I’m telling you, don’t think something is better somewhere else – this is the greatest country in the world today.”
The greatest country in the world, indeed. The greatest nation where control of the Senate, therefore the future path of the US government, and by that, the fate of the entire free world, might well rely on this outcome of a race where the wisdom of sexualised cattle might well play a part. It’s almost beyond parody.
Yet before we Brits start to swagger too much and boast about the relative sanity of our system, up pops Jacob Rees-Mogg on Radio 4, making a claim, expressed more cogently and with his impeccable diction, that makes one come to an abrupt halt in about half the time it took Walker to set off the logical airbags. Get ready. Your eyebrows are about to fly off the front of your face from the sheer incalculable stupidity of it all.
“You suggest something is causal which is a speculation,” said Rees-Mogg in that supremely precise way he has of making the less confident hesitate even when what he says is witless. “What has caused the effect in pension funds […] is not necessarily the mini-budget. I think jumping to conclusions about causality is not meeting the BBC requirement for impartiality.”
It’s a remarkable moment of gaslighting which reduces politics to the philosophical backwater of ontology (mixed in with tedious BBC baiting). “I mean… if you really think about it…” stumbles the undergraduate philosopher, reinventing arguments Descartes was having back when chamber pots were considered a mixture of black magic and advanced technology. “When does causality exist? Does anything ever happen outside the realm of the subjective?”
Rees-Mogg was riffing on the familiar adage that “correlation does not imply causation”. And he might well be right. Causality does not imply causation. But sometimes it does and, to borrow from Walker’s allegory, if you have six cows in a field and five of them become pregnant, there’s a pretty good chance that the sixth is a bull.
And if you think that I’m now proposing that Hershel Walker makes more sense than the current Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, you would be right. Walker is wrong on many points and is unsuitable for election to the Senate but, here, in this one story, we see an element of scorn directed at a poorly educated black candidate who simply lacks the elocution of a more seasoned politician. With Rees-Mogg, the opposite is true. Education, accident, and demeanour do a lot of heavy lifting when the substance is substandard. Because ask yourself: which is less catflap crazy: a slightly tedious allegory that can be better summed up in six words – “the grass is not always greener” – or the claim that a mini-budget, indicative of a government’s hard-line approach to the economy and a foreshadowing of a bigger budget, which created problematic tensions with the Bank of England – did not spook the markets?
As crazy as it sounds, in this narrow sense, the grass in Georgia might well be greener. Certainly, a little greener than it is in North East Somerset, though to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: England and America might well be two nations separated by a common language but they are still brought together by various degrees of bull.
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