{S} ometimes, as Sigmund Freud never quite said, politics is just politics.

One would not always know this by reading the American press. Unencumbered by extraneous talents and achievements, a sizeable number of this country’s journalists have come to exhibit an excessive faith in the only tool that they are capable of wielding: words. These days, to open up a newspaper or website is to get the feeling that the authors and editors who are featured within believe that reality is optional, that the truth must be subordinated to the narrative, and that all human experiences have been crafted out of soft putty. Once, we described members of the media as “reporters.” Presently, “scriptwriters” might be more apt.

For a useful illustration of this trend, consider how keen certain scriveners are to explain to the voting public what their well-stated concerns must “really” be about. At CNN this week, Nathaniel Meyersohn delivered a classic of this genre when he insisted that the “anxiety over shoplifting” that is spreading across the United States is actually “a stand-in for larger concerns of cultural, economic or political changes.” Taking his readers on a half-potted journey through the recent past, Meyersohn explained that worries about private-property theft have historically been driven by alarm about the “changing role of women,” “counterculture fears,” and a desire “to oppose criminal justice policy reforms.” This time, he concluded with the deployment of a carefully laundered quote, the “panic” is the product of “broader concerns about law and disorder.”

Quite why Meyersohn believes that the causation must run in this direction is unclear given that, elsewhere in his piece, he concedes openly that “shoplifting increased in some cities during the first half of the year compared to pre-pandemic levels”; that “shoplifting reports in 24 major cities where police have consistently published years of data — including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas and San Francisco — were 16% higher during the first half of 2023 compared to 2019”; that “toothpaste and deodorant are locked up at stores”; that “videos of thieves smashing store windows and grabbing merchandise have rocketed across the news and social media”; that “companies are calling theft a national crisis”; that “businesses have been sounding the alarm about a rise in theft, particularly from organized groups stealing merchandise”; that the “violence of organized groups are a growing threat to stores and employees”; and that “some companies say they are closing over shoplifting.”

Admittedly, I lack Myerson’s exquisite sociological antennae, but, to my unsophisticated antediluvian brain, it seems far more likely that people are worried about law and disorder because of shoplifting rather than that they are worried about shoplifting because of law and disorder. Indeed, of all the many unsolved mysteries of our time, this one strikes me as perhaps the most straightforward. Americans say they dislike shoplifting because it makes shopping more dangerous and more annoying, because it raises the likelihood that their local stores will be closed, and because it breeds contempt for the law, and what they “really mean” by that is that they dislike shoplifting because it makes shopping more dangerous and more annoying, because it raises the likelihood that their local stores will be closed, and because it breeds contempt for the law. Crime is a physical problem. It can be seen, felt, and touched. It has material effects. Useful as they may be in other contexts, one needs neither Harold Bloom nor Sherlock Holmes to delve into why the citizenry resents it.

Alas, there is no problem so obvious that it does not attract the attention of the deconstructionists. Two years ago, when the United States was in the midst of the worst bout of inflation in four decades, Rick Perlstein took to the pages of New York magazine to contend that the fears that he was witnessing across the nation were probably about something else. Examining the late 1970s and early 1980s — the last time America had suffered such rapid price increases — Perlstein wondered, “What were these people really talking about when they talked about inflation?” and concluded that, instead of “inflation,” they were actually engaged in an unrelated “moral panic” that had been provoked by the suspicion that “more permissiveness, more profligacy, more individual freedom, more sexual freedom had sent society spiraling out of control.”

Which, of course, is utterly preposterous. Like crime, economic stability is an elementary — perhaps even pre-political — question for a supermajority of voters. People loathe inflation because it blows apart their budgets, devalues their savings, makes it difficult to plan for the future, and triggers interest-rate hikes that render prohibitive the cost of borrowing for a home or car. Inflation is a concrete, not an abstract, problem. It shows up clearly in the numbers, and it has tangible effects that can be seen in neighborhoods, garages, shopping baskets, bank accounts, and beyond. It exists independently of individual freedom, sexual freedom, and the rest.

As our culture has evolved, human beings have developed a tapestry of valuable belle-lettristic tools. To convey meanings that we would rather keep veiled, we use symbolism, irony, implication, ambiguity, innuendo, and more. But there are substantial differences between literature and politics, and one of those differences is that, in politics, most people just say what they think — without need of interpreters, mediators, or exegetes of any form.