Ketchup on Fries
You can hear it if you listen for it.
Not what they say. How they say it.
Rick Roderick once described American politics in a way that sticks. You take your statement, whatever it is, and you dip it. A little Jesus. A little God. Not too much. Just enough to coat it. Like ketchup on fries. It doesn’t change the fries. It makes them acceptable.
The point wasn’t religion. It was packaging.
The statement underneath could be anything. War. Tax cuts. Surveillance. It doesn’t matter. The coating does the work. It signals belonging. It tells the listener this is safe, this is ours, this fits into the moral language you already trust.
Europe doesn’t do Jesus the same way. The instinct is still there.
You hear equality, diversity, inclusion, fairness. Not as arguments. As framing devices. They come first, or last, or sit around the statement like a soft border. The policy itself can be sharp, even brutal in its consequences. But it arrives pre-coated. It has already been morally cleared.
Again, the point is not whether those words are right or wrong.
It’s how they function.
They are not there to clarify. They are there to stabilize. To remove friction before it appears. If you question the policy, you are no longer just questioning a decision. You are brushing against the coating. And the coating carries weight.
That’s the move.
Language shifts the battlefield.
You are no longer arguing about outcomes, trade-offs, unintended consequences. You are pulled somewhere else. Are you against equality. Against fairness. Against inclusion. The question is loaded before it is even asked.
So the discussion narrows without anyone closing it.
This isn’t new. It’s just more efficient.
Politics has always needed a moral surface. Something that turns power into legitimacy. Religion used to do it openly. Now it runs through secular virtues. Different vocabulary. Same mechanism.
A kind of ritual language.
Not to discover truth. To signal alignment.
And once you see it, something else becomes hard to ignore.
The coating is interchangeable.
God. Justice. Security. Freedom. The people.
It doesn’t matter which one. What matters is that it cannot be questioned without cost.
That’s what makes it useful.
It moves fast. It travels well. It compresses complexity into a few words that feel settled before they are examined.
And people don’t resist it.
Not because they are stupid. Because it saves effort. It gives you a position before you’ve looked at the thing itself.
The alternative is slower.
You strip the language down. Remove the coating. Look at the fries as they are. Greasy. Uneven. Sometimes good. Sometimes not.
No signal. No guarantee. No built-in approval.
Most people don’t stay there.
So the coating remains.
And politics drifts. Away from what is being done. Toward how it is made to feel acceptable.