Kidnapped words are the Janissaries of campaigns to promote an invented reality. Their original identities are obliterated. Worse, unlike the Ottoman Janissaries, figments of the past identity can be retained when its resonance is considered helpful. Words
are kidnapped for two reasons. One is to slay them; the other is to exploit them. American politics offers rich examples of both variants.
The radical right in the United States effectively took control of the term
liberal and all its variants so as to infuse it with strongly negative connotations. They succeeded so completely in transforming it into a political ‘dirty
word’ that it has long been abandoned by Democrats. They now engage in all sorts of verbal gymnastics to avoid its designation for themselves, their ideas or their policy proposals. In the process, they expose any new coinage intended as a surrogate to similar
calumnies. For example, one self-styled progressive Senator was accused by his opponent of not having the courage of his convictions to call his ‘tax & spend’ program
liberal.
“Tax & Spend” is a vapid slogan that should be easily refuted – and thrust back at its perps with interest. The logic is elementary: governments exist in order
to spend and tax. All governments must tax in order to finance public services whose provision is its reason for being. The generation of requisite revenues means taxing groups and individuals under its jurisdiction. The level of taxation corresponds to the
value attached to the activities that government undertakes. Hence, the key question posed by attacks on public spending – carried to absurd extreme by Musk’s DOGE crude decimation of federal agencies – is: what public services are the citizenry ready to give
up if they wish to prioritize low taxation and debt reduction: MEDICARE, emergency medical care, epidemic disease control, research into cures of fatal medical conditions, disaster relief? Regulation of prescription drugs and food inspection, pollution control
and clean-up, workplace safety? Construction and maintenance of transportation networks, electricity grids, water and sanitation infrastructure; educational facilities; national parks? Etc., etc. etc. An honest, direct answer to such a blunt statement of stakes
and trade-offs makes obvious the fatuous nature of the ‘tax & spend’ meme. Of course, there are serious matters of what taxes are levies at what rate and how they are allocated among numerous public needs. However, it is not the intention of the specious
polemicists who thrill at taking a chainsaw to dismember government to engage such a discourse. Neither Musk nor his thuggish henchmen have the ability or temperament to do anything that constructive.
This regression from a word’s denotative meaning to slur to shrill expletive honed to provoke raw emotion is what occurs when language ceases to serve as a vehicle for communication and, instead, becomes a heady tonic for both speaker and target.
Conservative itself is a Janissary word. The literal meaning is one who conserves. In politics traditionally, it has been adopted by those factions who see virtue
in the status quo and are skeptical of change - especially when change is sudden and challenges established principles. There is nothing conservative about modern day Republicans who have made a fetish of conservatism. They are at once reactionaries, who want
to return America to a mythic past, and radicals who want to introduce basic changes in our public life.
Trump II’s dramatic assault on the American constitutional republic has gone far further is creating a quasi-fascist autocracy that purports to act in the name of a fictive popular will while in fact installing a combine of marauding billionaires, Evangelical
Christian jihadis, racists and psychotic sadists. MAGA polemics are free of any substantive content. Its life blood is a pastiche of images: John Wayne riding high in the saddle, triumphant wars where our victory is ensured because in God we trust, Norman
Rockwell portraiture of the true, idyllic soul of America.
As to their socio-economic thinking – more accurately, their primitive, incoherent emotional effusions, it is rooted in 19th century social Darwinism, their reference point the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s. Rolling back the New Deal and everything associated with
it, therefore, is objective number one. “Conservatives” also aim to fortify the arbitrary powers of the Executive, at the expense of the principle of ‘checks and balances’ etched in the Constitution, in a manner never before experienced in the United
States. Internationally, they are dedicated to building a world according to American specifications through generous application of American military power. This package is diametrically different from all that has been meant by conservatism historically.
The reactionary/radicals kidnapping of the term for their own purposes is made possible by the free and easy use of vocabulary in a literally mindless political culture.
