Bird's the word

I have a hard time doing "backbone" posts; the kind of fundamental reference point that I'll be noting often in future posts but which I'd rather not do because I want to get to the more fun and exciting stuff. Nevertheless I have to do it, otherwise I'd be facing the task of explaining it in every relevant post in the future, and this then causes me to put off doing those posts. So pretty much nothing gets done, as usual.

The topic at hand is the FUBAR nature of the American political glossary. I agree, of course, that it is more important to know what a person believes rather than what to call them, but we also need an accurate shorthand that will sketch out a general idea of what to expect thereof, because we haven't got the patience to go over the same things in every conversation. If I say "I'm a progressive," it's probably unnecessary to explain my position on the estate tax, say. But the shorthand nature of the news media and the natural duplicity of politicians has twisted these words to have hardly anything resembling their original meaning, or any meaning at all, even though they are still expected to have the same explanatory power.

The classic case of recent years is the desecration of the word "liberal," which, with the rise of the talk-radio gasbag, has become an all-encompassing insult covering essentially everyone who is not a conservative Republican. They toss the word around in public company like someone (quite possibly them) might bandy about an ethnic slur. There is a great scene in the film "This Divided State" where Sean Hannity, giving a speech at the Utah Valley State College auditorium, peppers virtually every clause with the word. "Liberals," whoever they are, are coming to destroy the Average American. There is no limit or standard to whom they will hang the word on; even Hillary Clinton, the epitome of doughnut-soft DLC centrism is tagged by the knuckle-dragging right as some kind of "super-extreme liberal."

There's only one problem; as polls repeatedly show, Average American is, on a great many issues, quite solidly liberal. Hell, if polls are to be believed, the Average American is just a few steps short of being screamin' red, and not of the Jesusland shade. But the trick that has worked so well for the right has been to associate these stances with "liberals," the Bad People you don't want to be, even though there's no substantive reason for it. In our language, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's an anteater.

Sadly, this problem is often aided and abetted by actual liberals and mainstream Democrats, who will run away from the scary L word under euphemisms like "progressive." My personal favorite, drawing from another documentary "Our Brand is Crisis," comes from one DLC-style political consultant who actually drops the term "social democracy." The irony here is mainstream liberals, afraid of a word that has been chained together with whooping radicalism, are exchanging it for terms historically associated with positions much further left. This, consequently, drains those terms of any meaning because some jelly-legged liberals won't stand up for themselves.

This brings up another important distinction, between "left" and "liberal," that is largely unknown to most Americans, since the absence of any significant, organized "left" is a uniquely American characteristic. In fact, many of the scarce-few American politicos who do claim the term "liberal" might actually be better associated with the international left, but who reject the label for their own reasons (the left being a bunch of delusional, unserious hippies, naturally.) The odd term "left-liberal" has been coined to describe these folks.

The American Right has clearly won the language war in the past 20 years, largely because they have tried harder and refused to be publicly shamed by their label in the way many liberals have. The result has been a complete disconnection of word from meaning. Everyone knows someone who's said at some point "well, I'm not a liberal, but.." or "I'm not a feminist, but.." This progressive (quack quack) isn't going to play that game.

To end this disaster of a post on a lighter note, you'll be interested to know the Wikipedia entry for "doughnut" is currently locked to prevent sock puppetry.