The Role of Language in Politics

As any reader of this blog likely knows, I am generally displeased with the nature of political discourse in the United States. Thanks to major, for-profit media outlets like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, our national discourse is shaped and our language is carefully selected to represent primarily the interests of the few extremely wealthy men who run those companies. As a result, we spend a lot of time talking about issues like abortion, stem cell research, and immigration policy - all admittedly important - and not much time talking about things like the structure of power, voting policies, and income distribution. Of course, we talk about those latter things some, but with those issues, as with the more popular and sensational issues listed before, the whole debate is framed by major media outlets. And that's the real point: the range of acceptable opinion has almost nothing to do with the range of possible solutions.

Perhaps the biggest reason for this is the brilliant associations the so-called right and left have made around each others' positions. Anything strongly conservative is "fascist," and anything strongly liberal is "socialist, communist, or Marxist." None of those words is used according to their actual meaning, but rather they have become bugbears, denoting some vague sense of evil and despair that comes from running a government that is not, as we call it, "moderate."

Moderate is much more a myth than words like Socialist and Fascist. How so? Because the concept of moderate depends upon a linear model of political discourse. For some reason we've all bought into the Facebook Likert scale of politics; each position is scored from strongly liberal to strongly conservative, with the middle being moderate. Why should this be? What is so linear about politics? On a superficial level, sure, it makes sense: if I believe the government should take measures to prevent illegal immigration, it is fairly easy to draw a straight line from there to the opposite position, which says that illegal immigrants should be granted amnesty. But does it really make sense to draw that line? Even if we can turn the general sense of what should be done into a linear continuum, surely there's room for debate on the how?

Consider: one person might argue that we need to build a big wall along the Mexican-American border. Another might say we need to round up all of the illegal immigrants in the country and deport them. Yet another might argue that we should work closely with the Mexican government to improve working conditions there, so as to minimize the incentives for immigration. Still another might argue that we ought to do our best to simplify immigration law so that it is easier to determine who is legal and who is not. And so on. The thing is, many of these positions are not mutually exclusive for any reason other than where they stand in our perceived left-right linear model of politics. Yet, if you were to ask most Americans, they would think that the border fence idea and the simplified immigration law idea are irreconcilable.

This is just a single example, but we could do the same with almost any issue. Try it yourself. Take a major, hot-button issue. Map out the conservative position and the liberal one. Then determine possible solutions, and see whether they are mutually exclusive.

I should say, what I'm talking about is not a moderate position, because that implies finding the midpoint of a line. My point here is that we are imagining - we believe almost unquestioningly - in a line that does not exist. There is no linearity in political solutions. Even a yes or no question like "should the USA reduce its military budget" cannot be answered by liberal-says-yes and conservative-says-no. The issue is more complicated than that. The issue is not, fundamentally, linear.

With all that in mind, I want to return to the words we use in politics to denigrate opposing positions. "That's socialism!" is the cry around which - ironically - many people rally when talking about President Obama (ironic because Obama is about as far from being a socialist as everyone who derides him for it; indeed, he probably has fewer socialist beliefs than most of the people who criticize him). No explanation is needed. No examination of why socialism is bad, how it works and doesn't work, and why we have to fear socialist reforms is offered in the national discourse. We take for granted that socialism is evil, that it has been tried and does not work, that income and wealth should never never never be distributed throughout the population.

In 1967, the median income in the United States was roughly $33,000. Someone in the 95th percentile, on the other hand, made roughly $89,000 per year. That's significant disparity, but not outrageous.

By 2003, the median income in the United States was roughly $43,000, while the 95th percentile had risen to $154,000.

I don't have the more recent numbers, but I suspect the gap is still growing. And here I wonder, when we start talking about economic policy, why we talk about socialism in such evil terms. Does the richest 5 percent of the country really need to make 4 or 5 times as much as the median (and lets not talk about the bottom 20 to 25 percent, who make less than a living wage)? Is it not possible and, perhaps, reasonable to change the way that income is distributed, not in some bizarre pseudo-Marxist equal way, but simply so that everyone can survive?

Here's the point. I'm guessing that, if you take out all political language, almost everyone will agree that, yes, everyone should have a chance to make it. Hell, it's in the declaration of independence. The thing is, we've been hoodwinked into thinking that equal opportunity exists under our current economic and social structures when it certainly does not. We've been fooled into thinking that we have a "welfare state," where people at the bottom are there only because they are lazy and incompetent. We've succumbed to the idea that there is no alternative - in the best of all possible worlds, to quote Voltaire - to what is increasingly a reverse-socialism in our economic policy.*

*That is, we have socialized losses and privatized gains, a truly despicable situation. Remember that the bailout was paid for by tax payers and paid out to large investment and insurance companies. In other words, a problem caused, at least in part,** by income disparity, was "solved" by increasing income disparity. Brilliant!

**It is worth noting that the biggest economic collapses of the last century occurred at the times of greatest income disparity; that is, in 1929, in 1987, and in 2008. Hmm...

All this because there is no language available to have a rational discourse around economic (or almost any other) policy. You believe in changing the tax structure so that it is more progressive? You're a socialist-communist-Marxist pig who doesn't deserve to be in the country, let alone the conversation. How much worse if you use the word - socialism - yourself? Gone are the days when Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey proudly called themselves socialists. Today you have to apologize, all because of the power of language.

What terms are available, however, is not the issue. The issue is that we have an entire political and social and culture machine that uses language to force us to think of politics as linear, and forces us to continually reinvent meaningful terms because the ones we try to use continually get twisted and saddled with innuendos and connotations they don't, in themselves, warrant. Language is a powerful thing - maybe the most powerful thing there is - and it seems we don't know how and don't want to use it responsibly.

