Skip to main content

Does Political Rhetoric Matter?

Kevin Drum has an addendum to my post about the rhetoric of the "fiscal cliff," which I think is mostly correct. (As a reminder, I was arguing that liberals should try to be more rhetorically coherent, better to drive out nonsense like "fiscal cliff," which is horribly misleading.) Jonathan Bernstein, meanwhile, in his once-yearly tradition of being correct about most things but wrong when he pays attention to me, has a much more radical proposition. Word choice matters not at all, he says:
Beyond that, the really important point is that in almost every case, what we call this stuff matters a whole lot less than people think, and probably not at all...
At any rate, my view is that there's basically no evidence that it would make any difference at all that whether we call all of this the "fiscal cliff" or something more accurate. Similarly, pick an issue: it almost certainly didn't matter that people came to call the recent health care reforms "Obamacare," or that people called certain taxes a "death tax."
Like how algebraic variables can represent any number, in this view words are merely containers with no shape or agency whatsoever; they are defined by reality and common usage, not by the intent of the propagandist. Put that way, it sounds silly, but I actually have a lot of sympathy for that view. The eternal prescriptive-descriptive grammar debate falls largely around these axes, and the descriptivists clearly win overall (which is to say that there is no wrong way to speak, only varying usage patterns—Ebonics is every bit as legitimate as Newcasterese). This is why linguists get so peeved by amateur grammar Nazis who toddle around scrawling on movie posters and shaming those who don't use who and whom "properly."

Here's an example of how this works over the long run:



And in the long run, I have to agree. Reality will win out every time. Abject propaganda like "collateral damage" becomes only more horrifying in its failure to hide reality (not to mention the image of a bunch of dead-eyed Pentagon PR flacks who come up with that stuff). But when it comes to the short term, especially during some high-stakes negotiations, I can't embrace the strong version of Bernstein's proposition.

When some political compromise is being hammered out a lot of things are interacting. The background culture and history shapes the space of things that are discussed and thought possible. Rich people, businesses, and pressure groups work the lobbying channels. Occasionally, mass uprisings can capture the discussion. Finally, elites provide coordination through signaling. Matt Yglesias had a great post on the latter awhile back:
In countries like the US and Australia where right-wing political elites are skeptical about global warming, you see the right-left split on climate science grow bigger as people pay more attention to politics. It looks very different in Germany. Well-informed voters are well informed about their ideological camp’s position, not well-informed about the issues. And in the United States, a conservative voter who takes the climate issue seriously probably isn’t a well-informed person who sees through Tom Coburn’s cant, he’s someone who’s so ill-informed that he’s not familiar with Coburn’s cant.
This is where lousy slogans can really have an effect. Economics is a tricky subject, and the intuitive appeal of Hooverite austerity policy is strong indeed. All across the developed world even lefty parties have embraced austerity, even at the cost of their own electoral success.

And the left's failure to unite around a common frame for the fiscal cliff really has weakened the left's elite signaling. Take the Daily Show. Stewart's stuff on the fiscal cliff has been weak, and he got badly rolled by Alan Simpson. Stewart is probably the most widely respected person among the lefty media, and his personal specialty is cutting through Washington bullshit and hypocrisy to reach underlying truth. The people complaining most about the fiscal cliff, foremost among them Alan Simpson, are the biggest bullshitting hypocrites in Washington, and that's saying something. If even Stewart can't manage to shovel all the way down to what's actually happening, it's a major failure of the lefty wonk-to-elite idea transmission mechanism. Good slogans are an important way to coordinate and give people fingerholds on complex ideas.

Again, I agree with Kevin, good slogans are tough to come by and maintain. But to say it would make no difference at all if we called it the "fiscal cheesy poof" is a step too far.

Comments

  1. As you said, I usually agree with Jonathan. But here I have to side with you. Even low information people have a conceptual framework, or a heuristic, that they think of when they hear about something. Surely their reaction to the word "cliff" is different than their reaction to "curb" or "cheesy poof". Even high information people are subject to framing effects.

    Perhaps this only matters on the margins. And surely there are many institutional barriers/preferences that confine policy outcomes. But in a divided gov't like we have and in a filibuster happy Senate I think the margins come to have more significance.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

The Setswana Grammar Manual

One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...