Kozlowski: Politics features fluffy phrases

Political language is often nasty. Political language is often nasty.

Less frequently noticed, however, is the constant use of meaningless language in politics. George Orwell famously complained of this, among other things, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell lamented that words like democracy, freedom and justice are bandied about, without clear definitions of what they mean and, instead, with only the implication that they are good things. This election year, I am reminded of how little has changed in 66 years. Our political discourse and our airwaves are filled with buzzwords without meaning.

We hear candidates attacked as “in thrall to Washington special interests” in ads that tout the opposing candidate’s independence from those interests and his AARP endorsement. But we seldom hear what those special interests are, other than a very vague, very menacing group of shadowy things that will no doubt destroy the Republic if not checked by a few heroic and deeply moral Congressjedi.

We are asked to hate special interests and the congressmen who serve them, yet we never hear special interests mentioned by name. If we did, they wouldn’t seem so scary. Pitt is a Harrisburg special interest. We want more money — hence special treatment — from the state. By extension, the students who’ve gone to Harrisburg to complain about the recent funding cuts form a part of that special interest. The AARP, unions, the Sierra Club, the NRA, the NAACP, the Catholic Church, the Freedom From Religion Foundation — these are some of the names and faces that make up those shadowy special interests.

Once the faceless special interest groups have faces put on them, they don’t seem so vaguely sinister. In fact, I would bet that every reader of this paper sympathizes with and would actively encourage at least two special interest groups. And yet, nobody would want to admit it.

“Ah,” you might say, “but I only support or belong to grassroots groups.” Here is another phrase that has lost its meaning. When does a group become large enough to not be “grassroots” anymore? If the richest guy in Pittsburgh and 200 of his friends start a group, it probably wouldn’t be called grassroots. But if you, I and 200 other students start a group, it’s grassroots because it comes from “the people,” even though the only real difference between the rich guy’s group and mine is the amount of money we have available. Similarly, the Tea Party has been attacked for being an “astroturf” movement, funded by the Koch Sith Lords, um, brothers. And yet The New York Times did not have a problem saying on Oct. 16 that “President Obama is exploiting his early lead in campaign fundraising to bankroll a sprawling grassroots organization.” I was unaware that grassroots organizations could be both sprawling and funded by campaign fundraising conducted by the president of the United States, but apparently they can be.

These are but two examples of how our political discourse is increasingly conducted with words that either have no meaning or have a meaning that is elastic. This is bad for several reasons. First, meaningless language makes it much easier to engage in rhetoric or political argument without a firm understanding of what is going on. Those special interests the congressmen are beholden to: What are they, and do you agree with their basic policy positions? Finding this out requires research. With the vagueness of political language, you can get away with merely saying “I don’t like special interests” and bashing accused congressmen. People are also more likely to accept asinine arguments if they are posed in the right jargon.

The second problem with using terms that are extremely elastic is that elasticity is easily manipulated. Ideas packaged as “progressive” tend to be more popular than exactly the same ideas packaged as “liberal.”

By choosing a term with which to label an idea, a politician very deftly makes that idea more or less likely to gain traction, regardless of its actual merits. Similarly, by saying that someone is “soft on crime,” a speaker can obscure what the target of the accusation actually means to do (which could be anything from decriminalizing marijuana possession to hiring out serial killers as day-care teachers). At the extreme, we end up with an Orwellian scenario in which some animals are more equal than others, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

A third and related problem is that imprecise political language leads to arguments over the stupidest things. The Tea Party: grassroots or astroturf? Does it really matter? More important is who they are, what they are advocating and whether we believe that to be good or bad. Meaningless words draw people into arguments about what words mean rather than the merits of the ideas those words should be representing. While to some extent meaningless words are an inevitable result of trying to come up with shorthand and shibboleth, we should avoid letting them be all we ever think or talk about.

Write kozthought@gmail.com.