sanewashing

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 got its start on the other end of the political spectrum, describing the practice by neoliberals of watering down more progressive ideas.

The term, in the verb form to sanewash, was apparently coined by a Reddit user who uses the moniker of inverseflorida. In 2020, 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:

inverseflorida. “How did ‘Defund the police’ stop meaning ‘Defund the police’?.” Reddit.com, 2020.

Molloy, Parker. “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity.” New Republic, 4 September 2024.

Urbandictionary.com, 22 April 2022, s.v. sanewashing.

Photo credit: Ajay Suresh, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.