Left and Right and Right and Wrong

If you've never stumbled across the "Political Compass" and given it a spin, I highly recommend doing so. I do not know the motivations behind the site - if any - except that they clearly are trying to offer a better picture of political persuasion than the general discourse we're all surrounded by every day. The essence of their insight is this: it is silly to delineate politics on a simple, one dimensional, left-to-right scale, because there are (at least) two dimensions at play. While I would argue that even a two dimensional representation is limiting, it is at least better than a one dimensional representation.

In the case of the Political Compass, they have selected economic "neo-liberalism" and "communism" as the extremes on the x-axis, and have juxtaposed on the y-axis "fascism" and "anarchism." Those, of course, are over-charged catch phrases-cum-insults that we like to throw around all too often, and so I tend to replace those extremes with their actual meaning. The x-axis, instead, ranges from strict government regulation of commerce ("Communism," as they call it, though Socialism might be a more proper label) to non-regulation (their "Neo-liberalism"), while the y-axis ranges likewise from strict regulation of people ("Fascism") to non-regulation ("Anarchism"). As you can see, the labels they apply make sense, but the connotations that we carry around make the labels too incendiary and, in a way, self-fulfilling. Better to look instead at the meaning.

So what is the meaning? Well, I will not hide from you that I register strongly on the side of government regulation of commerce, whilst also believing strongly that the government should not regulate people. I am joined, internationally and historically, by figures like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and the current Dalai Lama (which makes me happy, because I respect all three).* I am not joined, incidentally, by the vast (I mean vast) majority of American politicians, who almost exclusively occupy the upper-right quadrant of unregulated commerce and highly regulated society.

* As you can see, here is where the labels break down. Am I a Communist and an Anarchist? Hardly. Was Gandhi? Mandela? Is the Dalai Lama? Of course not.

What's that? American politicians are social authoritarians?! Believe it or not, the land of the free ought to be called the land of the free enterprise, because we the people aren't seeing the freedom. Consider this map of the major players in the 2008 Presidential primaries:

There's a great Noam Chomsky quotation that I feel like I've mentioned before in this space, but it bears repeating: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

Consider that quotation alongside the above graph. We get all caught up, in America, about how "ultra-conservative" or "ultra-liberal" our politicians are. But, really, with the exceptions of Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, and Dennis Kucinich (notably all considered "unelectable" and "outside the mainstream"), not a single one of our Presidential candidates in 2008 was off of the stubby trendline we might draw in that upper-right quadrant. On a scale of -10 to +10 in both dimensions, John McCain and Barack Obama are roughly 2 or 3 steps away from each other in either direction.

Also stunning is this map of the states, by Senator, which you can play around with if you like. The tendencies in our Presidential elections are corroborated by our senatorial representation, as you can see.

Most Americans, I suspect, believe that they live in a country that stands at the pinnacle of both social and economic freedom. That is simply not the case. It is also not the case that Europe is a relative bastion of seedy, left-wing socialists. Most European leaders fall somewhere near where Obama and McCain fall, in the lower part of the upper-right quadrant.

Who, then, falls in the other quandrants? Or, in other words, what good is this spectrum if all the notable people in politics fall in the upper-right? Well, the rest of the graph would be filled in, I expect, by ordinary human beings. In our globalized world, success in politics almost depends upon being, to some degree, a social authoritarian and an economic libertarian. Economic regulation is, simply put, not popular with the companies that, in the end, fuel political campaigns, while social freedom is not popular, ultimately, with the mass of voters who hold fairly strict and Puritanical social virtues.

What is interesting to me, though, is not the phenomenon of the upper-right quadrant, so much as the linearity that exists in that quadrant. With few outliers, most American politicians lie not just in the same approximate place, but along the same approximate line. There is not, in America, much of a debate within each party, because each party is itself content to exist on a linear continuum both with itself, and with the other party. Linearity rules our discourse because, ultimately we are politically linear. The Libertarians - who tend towards both economic and social freedom - are marginalized because we don't have any mechanism for understanding where they stand on our political line.

In short, we have conflated, in America, economic deregulation with social regulation, and have called those two things together "Conservatism." I have known a great many conservatives, few of whom actually believe in social regulation, but they don't realize, often, that the Libertarian and not the Republican Party represents their values. Likewise, I've known many Democrats who would score, like me, in the lower-left quadrant, but who "compromise" on Barack Obama, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, or the Democrat du jour because, damnit, at least it's better than the Republican. Of course, at a certain point, if you score -5 and -5, what's the difference between +2, +3 and +5, +6?

We get so caught up with the language of "left" and "right" in America that we often forget to talk about right and wrong. Those are loaded terms, of course, but they represent a real conversation, rather than an ideological - and unexamined - shouting match. Recalling Chomsky, part of why our current shouting matches are so violent (I'm thinking of the health care debate) is because we're so close to each other. Ironically, it's a lot harder to compromise when you start off in the same room than when you start in different houses, because there's so little distance that either of you can move, and because your motions become so perceptible.

As I said at the outset, I am not personally persuaded by a two-dimensional model of political opinion. It seems to me that human social morality - which makes up the impetus for politics - is far too complicated to capture even on a Cartesian graph, but at least it's better than a straight line. In the long run, the practice of setting ourselves up as foils to each other (I am a Republican, which means I am not a Democrat, or vice versa) serves only to obscure the conversations we should be having, and serves only to help both sides elect politicians who represent, not the breadth of opinion in this country, but a narrow, and therefore uncreative and uncompromising sliver. I challenge you to think outside the quadrant.