LAT op-ed: Democrats' loser linguistics

Democrats' loser linguistics
Republicans aren't winning because they have the best buzzwords, but because they're fluent in politics' ground-level language.
By Geoffrey Nunberg
GEOFFREY NUNBERG is a linguist who teaches at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His new book on politics and language, "Talking Right," will be published next month by PublicAffairs.
June 11, 2006

....In spite of catchphrases such as "No Child Left Behind," "Healthy Forests" and "Clear Skies," voters still give Democrats the edge on education and the environment. The administration's incessant invocations of the "ownership society" couldn't win broad support for privatizing Social Security. And surveys show that rebaptizing the estate tax as the "death tax" didn't have much effect on support for its repeal.

The right's real linguistic triumphs don't lie in its buzzwords and slogans, but in capturing the ground-level language of politics. When we talk about politics nowadays — and by "we," I mean just about everybody, left, right and center — we reflexively use language that embodies the worldview of the right.

Time was, for example, that the media used "elite" chiefly for leaders of finance, industry and the military — as the British press still does. These days, the American press is far more likely to use it to describe "liberal" sectors such as the media, Hollywood or academia, instead of the main beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts. "Elite" has become a placeholder for the effete stereotypes the right has used to turn "liberal" into a label for out-of-touch, latte-sipping poseurs. The phrase "working-class liberal," for example, is virtually nonexistent nowadays, though people have no trouble talking about "working-class conservatives" — the implication being you can't be a liberal if you can't afford the granite countertops.

It goes on. The media are far more likely to pair "values" with "conservative" than "liberal," even as they more often describe liberals as "unapologetic" (liberalism apparently being something people should have qualms about owning up to). And you hear the same tone in the dominant uses of words like "freedom," "bias," "traditional," and many others, even in the so-called liberal media.

Yet when Democrats try to recapture the language of politics, it's often with a clueless literal-mindedness. Sometimes they seem to believe that they can shed the fatuous stereotypes simply by disavowing their own labels. Many people who would have proudly called themselves liberal 40 years ago have abandoned the name in favor of "progressive"....But "liberal" is too deeply etched in the split screens of the American media to be discarded, and Democrats who avoid it in favor of "progressive" only confirm the widespread suspicion that liberals aren't talking the same language as other Americans, even when it comes to pronouncing their own name right....

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-nunberg11jun11,0,3792221.story?coll=la-home-commentary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(communication_theory)

We have lost because we have betrayed, or at best been wishy washy about, our principles. Harry Truman is despised by some here, but he took on the Right and the media head on, and said, if you are not a Liberal, you are a fool. No matter what Rove did in 2000 to manipulate the vote, it would not have been enough, if Al Gore had been the genuine Al Gore in confronting that congenital idiot George W. Bush that we see today. No more "triangulation." Stand or fall on principle. At the very least, be genuine. It's the only thing that works, besides Diebold guarantees. And that ain't us.

I don't agree with every word of it, but I reccomended it anyways because I think it does make some good points.

As far as abandoning the word liberal however, I am glad that people are trying to replace it with progressive. The word "liberal" can mean so many different things. If you spend money liberally that is not always a good thing. I certainly think Bush has been using our money very liberally when it comes to Halliburton contracts, and I don't like it. Also when you are talking trade policy a "liberal trade policy" is something most progressives would object to. I am not abandoning the term because of the way the right frames it, I am abandoning it because I don't think it describes me very well.

Progressive is a much more positive word, and its meaning is much more consistant.