Do these words move you? "I would hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo..." Try to read them without letting a scene take shape in your imagination. I can't. Words force reflexive thoughts and sometimes even actions, and may do so beyond our will to resist or at least without conscious awareness of our reflex.
You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center. I plead guilty." - Hillary Clinton in Columbus, OH, Sept. 10, 2015.
This is a more recent quote, obviously much more pedestrian, and it has set the site on fire, for all the obvious and well-tread reasons. But, something important is being overlooked and though this quote speaks to it, it's not about Hillary alone, but rather our entire political and media culture and how we allow them to dangerously misuse words. Though I'm not an especially gifted writer, I love words, their power to move, to evoke, and simply to define. That's their most basic purpose -- to define. As humans communicate verbally with each other, comprehension --
understanding -- is difficult at best if we don't have a shared definition of the words being used. Words mean things. The field of law exists from the need to extract and assert meaning from words and/or the need to protect the definition of given words.
We must be precise and careful with word use, because I caution you that we are greatly influenced by their abuse even as we are unaware of that influence. Let's start with a simple example:
The "Right."
This in itself an example of victory in defining a word, because Right is, well, right and not wrong. We raise our right hand when taking a public oath, even in court. We sit at the right hand of Our Father (for the religious). "He's my right hand guy." "Left," by contrast reflects an outlier. Being left-handed is anomalous. One can be "left" out. To be left is to be assigned a negative connotation. To be right is to be assigned a positive connotation. You don't agree? Look at a battery terminal, the right is positive. The left is negative. Always. Right is offense, left is defense. Right is strong. Left is weak. Right is power. Left is underdog.
Still don't believe me? Mind the gap, but take a leap of faith...
In your mind, as I list sets of humanity, immediately place them in the "correct" category of left versus right:
indigenous people
bankers
homeless
protestors
generals
CEOs
workers
If you are honest, those we think have power have been placed on the right, the others on the left. Of course this is not 100%, but the point is perception, reflexive bias. And it works both ways -- just by calling something "right" we assign it power even if we are not aware of it.
Yet very few give even these basic assignments any thought; we simply accept these definitions, without realizing it puts those on the "left" at a subconscious disadvantage. Even if we, as the DKos community recoil from the term "Right," we find ourselves defending our labels, whereas the Right simply asserts (offensive action) theirs.
Republicans in particular do an excellent job of selecting words for their evocative power and then relentlessly working to establish a recoil impulse when that given word is heard. Frank Luntz anyone? The man's practically his own institution, yet we have no common parallel on team Democratic because our tendency is to accept the Right's bastardized definition of terms and then play defense. It's why most elected Democrats run away from the term "liberal," even as their counterparts embrace the mirror word of "conservative."
But going even further, misuse of words can be even more insidious. This happens most when people retain a correct reflexive understanding of a word, yet the word gets co-opted for that positive connotation to become the label for something sharing no correlation to word's true definition. When that happens, our subconscious reflex tricks us into thinking something is as the word implies, even though it may be far from it. Confused? Here's a simple example:
"Centrist," defined by Google thusly:
cen·trist
ˈsentrəst
adjective: centrist
1. having moderate political views or policies.
noun: centrist; plural noun: centrists
1. a person who holds moderate political views
This seems simple enough. Nothing about this implies radical or extreme, correct? In fact, the label leads us to believe such a person is solidly in the mainstream, smack dab in the "center" of American political values. Comfortably average. No hint of threat.
Here's the thing, it's not true. In fact, it's wildly untrue. It's a dangerous lie because the policies claimed by political "centrists" have empirically been shown to generate benefits that accrue almost exclusively to a miniscule top fraction of the population. We've all seen the statistics about this "recovery." We've often seen the charts, including the one I've placed below.
How can pols claim to be moderates when their policies only benefit a tiny fraction of the population?
Words like "centrist" and "moderate" are not scary. We aren't going to steer our baby strollers away from a roving gang of moderates. Our minds conjure up neither images of the deranged psychos in
Clockwork Orange or the street toughs in
Fresh Outta Compton. Instead, our minds coalesce around harmless images of accountants, people driving sedans. We think of "average," "middle of the road."
But we should, because the politicians we've allowed the press to call "moderates" and "centrists" have in fact ravaged both the Poor and the Middle Classes in this country as they've made about 1% of 1% of the country obscenely wealthy.
Those we call "centrist" have enabled policies yielding results that can only be rationally called "extreme," from incarceration statistics to college debt to law enforcement violence to income inequality to healthcare costs to trillions in profits held tax free offshore.
At the same time, politicians whose ideas are supported by overwhelming majorities of Americans -- and widely supported even by self-identified Republicans -- are the ones labeled called "extreme" or called "leftist" and "out of the mainstream" when the facts reveal exactly the opposite is true:
...Referring to his core campaign positions, [Sanders] said: "It is not a radical agenda. In virtually every instance, what I'm saying is supported by a significant majority of the American people."
That's a claim worth double-checking. We pulled the key components of his announcement speech and looked at the most recent polling on each to see just how much support Sanders's proposals had. It doesn't take very long before we get mired in the ways polling can fail to capture the nuance of the issue but, spoiler alert: Sanders was generally right.
Even the NYT's Opinion Editor Margaret Sullivan,
in a piece this week that asks if Bernie is being dissed, tried to label Bernie as far outside the mainstream (bold emphasis is mine)!
It’s not hard to understand the news judgment at play here: Given Hillary Rodham Clinton as such a dominant candidate, with widespread support, lots of money and the Democratic Party’s likely imprimatur, almost any other Democratic candidate looked like an also-ran. And Mr. Sanders — whose politics are significantly left of center and who is 74 years old — didn’t appear to be the kind of candidate to change that view.
How is one "left of center" (again, that magic word "center") when, again, on
every core policy proposal Bernie has,
America agrees with Sanders
? The answer is, he's not. The positions he espouses more accurately reflects the "center" by any definition that requires proof points to earn its label.
Rudyard Kipling warned us that
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind,”
and we'd do well to heed his wise, well, words. Free speech. Slander. Libel. All recognize the weight of words. And today, they hold an even deeper power, because they drive search association on the Internet. Make someone wear a label, it lives tagged to that person into perpetuity. So don't let others play games with our words, don't let them wrongly label people, or lay claim to them undeservedly. In particular, don't let labels go unchallenged.
Maybe Roald Dahl said it best:
“Don't gobblefunk around with words.”
