The New York Times building in Manhattan, 2019
1 October 2024
Sanewashing is the portrayal of a radical or beyond-the-pale political idea as being within the mainstream of political discourse, making an insane idea appear sane. It is formed on the model of greenwashing (making an ecologically untenable idea or practice seem environmentally friendly) and whitewashing. It’s a good example of a word being older than most people think; words often have a period of relatively limited use in a specific discourse communities before suddenly being picked up in general discourse and becoming widely used across the board.
In its popular use, the term is most often associated with major media outlets, such as the New York Times, who tend to portray the racist, fascist, and otherwise anti-democratic ideas and statements of Donald Trump as reasonable. But sanewashing apparently got its start outside of politics, in transhumanism movement and discussions of how technology could be used to improve the human race. Use of the word in this discourse community goes back as far as 2007, when it appears in a post by blogger Dale Carrico. The blog post’s title is “Sanewashing Superlativity (For a More Gentle Seduction),” and the relevant lines in the post read:
Although Anissimov wants to reassure the world that transhumanists have no peculiar commitments to particular superlative outcomes one need only read any of them for any amount of time to see the truth of the matter. Far more amusing than his denials and efforts at organizational sanewashing go, however, is his concluding admonishment of those—oh, so few!—transhumanists or Singularitarians who might be vulnerable to accusations of Superlativity: “If any transhumanists do have specific attachments to particular desired outcome,” Anissimov warns, “I suggest they drop them—now.”
A few days later in the same discourse thread, another blogger, Richard Jones, picks up on Carrico’s use of the term.
It’s good that Michael [Anissimov] recognises the danger of the situation I identify, but some other comments on his blog suggest to me that what he is doing here is, in Carrico’s felicitous phrase, sanewashing the transhumanist and singularitarian movements with which he is associated.
Nearly a decade later, in 2016, the sanewashing is being used in the context of cryonics, the industry that promises immortality by freezing a person after death, thawing them in the future when a cure for what killed them is available. Reporter Corey Pein writes in the March 2016 issue of The Baffler:
There was another important factor in the sane-washing of cryonics. Alcor had a new chief executive. In contrast to his predecessors, this one looked and sounded almost . . . normal. And yet he was every bit the oddball charlatan that his predecessors were, as well as a longtime keeper of the organization’s secrets.
In a footnote, Pein credits Carrico with the coinage. The fact that these other early uses credit Carrico hints that they may have learned the term directly from his blog and that sanewashing was not yet in wider use.
By 2016 the term had moved out of the realm of wild-eyed speculation of a technological future and into the politics of the present. But it was first used in reference the ideas and discourse of the left. In 2020, a person going by the moniker inverseflorida wrote a post to the subreddit /r/neoliberal with the title:
How did “Defund the police” stop meaning “Defund the police”?—Why mainstream progressives have a strong incentive to ‘sanewash’ hard leftist positions
And within the post itself they wrote:
When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you’re not going to give up the position because you’re certain it’s right, what are you going to do? I’m arguing you’re going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go “Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]”.
Two years later, the gerund made it into Urbandictionary with the following definition:
Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public. This is often done by claiming that the radicals are taken out of context, don’t truly represent the movement, or that opponents’ arguments about its severity are wrong. Oftentimes, the person doing the sanewashing isn’t radical themselves—they may be doing so because they genuinely don’t believe the movement to be radical, or are trying to justify to themselves how they can support a radical movement.
A portmanteau of “sane” + “whitewashing” (portraying something as better than it is). Coined on the /r/neoliberal subreddit in late 2020 to describe progressives who misrepresent radical stances.
“/r/antiwork isn’t about not wanting to work at all, it’s about wanting to reform wage labor to make it less exploitative.”
“Stop sanewashing it, I found a video of the head moderator who says 20 hours of dog-walking is too labor-intensive.”
The term, however, did not enter widespread use for several years. (Urbandictionary, for example, has as of this writing only one entry on the term. It’s not unusual for popular slang terms to have dozens of people creating entries.)
Sanewashing burst into general political discourse on 4 September 2024, when Parker Molloy wrote the following in the New Republic:
While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty, Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump “charmed” this group of “conservative moms,” the Times didn’t even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen.
This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.
Dozens of other commentators and pundits followed her lead and started describing the media’s treatment of Trump as sanewashing.
It remains to be seen if sanewashing will continue to be used for the practice regardless of where on the political spectrum it occurs, or if it will become so indelibly associated with the media’s treatment of Trump that its future use will be limited to this one case.
Sources:
Carrico, Dale. “Sanewashing Superlativity (For a More Gentle Seduction).” Amor Mundi (blog), 26 October 2007.
inverseflorida. “How did ‘Defund the police’ stop meaning ‘Defund the police’?.” Reddit.com, 2020.
Jones, Richard. “The Uses and Abuses of Speculative Futurism.” Soft Machines (blog), 30 October 2007.
Molloy, Parker. “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity.” New Republic, 4 September 2024.
Pein, Corey. “Everybody Freeze!” The Baffler, March 2016.
Urbandictionary.com, 22 April 2022, s.v. sanewashing.
Zimmer, Ben. “sanewashing.” ADS-L, 11 September 2024.
Photo credit: Ajay Suresh, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.