Exploiting Janissary words normally occurs when they are seen as having a positive image that can be used to market something rather different.
Reform is an outstanding example. Its emotive power stems from the implication of progress, an unalloyed good in modern imaginations. Progress in turn implies
improvement or betterment. Reform movements in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world were associated with expansion of voting rights, the breaking of monopolies, the sweeping out of office of corrupt political machines, etc. The beneficiaries
in those cases were the ‘people,’ the citizens, the common folk, the little man. Nowadays, the term reform has been abducted and put in the service of change that implies greater efficiency, especially the efficiency of markets, in disregard for the well-being
of flesh and blood persons.
Liberal is a close cousin of the grander word
Progress. Liberalism’s essence is the conviction that progress will ensue from following its precepts. Progress means more wealth and greater liberty - for
all. For society to follow the course marked out by enlightened reason is to have the reality, not just the promise, of the good life. The collective good is synonymous with the individual’s good. The sum of satisfied individual interests is the common interest.
The progress registered by the triumph of neo-liberal economic practices and policies contradicts this principle. Many people in the Western countries, most in the United States, have not shared in the aggregate wealth generated.
Nowadays, the promotion of any social change is labeled reform - whether or not its objects will find their situation improved. Market fundamentalists campaign under the banner of
reform when they press for ‘flexible labor markets.’ That phrase is a euphemism for making terms of employment more onerous. Workers, in the wake of labor market reform, find themselves less secure in their jobs, less well paid and recipients of reduced
fringe benefits. It can be argued, of course, that the change improves the overall efficiency of the economy.
The dogma of market fundamentalism says that systemic efficiencies help everyone. That is not true. There is a redistribution of wealth and even opportunity. There are winners and losers - certainly in the short and middle run. Whether everyone gains in the
long run depends on the intervening factors of how market power is structured and what actions are taken by governments. In the decades preceding the financial crash of 2008, reform was even the preferred term of those advocating an end to the regulation of
financial markets. They succeeded. The heaviest costs of their success - and the resulting abuse and then failure of financial markets - were borne by the general populace. Their lives deteriorated rather than improved. There was a high positive correlation
between implementation of that ‘reform’ agenda and society’s moving backward by the enlightened standards of the past century.
Similarly, American officials and pundits talk about the vital need for
‘Reforming’ entitlement programs - itself a euphemism for Social Security and Medicare. Reform in this instance means cutting benefits, i.e.
a straightforward reduction in the value of what recipients get. Blatant untruths are propagated by the advocates of ‘reform’: Social Security is in crisis; there is no other way to fund these programs. It fact, it is funded until 2044 and there are reasonable
ways to fund it thereafter - such as raising the ceiling for FICA and Medicare withholdings. An honest public discourse would not use the word ‘reform.’ Instead, it would refer to cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits so as to distribute the nation’s
wealth towards other ends, persons and purposes. It remains to be seen whether the harsh lessons administered by the ‘great recession’ will sensitize us to the practice of enlisting the Janissary words
Reform and Progress into causes with no legitimate claim to the words
*******
An intriguing question is why the immanent truth of social cohesion even in successful societies is forgotten or overlooked at times. We currently are in one of those odd periods when segments of the political class and ‘intelligentsia’ think and act as if
oblivious to very remarkable accomplishments and signal achievements both political and economic.
*******
The term Middle Class has been completely denatured by a process of indiscriminate, promiscuous usage. It is a complex phenomenon
whose examination reveals a number of current elements in the silent campaign against truth and honesty. It has become a synonym for the great mass of Americans who figure neither among the super-rich nor live below the poverty line. Anyone earning between
$20,000 and $250,000 is now declared ‘middle class’ in political parlance. The upper bracket is drifting even higher.
