Politics and Language

Andrew et al link to a polling graph that places my misreading of party ID numbers last week in pretty obvious context. I’ve spent the last week thinking a lot about that post and the push back I received to it.

It was a bit surprising to me just how emotionally invested I became in the contents of that post and how charged my own actions became around the ensuing discussion. I’m generally pretty sincere in my writing, but also try to consciously maintain a certain distance from anything I write. I want to be open to as much as possible, unattached to being “right”, and swayed by the best arguments that happen to come along. My thought process on that post might lend some insight into why that wasn’t the case with that particular post and leads well into where my head is at now vis-a-vis its contents.

As you might recall if you read the post, my original intent was to go out and find some statistics that would help to support my thesis that Democrats following Grayson’s lead in leveling rhetoric at Republicans that was on par with the rhetoric that Republicans have often leveled at Democrats was a losing formula. When I found the poll and the graph that I did, I was quite taken aback.

Certainly part of that reaction was my misreading of the numbers, no doubt there. Part of it also, though, was this sinking feeling I had in watching liberals and Democrats rally around Grayson’s comments and start to seem to get the eyes-rolling-into-the-backs-of-their-heads, feeding frenzy look to them and the sense that I had nothing really concrete to use in arguing against that blood lust.

It just seems obviously true to me (and most liberals) that Democrats have spent most of the past decade (if not longer) being whacked around pretty hard by Republicans and not really doing much whacking back. It is then easy to understand why many liberals and Democrats might be hair triggered to see red and start looking to play that Republican game better than Republicans.

Payback, as they say, is a… well it can hurt.

The Pollster.com graph and numbers might now pour some water on that fire, but at the time it seemed to me that there was little in the way of hard statistics to counter that inclination. There seemed to be no downside for Democrats in choosing to tread that path and I found that really disturbing.

The question, of course, is: why? Why should I become so upset and emotionally invested in  what struck me as a perfectly understandable reaction from a political party of which I am often critical, but broadly supportive that operates in a country of which I am not a citizen?

It’s a good question. I’ve spent the last week asking it of myself. Here is what I’ve come up with: how we talk about politics matters, and, in fact, it matters a great deal more than I think we generally acknowledge.

The famous Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Without getting too deep into the weeds of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work and its attendant problems, what we can glean from that quote is that the language that we use has a profound impact on how we understand the world around us and our place in that world. That insight is true in pretty much every corner of our lives, no less so in the political corners.

How we choose to language and articulate our political situations and potential solutions fundamentally frames not just the debate, but our very understanding of the debate and the circumstances out of which the debate arises. It is true that there is a lived experience that greatly informs that debate, but the interrelated nature of our linguistically informed understanding of the world and our, for lack of a better phrase, felt experience of the world are not lines that are easily left untangled. There is a give and take, a constant loop of feedback, and so how we talk about our world and, in particular, our politics, will, at the source of our cognitive, perceptive, and analytic processes, affect the very nature of our understanding and actions there within.

As I went through all of that in my head, it also occurred to me that this above isn’t merely a theoretical nicety. There is, off the top of my head, at least one recent example of how the language and tone of a political debate has fundamentally impacted and formed the contours of that debate to both both great effect and great tragedy. That example is, of course, the invasion of Iraq.

Following the traumatic events of 9-11, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and a host of other Republicans  managed to take commanding control of the use of language and the tone of debate to both engineer an outcome that they desired and effectively supress the majority, if not all, debate or dissent on that outcome in the mainstream of American political discourse.

Whether it was Condoleeza Rice talking about “smoking guns” and “mushrooms clouds”, George W. Bush mouthing unfounded certitudes about “weapons of mass destruction”, Rumsfeld obfuscating via “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns”, or any number of Republicans questioning the fundamental patriotism and moral integrity of anyone who dared to question the decision to invade Iraq, language was used as a vicious weapon in shaping not just the terms of the debate, but the basic understanding and analysis that most people brought to that debate, and to great effect.

Even now, Dick Cheney continues to use these same types of linguistic gymnastic around his role in the CIA use of torture.

There is, of course, now a general consensus about the disastrous outcomes of that decision. But that consensus comes far too late in the course of events to have anything other than a postscripting effect and continues to fail in terms of dissecting just how deeply rooted the problems that lead to present circumstances were and are. It might be nice to tack blame for all of those atrocious failures on George W. Bush, but the ways in which language played a fundamental role in not just enabling, but demanding such a severe malfunction in judgment all around is far more endemic to the political arena than such answers are able to explain.

And so it is in this light that I have come to see the clean up of the language and tone we use to engage in and describe our politics as one of, if not, perhaps, the most important exercises of present participants. It should never again be the case that language can be used to so thoroughly and completely blunt the razor edge of our discriminating and critical faculties. How we formulate our political language and frame our political debates must be something to which we append at least a modest amount of our attention, lest we doom ourselves to similar failures and moral abrogations.

To that end, the first step in achieving such reform is, I believe, in overtly refusing to use language as a weapon, under any circumstances. It is, I believe, the very least we can do.

Looking out over the landscape of US political discourse, it seem overwhelmingly clear to me that the Republican Party is not the agent for that kind of change. While it is true that there are a not insignificant number of conservatives who seem only too prepared to assume the appropriated humilities and learn from the mistakes of the past, too many movement conservatives and Republican leaders seem intent on doubling down with a lexicon of manipulation and deceipt as a means of survival and last resort. Ultimately, it would seem, so much the worse for them.

So it appears, then, that the primary players in such reform are Democrats and, indeed, the opportunity is theirs to seize. But insofar as the charge forward is represented by the back pedaling to lowest common denominators of which Rep. Garyson’s comments seem indicative, not only is that opportunity lost, but history seems only too easily repeated at some point in the future.

Tagged as: Alan Grayson, analysis, cognition, Condoleeza Rice, dick cheney, dissent, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Grayson, iraq war, language, rhetorical tone, torture, Wittgenstein