One calculating reason for this inflation is to erase the ‘working class’ from the public vocabulary. That term has acquired unsavory connotations. It implies poor and failure - notions that are linked in American minds. Rather than take steps to improve the
lot of the working class, they are offered honorary status in the Middle Class. Admittedly, in our habits of what we buy and how we entertain ourselves, there indeed has been a move toward uniformity, a cultural compression. Nonetheless, life on an annual
income of $30,000 is very different in terms of health care, comfort, opportunities for children and many other ways from life on $250,000. A one-size-fits-all vocabulary elides those realities and glosses over the public policy implications.
Responsibility is yet another casualty of the flight from truthful _expression_ of reality. Its deformation takes two forms. Most glaring is its cavalier use to affirm something real when in fact nothing real is intended. Leaders of all types declare
themselves responsible when the organizations or groups they head do something reprehensible. It has become almost cartoonish for the chief involved to go to the microphone in order to pronounce: ‘I take full responsibility” or ‘the buck stops here.’ Left
to be inferred is that there will be no consequences. It is as if the declaration is sufficient unto itself. Responsibility carries with it no tangible accountability, just nominal accountability. In short, the promiscuous use of the word
responsibility has voided it of all but nominal meaning. Its very use in this manner is a lie.
Freedom has been in servile use for generations. The free world
Cold War days included a menagerie of tin-pot dictatorships and thugs in American employ. One certainly can argue that the core of the free world was indeed free; that expedient actions had to be taken to protect it; that it was not possible to be honest by
calling our own bad guys something other than defenders of freedom. Still, promiscuous use of the word, and its derivates, has discounted its value. For most Americans, it simply has come to mean those people who are on our side and/or do what we want in places
like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Pakistan, Israel/Palestine or Lebanon. George Bush sealed these subjective perceptions with his self-serving and simplistic rhetoric about ‘being with us or against us’ - ‘us’ meaning
the United States as the fount of political virtue. Thus, we had Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and sundry other misappropriations of a noble word. This was calculated exploitation of a brand name.
Bleached words have been scrubbed of all denotative meaning while keeping a faint tinge of past usage.
Center and bipartisanship head the list. They conjure vaguely positive images that merge in peoples’ minds.
Center suggests pragmatism and moderation as associated with avoidance of the ‘extremes’ of ‘right’ and ‘left.’ Whatever meaning any of those terms has is wholly situational. The remarkable shift in the locus
of American political discourse toward the radical right, accompanied by the liberals’ self-emasculation, means that the literal center is now somewhere to the
right of where so-called Rockefeller Republicans were located, and on the right fringe of the political spectrum anywhere in Western Europe. Oddly, the locus of public opinion, as measured by issue specific surveys, simultaneously has shifted well to
the left. That is to say, public discourse is manipulated to serve a conservative political agenda.
Bipartisanship
has suffered a similar linguistic and political fate. It has been reduced to verbal decoration. Once it was used when a pragmatic coalition of legislators from both sides of ‘the aisle’ was formed to back some piece of legislation that cut across standard
party platforms. The other was as an _expression_ of solidarity in times of national emergency, e.g. World War II, post-war security engagements, the Gulf war. These days, bipartisanship is a fuzzy word used to lend an aura of high-mindedness around what is
a flaccid, lowest common denominator consensus. On most occasions, bipartisanship is not good for everyone. There are losers in compromises. Moreover, a broad bipartisan consensus can form around dubious policies - the cocktail of unsavory practices that is
called the ‘war on terror.’ The words appendage to the disgraceful process that produced health care ‘reform’ suggests that it should be given a dishonorable discharge from the political lexicon.
Barack Obama’s legendary stress on bipartisanship was integral to his ‘feel good’ style, an above the fray manner that neatly matched his preference for the status quo on matters of consequence - American commitments in the Greater Middle East, the virtues
of mutant financial institutions and practices, the probity of the intelligence agencies, and a health care system build around profit-making commercial enterprises also ‘too big to let go of.’ What mainly interests us here, though, is not the content of Mr.
Obama’s views as much as his addiction to a discourse that intentionally blurred rather than clarified the meaning of words and ideas.
Common ground was his mantra. It became a metaphysical concept rather than a considered political state where opposing parties might find a measure of agreement based
on some shared, underlying principles or simply expedient overlapping interests – e.g. Hitler and Stalin’s tactical security calculations that produced the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The common ground so casually invoked by Obama, and others of the same disposition,
connotes an idyllic grove where concord and goodwill prevail. Once parties enter that exalted realm, they supposedly would behave like bonobos – congenial, tolerant and accommodating. In reality, the inhabitants of Washington are by nature fractious, intransigent
and distrustful – like chimpanzees in an enclosure.
Hence, Obama’s multiple attempts to lure the Republican Congressional leadership onto the harmonious common ground were met with distain and hostility. His devotion to finding common ground with the financial predators of Wall Street by playing companiable
rounds of golf with the likes of JPMorgan Chase’s Jaime Dimon amounted to little more than a policy of appeasement and deference. The Bethesda Country Club was the perfect place for spying those legendary ‘green shoots” poking up amidst the ruins of the country’s
financial system. "Common ground" has no fixed location"
“Common ground” is not a kidnapped phrase recast to exploit its evocative power in a campaign to promote something quite different from its original meaning, Simply put, it is a banal phrase of no particular affect energized to create an image useful
as an all-purpose rhetorical device signifying nothing in particular.
*******
Some words have been so abused as to be little more than slogans emptied of all meaning.
Bastard carries no presumption as to the matrimonial status of one’s parents at the time of birth.
Son of a bitch carries no presumption as to the actual temperament of one’s mother. Analogues in the political realm jump to mind.
Change for example - or,
CHANGE as it has come to be known. Whenever the current state of affairs is bad, change looks to be a good idea - whatever its contents. The key to turning it into a Janissary is to exploit its positive connotation while diverting attention from what
if anything substantive you have in mind. Jimmy Carter took this tack to gain entry to the White House. So did Bush the Younger. And that is exactly what the Obama campaign did.
Phantom words reference a seeming reality that in fact does not exist. They are emotive words masquerading as denotative words. Emotive in the sense that they are
intended to create an impression of something actually happening or being that is not. Public discourse nowadays is rife with them.
First there is
responsibility, again, as in “the system failed, but I take full responsibility.” This is a favorite of elected officials and of organizational leaders more generally. The explicit meaning is that the unfortunate
matter at hand was my fault - directly or indirectly, intentionally or inadvertently. That literal definition implies accountability which, in turn, implies penalty or chastisement. None is envisaged, of course, by the resolute statement of ‘responsibility.’
Just the opposite. The declaration is designed not to open the way to some sort of reckoning. Rather, it aims to foreclose any further consideration of the issue, most specifically punishment. The speaker is pronouncing closure even while punctuating that
he is the only one who has done anything blameworthy. In plain English, the true message is:
yes, what occurred was most unfortunate; it was pretty much inescapable given the circumstances, I am the one who as the Boss therefore am ultimately ‘responsible in that I am supposed to monitor and supervise, but we all know that it is impossible for
any mortal soul to oversee and monitor everything that goes on in this vast government/organization, so I’ll do everything I reasonably can to prevent things like this happening again, now let’s find closure on this troubling affair and fix our attention of
other pressing problems - going forward.
It is a commentary on our feeble power to scrutinize critically the conduct and speech of our rulers that this formula invariably succeeds. Evidently the part of us that desires comity and faith in high officials outweighs the part of us that seeks to
place blame as a prelude to exacting a penalty. Skepticism is not ingrained in our political culture even as Americans vaunt their rugged individualism and strong belief in the republican virtue of not deferring to the holders of high office. Rugged individualism
itself is manifestly a phantom phrase itself.
Michael Brenner
If you wish to unsubscribe yourself from this list, please go to the following link:
Go to the bottom of the page and enter your email address in the box and hit the button for "Unsubscribe or edit options"
Then enter your email again in the email text box, and then click unsubscribe. You will receive an email shortly with a link to confirm your unsubscription. Click on the link and you will be unsubscribed.